I. A Moment of Reflection

My readership has recently doubled, so I want to reflect for a moment on their behalf. If you know my story, feel free to skip down to the second part, II.

As I have shared many times, I had a personal crisis of faith in 1990 while serving as a missionary in the Muslim world. The impetus of that crisis was when I recognized that our evangelical subculture fostered an atmosphere of abuse. Although the pivotal point was when my son almost died from that abuse (the leader refused to allow us to take him to a doctor), we were not mere victims, as I, too, was an abuser.

But once there was a crack in that subculture, the whole thing began to fall apart, held together by lies. We told many factual lies, but more so, emotional lies. Lies we told ourselves and each other. Pretentious. Religion, I have found, is very competitive, striving to prove who is the most spiritual. Performance Christianity is built brick by brick upon virtue signaling.

I committed before God there in Cairo, that I would pursue truth at all costs, because if there really were a personal creator, that creator would exist in the center of truth, not some sleight of hand or deception. When my feet hit American soil, I began studying earnestly, trying to make sense of the Christian culture I had been part of for over 20 years. My studies have only intensified as my time on this earth has dwindled.

Around 20 years ago, I started a blog for those like me who have become disillusioned with evangelicalism. Most of them, like I almost did, were leaving Christianity for good. My goal was to answer their questions and to deconstruct the American evangelical culture, trying to make sense of how it was, how it got there, and how it differs from the simple teachings of Jesus of Galilee. The name of that blog was The Christian Monist. I chose “monist,” a philosophical term meaning a unity in creation, not the dualism that sees the material as bad and the spiritual as good, which dominates much of Christianity today.

In 2018, feeling like I had said enough, I pivoted to writing meaningful fiction and wanted to change my blog to J. Michael Jones, Writer, as all authors need a place to showcase their books.

Soon after that, I became deathly ill with cancer. Our pastor asked if I was part of Caring Bridge so that the church members could follow my progress, or lack thereof. I decided to write about my cancer journey on this blog, which was well-established. I think I had, at one point, 2,000 daily followers, many from my church and some from college and even high school. I felt loved and supported, and am so grateful for those who came.

As I emerged from the throes of death, several months later, some followers from my old Christian Monist blog asked me when I was going to return to my provocative writing. So, I pivoted once again, writing more and more about my philosophical ramblings.

This created some problems. For twenty years, I had “drive-by” attackers, always accusing me of being the devil because I challenged traditional thinking, and the crux of religion is conformity, not truth-seeking. But those attacks were like water on a duck’s back to me. But my new audience, made up of Christian folks who had never been to the Christian Monist or seen this side of me, was perplexed. They assumed I was having a personal crisis of faith due to my cancer. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

While I assume most people at my church see me now as a weirdo, or a poor, confused, unspiritual person, the worst of them began attacking me personally. It is one thing to have strangers say you are the devil; it is quite another to have friends, even your best friend, and people you go to church with, accuse you of the same. Profoundly painful, so much so, I was very tempted to leave organized religion for good.

But with a broader view of this situation, the last of the attacks was last summer, and almost all of the attackers (those connected with my church) no longer attend there because they disrespected our pastor in the same way they disrespected me. So, I am trying to bounce back from the trauma. It was traumatic as these people came to my blog to “support me” in my cancer journey, only to accuse me of being aligned with Satan and having no real relationship with God, profoundly cruel. I’ve lost many nights of sleep over this.

The vast majority of the folks at my church, including those who come here, have been very gracious toward me (even if in their hearts they think I’m strange), and I have the fullest respect for them. I measure people by how they love, and many of them are better lovers (broad term) than I am.

II. Excerpt from How Cancer Taught Me to Swear

In an amalgam of this blog’s history, I want to post an excerpt from one of the two books I am working on. Between my writing, books, blogs, my three or four hours of study per day, normal housekeeping chores, and building my stone cottage, I’m the busiest I’ve ever been in my life, with half my normal energy (due to my cancer).

The first book, Agony of a Woman, is fiction and takes the reader right into the middle of the pro-life/pro-choice debate, offering new insights for both sides. I am now pitching that book to agents, which is an arduous and humiliating task. So far, none have asked to see the manuscript, based on the premise that I am a nobody.

The book I am now writing, and am working on the closing chapter, How Cancer Taught Me to Swear, is nonfiction and not just a memoir of my cancer journey, but a satire on how culture deals with cancer and tragedy in general.

I wanted to post a short excerpt from chapter ten, where I discuss the heart of the debate about the ‘why’ of cancer. The excerpt includes the biological process that leads to multiple myeloma, which you may not be interested in, so I have highlighted the more important part regarding theists at the end.

