GOOD GOD

Catholicism, secularism, and the consolations of superstition BY ALISTAIR MURRAY

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. Christopher Hitchens Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. Bertrand Russell

How does one go about the business of answering existential questions? Any person interested in such abstract matters of philosophy surely cannot be dismissed as shallow for responding with a resounding I dont know. If there is one thing of which we can be entirely certain as a species, its our lack of knowledge. The single avenue to awareness of exactly how little we really know is actually knowing something in the first place. Once man is burdened with the heavy load of actually knowing something, he is given at least some indication of all that he does not, and in some cases cannot, know at all. So when someone like you or, God help us, me comes to the notion of purpose or meaning, its almost immediately understandable why the term big is often ascribed to such questions. Its always the big questions. Why is it never the small questions? What many fail to grasp is that these questions are just as much concerned with the big things as with the small; even

more importantly, that when we ask very big questions, were asking small questions; and most important of all, that the very big is nothing if not composed of the very small. Circumlocution and philosophical gymnastics aside, were still left with the following loathsome question: I just said that, but what does it mean? The unfettered, unadulterated, indisputable truth of such matters is that there is no answer to these questions. Or, I should say, no answer that can be illuminated for us within our own lifetime not right now, anyway. Perhaps (and Im in no position to rule this out) we will all disembark to discover that, as so many over thousands of years have claimed and pontificated, for better or for worse, the afterlife really does exist. It would be dishonest not to reveal at this very early stage in the proceedings that such an outcome sounds like complete fairytale to me. Among the believers, though, it is the absolute truth of the world. That understood, surely were right to believe that, indeed, the truth for one really ought to be truth for everyone. This notion of absolute truth underlies the ultimate struggle of philosophy. Regardless of however philosophically open and pluralistic we might appear, there exists a small part of our understanding of the world that contends that there is one unifying philosophy to explain everything and anything. The beautiful word pursuit seems rather vacuous in any other context; the pursuit of truth is the only phrase in which the word can be properly understood. After all, what is life in the absence of understanding? I could write about these questions forever, adding little to the seemingly endless shelves that have already been authored on the subject. Terseness is no virtue, but apparently necessary on occasion. Hence, I shall attempt to marshall my arguments into respective units, roughly in this order: 1) on the notion of an afterlife; 2) on the truth or untruth of religious doctrine, Gods existence or nonexistence; 3) on suffering and its association with both the Catholic and secular worldviews; 4) finally, on the need for the dissociation of faith and virtue, religion and morality.

*** The afterlife remains one of religions more useful inventions. Though useful in itself, the siren song of paradise is made doubly effective by the enduring image of hellfires and eternal damnation. It may have occurred to readers stultified by backward parochial schooling that Hell is in some curious way easier to imagine than Heaven. For whatever reason, it seems that our prehensile human minds have a firmer grasp on suffering than on pleasure: perhaps because the fleeting manner in which we experience happiness rarely gives us pause to register memories of it, whereas true suffering is anything but fleeting. But this still fails to satisfy the question. When placed in the context of a search for meaning, the notion of an afterlife becomes more applicable. The ongoing struggle essentially concerns an abstract task; basically, to define an innate purpose we all feel but that remains obscure. Something that we are told is meant to define us, but that eludes us. That slips from our grasp. One cant help but speculate as to what might happen if we ever really beheld it even for a moment, or were granted a few brief seconds in its presence. People talk of epiphanies and other life altering experiences often, but universal truth seems beyond us, out there:

