The GOD Delusion (48 page)

After
watching a rehearsal, in which the devil was suitably diabolical in the
hammed-up style of a villain of Victorian melodrama, I interviewed
Pastor Roberts in the presence of his cast. He told me that the optimum
age for a child to visit a Hell House is twelve. This shocked me
somewhat, and I asked him whether it would worry him if a
twelve-year-old child had nightmares after one of his performances. He
replied, presumably honestly:

I
would rather for them to understand that Hell is a place that they
absolutely do not want to go. I would rather reach them with that
message at twelve than to not reach them with that message and have
them live a life of sin and to never find the Lord Jesus Christ. And if
they end up having nightmares, as a result of experiencing this, I
think there's a higher good that would ultimately be achieved and
accomplished in their life than simply having nightmares.

I
suppose that, if you really and truly believed what Pastor Roberts says
he believes, you would feel it right to intimidate children too.

We
cannot write off Pastor Roberts as an extremist wingnut. Like Ted
Haggard, he is mainstream in today's America. I'd be surprised if even
they would buy into the belief of some of their co-religionists that
you can hear the screams of the damned if you listen in on volcanoes,
¹⁴⁰
and that the giant tube worms found in hot deep-ocean vents are
fulfilments of Mark 9: 43-4: 'And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off:
it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands
to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: where
their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.' Whatever they
believe hell is actually like, all these hell-fire enthusiasts seem to
share the gloating
Schadenfreude
and complacency
of those who know they are among the saved, well conveyed by that
foremost among theologians, St Thomas Aquinas, in
Summa
Theologica:
'That the saints may enjoy their beatitude
and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the
punishment of the damned in hell.' Nice man.*

*
Compare Ann Coulter's charming Christian charity: 'I defy any of my
coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins
burning in hell' (Coulter 2006: 268).

The
fear of hell-fire can be very real, even among otherwise rational
people. After my television documentary on religion, among the many
letters I received was this, from an obviously bright and honest woman:

I
went to a Catholic school from the age of five, and was indoctrinated
by nuns who wielded straps, sticks and canes. During my teens I read
Darwin, and what he said about evolution made such a lot of sense to
the logical part of my mind. However, I've gone through life suffering
much conflict and a deep down fear of hell fire which gets triggered
quite frequently. I've had some psychotherapy which has enabled me to
work through some of my earlier problems but can't seem to overcome
this deep fear. So, the reason I'm writing to you is would you send me
please the name and address of the therapist you interviewed on this
week's programme who deals with this particular fear.

I
was moved by her letter, and (suppressing a momentary and ignoble
regret that there is no hell for those nuns to go to) replied that she
should trust in her reason as a great gift which she - unlike less
fortunate people - obviously possessed. I suggested that the extreme
horribleness of hell, as portrayed by priests and nuns, is inflated to
compensate for its implausibility. If hell were plausible, it would
only have to be moderately unpleasant in order to deter. Given that it
is so unlikely to be true, it has to be advertised as very very scary
indeed, to balance its implausibility and retain some deterrence value.
I also put her in touch with the therapist she mentioned, Jill Mytton,
a delightful and deeply sincere woman whom I had interviewed on camera.
Jill had herself been raised in a more than usually odious sect called
the Exclusive Brethren: so unpleasant that there is even a website,
www.peebs.net, entirely devoted to caring for those who have escaped
from it.

Jill
Mytton herself had been brought up to be terrified of hell, had escaped
from Christianity as an adult, and now counsels and helps others
similarly traumatized in childhood: 'If I think back to my childhood,
it's one dominated by fear. And it was the fear of disapproval while in
the present, but also of eternal damnation. And for a child, images of
hell-fire and gnashing of teeth are actually very real. They are not
metaphorical at all.' I then asked her to spell out what she had
actually been told about hell, as a child, and her eventual reply was
as moving as her expressive face during the long hesitation before she
answered: 'It's strange, isn't it? After all this time it still has the
power to ... affect me . . . when you . . . when you ask me that
question. Hell is a fearful place. It's complete rejection by God. It's
complete judgement, there is real fire, there is real torment, real
torture, and it goes on for ever so there is no respite from it.'

She
went on to tell me of the support group she runs for escapees from a
childhood similar to her own, and she dwelt on how difficult it is for
many of them to leave: 'The process of leaving is extraordinarily
difficult. Ah, you are leaving behind a whole social network, a whole
system that you've practically been brought up in, you are leaving
behind a belief-system that you have held for years. Very often you
leave families and friends . . . You don't really exist any more for
them.' I was able to chime in with my own experience of letters from
people in America saying they have read my books and have given up
their religion as a consequence. Disconcertingly many go on to say that
they daren't tell their families, or that they have told their families
with terrible results. The following is typical. The writer is a young
American medical student.

