High-altitude attitude.

I sat on a plane for a few hours last night, heading home from a trip to DC. Finished Jeffrey Eugenides' masterful Middlesex early in the flight, and was sitting too close to the little TV screen to focus on the lousy movie. For a little while, I amused myself with a magazine, then played with the rubbery mozzarella cheese/red pepper sludge that was my veggie snack-in-a-box. Once I'd accomplished all of this, I still had two hours left in the flight but, like Kenny Rogers once said, I was too tired to sleep.

For a while, I stared out the window, watching the wing lights flash against the clouds and thinking about the kid in Bee Season who "sees G-d" in just such a situation. After thirty-plus years of pretty regular air travel, I feel far removed from the naivete that allowed the novel's character to experience a spiritual revelation from his airplane seat. I'm also not much of a G-d believer, though I clearly buy into Jewish superstition enough that I wrote The Name with the traditional hyphen without even realizing it at first. But sitting there in my uncomfortable seat, happy to have the luxury of Economy Plus legroom, I started wondering not so much why people believe in a higher being, but why they feel so compelled to find evidence of that being's existence and supremacy. It seems to me that if you buy into the concept of G-d (or Allah, or Yaweh, or Jehova, or Budda, or Jah Rastafari, or whatever), that your belief should be all the evidence you really need. Or rather, the evidence is in your own existence, and your ability to formulate the concept of G-d, and to identify particular phenomena as causally related to the doings of G-d.

Perhaps so much evil is perpetrated in the name of G-d, or religion, because people are truly so tentative in their belief in the higher being that they feel compelled to annihilate anyone whose own beliefs, conduct, or mere existence challenges that belief. If they truly accepted the existence of G-d, they would have no need to kill, discriminate against, or otherwise harm anyone who believed otherwise, safe in the knowledge of their own rightness.

I guess this isn't a particularly new or earthshattering insight. It's not too far from Michael Moore's theory about Americans' deep-seated fear leading to gun use. And I'm not trying to condemn all religion; I accept that religion can play a positive role in the world, and my own Judaism, while not terribly focused on the "praying" aspects of the religion, plays an integral role in my identity and day-to-day conduct.

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