death of an apologist; or, why Dawkins is right
Some time around the publication of Richard Dawkin’s bestselling The God Delusion, it became impossible to go to the pub without a heathen friend launching into an argument about how demonstrably wicked religion is. I used to argue back, but now I don’t. I’ve come to the conclusion that those heathens have a point. Those pub arguments used to be fun. Some pagan would get tipsy and trundle out Marx’s old saw that religion is the opium of the masses. Then, without fail, they’d decide that religion is the cause of all wars. It was always enjoyable to point out that in many Marxist societies, opium has been the opium of the masses, and then add that if religion is an opiate, it should surely reduce war. But the Enemy is better read nowadays. I tried to keep up, which meant spending a lot of time reading high-level apologetics and not much time caring for widows and orphans, ministering to the sick, or distributing alms. Finally, after ages of defending religion against charges that it is offensive and ridiculous, I have decided to concede that it is both offensive and ridiculous. Things came to a head the other week. Someone in the White Swan asked me why on earth God told Saul to massacre all those Amalekites and their innocent camels in the first book of Samuel (and, specifically, why we should worship such a mean-spirited, bloodthirsty deity). The standard answer, of course, is that the Amalekites deserved it, and those camels were wicked infidels; but before I could say it, I realised I didn’t buy it. The truth is, I’ve always felt bad for those Amalekites and their doomed dromedaries. Like I feel bad that my holy book sanctions concubinage, occasionally glorifies genocide and suggests that parents punish recalcitrant teenagers by stoning them to death.
Listen up, fellow camel-lovers. I searched scripture for answers, and I discovered something shocking. The bible agrees with the heathens: religion is bad.
Not just bad. Religion is death. It is destruction - because religion is any attempt to impose on humans the purity of a God who is a raging fire. Even codifying this will as Law turns it into something fearful.
Ever since our Edenic ancestors tried to digest the nature of God in the form of some fruit, our attempts to appropriate God’s holiness have always led to some form of violence. Touch the Ark of the Covenant and you must die, even if you’re only trying to stop it from toppling over (see 2 Sam 6:7). Mess with the Chosen People and you’re a goner, even if you are only a camel. God’s purity sweeps everything clean, with incendiary force.
The thrust of the bible, from beginning to end, is this: we cannot accommodate the will of a holy God and live. Imposed from without, his purity destroys us; it takes on the character of wrath. The only way God’s will can be done in us is if God himself re-creates us to accommodate it, grafts on this new self and phases out the old self – and then performs his will in us to the degree that we let him. And it turns out that this was God’s plan all along.
You know the verses. Jeremiah: I will write my law on your heart. Philippians: For it is God who works in you to will and to work for his good pleasure. And others.
Sometimes it is hard to know where religion ends and evil begins. That’s why the biblical antidote to evil is also the biblical antidote to religion: the Cross, where Christ holds humanity and divinity together in his own person. He accepts the full force of the cataclysm and overcomes it; and the consuming fire seals the two together.
Christianity starts with filing for religious bankruptcy. You ditch your pious resolutions and stumble to the cross and the empty tomb. It is a more thoroughgoing rejection of religion than atheism. The realisation of this has been very liberating for me. Here are two other things I’ve realised.
First, you can’t ban evil. There’s no political or educational or psychological answer to the problem of sin. You can’t force goodness upon yourself or anyone else – that tactic always ends not just with failure, but with some kind of violence.
Jesus’s harshest words were reserved for those who, claiming personal righteousness, persecuted certain classes of people - tax collectors, for example - as paragons of evil. Jesus himself much preferred the tax collectors. My guess is that he also prefers the homosexuals who we modern hypocrites effectively try to ban. Folks, none of us are any better than anyone else, and if we haven’t shared the gospel with ‘sinners’, with love and grace and trembling humility, then it is a plain denial of the gospel to try to force values on them by other means.
Second, the truth of the gospel does not depend on whether it is reasonable, or logical, or scientifically verifiable. It depends on whether it is true. If you want proof of the existence of a personal God who listens to prayers, the most sensible course of action is to ask Him. There’s nothing to lose and it’s free and it seems to work sometimes.
If my godless friends will accept that challenge, I’m happy to agree with their verdict that religion kills. I’ll go further: religion is an impossibility. An eye of a needle through which we must somehow leap. All I can do is testify to what I am: one of a long train of Amalekite camels squeezing, by amazing grace, through.
