In the decade since 9/11 – the day when Faith, in its most pitiless and fanatical declension, hurled itself against the innocents of Lower Manhattan – large swathes of the cultural bandwidth have been given over to talk of God and the (by no means coterminous) project of religion. The pachyderm of Belief, gelded and shrunken into quaintness by the civilizational gains of the preceding four centuries, occasionally touched for luck by the poor in mind and spirit and prized as a talisman by the heirs of Tartuffe for its clasp-loosening way with a credulous handbag, was suddenly filling up the salon and shitting all over the furniture.
In the United Kingdom where few people take religion seriously but where most can be relied on to provide disaster funds with generous support (thus denting some religions’ arrogant claims to be the sole guide to ethical living) religion is almost definitionally good for a laugh. The eyes of those who claim no invisible means of support swivel heavenwards only at tales of hippies gashing their feet on healing crystals or at those Divines who claim in one breath to detect the Hand of God in something or other while asserting in the next His essential opacity. Pick a lane, pal.
And on 9/11 they did.
Here, said the critics of religion as they pointed to the reeking stumps of the Twin Towers, is where Faith gets you. Try not to choke on it.
And they said it in a freshet of books that damned every notion of the divine. First out of the trap was the neuroscientist and philosopher, Sam Harris with his The End of Faith. This was followed by Professors Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins with their respective best-sellers, Breaking The Spell and The God Delusion. The Fourth Horseman of The Counter-Apocalypse and the stupid bully’s nightmare, Christopher Hitchens soon joined them with God Is Not Great. And so the movement known as New Atheism was born. In an improvement on Christianity, the birth was attended by four wise men.
There were those who said that Faith itself was hijacked on that bright and dismal morning; that a ‘religion of peace’ (albeit one at war with itself) was commandeered by a pack of quasi-politicized psychopaths. But this is simply not to take the murderers at their own estimation. It is a refusal to call someone by their chosen name. Whatever were the promptings of their geopolitical ‘grievances’ and whatever their ‘justice’ it cannot be doubted that the slaughter of thousands was conceived and executed through the prism of Faith.
Naturally and soon enough, the West’s own religion, Christianity, which is the subject of this essay, was once more placed under the microscope and weighed in the balance where it was found to be very wanting.
Though honoured for its culture and its ability to ease some people through a dark night, esteemed as a means of mitigating or even annulling the anxieties of those with learning difficulties and similar cognitive challenges, its unignorable status as our first attempts at philosophy, science, literature and even psychiatry were not enough to command the assent of most modern, educated people. This is partly because religion all too often presents a temptation to make of itself a bullhorn and echo-chamber for the prejudices of those for whom the quite undecidable issue of god’s existence is a fact.
Take, for example, Graham Dow, quondam Bishop of Carlisle who confidently asserted that the inundations of North Yorkshire in 2007 were God’s punishment for our environment-wrecking material greed and our indulgence of homosexuality.
I’m almost tempted to leave the howling absurdity of those propositions twisting in the wind, but I can’t help adding that a year later The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology found not a whisper of evidence for the first of the Bishop’s assertions. As for his second claim, there can be no proof except of his colossal stupidity and nastiness.
Many Christians, of course, were just as sickened as were the rest of us by the Bishop’s perversity of thought. He doesn’t represent the true faith, they told us. But here’s the rub: What’s the test? There appears to be none. By what authority do “moderates” tell “fundamentalists” they’re off message? By what authority do the faithful opponents of the Bishop say God doesn’t hate fags? He has scriptural authority on his side after all. They do not.
Still, as long as religionists are content to fondle their mental luxuries in private and not frighten the horses; provided they are content to beguile their holy days grovelling before smoking altars while wailing and bleating at an empty sky (and the sky above Auschwitz better had be empty) then in Thomas Jefferson’s famous formulation, “It neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket”.
