Close encounters
To counter the pervasive influence of religion in our mountain hometown, my father once loaned me his copy of Mark Twain’s satirical Letters from the Earth. A decade later I encountered Twain’s barbed commentary on a famous line from the Sermon on the Mount. To a character who claims that God would care for a poor kitten because “not a sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it,” Twain has his skeptic respond, “But it falls, just the same.