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I hesitate to say from that, though, that religion is evil. It's not particularly evil - but merely particularly human. A lot of good gets done for the sake of faith - and also a lot of evil. Makes sense - human beings can be both good and evil, and are usually both at once. If we're going to say that religion is evil because evil has been done in the name of religion, then shouldn't we evaluate every other social structure on that same basis? What about government? Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, the Janjaweed - certainly great evil has been done by and for these. What about social groups altogether? We could argue that racism, sexism, classism, and almost every other nasty "ism" out there is the conflict between groups of people. Why not eliminate social groups because they're evil? Tribalism and whatnot.
As to "religious bankruptcy," there are stories of Sufi mystics who, in a state of ecstacy, have proclaimed that they are no longer Muslims - that they are neither Jew, nor Christian, nor any other class - that they have transcended religion into a new connection with the Divine. I've never heard of anything similar within Judaism, but then Jews have always believed that God transcends Judaism - that this is merely our particular contract with the Eternal - that others may have their own. All of our sacred texts are laden with violence - but so is the history of the world. For better or worse, these are our stories.
Agreed. It's not so much the evil that's done 'in the name of religion' that I'm talking about - people will hurt each other over anything that they care about; if religion is evil, so is just about everything else. What I'm interested in is the basic religious problem that trying to accommodate the will of God is like swallowing a grenade. It’s more than anyone can handle. There seems to be an implicit acknowledgement of this problem in the bible, in that we find God expressing a desire to alter us so that we can be moved to obey him spontaneously.
Liberal apologies for the biblical God's 'tyrannical' deeds usually seem to boil down to arguments from cultural relativism or appeals to 'progressive revelation', which to the anti-religionist just look like admissions that religion belongs to a cruel past and should be consigned to the same historical dustbin as Molech-worship. The answer of liberal theology is to recast God as someone who meets us on our own terms. But what if the wrath of God, his violence and (in critics' eyes) 'evil' are simply what God looks like to any human placed in the position of having to appropriate something of his will – i.e. called to pursue the project of religion? And what if this fundamental problem of religion is precisely what is addressed by the 'new heart - heart of flesh' etc promises of the Jewish scriptures, and the soteriology of the Christian scriptures?
In other words, I'm agreeing with the four horsemen that religion is a terrible thing, a thing of violence; not because of what is done in its name (that’s a straw man; nay, a straw boy), but because it involves pouring a divine will into a human vessel. This tornado-in-tupperware character of Judaism and Christianity is proof against the idea that humans created God in their image, as some kind of comfort. What’s more, embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a recognition that religion - by which I mean the human attempt to do God's revealed will - is not enough to bring about a divine-human rapprochement; some sort of divine provision must be (and, we’d say, has been) made.
Of course, in all of this I’m seeing the Jewish bible through a Christian lens. Would you say the above is at all reconcilable with any of your own beliefs, or do they clash?
I've written about Dawkins and the other "New" atheists and felt bad afterwards - its kinda like shooting fish in a barrel, or fighting a one armed man. I finally figured I should just walk away in pity rather than engage them even if, like in Monty Python's The Holy Grail, they, like the Black Knight, keep shouting they want to fight even after all their limbs have been hacked off. Excellent post.
Great post.
We shouldn't forget the "impossibility". It's something we step through each day on our journey.
I've read your posts about the New Atheists while devouring your blog, and they're top notch.
The idea of a diachronic gradient stretching from our ignorant, superstitious, religious past into our enlightened, rational, faithless future is pure sleight of brain, but so many people buy it. Science can't rule out the idea of some subjective agency or agenices operating behind the scenes of nature, because it can't tell us what forces or natural laws actually are, as distinct from their effects. Interestingly, the only thing we can experience that exists apart from these effects is subjective agency, consciousness. So when the ancients explained the world in terms of a material world underpinned by subjective consciousness(es), they were explaining it in terms of definite concepts readily to hand, rather than positing unknowables. In Occam's barbershop this counts as efficient, intellectually honest explication.
Anyway, morning break over - back to data entry. Have a good day and thanks for making me smile with the Python image.
Thanks, Murray. Happy Festival of Saint Matthias to you!