These days I almost feel sorry for The Anglican Communion. Until very recently it had served only as a sort of heritage industry, a guardian and steward of some lovely architecture. Much reduced, it had become the sinecure of happy-clappy tambourine bangers and the putters up of big red thermometers alongside its crumbling steeples. They never stirred to concern themselves with, say, debt levels in the developing world or the rights of women and animals. Hardly ever were they in the van of the campaign for minority rights. They were too busy appearing on ‘Thought For The Day’ giving the lie to religion’s supposed selflessness with lines like “For me the meaning of Pentecost is…” or “Palm Sunday for me is a time of…” Always these dismal lightweights and warbling authoritarian establishment kiss-asses came with the me, me, me.
In The Future of An Illusion Sigmund Freud takes us on a tour of hecatombs, vast mausoleums and gigantic pyramids and invites us to name the true architects of these edifices. Self-importance and the fear of death, Ego and Thanatophobia, are his irresistible conclusions.
The two non-issues that consumed the Anglicans, and consume them still, were the ordination of women and sexual conduct. Where you shove your show continues to be their principal obsession. The Anglican Communion in Africa is riven by the single non-issue of homosexuality. And in a way they are right to be. Their Bible after all tells them it should concern them.
Poor Christianity. After centuries of carrying water for absolutism; its wars of religion; its racist and often lethal missionary work riding on the coattails of colonialism and imperialism; its suppression and poisoning of the sexual impulse; its opposition to free enquiry; its opposition to freedom of expression; its opposition to evidence-based thinking; its opposition to medical research and medical practice; its oppression of women; its anti-Semitism; its collusion with apartheid and Fascism; its institutionalized sadism towards children – what shall stand to its credit?
Well, let me try and make a case for it.
Those of you who, as Gore Vidal likes to put it, shower in the Blood of the Lamb and who have got this far probably have little confidence my ability to do such a thing. But let me try anyway. Here goes.
At least Christianity, it is argued, provides us with sound, even beautiful ethical values and standards by which to judge the enormities committed in its name. With the emergence of Christ as a prophet of love and compassion in a century that seemed to have lost confidence in the physical world, did not the gentleness of his spirit and the perfection of his character summon us to a better, more transcendent sphere away from the sordid and often brutal realities of power and of the flesh?
Did not Christ come to stand humanity in the right relation to God? Did not Oscar Wilde, who died a Catholic after years of sniping at the Scarlet Woman of Rome, say that “before Christ there were gods and men and after Him there was God and Man”. And what of His sacrifice for us?
What of those brave priests and nuns who in imitation of Christ reached out to the stranger and risked their lives to shelter fugitives from Nazism?
What of the French worker-priest movement of the 1940s? What about Liberation Theology and its struggle against poor world dictatorships?
What of the immense charitable labour undertaken in Africa by the Christian Churches in the fight against HIV and AIDS?
And what about Abolitionism? If that struggle, lead by the brave and devout William Wilberforce, was not faith-based surely nothing was. Was not Martin Luther King a devout Christian whose faith and the faith of his followers sustained them in the push for Civil Rights?
Then there are the glories of Christian culture: the Art, the sublime Architecture, the devotional Music and the imperishable cadences of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.
The recent canonization of John Paul II (or Jean Polak as he was known irreverently to the French; Auntie Karel being another moniker pinned on him by the fruitier strands of his Church’s Millicent Tendency) reminds us that though His late Holiness was slow to tackle child-rape and was in every other respect fully as reactionary as you might expect a Supreme Pontiff and guardian of the Eternal Truths to be, he at least helped to weed out the communist tyranny from his native soil. A strong negative point often made in Christianity’s favour is that dire though much of its track record has been, the catalogue of its infamy is dwarfed by the Himalaya of savagery that was thrown up by atheistical totalitarianism. If we descend momentarily to the actuarial, we find the body count produced by Stalinism – aided and abetted by advances in science and technology at that – far exceeds anything achieved by the Inquisition, the Crusades and the forced conversion of the indigenous peoples of South America combined.
The critics of Christianity must at least concede that it can be an engine of social cohesion and can therefore lay claim to more than a marginal utility.