something we might compel ourselves and indeed others to search for, but are not in any way permitted to find. Given the breadth, not to mention the depth, of the subject, I shall attempt to limit myself to two worldviews: the secular worldview, and that of the Catholic Church and its followers. Even as a resolute secularist operating on this higher level of abstraction, it is difficult to push the concept of an afterlife completely aside. The idea of a destination is common to most religions, mostly due to its being compatible with the journey metaphor widely held to be the highest expression of human existence, even among some secularists, who, of course, roundly dismiss the notion of an afterlife or a divinely-endowed purpose to life, let alone a designer. Whats important to remember, however, is that the destination idea displays the greatest resonance among the largest number of people. And while there mightnt be a unifying vision of heaven, most people agree upon the idea of a Disneylandlike paradise. The very word paradise is ever so slightly sickly. All of the things we, in Western societies, have come foolishly to associate with the term like plastic parrots and palm trees make it so empty and vapid. Its religious connotations are lost. And like its siblings, nirvana included, it is far too often misunderstood. Catholicism, like almost every religious affiliation, has a distinct and expressed interest in matters of an eschatological nature. Most dogmatic religious rhetoric would seem incomplete without the notion of worlds end as its unmovable centre. The Catholic perspective leaves no doubt as to the boundless superiority of the latter realm, the heavenly home to which we should nay, we must aspire. Though the church is rarely accommodating of differences in opinion (partly due to the arrogance of believing that it is the exclusive vendor of divine truth), there is no altogether Catholic view of the afterlife. I shall therefore attempt to summarise the myriad of differing views on the subject as best I can. Things do get awfully complicated, though. The central Catholic view of life after death concerns judgement. After the spirit or soul since there is no better metaphor has departed the body, Catholics hold that the righteous shall enter Heaven. Those who die with unrepented mortal sin, presumably, go to hell, although the concept of damnation has slowly faded from the minds of contemporary Christians. The idea of a deity who punishes simply doesnt conform to the benevolent, kind, ingratiating god Christianity now likes to tote and praise. The austere, intimidating notion of judgement rests with the more capricious God of the Old Testament. Kindness is the new black. Likewise, the idea of purgatory has almost entirely disappeared from the minds of modern Christians; the even more disturbing story of Limbo has also been discarded. Limbo (translated from the Latin, Limbus, meaning edge or boundary) refers to the state most infamous for its purportedly being Hells place for unbaptized infants. Although in 2007 the Church, in its document, The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without Being Baptized, reached the following conclusion: Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered above give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and enjoy the beatific vision. What has been revealed to us is that the ordinary

way of salvation is by the sacrament of baptism. None of the above considerations should be taken as qualifying the necessity of baptism or justifying delay in administering the sacrament. Rather, as we want to reaffirm in conclusion, they provide strong grounds for hope that God will save infants when we have not been able to do for them what we would have wished to do, namely, to baptize them into the faith and life of the Church. Surely I neednt illuminate for you the bitter absurdity of the above passage. For the countless parents of unbaptized children who accepted Catholic doctrine in these affairs, it was indeed a real place. To simply issue a retraction after such a long while speaks of the man-made nature of religious doctrine. Surely the officially held views of the Catholic church ought to be not only divinely true, but eternally true. Moderate or liberal Catholics, very few of whom found within the walls of the Vatican, even now cannot dodge the question, for the more moderate one becomes in religious matters, the more others are invited to question previously concrete certainties. Not even the church, in other words, really knows what to tell its millions now. The secularist roundly dismisses the notion of an afterlife, aligning it with other delusions and superstitions. But in many ways it is the central superstition in the eyes of atheists and secularists alike, because it is the one that appears to draw so many to a religious life, or even a bet on the divine. The wager proposed by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal is based on the desire to hedge ones bets about the existence of god, and thus increase ones chances of admission to whatever sort of reward may await the faithful. The idea being that any agnostic person should accept and surrender himself to God, because if it transpires that he or it exists, then the outward believer will be admitted to Heaven; but if there is no such thing as God, then nothing has been lost. But of course something has been lost. To me this appears a facile and dishonest approach to existential questions, in every sense seeming to dodge them altogether. What you have lost, among other things, is your intellectual honesty: your ability to discern truth from untruth, right from wrong, a moral argument from an immoral argument. Our intellectual honesty is maybe the only thing we have. Who could possibly be so frivolous in its squander? I happen to believe that even as an atheist an exception would be made in my case. Its a worrying day when you begin placing yourself in Gods almighty shoes, but if I were responsible for selecting those who go to Heaven and those who are condemned to Hell, then I would be likely to find myself inclined to put more weight on those who honestly could not believe than on those who outwardly pretended to because they thought it might be true. Either way, Im not betting on the matter.

