Jack Heald

Last week I wrote about my complaints against Faith. Now I take the other side. I have a few complaints against Athiesmm which is kinda “the Thing” in the crowds I run with.

“A Priestess” by John William Godward
Completed 1893

My frustration with religion in general and Xianity in particular has its locus in the fact that I find Reason to be dependable and the invisible god frankly undependable. I think it silly to believe in a god who allegedly gives me the gift of Reason and then chides me for making use of it.

But my complaint against Atheism is also rooted in Reason.

When you believe – as atheists do – that the universe is the accidental result of random forces then it is just silly to consider “Reason” to be dependable. You have no reason to believe that your Reason is anything more than the random collision of atoms inside your skull. Protesting that the existence of God violates your “rationality” is a prime example of sawing off the branch you are sitting on. Asserting that God cannot exist because it is irrational is like using logic to disprove the validity of logic. It’s nonsense.

Another common reason given by atheists against the existence of God is – again – the problem of evil. “If God is so powerful and loving”, they say, “why does he allow such evil?” While I certainly sympathize with this perspective, it is an irrational one. To declare something “evil”, you must have something else in mind to which you compare it – something that is “good”. But where did this idea of “good” come from? If the universe is nothing but a random accident in a chemical factory, then your idea of “good” is just molecules bumping in your head. This “goodness” you imagine does not exist outside your head. Just because lots of us have the same sort of “idea” doesn’t mean it exists anywhere outside of ourselves. (Unless, of course, you admit some sort of supra-human hive-mind or genetic memory into the equation, and that is something even less rational than believing in god.)

One final observation” many atheists – good people all – seem to share the belief that proper education is the key to solving society ills. “The reason we have all this trouble is because parents do a lousy job raising their kids and schools do a lousy job teaching them.”

This particular point of view holds that children are tabula rosa and the only reason they screw up is because of bad external influences. But this belief is crazy for a couple of reasons. First, if there is no external, objective standard of “good behavior” then a child who grows up to murder his parents and prostitute his sisters is no more “evil” or less “good” than a child who grows up to create a business that saves lives and employs thousands. Perhaps you and I prefer hospitals to concentration camps, but that is all it is – our preferences. Perhaps some other people prefer a drug-addled, crazed, murderous existence to a more benign alternative. Who am I – or you – to gainsay such preferences?

If the universe exists because of a chemical accident, then our ideas of “good” and “evil” have no objective existence outside our own heads. There can be no “good” and there can be no “evil” – there is only preferences. And it is silly to argue otherwise.

Secondly, in my experience, the people who hold this view seem to be - more often than not – childless themselves. Although this strange fact is neither proof for or against the existence of god, it is curious that people with the strongest opinions about the benefits of “proper” parenting and education are the people with the least experience at the job. Anyone who has actually raised children knows that they come into the world with their own pre-existing traits, many of which you as a parent have absolutely no control over whatsoever.

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One other thing – tangentially related but not precisely on subject: I think atheists who protest against the existence of God because “a good God wouldn’t allow such evil” actually demonstrate more faith in the kind of God the Xians proclaim than most Xian apologists do. These atheists respect the idea of “Good” so strongly, that they refuse to acknowledge anything like “God” could countenance the evil we see in our world. Frankly, I think that is pretty damn admirable.

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I was taught in Bible class that faith was a gift from God. That means, “if you have faith, it is because God gave it to you, not because you did something to create it in yourself.” Ergo, people of faith have faith because it was given to them; nor is it given to everyone.

I don’t have the gift of faith. Many of the people I love do.

People who do not have the gift of faith can either pretend we do, which would make us liars but accepted by those with the gift, or else we can be honest about lacking that gift and be reviled by the believers for our lack of faith. It’s a lousy choice. Why do those with the gift look down on those without? Is not their faith a gift from God?

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One of my main complaints against Xianity is that it requires me to ignore the evidence of my senses. Paul in Romans says that nature clearly tells us about God, and I agree. My experience of nature confirms the existence of a Creator. Paul also  says that God’s nature is most clearly revealed to us in the man Jesus. That’s something I cannot experience directly. Instead, I must simply accept it and believe it. But without the gift of faith, how am I to believe it? I am forced to depend on what I can know using the only tools available to me: my mind, my intuition and my experience.