The avowal that Christianity is, if not true, then at least socially useful I find hypocritical, unprincipled and cynical. People often do the right things for the wrong reasons and I have already conceded that. If utility is the sole indicator of merit in this argument, Christianity shall have to find more in Stalinism – certainly in the years 1941-45 – than it ever has.
Now, to stay with Stalinism and his atheistical tyranny for a moment, the first thing to be said is that were I religious I’d hope more could be said of my faith than that it’s not quite as sanguinary as other ideologies. In any case the point rests on a false antithesis.
George Orwell was surely right to insist that totalitarianisms are essentially allotropic theocracies. They are dogmatic, political religions every bit as opposed to rationality, scepticism and humane critical thinking as was Calvin’s Geneva. Recently evolved primates that we are, we seem to have a weakness, as Dostoyevsky noticed, for Magic, Mystery and Authority. And just as the early Christian Church was quick to appropriate local cults and customs in order the more easily to absorb and supplant them, so Stalin, trained after all as a seminarian, was not slow to feed off a mulch of ignorance, fear and superstition that half a millennium of Tsarism had prepared for him.
It is almost the work of a moment then to discover multiple points of contact between totalitarianism and theocracy. Both systems rest on the cult of personality; they both have their Dear Leaders to whom is due not only love but fear; both have their saints and heroes and martyrs; both are essentially dogmatic and require their dogmas to be propounded by infallible elites, either of the priestly or of the Inner Party kind; and both are given to Inquisitions and star chambers and show trials. Both dispensations inevitably produce their Witchfinder Generals and seat-sniffing heresy-hunters. It goes without saying that both systems had their means of coercion, their torture chambers and their ways of dealing with its recalcitrants and dissidents – usually by way of murder pour encourager les autres following a very public excommunication or as in the Soviet style, the consignment to non-personhood.
Stalinism even produced its fraudulent thaumaturge in the pseudo-geneticist, Trofim Lysenko who promised gigantic tomatoes, multiple yearly harvests and other… miracles.
Neither system recognises any limit to its authority and each arrogates to itself high, middle and low justice over absolutely every aspect of their subjects’ lives up to and including that of their minds. Christianity and totalitarianism can convict you of – and here is the Big Brother signature coup – thought-crime. The only difference between theocracy and totalitarianism is that the former can harry you not just into the grave but beyond it.
And so to the point about Christian culture. The broadcaster Jeremy Vine, himself a practising Christian, once marvelled at the capacity of Richard Dawkins (who is not) to enjoy a Carol service in church. I forget the good professor’s reply but Mr Vine’s perplexity is well, perplexing. Must one really become a practising Jew or a German Lutheran to be moved by The Book of Job or the St. Matthew Passion? I need no more become a votary of the goddess Pallas Athene than I need convert to Buddhism or become a Hindu in order to get a bang out of the Parthenon or the temple complex of Angkor Wat. This is what culture means.
Yet it is often claimed by Christians that their culture has had a particularly inspiriting effect on the abolition of slavery and the promotion of Civil Rights in America; that without their Bible and activist exegetes of the calibre of William Wilberforce and Martin Luther King Jr the ownership of humans by other humans would still be with us.
This is a particularly tough sell since the Bible itself recommends slavery along with much else of a gruesome nature (genocide, dispossession, genital mutilation) that we no longer find acceptable still less moral. Dr King may or may not have been a sincere Christian (he is said to have had early doubts about the Resurrection and was a keen student of Marx and Hegel) but it was surely a rhetorical masterstroke on his part to deploy the metaphor of Exodus as a means of agitating for Civil Rights. The Bible was after all the one book with which his followers were sure to be familiar. And it’s as well he preached the metaphor of Exodus and not the letter since that would have entitled his followers to slaughter anyone who got in their way en route to the promised land. It is a great pity that secularists of the stature of Bayard Rustin who helped organize the March on Washington have been airbrushed out of the picture.
