From Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring) IX

From Letters to a Young Contrarian (Art of Mentoring)

IX

“You seem to have guessed, from some remarks I have already made in passing, that I am not a religious believer.  In order to be absolutely honest, I should not leave you with the impression that I am part of the generalized agnosticism of our culture.  I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief, is positively harmful.  Reviewing the false claims of religion I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true.  I do not envy believers their faith.  I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.

Why do I say that?  Well, there may be people who wish to live their lives under a cradle-to-grave divine supervision; a permanent surveillance and monitoring.  But I cannot imagine anything more horrible or grotesque.  It would be worse, in a way, if the supervision was benign.  (I have my answer ready if I turn out to be mistaken about this: at the bar of judgment I shall argue that I deserve credit for an honest conviction of unbelief and must in any case be acquitted of the charge of hypocrisy or sycophancy.  If the omnipotent and omniscient one does turn out to be of the loving kind, I would expect this plea to do me more good than any trashy casuistry of the sort popularized by Blaise Pascal.  One could also fall back upon the less principled and mores shiftily empirical defense offered by Bertrand Russell: “Oh Lord, you did not give us enough evidence.”)

I think that this conviction does bear upon the mental and moral resources that are necessary if one hopes to live “as if” one were free.  In a much-quoted reflection on America’s original sin, Thomas Jefferson said, “I tremble for my country when I remember that god is just.”  However, if there really was a god, and he really was just, then there would be little enough for believers to tremble about, it would be a consolation that infinitely outweighed any imaginable earthly care.

I have met many brave men and women, morally superior to myself, whose courage in adversity derives from their faith.  But whenever they have chosen to speak or write about it, I have found myself appalled by the instant decline of their intellectual and moral standards.  They want god on their side and believe best, but an extreme form of solipsism?  They proceed from conclusion to evidence; our greatest resources is the mind and the mind is not well-trained by being taught to assume what has to be proved. 

This arrogance and illogic is inseparable even from the meekest and most altruistic religious affirmations.  A true believer must believe that he or she is here for a purpose and is an object of real interest to a Supreme Being; he or she must also claim to have at least an inkling of what that Supreme Being desires.   I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator--that’s beyond my conceit.  I therefore have no choice but to find something suspect even in the humblest believer, let alone in the great law-givers and edict-makers of whose “flock” (and what a revealing word that is) they form a part.

Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicity in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville’s unforgettable line, “Created sick—Commanded to be well.”  And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail.  Christians, for example, declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born.  I didn’t ask for it, and would willingly have foregone it, but there it is: I’m claimed and saved whether I wish it or not.  And if I refuse the unsolicited gift?  Well, there are still some vague mutterings about an eternity of torment for my ingratitude.  This is somewhat worse than a Big Brother state, because there could be no hope of its eventually passing away. 

In any case, I find something repulsive in the idea of vicarious redemption.  I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form.  There’s no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway.  As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on another man’s debt, or even offer to take his place in prison.  That would be self-sacrificing.  But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility.  So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the whole concept to the free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out ethical principles for ourselves. 

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment.  There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory.  The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context).  The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone.  The first is the moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativist and “non-judgmental” that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson.  Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra-vindictiveness and ultra-compassion.

I can speak with more experience of the Christian propaganda, since I was baptized as an Anglican, educated at a Methodist boarding school with compulsory religious instruction (which I enjoyed and which taught me a good deal) and was once received into the Greek Orthodox Church for reasons that are irrelevant here.  But I also had a Jewish mother and was once married by a distinguished rabbi (who I suspected of being a secret Einsteinian agnostic).  Judaism has some advantages over Christianity in that, for example, it does not proselytize—except among Jews—and it does not make the cretinous mistake of saying that the Messiah has already made his appearance.  (When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that “he may tarry,” we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.)  However, along with Islam and Christianity it does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god.  I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realization that there is no such thing.”

Christopher Hitchens