*** It may not be said that God doesnt exist. In 1952, Illustrated magazine commissioned the famed philosopher Bertrand Russell to write a piece on the truth or untruth of religious doctrine. The atheist Russell went on to pen what has become one of the most famous

analogies in the theist-atheist debate thus far. Is There a God?, his essay, was never published by the magazine, which we can assume found its contents too controversial for publication, but this minor editorial decision certainly didnt stop the metaphor of Russells Teapot coming to popular attention. His simple philosophical point was, and I paraphrase: suppose someone were to assert that there is a china teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars, and he were clever enough a theologian to add that the teapot in question is so tiny not even mans most powerful telescopes can detect it. Nobody can disprove the assertion. But this is a banal and meaningless fact; the unfalsifiable nature of any claim, particularly a religious one, is no justification for belief in it. In other words, simply because someone cannot disprove an assertion means nothing. It would be absurd and laughable to use the inability to disprove as a basis for belief in its existence. Russell carried his metaphor to its logical end: If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. The philosophers key point in the use of the analogy is, to put it simply, that the onus is upon the person making extraordinary claims to provide proof, not on the sceptic to disprove. To borrow from the work of the late Christopher Hitchens, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Many atheists and agnostics yield unconditionally to the idea that much of religion is simply harmless myth, and that little damage is done by believing in or worshipping the gods of ancient scrolls. But of course, like all myth, religion requires that we surrender or otherwise silence our critical faculties, and to believe things, as the religious themselves so elegantly put it in a word, on faith alone. The Catholic view on the existence of god is plainly obvious, but in an apologetic sense the position of the church is best summarized in the endless works of the sainted theologian Thomas Aquinas, who presented his arguments most famously in Summa Theologica. The most persuasive argument, in my opinion, to have ever been made for the supposed existence of god is that of the cosmological argument, which asserts that there had to be a first mover in order to set the order of the universe in motion, usually presumed to be God. But of course theologians such as Aquinas can, even by the most liberal applications of this already-tenuous logic, only bring themselves validly to deism the belief that there had to have been a creator, but that the deity no longer intervenes or has any interest in our lives. (Numerous influential historical figures, including many of the founding fathers of the United States, identified as deists.) To go a step further, as many theistic channels including and most notably the Catholic Church have done, and say not only that they know God exists but that they also know what he wants, what he says, with whom he wants you to go to bed, what he wants you to eat, how exactly you should carry out certain rituals in his favour, and so on...this requires an infinitely higher standard of proof. Any sane individual who claims to know the mind of God claims knowledge he simply cannot possess. Theology, in the words of H.L. Mencken, is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

C.S. Lewis in a famous moment of profound honesty in Mere Christianity, states that either Jesus was or is the Son of God, or else he is a madman or something worse. My simple question would be this: which of these options seems more likely? This is naturally a very serious topic, involving very serious people with very serious job descriptions. I speak of very few of those people when I talk of those who use religion to deceive or solicit money from their fellow human beings, to exert control over their brother and sister primates, or otherwise install shackles on the figure of reason. I have no quarrel with those who wish to quietly practice their religion in their homes or in their respective churches, to peacefully live out their spiritual lives with one another, or to simply have faith among their own thoughts; secularists are not concerned by such people. When religion becomes harmful is when it wishes to dictate what should be taught in schools (the stultification of American children by psuedoscience under the fatuous name of intelligent design is frightening), when it stipulates or demands that its followers commit murder or any other heinous atrocities, and when it becomes dissatisfied with remaining quiet and reserved. People ask why atheists have become more vocal in the past few years. Good question. Perhaps its because the fundamentalists leave them no choice. Fundamentalism is not concerned with the pursuit of truth. It is by definition the negation of pursuit. It is the idea that a person can study one book, consider one perspective, and must (not should, but must) accept it as absolute and universally true. Religion, even in its most benign manifestations, echoes this sentiment. It corrupts the pursuit.