The secular case against slavery was complete and predates Wilberforce’s efforts by many years. Tom Paine, that brandy-soaked son of a Thetford stay maker and the man who coined the phrase ‘The United States of America’, argued for abolitionism to be included in The Declaration of Independence. Let me wallow in subjunctive history for a moment while I whimper a soft, “if only…”
As far as Christian charitable outreach is concerned, there is nothing the Churches do that is not done by secular organisations. Doctors Without Borders, for example, simply identify a need and aim to meet it without asking for anything in return such as your immortal soul. And if Christians are to be praised for their charity work – which doesn’t in any case prove the validity of their other beliefs – then Hamas, the Nation of Islam and even Nazi Germany also deserve credit for their provision of social services. And given the Catholic Church’s criminally lethal position on condom use, to praise it for its fight against HIV and AIDS is to praise the drug lord and the pusher for sponsoring rehab.
Liberation Theology need not detain us for very long. The gospels according to Marx and Engels do not wish the poor always to be with us and they certainly do not advocate rendering unto Caesar. So we can tell that Latin American priest who wants Fidel for Pope that his Liberation Theology is straightforwardly a contradiction in terms.
Those brave priests and nuns who risked their lives for others were behaving, as it happens, like perfect Jews. The care for strangers appears in many cultures. Jesus, it seems, was reminding his Jewish audience to be better Jews. The injunction ‘to refrain from doing to others that which you would not have done to you’ is by no means original to Christianity. It is already to be found in Leviticus and almost every other culture on Earth, the Analects of Confucius not excluded.
Now, before I move on to examine Jesus’ teachings and character it’s necessary to say something about his central concern – namely God.
This subject is at once too large and too small to enter into in any detail here. Too small because my own view is that the term ‘god’ is literally meaningless – and so there the matter ends. And too large because all the other possible stances vis a vis the celestial overlord – deism, theism, atheism, pantheism, agnosticism, apatheism, naturalism, humanism, theological noncognitivism, ignosticism and igtheism are just too interesting to ignore.
To be brief, the concept of ‘god’ raises more problems that it solves and every definition of it sooner or later collapses into unintelligibility.
There are those who maintain that without a transcendent god we would have no source or guarantee of morality. A strange notion – often known as the Divine Command theory – and one that succumbed to the Socratic wrecking ball five centuries before anyone had even heard of Jesus. And anyway, perched at the apex of Japanese society during World War II was nothing less than a living god, the emperor. Did that ‘fact’ help the Japanese to discover the best way to treat their prisoners of war?
These days Christian apologists are reduced to hunting for god in the far from impressive haunts of the fine-tuning argument and Axiom 55 of Modal Logic. Hardly anywhere do you find avowals of the Faith for which Pilgrim left his family weeping on the lintel. And in any case, where would such ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ lead? Nowhere but to the annihilation of Faith itself.
The term ‘god’ is thus an empty referent, a Rorschach of ultimate concerns, a claim, a hope, an opinion, a hypothesis, often a prejudice and usually a relativizing symbol that has generated (as one might have expected) a proliferation of fissiparous, mutually excommunicating confessional identities. In other words it’s whatever the user wants it to mean. What it most certainly is not is a fact.
Some Christian apologists, betraying a reflexive anthropocentrism, offer as an explanation for the superabundance of suffering in the world either our rebellion against or deafness to god. Original sin is the usual reason given why infants, born as they are in filth and the shame of Adamic sinfulness, fall prey to fatal diseases.
But who’s talking about humans? On all seven continents, as we speak, there are creatures endowed with central nervous systems fully capable of registering pain, agony – I would even say anguish – that are being preyed on by other creatures which in many cases devour their catches alive. What is this good god that has created an environment that favours the strong and cunning predator?
Thus, Epicurus’ classic objection to an omnipotent and omnibenevolent divine artificer still stands:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he is able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
Now it’s time to have a look at the character, example and preachments of Jesus of Nazareth.
