Richard Dawkins is a distinguished British scientist, celebrated author, and world-class evolutionary biologist and atheist. In his new, best selling book, The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006), Dawkins tells us that our collective belief in the existence of God is not only irrational, it is dangerous.

This book is factual and chock full of annotated details about the atrocious harm that religion has inflicted upon society. They include devastating wars, bigotry, and torture and abuse of women, children and slaves, all committed in God’s name. Dawkins rails against fundamentalist religions because they actively debauch science; he dreams of the time when atheism is widespread and God has no role to play in our politics or our thoughts.

I have tremendous respect for Dawkins as a scientist, and I share many of his concerns over religious extremism. I share his zeal as a scientist, believe that we should always ask questions, check things out, and be open to new theories and explanations. Like Dawkins, I also cannot imagine God as a white-haired, celestial superpower who judges our every word and deed and who grants requests and inflicts punishments.

But I don’t think that belief in God is delusional. I believe there are some questions science cannot answer — the mysterious existential questions like what are we doing here, and is there a purpose to it? Dawkins calls these unanswerable questions, “gaps.” He says these gaps will shrink as science advances. I think the gaps will certainly narrow, but I also believe there will always be gaps, because as a species we always want to know more than is available to us. That’s wonderful, because it really doesn’t matter that the bigger picture can’t be answered by science or God. What matters is that we appreciate the enormity of our capacity to be awestruck by wonder.

Dawkins quotes Albert Einstein liberally who said it so beautifully:
“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp, and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

Also, “I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”

Life, like nature, is sometimes predictable, often serendipitous and unexplainable. It is because of the unexplainable gaps that I find room for God (the fact that brain researchers have discovered humans are hardwired for mystical experience reinforces my sense that the God concept serves a beneficial purpose). I call these gaps “the place where God lives.”

I also believe there is an indefinable energy that exists in those gaps. I have seen people create energy that consistently and predictably improves the quality of their lives and promotes healing. This energy in the gap I call “The Big Love” or “God Energy.” I believe people can influence this energy by putting out good thoughts and performing good deeds and can spread it around to make a better world.




Dawkins makes a compelling case that religion can be hazardous to your health, but I don’t think God is. It bothers me that one of the unfortunate consequences of this valuable book will be that some will throw out the God baby with the religious bath water. Don’t let Richard Dawkins convince you that belief in God is delusional. Believe in the awesome power of “the gaps,” because it is our greatest resource.

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Let me first say, thank you, to the record-breaking number of relatives who posted in on the Healing Café encouraging me to keep on writing my weekly Schlagbytes, as long as I wanted to. At the conscious level, I didn’t realize that I was so shamelessly pandering for votes. Before I had a chance to bask in self-congratulatory bliss, my wife said, “25 respondees out of the thousands of people who receive Schlagbytes (and who knows, the untold millions to whom they are forwarded), hardly represents a landslide”.

Less may be more (as she says), but there is so much happening out there that invites response, it’s irresistible not to comment. I know I have a limited amount to say (most of which I have probably already said), but every now and then there is a new thought, experience or insight, that might shed a new reflection on even an old theme. You have to be able to wade through the uninspired before you find one worth reading, so be it.

And then there are the stories I come across that inspire me; stories that give me hope in our suffering world, I love to share those. This story was reported (NYT, 1/7/07) about Mr. Wesley Autrey, a 50-year-old construction worker and Navy veteran. Mr. Autrey leapt in front of a Subway train to rescue a stranger who had suffered a seizure and fallen onto the tracks. He left his two young daughters standing on the platform to cover the strangers’ body with his own, as the train passed overhead. Both men lived.

Later, Mr. Autrey was asked why he did it; he chalked it up to a simple compulsion to help someone in distress. What a wonderful reminder that social support is important to survival. This is an old story; we are hard-wired to be connected to others. Belly-buttons are the reminders of that biological truth, so look at yours every day and say thank-you. From mothers, to families, tribes and nations, we are all tribal people. People with strong social networks thrive in comparison to those who do not.


Mr. Autry is a hero to me; he did it because he was compelled to because of what he learned to value. Heroism isn’t an act of conscious analysis, it is instinctive, and people like Mr. Autrey are cut from a different cloth. How many of us would leave our 4 and 6 year old daughters, and put ourselves in harm’s way to rescue a stranger. I’d like to think I’d do it, but I am afraid that in that split-second, self-preservation and my girls, might have made me a bystander.

