Religious belief has always been a painful subject for me, sometimes quite literally. I like to think that my beliefs are grounded in rationality, but the end of my belief in a present and attentive deity ended abruptly and for entirely emotional reasons.

When I was eleven years old, I was helping my Dad lay down stripes in a parking lot, a fun and profitable side-business that he maintained for many years. We were in downtown Houston, and I have a clear snapshot memory of this.

I was standing at the edge of the parking lot when a lost baby bird wandered out into the street. I had taken a couple of steps to retrieve it, when a car flashed by, and there was suddenly only a messy brown splatter where a second before had been an innocent infant life.

At that exact moment I decided that, if there was a God, and he actively made the universe run, the way I had been told he did, he wasn’t a guy I wanted to hang out with. I can still remember how I thought that, if God had a purpose for that brief life and death, I didn’t want to fathom it. Maybe it was to test my belief in an infinitely-powerful and infinitely-loving being. If so, I failed the test.

I already understood that things die. It wasn’t the first time that I’d seen that. But the utter callous meaninglessness of this particular tiny death also killed the Christian God for me, because He was all about meaning. It was an instant conversion to an unpleasant Existentialism.

I mentioned my apostasy to a couple of people at West University Elementary in the following days, and got beaten up a couple of times by small gangs of pre-adolescent boys as a reward.

As I got older, I continued to be surrounded by hard and soft Christianity, and some occasional Judaism. I couldn’t respond to the emotional appeals, and any attempts at logical argument in favor of the existence of an involved God simply fell apart under even the most cursory examination. I did try to follow the reasoning presented to me, because it would be important if there was an underlying purpose to everything.

But the arguments always boiled down, sooner or later to: My religion must be true, even though wrong-headed people interpret the details differently than I do, because our Holy Book says it’s true. And our Holy Book is unquestionably the word of God, so it must be true. Completely circular logic.

So, let’s continue to talk about emotion rather than logic. Many people find comfort in their religious belief. They make what is commonly called the Leap of Faith, and then they get to turn their attention to predicting which football team is going to win the Superbowl this year. It helps them cope with the on-going struggle that inevitably leads to the end of Superbowl predictions.

Me, I just deal with the struggle and the darkness as best I can — which isn’t always graceful or attractive. I can’t and won’t make the Leap of Faith, not because I’m too damn smart (though I am indeed too damn smart), but because it feels cowardly and dishonest. I decline to adopt a deep belief simply in order to be comforted. My universe is an uncaring, unmanageable enormity.

My mother tried to do some religion with me and my sister, briefly. Here’s my memory of it:

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I saw Led Zeppelin play live two times. I think. Maybe three times. The one at the three-day Texas International Pop Festival in Lewisville, I don’t remember much, as there was a heavy acid rain that weekend. The other one was at the Dallas State Fair Coliseum.

They came on and rocked the house forever. They played an electric set of all of their recorded songs, as well as some from their upcoming album, took a break, then came back with another long acoustic set. No diva behavior at all, no shortened concert time. Just hard-working rockers giving everything they had.

Following their old-skool display of musical virtue in London in December, us elderly hippies impatiently await final word on what has been called the Second Coming. Robert Plant has been coy about his ability to commit to a Zep tour, as he has a hit album out with Allison Krause. It’s at #6 on Amazon today.

Here’s the stream of the full album, Raising Sand.

It’s a relatively Easy Listening album, but I like it. I’m especially fond of the darkness of ‘Trampled Rose’, and ‘Nothing’ is excellent heavy rock — though I wish they’d gotten Page in there for this track to Zep it up a little more. ‘Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson’ is a great toe-tapper.

Here’s the vid of the lead single, ‘Gone Gone Gone’:

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It’s utterly charming, and, unless they’re both great actors as well as great musicians, they actually like each other a helluva lot.

…I figure that the boys are gonna have to do the tour sooner or later. Just to prove that you’re never to old to Rock and Roll.…

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Since I wrote a piece about why I’m voting for Barack Obama in the primary two weeks ago, I’ve been thinking a lot about the persistent sexism in our culture.  When the feminist movement was in its second wave back in the ‘70s, I was in high school and college.  Despite what seemed to be big changes afoot, the attitudes toward women back then were still as entrenched as ever. 

Maureen and I grabbed breakfast the other morning and ended up talking about this.  We had both had the same experiences with weird male prejudice.  The first was being told by men — strangers and “friends” alike — to smile.  As in,  “You’d be so much prettier if you smiled.” 

To this day, I want to punch anyone who tells me I should smile.  To put it bluntly, maybe I don’t fucking feel like smiling. Why should I smile to satisfy you?  How dare you tell me how to feel?  Or that I should pretend to feel happy in order to satisfy you.

I suppose this doesn’t sound like a big thing, but upon closer scrutiny, it’s profoundly telling.  That these random men felt it was both their place and their right to tell women to “put on a happy face.”  As if women should walk around all day, grinning from ear to ear, in a perpetual state of compliant “happiness.”  The arrogance of those demands still staggers me to this day.

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