I had received a call from my mother earlier in the month – and after the usual salutations and such, a question was posed to me:
“What is an...agnostic?”
After giving my mother a more-or-less dictionary accurate description, I discovered the reason for the query: she found my Facebook page, and noticed such was stated for me under “religion.” How or why she was looking up my Facebook page is a mystery for another time.
Surprisingly, my mother did not go into preaching mode (being I was raised a regular, church-going Catholic), but instead told me about her recent car incident, in which a blown rear tire caused her car to spin out of control on a highway causing the vehicle to briefly assume a rotational speed approximately that of an astronomical body known as a neutron star. The car “miraculously” come to a stop at the side of the road, and all of this without striking anything. The conclusion, of course, is that supernatural intervention was involved – not the usual physics, nor the reflexes of the humans along the roadway.
Obviously, the story wasn't convincing to me. If divine intervention was involved, couldn't it have been less dramatic, such as not causing the car to spin out in the first place? You get my drift.
Anyway, back to the main point of the story: My mother has found out that I rejected religion, yet in that very phone call, I am informed that my brother (highly educated, church-going, married to a fine woman, three kids) is out of the will due to some trivial reasons, yet I'm still in it (the agnostic, woman-chasing, hard drinking, unmarried So Cal playboy). Maybe that's the only reason I didn't catch “hell.”
Well, so much for religion...