The fact that Mr. Autrey is black, and the man whose life he saved was white, never entered the picture. Mr. Autrey is the man I want to be. I see in him the spark of the Divine that resides in each of us. In him, I see the light of goodness, a beacon to us all that we can reach out and save each other.



I love this old story; we are all related; be with all things as with relatives and we will save each other. I say this, For All My Relations, Mi Takuye Oyacin.

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Last week’s Schlag Byte, Barbaro Lessons (about the great Stallion who was just euthanized), was actually a replacement for one that my wife and daughters told me was unprintable. It was my research project about how people of various ages, and in a variety of settings, responded to a remote-controlled device that triggered authentic bowel sounds.

I found the rejected piece riotous, they thought it wasn’t funny at all and attributed it to being “a man thing.” Men are little boys at heart who will still ask you to pull their finger and find it amusing. Giving up the byte wasn’t a problem; the killer came when they added that maybe I was running out of things to say. They said the Schlag Bytes were getting a bit repetitive, and I wasn’t saying anything they hadn’t heard before. Writing a byte once a month, they thought, might be sufficient (they were brutal).

My woundedness dissipated this week, however, because I attended a “Board Meeting” with “my nurses.” I worked with them for almost 20 years at the Judson School in Scottsdale, Arizona. These were great nurses who loved children, and could also set limits with them. We saw each other weekly, and once a month we’d get together for clinical case conferences and to talk among ourselves.

We haven’t worked together for 15 years, but we still get together for “Board Meetings.” We still talk about everything that’s happening in our lives, from dance lessons to radio show call-in winnings. We acknowledge our growing limitations and discuss facing these new realities. I told them about my leaky valves, forgetfulness, my family’s suggestion that I was getting repetitive, and last week’s byte experience. I thought they’d all leap to my defense, but three of them didn’t read them at all and the other one only irregularly. They decided to monitor them for a month and then vote (my wife was quick to point out that the vote of four people who have not been reading them for the past ten years will be meaningless). Okay, I admit it . . . even if it has no validity whatsoever, it makes me feel better.

My only devoted reader in the group is Betty Ann, the pride of Clinton, Tennessee, a high school cheerleading beauty with an alluring Southern drawl. She can put that accent on and it still makes me smile all over. Betty Ann has been living with Multiple Sclerosis for the last 20 years. Nowadays, she’s not getting around much and spends most of her days in a comfortable recliner in front of her computer. There’s a TV nearby where she watches the news channels and keeps up with what’s happening in the world.

Betty Ann has been reading my bytes since I began writing them a decade ago and, without hesitation, said she wants to keep getting them weekly. She said last week’s byte about Barbaro moved her. She wanted to make sure that if a time came when she could no longer speak or recognize herself that the Board would speak for her. And if we could tell she wasn’t Betty Ann anymore, we would help let her go, as in Barbaro’s case.

Before I left Betty Ann said, “Keep on writing those bytes; I look forward to starting my week with them. And don’t worry about being repetitive, you never had that much to say, but you say it good, and most of us need to hear it again.”

From Byte blues to Board business, I love “my nurses.”

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Last week, people around the world said goodbye to Barbaro, the thoroughbred stallion who suffered a terrible accident in the Preakness. Barbaro was euthanized after an eight month struggle for survival. We remember the film footage of that fateful moment in May when he mis-stepped at the start of the race and snapped the leg bones of his right hind leg. Twenty years ago that injury would have necessitated his being put down immediately, but with today’s best medical care he had a 50% chance of surviving this catastrophic injury.

A couple of months later he developed laminitis, a devastating structural disease in horses that is the result of balancing the enormous weight on only three legs, creating stress. The disease required additional surgery, after which his surgeon said Barbaro’s odds were not good, but that this horse had enormous heart and character, which were important factors in his recovery so far.

Several weeks ago, Barbaro developed an abscess in his hoof requiring yet another surgery; together with the deadly laminitis, it left this legendary colt barely recognizable. His tail was half its normal size, his side was scarred, and he was walking unsteadily. In the last days, his surgeon who had come to know him intimately said, “He was not himself, he was a different horse, you could see he was upset.” It was more than he or his dedicated owners wanted to put him through.

Why do we mourn his loss? Because he reminds every one of us that heart and soul are important factors in our recovery from traumas, and that when faced with devastating prospects, we can find the courage to fight. Barbaro reminds us of our noblest selves.

Finally, no matter how courageous we are or how hard we struggle, there will come a time when each of us will have had enough. I hope I have a doctor like Barbaro’s who, even if I can’t speak, will see in my eyes that this is not me any more and ease my journey.


Farewell, Barbaro, you touched our hearts.

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