*** One of the most often-cited benefits of belief in God is that it helps people cope with not only the stresses of everyday life, but also more displacing episodes of bereavement or loss. Suffering is central to human existence, and both Catholics and their secularist brothers will affirm the phenomenon of church-going in times of grief or strife. Humans have a pronounced tendency to lend themselves to religious ritual when challenged by difficulty. Though this is hardly an argument in favour of religion. It may be, and the atheist is likely to point out, that the irrational impulse evident in all humans is simply exercising its considerable muscle. Superstition can be comforting and disconcerting in equal measure. Even if religion could comfort us in our times of strife or suffering, this is in no way a reason to accept its doctrines, nor does it add any evidence to absurd claims of deities or other divine entities. Its ability to soothe our pain and remove our thoughts of the grave are, apart from being a junk cure (we are to be consoled by this?), almost entirely irrelevant. Because they have this function they are almost deserving of the ascription useful. But of course, simply because something is practical does not mean and has never meant that it is axiomatically true. That would be absurd. In order to maintain our intellectual honesty in these matters and all others, we must discard our own preferences and consider only the

facts. To be disinterested and unbiased, like science, is to embody all that the word pursuit implies in this context. People rarely embrace religion on grounds of reason. In truth, emotion typically takes an undeserved position of unparalleled importance within the human mind. Decisions and alliances are not made out of rational thought but instead because the thinker has an unshakable preference to one of many possible outcomes. In the philosophical world of the rational thinker, truth is and always will be indifferent to your preferences. Simply because you want something to be true doesnt make it such. How comforting, though boring, that would be.

*** One of the most perturbing aspect of todays world is the unholy marriage of faith and virtue, the belief that religion is central to our understanding of ethics and morality, or, in the views of more ardent Catholics, that morality is in some way inseparable from religion, or that it is in any case derived from it. Many Catholics may sympathize with the Dostoyevskian view, expressed in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, that in a world without God everything is permitted. Indeed, they may also find common ground with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who, in his philosophical investigation The Critique of Pure Reason concluded that the ties between faith and virtue can scarcely be cut without consequence. Or they might, by a loose reading of Voltaire, align themselves with his assertion that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. Secularists are acutely aware that the argument for a humanist, intrinsic, pre-installed equivalent of religious moral codes is weak. Thus, its probably best not made. What we do know is that we have an innate sense of decency. The repulsion we feel immediately at the sight of certain acts is evidence of this (whether or not the capacity for this gut reaction was placed within us by a superior being, I dont know). These reactions are perfectly acceptable when they make themselves apparent, but not on issues that lie among humanitys myriad shades of moral grey. Abortion is the example most readily at hand, although it should be noted that there are humanist arguments to be made against this, too (I trust that you, intelligent reader, are capable of mounting them yourself). This said, I say with reasonable confidence that there is actually no objective basis for morality. Everything is demonstrably subjective, though not exactly relative. The secular world may be yet to present a coherent vision of morality in postmodern society, and its unlikely that it ever will, but swallowing ones moral code in tablet form has rarely ever been pertinent advice in the past anyway. Catholics set firmly in their conviction that religion is the exclusive source of moral good will often tell you that the Ten Commandments are the highest expression of human obedience to morality and a standard of ethics to which we can all aspire. Again, they are upheld largely because they are considered useful.

Ann Widdecombe, a former Conservative MP of the United Kingdom and a devout Catholic (she publicly defected from the Church of England in 1993 following their decision to allow the ordination of women) participated in a debate conducted by Intelligence Squared, the moot being, The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. Her opponents, a team composed of the actor and author Stephen Fry, and the journalist and intellectual Christopher Hitchens, presented a persuasive case for the negating side, and were later invited to participate in follow-up interviews for a documentary by Widdecombe, The Bible: A History. When prompted by Widdecombe in the subsequent interview to explain what was wrong with the Ten Commandments as a code of morals, Fry replied: Well theres nothing wrong with those particular commandments, if you want to call them that, but lets have a look at what they dont do. They dont stop slavery, theres no mention of it, and they kept slaves...what a perfect society they had because of their Ten Commandments! What did God forget? [The commandments are the product of] the hysterical believings of a group of desert tribes. Those desert tribes have stored up more misery for mankind than any other group of people in the history of the planet and theyre doing it to this day. But the failure to include injunctions on such apparently simple is far from the only fault in the apparently incomplete Ten Commandments. Not only are many of the commandments almost entirely redundant by mere human nature. Im not aware of any society, for example, that condones stealing. Number ten is from my point of view particularly interesting. You shall not covet your neighbours house. You shall not covet your neighbours wife, or his manservant or maidservant, ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. A couple of things immediately appear wrong here. The shameful implied equivalence of a female to a possession, like an ox or a donkey, is so obviously immoral it barely requires any further thought. Furthermore, number ten is the only commandment that expressly includes an injunction on thought crime. This section forbids even thinking about something. Many atheists who at some early stage left their religion behind profess a sort of regret over their lost faith. They mourn the loss of their belief in God elegiacally as though it were a limb. At times I am drawn to the private letters of Mother Teresa, whose character I am sometimes compelled to question, but whose writings on religion are very fine indeed. In a rare moment of candor, she reveals, Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love and now become as the most hated one the one You have thrown away as unwanted unloved. I call, I cling, I want and there is no One to answer no One on Whom I can cling no, No One. Alone ... Where is my Faith even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness & darkness My God how painful is this unknown pain I have no Faith I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart & make me suffer untold agony.

