The Comedian Who Died, Literally

Perhaps because the weather is getting cooler toward the end of summer, I find myself remembering my visit one cool evening to a small Christian coffee house in East Northport, N.Y., where, not long ago, I heard a comedian give witness to life after death.

Samantha's Li'l Bit of Heaven hosted my friend Lenny Horowitz, the only Jewish act on the bill on its regular comedy nights. He was the resident non-believer, and he got lots of mileage out of his outsider status. When he told jokes that challenged the audience's delicate sensibilities, they would shake their bags of pretzels in disapproval.

As I had done a few times before, I visited one evening for Comedy Night, to see Lenny perform, and decide whether or not I could overcome my stage fright and do 5 minutes.

I decided against it. Lenny did well. But he was not the closer that evening. Another comedian, named Mike, whom I also know well from the local circuit, stood up to do his act.

Mike did many of his old bits, sanitized from when he would perform them at Governor's Comedy Club in Levittown.

But the one thing I expected least was when Mike decided to close his act by testifying to this eminently receptive audience about the time he "died" and went to heaven. Mike's heart had stopped beating during a heart attack years before. How long it stopped I don't remember him recounting. But, as he said, he "died on the table" at the hospital.

During this time, he told the rapt audience, he experienced an incredibly friendly and peaceful presence. It showed him that his wife and all of his children would be healthy and happy. And that they would join him someday. Most interestingly to me, he also got a rather immediate explanation for all of the suffering in the world.

But, alas, he was revived. And he told the medical staff saving his life, "Let me go! Let me go!" because he wanted to be in heaven.

And from that day forward, he said, although he did not know why he was still here, he did not fear death, or anything else for that matter. He "knows" that he will be happy after death, and that all is well with the world.

Out of respect for the man's story, I should have simply remained silent. It was a deeply moving moment. But I couldn't resist the urge, once the show was over, to question him more.

I congratulated him on a great performance. And then, I asked, "You don't happen to remember the explanation for all that suffering, do you?"

"No," he said, shaking his head.

A few days later, the inspiration of his story faded.

Another One Page Refutation of Unbelief (Yawn)

I like the publication First Things. I respect the life's work of the theologian and philosopher Michael Novak. But, damn, and yawn, if I don't see simplistic, dismissive, curriculum vitae-padding arguments against unbelievers, like Novak's latest, too often in First Things and elsewhere on the Christian Right.

In a drive-by article, majestically titled "Atheism and Evil," Novak engages a friendly audience of First Things readers to quickly dismiss atheists and agnostics for their struggles with belief.

A good percentage of these unbelievers, according to a recent poll, have allowed the problem of evil to drive them away from the notion of a personal God. But, surprisingly, many of them cling to some notion of an ultimate force.

In the most insulting statement of the entire piece, Novak accuses all of them of possessing a "morose delectation" for the reality of evil. In other words, they should just get over their perverse hang-up with suffering. (Now break out the brandy.)

Novak reminds us, yawn, that Thomas Aquinas posited that evil was not a co-equal reality with good. Evil tends toward non-being rather than being. (Ah, how did millions of human beings miss that? It's all explained now!)

And, without the possibility of moral evil, the world could never reach its current heights of goodness.

Excuse me if I yawn, again. These arguments are repeated endlessly against modern unbelief like a Thomistic spell. And yet, unbelief doesn't seem to go away. Curious.

Of course, the reality of physical evil (hurricanes, cancers, etc.) is not addressed here. That would have required at least another page of strenuous quoting of the Church Fathers.

Or perhaps it is, encrusted within Novak's brief, metaphorical reference to the world as a "tapestry of human experience." Or in his sweeping notion that "[a]ll the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and 'blooming, buzzing profusion.'”

There you have it. The whole thing, from Krakatoa to Katrina, is just another "good story," and "blooming, buzzing profusion." What?

I know that Michael Novak means better. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens' delectations have gotten too much under his skin.

But I think that if one were actually concerned with these issues, in a spirit of genuine solidarity with non-First Things subscribers, it might help to acknowledge the serious concerns of "unbelievers" -- and perhaps more "believers" than one might care to acknowledge -- with moral evil, physical evil, and even metaphysical evil -- where one grinds daily against the limits of one's own being.

In a media-mad world in which human beings are buffeted daily by images of untold suffering and cruelty, and even levels of human success and honor that they will never achieve, it will require more than a series of dusty syllogisms to ease the suffering and dissension caused by the "immense crisscrossing" within the human spirit of the problems of moral, natural and metaphysical evil.