Historically, Jesus presents as a very shadowy figure hovering somewhere on the border of myth and reality. Very little is known about the man and, because of the extreme exiguity of corroborative evidence for his life outside the gospels, there is by no means a consensus among scholars that he even existed. This can be an advantage. To be all things to all men is to be a blank screen. And a blank screen – like the god symbol – is useful to those who would project onto it whatever they wish. The Nazis (and we must never forget that the phrase ‘Nazi Catholic’ is usually pleonastic) claimed that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera thereby half-Aryanizing The Saviour. And the most important aspect by far of Jesus in St. Paul’s post-hysterically blinded eyes was that he underwent a Resurrection.
Interpretations of his life and work proliferate endlessly. His father was no mere carpenter. Though the Aramaic word naggar means literally that, it also has connotations of craftsmanship, learning and affluence. It’s hardly ever the dirt poor that find themselves in god’s special favour.
The first influential man in our culture to bear a metronymic (he is not known as Yeshua bar Yosef but as Jesus Son of Mary – or Miriam) he is thought by some to have been raised in the tolerant Hellenistic atmosphere of Egypt where he fled to avoid childermas and absorbed the more wholesome aspects of sun worship. It is possible that his last words on the cross were not Eli, eli, lama sabacthani but Elie, elie…This is the vocative of helios in its demotic unaspirated form. He was calling on the sun, the ultimate giver of light.
A foreign apprenticeship in Alexandria was thought by the late Desmond Stewart to have disclosed itself in the parables (which were formulated not to sweeten Jesus’ message but to obscure it). The tale of the Prodigal Son tells of famine in the land – more likely in Egypt than in Judaea – and of pig-keeping, anathema to the Jews. And the miracles have struck some as mere exercises in Egyptian necromancy.
Jesus’ character and temperament are at first blush somewhat perplexing. He’s a strange mixture of the sort of universal love that can be found in Stoic philosophy (particularly Epictetus), withering scorn directed at the Pharisees from who he probably derived his intimations of immortality, and rage at the money-changers in the Temple. His visiting mother is met with, “What art thou to me, woman?” (not what a Jewish mother wants to hear). He petulantly blasts a fig tree for its failure to supply him with fruit (hardly making him a paragon of sustainability), and he sends demons (who did not and never have existed) into a herd of pigs – which he then sends over a cliff edge (animal rights activists, take note). He declares he has come to bring not peace but a sword (nice). He tells us to take no thought for the morrow and to behold the lilies of the field for they toil not, neither do they spin (there goes saving for a rainy day and with it culture). Moreover, he claims that no one may enjoy a relationship with god unless they recognize him as the Almighty’s sole and exclusive agent. And to cherry-top it all, he implores us to forsake our families in order to follow him.
Frankly, none of this is looking good for our boy.
So where’s the good news?
There’s an old joke that runs as follows: A woman taken in adultery was about to be stoned by an angry mob when Jesus said, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”.
The poor woman looked up just in time to see – but not avoid – a massive boulder descending on her. She was instantly crushed to death. On the wall above the deceased Jesus saw another woman dusting off her hands. He said to her,
“There are times, mother, when you really piss me off”.
I would have claimed the Biblical version of this story as a favourite of mine from the New Testament but it turns out to be a late interpolation and so cannot be credited to Jesus. What else?
‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ is a sweet enough sentiment, always providing that the peace is just and honourable. The peacemakers of the Versailles Treaty do not qualify.
‘Resist not evil’. Are you kidding? Michael Frayn once wrote that all arguments boil down to Love and Hitler. How far, I wonder, would this Christian apophthegm have got the liberal democracies in 1939?
‘Judge not lest you be judged’. If that really means ‘Do not rush to judgement’ (which it seems not to) then I have no quarrel with it. But if it means we are prevented from indicting war criminals then it’s obviously inadequate.
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ is at once too strenuous and too sickly an injunction, which moreover trespasses on my right to have preferences in people. Respect for one another is enough.