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them because of

the blasphemy If there be God please forgive me When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts

return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart? Many atheists who at some early stage left their religion behind profess a sort of regret over their loss of faith, as though some intrinsic part of them had been deserted long ago behind them. In this sense, Mother Teresas atheism is not like mine. She tried desperately to believe, but could not, whereas I am rather glad that it isnt true. To me, the idea of the father that never leaves, whom you must love but whom you must also fear, is a wicked belief, and one that challenges the independence of mind and body that we in the secular world treasure and hold dear. Holy texts most often seem to me to be a series of appeals to a divine totalitarian dictator, whose caprice has been repeatedly and sufficiently demonstrated. Our modern image of God has shifted markedly from this idea. Religion, including but not limited to the Catholic Church, now approaches us in a smiley-faced ingratiating way, but, as Hitchens reminded us, weve no right to forget how they acted when they had true power, and when they really did believe they had God on their side. Religion holds at its very core an arrogance greater than that of the secularist. To say that the universe in its vastness is designed with humans in mind is to set before oneself a great and potentially impossible task of argument. We are, in a way, bound for cosmic irrelevance. Nobody in todays world, with so much known but so much yet to be learnt, can possibly claim certainty such as theirs. Secularism is the idea that we mustnt only accept what we do not know but embrace it; science teaches us to look upon gaps in our understanding as a challenge. Can we understand more? How do we explain this? Scepticism is the underlying constant that drives the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and ultimately wisdom. Religion blinds these faculties, and teaches us to be satisfied with a non-explanation. The offer of complete security, the offer of certainty, the offer of an impermeable faith, is as Hitchens put it, an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life all the time like I dont know nearly enough yet, he told a university audience. That I cant know enough, that Im always toiling hungrily on the verges of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldnt have it any other way. And Id urge you to look at those who tell you, those who tell you at your age that youre dead until you believe as they do...dont think of that as a gift; think of it as a poison chalice, reject it however tempting it may seem. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty and wisdom will come to you that way. Would it be wrong of me to say Amen?

A SHORT SUMMARY OF REFERENCES [1] Life After Death, The Catholic Education Resource Center, by Peter Kreeft, published in 1988 at http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0022.html; [2] Is That All There Is?, The New Yorker, by James Wood, published in August 2011 (note that this is the source of the image), can be accessed at http://www.newyorker.com/ arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood?currentPage=all; [3] Mother Teresas Crisis of Faith, Time, by David Van Biema, published in August 2007; can be accessed at http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1655720,00.html; [4] Why I Am Not A Christian, by Bertrand Russell, delivered as a lecture on March 6, 1927; can be accessed at http://www.users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html; [5] The Bible: A History, presented by Ann Widdecombe, a documentary produced in collaboration with Channel 4, UK, with Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens. Can be accessed online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeRs9pnnI1U; [6] Home Page: The Mencken Society, can be accessed at mencken.org; [7] Christopher Hitchens Closing Remarks, accesssed here at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lhC459k1cMU; [8] God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens, Grand Central Publishing (2009), ISBN 0446697966 [9] The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptised, released by the International Theological Commission, can be accessed at the website of the Holy See, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/ rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html;