So that was my religious journey, such as it was.  By 1970, it was over (although I have to admit to a year of backsliding into belief in the late 70s).  Looking back, I'm struck by how short the period was: from the time I told the minister I couldn't sign the pledge in the workbook to my skipping from one religion to another to abandoning religion altogether; it comprised just a few years.  For over forty years now, I've been a contented atheist.  As I said last time, no god, no religion, no heaven, no hell, no soul, no spirit.  It drives me crazy when believers say, "Well, you may not be religious, but I can tell you're a deeply spiritual person."  Nope.  Not a spiritual bone in my body.  I know many atheists who are interested in debating and defending our position.  Just as I was surprised by the existence of an Atheist of the Year award, I was pleasantly surprised and heartened to discover that the park closest to my house is sponsored by the Atheist Community of Topeka.  But except when provoked or when talking about organized religion and its effects, I am content to leave philosophical debates about god's existence to others.  I don't have an open mind on the subject, and I assume others don't either.  Occasionally, though, the subject would intersect with what I was teaching (you can't understand American literature, said Robert Frost, hardly an enthusiast for religion, without knowing the Bible), so here are some random examples of what everyone now calls "teachable moments" (a phrase that seems awkward and inexact to me):

When I first started teaching freshman comp. in 1966, there was an essay in the text by the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich.  I loved teaching the essay to my generally religious Oklahoma students.  Tillich defines God (the capital letter is just for convention) as one's "ultimate concern."  He argues, unconvincingly, I think, that since everyone has an ultimate concern, everyone has a god.  More effectively, since God is infinite, man is finite, and the distance between the infinite and the finite is itself infinite, man must find ways of approaching an otherwise inscrutable God.  This he does through myth and symbols.  The Bible must be read in this light: a way of approaching the infinite; thus, anyone who reads the Bible literally is committing idolatry.  I'm not sure the students were convinced, but I took a perverse pleasure in watching their reactions.

There was also an essay by Martin Buber, who defined God as the Eternal Thou.  Buber talks about the replacement of Thou with It, of I-Thou relationships with I-It ones, and he describes this as the "eclipse of God," a phrase also used by Emily Dickinson.  For Buber, the fault lies with man.  For Dickinson, it is God who "hid his rare life from our gross eyes" in what she describes as a "fond Ambush."  This is a poem that begins, "I know that He exists."  What could be more definitive than that?  And she ends her affirmation with a period--a rare mark of punctuation in Dickinson's poetry.  The short poem darkens quickly, as the oxymoron "fond Ambush" would suggest.  We've all seen enough bad Westerns to know that it isn't the good guys who lie in ambush.  And by the end, if there is a god, perhaps it's better that he has been eclipsed.

Dickinson has much in common with Frost, whose sonnet "Design" (and what could be more traditional and designed than a sonnet?) takes the most common argument for the existence of God (the argument from design) and turns it on its head.  For twelve lines, Frost describes a scene of morning predation (a spider eating on a moth while perched on the ironically named flower a heal-all), and then in the thirteenth line suggests that if this synecdochal scene is designed, it's "a design of darkness to appall."  And then Frost concludes, as if a merest afterthought, "if design governs in a thing so small."  The thought that there is no designer, so horrifying to the religious, seems less terrifying than the notion that the world is indeed designed.

To give the other side its due, Flannery O'Connor, devoutly Catholic herself, turns an atheist's most common argument against the existence of God (if there is an all-knowing, powerful, benevolent, etc., god, why is there evil in the world) and uses it for her own religious purposes in her story "Good Country People."  The main character of the story, Hulga (who has changed her name from Joy) is a nihilist with a prosthetic leg.  A mysterious stranger, suggestively named Manley Pointer, arrives, supposedly selling Bibles but with other conquests in mind.  By the end of the story, he is revealed as pure evil, and Hulga's nihilism leaves her literally and figuratively without a leg to stand on.  For O'Connor, evil is indeed real, and if you believe in nothing, you're as helpless as Hulga to fight it. 

And while I'm giving the gods their due, it was always fun to teach St. Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God.  Anselm first stipulates a definition of God: that of which nothing greater can be conceived.  And then we list his attributes: he's good.  How good?  He must be all-good because if he weren't, we could conceive of something greater and therefore would have contradicted our definition.  He must be powerful.   How powerful?  All powerful.  And the list goes on until finally we get to this attribute: existence > non-existence.  Therefore, existence must, by our definition, be an attribute of God. 

But all of these examples and many more, including almost anything by the later Mark Twain, were interesting or fun to teach, but only reinforced what I already believed if they were by writers like Dickinson, Twain, or Frost or didn't touch my beliefs at all if they were by writers like O'Connor.  I was (and am) the kind of reader that Flannery O'Connor most complained about: I think "Good Country People" is a great, witty, thoughtful story--but I don't believe a word of what it's saying.  O'Connor hated readers like me, evidence, she always thought, that the story had failed. 

And that's as deep (and as haphazard) as my interest in philosophical debates about god's existence goes.  There are more interesting things to contemplate: in an hour SCOTUS reveals its health care decision and the guy who tiled the bathrooms will come to seal the grouting.  To amplify Richard Wilbur, love (and disease and justice and practicality) calls us to things of this world.