JESUS SAVES, MOSES INVESTS

Last year on Nantucket, I encountered this very nice and sincere young man on the sidewalk on Main Street. He had a camcorder and collected short videos in which the subjects, myself among them, were asked "Where go you go after you die?" There were no obvious signs that this gentleman was a born-again Christian and I presumed it was more of a scientific pursuit. Yesterday I ran into him again and he is the same nice guy he was last year. This time the conversation eventually wandered into "faith based" salvation. As you may know, "Born-Agains" among others, believe that it is not through your deeds that you are saved and will eventually go to heaven to be with Jesus ("Where do you go after you die?") it is 100% though your faith as in "I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior." Accept this and you are born again and will go to Heaven after you die. Simple, straightforward, and incontrovertible, with no wiggle room for Reincarnation, working your way into Heaven by giving all your wealth to the church, visiting the sick or incarcerated, NADA.

The usual "What if" questions arose in my mind... what if this is true and I am deluding myself into believing my Catholicism and its deed based dogma is guaranteeing me a one way ticket to Hell? On the other hand, What if all religion is a bunch of Hooey and the New Age folks are right that we are a cloud of energy and we just get redistributed again and again... like Stardust.

Let me tell you a story from about 35 years ago. I had just arrived in the town where I lived since then and practiced medicine and raised my family. I had "had it" with the Catholic Church but not with Christianity. I heard about a breakfast group that met at the hospital one morning a week. I went. The leader was an old time family doctor who had demi-god status *(possibly he was an elder or deacon in the most common denomination among us) within the group for some reason. The subject of alcohol came up. The leader piped up that all drinking was wrong and alcohol was the Devil's weapon against man. And he was not just talking about the Irish. Being new and not realizing that anything I could say would be heresy, I reminded the speaker of that famous story in the Bible, "The Marriage Feast at Cana" in which Jesus, a guest at the wedding, came to the rescue when the host ran out of wine. Jesus turned water into wine, and not just any wine, but it was so good that the guests remarked "Usually they serve the best wine first." The older doctor said "It was not wine it was grape juice." I said to myself, "Sure, people in the ancient middle east drank grape juice with their meals." That was the last time I went to the breakfast club.

Anyhow, I have since that time been suspicious of any man who lives his life by ONLY ONE BOOK.