An agnostic appeals for less prayer, more care from `people of faith'

NEW YORK - Like many Americans, I am an agnostic. This means I am convinced neither that God exists nor that he, or she, doesn't.

I'm not an atheist because I'm not smart enough or brave enough to claim to know for sure there is no God.

Nor am I what they call today a "person of faith" who believes in virgins having babies or in a dead man suddenly waking up or in somebody opening a footpath through an ocean by waving his arm.

I am also a U.S. citizen, and as such, not quite sure how I feel about being told you have to buy all or some of this to be considered a good one.

Nature can be astonishingly beautiful or unconscionably cruel. The colors and scents of flowers, graceful or awesome landscapes, the sounds of larks or waterfalls, thrill me beyond words. Sunrises are magical and uplifting; sunsets profound, sometimes heartbreaking. Volcanoes and storms are majestic to behold, yet pitiless in their obliterative power. All in all, more good and beauty surrounds me than I feel I deserve.

The genius and dedication of scientists and engineers have given us gadgets and gizmos that light the night, take us anywhere over land, water or through the sky, answer virtually any question at the tap of a key. We can see something in our homes at the moment it happens halfway around the globe.

Skilled surgeons can take the heart out of someone who has just died and stitch it into the chest of another whose own is about to fail. Someone smears colored chemicals across a stretched rectangle of canvas and it brings inexplicable joy and wonder to our beings.

Yet, in my own lifetime, 6 million of my own kinsmen and women were murdered because of their religion . Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in major cities in Europe and Asia were incinerated in two wars "to save lives." For centuries, my own countrymen condoned the buying and selling of humans as free labor. We kill unthreatening animals and then wear their skins for show.

Wealthy citizens in my home city who frolic and amass fortunes reside within feet of sad, ailing, impoverished people who have no health insurance. Good people die young of illness, preventable accidents and the desperate or reckless behavior of others, while their neighbors purchase every manner of medical miracle to extend their flamboyant or greedy lives to the limit, then complain about the lack of closet space for all their "stuff."

This question persists: If God exists, why do bad things happen to good people? "It's in His grand design," we are told, or "God loved her so much, He sent for her early."

"People of faith" believe this. They say we are a Christian nation now, one that claims to be tolerant of all creeds, but essentially Christian all the same.

I don't know what, if anything, exists beyond the visible universe. The mysteries of its origin and expanse perplex me no end. Believing Christians have faith in answers written in a book centuries ago. Jews will spin your head and keep you up forever with a million unanswerable questions.

I am an American. My president and his ilk think Darwin got it wrong about the survival of the fittest. And yet that very same thinking is the rock upon which their political and economic policies for our country and the world are built. Maybe less praying and more paying attention to what we are doing to, and not doing for, each other would be more helpful.

Daniel Meltzer is a journalist and a playwright.