C. S. Lewis (who in the opinion of many was the twentieth century’s most influential Christian apologist) tells us that Jesus’ teachings make no sense unless he is taken at his own estimation as the herald of the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven. If Jesus was wrong about that, and he obviously was, then it follows that his denunciations of “taking thought for the morrow”, working for a living and family values are, to say the least of it, ethically insecure. Lewis also tells us we must make a choice. “Either this man is the Son of God or else a madman or something worse”. Very well, then…
But surely no madman could devise this:
‘Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these mine bretheren, ye have done it unto me’. (Matthew 25.40)
It sounds all right, doesn’t it? It’s exactly the sort flea you might expect Margaret Thatcher to have put in General Galtieri’s ear when he invaded the Falkland Islands.
But wait. In the very next line we get:
‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire…’
This echoes an earlier sentiment found at Matthew (13: 49 et seq.,)
‘So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire: there shall be a wailing and a gnashing of teeth’.
Thus far, I would argue, the scales are already tipping decisively against Jesus as even an adequate example of moral suasion. But it has just got a whole lot worse. It is often said, usually by self-serving and self-flattering anti-Semites, that the New Testament is an advance on the Old. But nowhere in the latter do we find any mention of the eternal torture of the dead. For the invention of that – Hell – we have to thank the Prince of Peace.
Consult almost any Greek philosopher (from Socrates and Epicurus to Plato and Aristotle and Epictetus) and you shall find more warmth, more humanity and more coolly reasoned creativity than you shall in any version of the salmagundi of concentrated nonsense that goes by the name of Christianity, with its tendency to persecute and veer wildly from sadistic fanaticism to abject masochism. Hardly anywhere in Greek thought shall you find hysterics and fanatics in their greedy, arrogant exceptionalism, raving about salvation and redemption and glory.
Just as the heavenly ‘gift’ of Free Will compromises the element of true freedom, so the insistence on compassion is vitiated by the minatory “or else’ component. Nowhere in the Gospels are we encouraged to do the right thing for its own sake and everywhere are we urged on by the false promises of hysterically exorbitant rewards and disgustingly disproportionate punishments.
And if all of that isn’t bad enough, we have the Doctrine of Vicarious Redemption. To fling your sins onto a scapegoat (a primitive, savage practice) and thereby have them annealed is to dissolve utterly the notion of personal responsibility on which any serious conception of ethics and morality must depend. I can help a friend in need but I cannot assume responsibility for what he or she did. It can’t in fact be done and shouldn’t be attempted. Christopher Hitchens may have wished to assume co-responsibility with Salman Rushdie in order to widen the front against Khomeini’s fatwa but he could not very well claim authorship of The Satanic Verses.
Since I mention Mr Hitchens, I am with him all the way when he characterizes the urging of forgiveness for one’s enemies as an entirely evil preachment. If the welfare of my family and friends is at stake, not only am I disinclined to forgive those that threaten it, I’m equally disinclined to look warmly on those who would forgive my loved ones’ assailants. Mr Hitchens himself has phrased it trenchantly. “Forgive your own fucking enemies, don’t be forgiving mine”.
I am grateful to Mr Hitchens in this context for another reason. Oscar Wilde was once asked if there had been any Christians before Christ. He replied affirmatively but added that the really remarkable thing was that there had been so few since. The relatively late intervention of the Messiah in human affairs has long been a problem for Christianity, and its inability to square this circle has afforded Mr Hitchens the opportunity to devise a very clinching argument to demonstrate the religion’s essential absurdity. Here is a freely adapted version of it.
In the matter of anthropogeny, it is thought that homo sapiens has been in existence as a discrete species for approximately 200,000 years. During that time we very often died in childbirth, if not killing our mothers. If we were lucky enough to make it into our twenties (Voltaire’s guestimate of the average life span of his own day was twenty-five years) we succumbed to predators, natural disasters (which in our guilt-stricken self-centredness were all our fault), other humans or, lacking a germ theory of disease, we fell prey to any number of micro-organisms over which we had (pace Genesis) precisely zero dominion. Our brief lives were lived and lost in a state of brutal, lethal ignorance.
