God, Spock and Me

I know a man who is so religious he sees images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary at least once every few months in everything from bathwater to slices of enriched white bread.

He is one of those who saw Mary in the bark of a Chinese elm tree in North Hollywood awhile back (it turned out to be a fungus disease) and traveled to New Mexico to see the face of Jesus in a flour tortilla (skillet burns).

I also know a man who is an atheist and believes religious emotionalism is making the world crazy. He maintains that any true personification of a god would be in “Star Trek’s” Mr. Spock because he is logical and well-meaning.

The religious person, who doesn’t want his name used, I’ll call Melvin. We met at a home in Pacoima where the Virgin Mary was seen in a bathroom window. It turned out to be dust streaks.

Melvin adopted me when he learned I had been to Lourdes a few years ago, even though I explained I had just passed through as a tourist and had not witnessed any lepers being cured.

The atheist is a man named Brian Nevish, an electronics engineer whose mother wanted him to be a priest, which gives you some idea how much influence mothers have in our lives.

I heard from Nevish after he read a column I wrote on the haters among us. He insisted I had left out one minority that is constantly the object of hatred and derision in Christian America and that no one gives a damn.

That minority, he said, is the atheists.

I mention Melvin because I figure when you’re writing about atheism you need a balancing point of view, and Melvin represents the opposite extreme.

I am not an especially religious person, although I once had a passing flirtation with Buddhism.

Buddhists believe if you do good in this life you come back in a better position the next time around. I lost interest when my wife suggested I must have made serious mistakes in my past life to have come back as a newspaper columnist.

“You keep screwing up,” she said, “you’re liable to return next time as a lawyer.”

About Brian Nevish. He has a point. If you want to believe in God, or even a whole board of gods, that’s fine, but it should not be holy law.

I don’t see belief in God as a requirement for anything, and swearing on the Bible is meaningless ritual.

We should be able to swear on any book we want--”Bambi,” “Cat in the Hat” or “Roget’s Thesaurus”--or on nothing at all. If truth and God were serious factors in America we’d have been without a President in my lifetime.

Nevish hit on those points in his letter and in a subsequent telephone conversation. I had to write to him first and have him call me from a pay phone because he doesn’t have a telephone at home.

I’m not sure why he doesn’t have one since phones are secular instruments. Perhaps his girlfriend took it. Nevish explained that the woman with whom he lived for two months (she was a waitress) absconded with his VCR, his typewriter and his answering machine.

“Friends told me she was a little dippy,” he said unhappily. “I should have listened to them.”

Nevish, who is 35, attended Catholic schools, where the more he learned the less he believed in God. “The Earth became my temple,” he told me, “and doing good work my faith.”

Because he doesn’t believe in God, he also doesn’t believe in heaven. When we die we’re gone, zappo, period. No pearly gates. No harp and halo.

(Melvin suggests that since Nevish believes in Spock, perhaps he will go to the planet Vulcan instead of heaven.)

He is not anti-God, but simply without a god, Nevish says. On Sundays, when everyone else is in church, he shops. That too is a kind of religion. When my daughter feels in need of spiritual sustenance, she goes to a mall.

I showed Nevish’s letter to Melvin. “How can he be an atheist when he can’t even spell it?” Melvin demanded.

I looked closer. Nevish had reversed the i and the e in atheism. It came out “athiesm” throughout.

“Don’t be too harsh,” I said. “I can remember a letter in which you misspelled religious. It came out re-lig-ous.”

“God will deal with him,” Melvin replied, ignoring me.

Nevish and others have been objects of scorn and physical assault because they deny the existence of an omnipotent deity. We ought to be able to believe in whatever we want, or in nothing.

Humorist Fran Lebowitz said, “I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.” Nevish believes in Leonard Nimoy and the star ship Enterprise. At least that’s something. May he live long and prosper.