 Chapter Ten

Digging Out

Those who imagine a God, a spiritual force, or even the cold, dark universe as intentional and deterministic, as expressed in the statement, “All things happen for a reason,” find great comfort when things are going well. Marx was right in this situation: religion can be the opiate of the masses. But when disaster strikes, such a presupposition creates a personal dilemma. The only comfort in that place is to recognize that there is space within the boundaries of reality for simple cause and effect and meaningless randomness; otherwise, like it or not, your God becomes the devil. To try to hold in the clutches of the same hand, a good God who controls everything, and pure evil, pushes one into delusional thinking that is unsustainable. Maybe I am wrong, and there are some people who can imagine a God that loves them and deliberately gives them hell on earth.

If I were to explain the whole story of how my healthy body developed multiple myeloma, it would take a book larger than this one. The human body is far more complex than most people realize, and the most astute scientists cannot fully appreciate.

We have a type of white blood cell called B lymphocytes that lives primarily in the bone marrow. We have around 300 billion of these cells in our bodies, and they perform a variety of crucial roles in fighting infections. Approximately 20 billion of them differentiate into one of two types of plasma cells: transient ones that live for days to weeks, or permanent ones that last for years or even a lifetime.

Like all cells, plasma cells have a nucleus that contains the blueprint for all body structure and functions: DNA. Surrounding the nucleus is the cytoplasm. Thousands of units of messenger RNA (mRNA) copy segments of the DNA blueprint and carry that information from the nucleus into the Rough Endoplasmic Reticulum (RER) of the cytoplasm. There, it is like a factory receiving a software plan (from the mRNA), uploading it into a machine that spits out precise widgets based on the design.

In real life, the mRNA tells the RER how to fold organic molecules called amino acids, 110 pairs to be precise, into 3-D structures: five different heavy-chain and two different light-chain proteins, lambda and kappa. It then assembles, almost like braiding hair, two identical heavy chains with two identical light chains to form a single antibody. There are leftover, or “free,” light chain proteins released into the bloodstream. The free light chain proteins assist the immune system in several roles before being excreted by the kidneys. Each plasma cell produces thousands of these antibodies per second. A bustling factory!

All cancers begin with a mutation in a cell’s DNA, and multiple myeloma is no different. A toxin, radiation, or genetic cause may account for this mutation, but most of the time it is due to an unknown reason, likely a simple accident. In multiple myeloma, there are typically at least two mutational steps. In the first step, the mutation causes cells that are not supposed to reproduce to start cloning themselves. When this happens, the antibodies produced by these cloned plasma cells are detected on a Serum Protein Electrophoresis, which separates proteins by type, as an “M-spike.” At a 1% per-year rate, these clonal cells mutate again, turning them into cells that proliferate wildly. This, my friends, is multiple myeloma.

The first problem with multiple myeloma is that these proliferating cells take over the bone marrow, disrupting its regular role in protecting us from infections. Overwhelming infections are the leading cause of death in multiple myeloma. Sometimes I wish I could better convince some of my friends and family of this significant risk, like a friend who intentionally coughed on me to mock me for wearing a mask, or well-meaning family members who took me to a very crowded restaurant during the COVID pandemic, although I had told them I couldn’t go there. An infection would have been the death of me at that time.

The next problem is that the proliferation of these clonal plasma cells is so great that the bone marrow can’t contain them, and they start to erode away at the bones from the inside out. They do this by activating old bone resorption and inhibiting new bone formation. Fractures are often the first symptom of multiple myeloma; if, like the victim I mentioned, whose first symptom was fracturing her neck and becoming a quadriplegic, those can be deadly.

While half of multiple myeloma patients have kidney damage, in only five percent of us is it severe. This happens because the proliferating cancerous plasma cells produce far more light-chain proteins, either lambda or kappa, than can be braided with the heavy proteins, and they leave the plasma cell as “free light chains” that gum up the kidneys. The kidneys are meant to process unbound, free light-chain proteins, but not when their levels are 1,000 or 10,000 times normal.

Since plasma cells don’t divide (mitotically), the vulnerable period for these mutations is during B lymphocyte transformation into a plasma cell. This transformation occurs several billion times per day, more during active infection. So, if you live to 80, you will have 58 trillion conversions from B lymphocytes to plasma cells. With each conversion, the information for 300 genes must be reprogrammed for the new role. During this reprogramming, mistakes can occur. This means that in your life, there are 150 quadrillion points at which plasma genes are altered and susceptible to mistakes. It takes only two groups of translation errors for multiple myeloma to arise.

One way to look at it is to imagine that each typed word is equivalent to one gene. However, a gene contains much more information than a single word. If you were to type 150 quadrillion words nonstop, it would take you almost five hundred million years to finish, typing sixty words per minute. And each keystroke must be perfect.