The guys who actually knew Jesus in the flesh – Matthew, Mark, John, Peter, Paul and the writer of Hebrews – wrote a good bit about him. How do I know that they wrote the truth?

I can’t.I have to trust that what is written in my New Testament is true. But the New Testament contains internal contradictions and makes claims that stretch credulity and defy experience. In other words, the New Testament gives every evidence of being the work of several men over a number of decades who might have engaged in some wishful fiction. Without the gift of faith, how can I overlook all these very real problems?

The problems go away if I treat the Bible as a magic book, delivered in toto and from the hand of God and flawlessly transcribed and transmitted by the hand of men. But to believe that, I have to ignore the evidence of my senses and my experience. I also have to accept without question an awful lot of flatly contradictory stuff in the Bible. The New Testament is more consistent than the Old, but it still has weird shit like James and Philemon and Paul’s apparent misogyny. (Oh, and the Revelation of St. John? Can anyone say “hallucinogenics”?)

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Most branches of Xianity teach that all people are important to God. Let’s examine that belief against the evidence: Hmmm, according to history, terrible things happen to good people all the time and evil people get away with unspeakable evil all the time. This has been true for all of recorded history. If I treated the people I love the way God treats the people whom He allegedly loves, my loved ones would have every reason to question the truth of my love.  I see no way around this problem. (And yes, I realize “the problem of evil” is not a new issue.)

The only way to believe that  ”all people are important to God” is to push rewards and punishment out to some place and time where we cannot observe them. In other words: “No matter how sucky life is now, everything will be made right after death.” So again, we are forced to just take it on faith that – regardless of what our experience teaches us – God cares for us. That’s pretty hard to do without the gift of faith.

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If I were a Seriously Bad Guy with designs on getting and keeping power, I would create a religion for my subjects that promised them eternal happiness as long as they tolerated an unlimited amount of earthly mistreatment. Unsurprisingly, that describes most religions and is how Xianity in fact functions.

And if I were some poor shmuck who knew my life was never gonna get any better, and that the people in power who oppressed me were always gonna be in power and always gonna get away with everything, I would comfort myself with the belief that “they’d get theirs in the end” and perhaps that I might be rewarded for my “faith”. Again, this is a pretty accurate description of how most religions – Xianity in particular – actually works.

Good deal for the powerful. Sucky deal for the oppressed.

Frankly, that’s a lot easier to believe.

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But what if not all people are important? That would explain God’s lack of care, but would also shoot a big hole in most Xian doctrine.

If only some individuals are important, then the odds are that I am one of the unimportant people. Intellectual honesty requires me to admit that.

Maybe there are only a few people in the world who are truly “important” and everyone else is just filler – bit players in the giant drama called “Life”  - completely interchangeable and completely dispensable.

If that is true, then what the unimportant people do is also unimportant.

It is a dilemma, for either everyone is important, in which case God’s clear lack of care belies the doctrine that He is all loving, or else only a few are important, which belies the doctrine that what we do matters to Him.

(There is a third way: hard-core Calvinism, in which God is a dick. I reject that just because I’m not interested in worshiping a God who is a dick.)

The only other option I can see is to believe in something which is impossible to observe or verify: we get rewarded or punished after death. Which leads us back to the gift of faith, which I don’t have.

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People were also bringing babies to Jesus to have him touch them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” Luke 18:15-17

In this passage, Jesus says that we cannot enter “the Kingdom of God” unless with receive it like a little child. A lot of people think that when Jesus says “the Kingdom of God”, he is referring to the place that believers end up after they die, but that is a mistake. A kingdom is, by definition, the place ruled by a King. The Kingdom of God is therefore the place that is under the rule of God. Or to put it more succinctly: everything everywhere. That means that the danger for us is this: if we do not become like little children, we will be right smack in the middle of God’s Kingdom, and yet not be part of it.

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