Eventually, by dint of our natural curiosity (punished in Genesis by a tribal god who must always have known it always would be punished) and thanks to our most precious faculty, that of reason, we managed to win some measure of understanding of and protection against our environment’s pitiless hostility. Entire civilizations rose and fell unshriven, unredeemed and quite innocent of salvation.
Now, if you’re a serious Christian, you must believe that for 198,000 of these years the God of Love surveyed our pain-swept blunderings with perfect insouciance before deciding a mere two thousand years ago to mount an intervention that mandated the torture and execution of a mediocre, unoriginal ethicist and delusional faith healer who was in any case entirely innocent.
We are told that God wished to express solidarity with our condition by sacrificing His only Son. Except that He didn’t sacrifice Him, did He? He lent him for a while for as soon as the stone was rolled away Jesus was up and about showing off his wounds but not his limp (which you might have expected of someone who had just had his legs smashed on the cross.)
No matter. Let’s not be literal about a poem. Still, we are asked to believe that his message was of such cosmic importance that, having been delivered to a fly-blown and barely literate part of the Earth, it trickled millimetrically across the globe in four discrepant versions, has not yet penetrated everywhere and is still not believed by everyone who has encountered it.
Finally, this salmagundi of clashing proverbs and Chinese whispers, sponsored by an opportunistic and theologically illiterate warlord (Constantine), coheres into the human sacrifice death cult and religion of the grave we know and love today.
Now, I know Jesus told his followers to expect ridicule for their beliefs but I put it to you, Reader, you must loathe truth and intellectual honesty with a white hot passion before you can be brought within hailing distance of believing such a mad salad of jabberwocky crazytown.
But wait. There are some Christian apologists (Dinesh D’Souza and William Lane Craig to name – and shame – but two) who maintain with straight faces that God was waiting for the population to lift off before introducing us to His only Son.
Again, it is very tempting simply to leave this self-satirizing proposition dangling in the air. But while such a belief invites – begs for, lusts after – ridicule and contempt there is something extremely insanitary lurking in it that prompts a comparison. It’s a Pol Pot mentality that can with such casual sadism hurl entire generations of poor, suffering pre-Revelation humanity into a meat-grinder experiment for the ultimate production of a shining theocracy on a hill. It’s eggs broken for omelettes all over again and just as staggeringly inhumane.
When Hamlet asks, “Who knows what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?” he asks one of the great questions of the human condition. It’s a little strange coming from him perhaps since he’s recently encountered his father’s ghost. Still, for us the question throbs. Who knows what lies beyond?
To which the only answer is: absolutely no one without exception. The philosopher is at this juncture stern. Whereof we cannot speak – zip it.
But Christianity promises us everlasting paradise if you, unlike most of the world’s population living and dead, can avoid eternal damnation.
The likelihood of Christianity’s being right about this when it has got just about everything else in its history galactically wrong should be enough to put us on our guard.
This lust for the End Times, this slighting of the here and now, this view of our existence as a staging post and a vale of tears is one of Christianity’s most sinister aspects. A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher said at some point in the 1950s that the threat of thermonuclear war was not the gravest threat facing mankind because the worst that could happen would be the transference of millions of souls to a sphere to which they were in any case bound.
Battersea Dogs’ Home in a shower of aniseed was not more barking than that primate. And, yes, I use the lower case studiedly.
Yet one must admit the possibility of an afterlife. And I’m willing to be surprised and delighted. If barred from such a dimension are the Ian Paisleys, the good Catholics Mugabe and Hitler. If it means no more Torquemadas, no racks, no dungeon scales at Threave, no Ann Widdecombes, no Anne Atkinses, no Stephen Greens, no foolish, boring theologians with their babble of noospheres and Omega points, no Lord’s Resistance Army, no Rick Warrens, no Jerry Falwells, no Rapturers, no ranting shake down artists, no Rowan Willamses, no Ratzingers, no Talibanizers of classical culture, no frothing mobs tearing at Hypatia, no book burners, no Index compilers, no ring-slobbering hysterics, no Christianity.
If I had all that to look forward to on the other side, why then I might wish with Socrates to die and die again.
Kim Harris
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