1 post tagged “opium of the masses”

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.