I have written books with one million keystrokes. With three or four layers of proofreading by myself and others, it is still hard not to have one mistake, one wrong keystroke in the manuscript. Therefore, rather than being angry at my body for the errors, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for the precision that keeps all of us alive. We walk tightropes of glass.

Specifically, for me, the typo in my DNA during the transition of one B lymphocyte to a plasma cell was that the long (q) arm of chromosome 1 was enhanced or longer than it should be, the long (q) arms of chromosomes 9, 5, and  15, were shorten or missing, and in another chromosome location, 14q32, some extra genetic material had leaked in. Just five typing errors in quadrillions of copies. Understanding this mechanism for cancer prevented me from asking the question, “Why me?” which implies some meaning for cancer.

To an atheist, a natural evolutionist, this makes perfect sense. From their perspective, we came into being by chance, and natural selection made us who we are. Natural selection is not perfect, and evolution occurs through DNA mutations.

Because there is a much higher rate of cancer in our older, non-reproductive ages, natural selection has no interest in overcoming the disease. As a matter of fact, if you are honest about it, the death of older people has an advantage, at least biologically. By thinning the herd of the infertile, you would have more resources for the fertile. Maybe, indirectly, having grandparents around increases the odds of grandchildren maturing to their reproductive ages, but that’s a stretch. Natural selection is only interested in reproduction. If suffering, depression, and misery caused us to be more fertile, reproducing more offspring, then natural selection would work to make us more so. But atheism has its own problems, as I’ve mentioned, not the least of these are the fine-tuning of the cosmos for human life and the loss of meaning and morals.

A theistic perspective faces its own difficulties when confronted with tragedy. We have only a few logical conclusions. God created the cosmos and the profoundly complex systems of biology and physics, but either God can’t control the mistakes within those systems or doesn’t want to. If God can’t control the mistakes, God is incompetent, much like the gods of the Greco-Roman world. Those weak gods, who were as much victims of fate as we are, were not viable. The much more competent monotheistic God supplanted them. A God who does control fate… and mistakes. But this competent God raises the question: are they good if they willingly allow suffering?

For me, the only logical answer to a God who is big enough and good enough is that, for reasons we can’t understand, a real mystery, nature is allowed to take its course most of the time. I am not a deist, because deists believe God never intervenes.

Five of the first six American presidents were deists, as well as other statesmen such as Ben Franklin. This was the only way they could hold on to a mighty God who allows mistakes. But I still pray… and boy do I pray… always hoping for an intervention from God. While an honest observation of life, I know that God rarely intervenes in the cause-and-effect of nature, but the hope of God’s intervention springs eternal.

Unfortunately, as I have alluded to, it is a widespread belief to project meaning into tragedy. It must have happened for a reason… right? God did it for my good? I believe we have to let go of that notion to find peace. “Shit happens” is a profoundly healthy theological position. I don’t know why Christians have such a hard time with that concept, as the idea of a fallen, dangerous, imperfect cosmos is one of the cornerstone teachings of the faith.

Most of the great theologians in Christian history knew that God wasn’t the author of evil or mistakes. This includes Augustine, Thomas Aquinas (my favorite), and even John Calvin. Calvin was the most deterministic of them all, but still wrote that God did not create things like cancer, yet God allows such disasters for a reason. But by God selectively allowing tragedies, we are back to the same problem of cancer having a purpose. Yet, to be clear, even though I don’t believe cancer is intentional, part of God’s plan, I do think we have options as to what we do about it. Withdraw into a cave of self-pity? Fight the monster with all we have? Encourage other sufferers to fight as you do? The ESPN sportscaster, Stuart Scott, who had a long battle with a rare appendix cancer, used to say, “I can fight cancer without fighting God.” C.S. Lewis expressed similar views in his books, The Problem of Pain, and A Grief Observed.

There are local reasons, cause-and-effect, for everything, but not universal reasons. My neighbor, Jean, who died in a car wreck, had a local reason. She had just learned her boyfriend was breaking up with her, and she was furious. She jumped behind the wheel of her parents’ car and drove fast down a winding road to reach him before he left for college. She passed a vehicle on the double yellow line, driven by extreme emotion. She hit an oncoming car at high speeds. There is a reason, as there is a reason for cancer, but the meaning stops at the local level rather than the celestial.

Because I had learned that shit happens and for no celestial reason in 1990, as my religious world was collapsing, I did not have to doubt God in 2019 when I developed cancer. For those who maintain the need for meaning in their tragedy, I believe, will eventually feel unloved by God in their secret places.

Peace, Mike