Posted on 04/17/2003 5:23:15 PM PDT by kaylar
In the spring and with the coming of Easter, an old man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of gods. I am now 83 pushing 84 and the closer I come to shuffling off this mortal coil, the more mystified I am by Christian belief in the deity they call by the not very original name of God (as if there had never been others). Not all Christians of course, for the exodus from their churches these past few decades has only been paralleled by the numbers of the children of Israel as they traipsed across the wilderness in search of the promised land. Two things in particular puzzle me: first the claim, proposed in Genesis but still subscribed to today, that out of nothing "God" made our world and everything in it, yet without the hint of an explanation of the one thing we want to know: just how in practical terms such a massive feat of engineering came about. To have to take it on trust is, I submit, insufficient; indeed the extravagance of the claim calls to mind Glendower's boast to Hotspur: "I can call spirits from the vasty deep", and Hotspur's withering reply: "Well. So can I and so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?"
And the other puzzle is this. Every week in their churches Christians belt out in hymn after hymn that "God" is just and merciful and wise, yet also, they claim, invisible, inaccessible and silent as night. These attributes are contradictory, for if the latter are true, the former cannot be. And just where in our daily lives do we find examples of God's mercy, wisdom and justice?
Yet despite the contradictions and non sequiturs, the Hallelujahs continue to hit the rafters, votes of thanks and confidence are repeated ad nauseam ("Praise him! Praise him! Praise him! Praise him! Praise the God of Righteousness!").
Do the brothers and sisters really believe they are being listened to, and have they ever paused to consider how silly to outsiders they sound and look? (Though no sillier than Jews nodding at the Wailing Wall or Muslims prostrating themselves in the direction of Mecca - an attitude described by Rowan Atkinson as the hunt for Khomeini's contact lenses.). And has David Hume's famous saying escaped them: that it is an absurdity to believe that the deity has one of the lowest of human possessions - a restless appetite for applause?
It is a mistake to consider gods as unconnected, existing in a vacuum. The ones we are saddled with are heirs to a long line of former idols like Bunjil and Pulga, Baal and Mithras, Ra and Osiris, Thor and Odin, and before them literally thousands of others, gods of the sea and sky, of rivers and mountains, stones and bushes, all of which originated when primitive man sought comfort and reassurance in the things that scared him: thunder and lightning, droughts, earthquakes, volcanoes, fearsome beasts and poisonous fruits and berries.
All gods from time immemorial are fantasies, created by humans for the welfare of humans and to attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable. But do we, in the third year of the 21st century of the Common Era and on the springboard of colonising the universe, need such palliatives? Should we not heed the message of Corinthians that while we once spoke as a child, understood as a child and thought as a child, we are now grown-up and should put away childish things?
There have been periods in history when men and women found spiritual fulfilment, as I and increasing numbers do today, in nature, art; long periods too when they lived without religious beliefs. The Ancients, wrote the philosopher John Locke in 1689, had no beliefs in a personal god, and about the same time French missionaries seeking converts were finding godless societies living contentedly all over the world.
The Indians of the Gaspe peninsula, wrote Chretien Le Clerq, had never formed a conception of any divinity but were charitable beyond anything in Europe, while the Jesuit Le Jeune found the natives of Cap Breton "exceptionally clever, honest and decent, very generous with a cheerful disposition", but also godless. And the Dominican Jean-Baptiste du Tertre whose church had warned him he would find black atheists in the Antilles to be depraved found otherwise.
"The love they have for one another is extremely tender... they assist each other in all their illnesses and cannot see their companions mistreated without feeling their pain." Similar discoveries were made in Thailand, China and Japan.
Would that such societies still existed today. But wherever one looks there is conflict: Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland; Jews, Christians and Muslims in Palestine; Muslims and Hindus in the Indian subcontinent; Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Is not the case for atheism made?
· Ludovic Kennedy's books include All in the Mind: A Farewell to God (Hodder & Stoughton)
Godless in this context does not mean atheist as we understand it, but pagan.
The Micmacs would be most surprised at the discovery of their atheist past, as they have been telling legends about Glooscap for centuries now.
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