I
felt the urge to write you an email because I share your view on
religion, a view that is, as I'm sure you're aware, isolating in
America. I grew up in a Christian family and even though the idea of
religion never sat well with me I only recently got up the nerve to
tell someone. That someone was my girlfriend who was . . . horrified. I
realize that a declaration of atheism could be shocking but now it's as
if she views me as a completely different person. She can't trust me,
she says, because my morals don't come from God.
I don't know if we'll get past this, and I don't particularly want to
share my belief with other people who are close to me because I fear
the same reaction of distaste ... I don't expect a response. I only
write to you because I hoped you'd sympathize and share in my
frustration. Imagine losing someone you loved, and who loved you, on
the basis of religion. Aside from her view that I'm now a Godless
heathen we were perfect for each other. It reminds me of your
observation that people do insane things in the name of their faith.
Thanks for listening.

I
replied to this unfortunate young man, pointing out to him that, while
his girlfriend had discovered something about him, he too had
discovered something about her. Was she really good enough for him? I
doubted it.

I
have already mentioned the American comic actor Julia Sweeney and her
dogged and endearingly humorous struggle to find some redeeming
features in religion and to rescue the God of her childhood from her
growing adult doubts. Eventually her quest ended happily, and she is
now an admirable role model for young atheists everywhere. The
denouement
is perhaps the most moving scene of her show
Letting
Go of God.
She had tried everything. And then ...

...
as I was walking from my office in my backyard into my house, I
realized there was this little teeny-weenie voice whispering in my
head. I'm not sure how long it had been there, but it suddenly got just
one decibel louder. It whispered, 'There is no god.'

And
I tried to ignore it. But it got a teeny bit louder. 'There is no god.
There is no god.
Oh my god, there is no god:
. . .

And
I shuddered. I felt I was slipping off the raft.

And
then I thought, 'But I can't. I don't know if I
can
not
believe in God. I need God. I mean, we have a history' . . .

'But
I don't know how to not believe in God. I don't know how you do it. How
do you get up, how do you get through the day?' I felt unbalanced . . .

I
thought, 'Okay, calm down. Let's just try on the not-believing-in-God
glasses for a moment, just for a second. Just put on the no-God glasses
and take a quick look around and then immediately throw them off.' And
I put them on and I looked around.

I'm
embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy. I actually had the
thought, 'Well, how does the Earth stay up in the sky? You mean, we're
just hurtling through space? That's so vulnerable!' I wanted to run out
and catch the Earth as it fell out of space into my hands.

And
then I remembered, 'Oh yeah, gravity and angular momentum is gonna keep
us revolving around the sun for probably a long, long time.'

When
I saw
Letting Go of God
in a Los Angeles theatre I
was deeply moved by this scene. Especially when Julia went on to tell
us of her parents' reaction to a press report of her cure:

My
first call from my mother was more of a scream. 'Atheist? ATHEIST?!?!'

My
dad called and said, 'You have betrayed your family, your school, your
city.' It was like I had sold secrets to the Russians. They both said
they weren't going to talk to me any more. My dad said, 'I don't even
want you to come to my funeral.' After I hung up, I thought, 'Just try
and stop me.'

Part
of Julia Sweeney's gift is to make you cry and laugh at the same time:

I
think that my parents had been mildly disappointed when I'd said I
didn't believe in God any more, but being an
atheist
was
another thing altogether.

Dan
Barker's
Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist
is
the story of his gradual conversion from devout fundamentalist minister
and zealous travelling preacher to the strong and confident atheist he
is today. Significantly, Barker continued to go through the motions of
preaching Christianity for a while after he had become an atheist,
because
it was the only career he knew and he felt locked into a web of social
obligations. He now knows many other American clergymen who are in the
same position as he was but have confided only in him, having read his
book. They dare not admit their atheism even to their own families, so
terrible is the anticipated reaction. Barker's own story had a happier
conclusion. To begin with, his parents were deeply and agonizingly
shocked. But they listened to his quiet reasoning, and eventually
became atheists themselves.

Two
professors from one university in America wrote to me independently
about their parents. One said that his mother suffers permanent grief
because she fears for his immortal soul. The other one said that his
father wishes he had never been born, so convinced is he that his son
is going to spend eternity in hell. These are highly educated
university professors, confident in their scholarship and their
maturity, who have presumably left their parents behind in all matters
of the intellect, not just religion. Just think what the ordeal must be
like for less intellectually robust people, less equipped by education
and rhetorical skill than they are, or than Julia Sweeney is, to argue
their corner in the face of obdurate family members. As it was for many
of Jill Mytton's patients, perhaps.

Earlier
in our televised conversation, Jill had described this kind of
religious upbringing as a form of mental abuse, and I returned to the
point, as follows: 'You use the words religious abuse. If you were to
compare the abuse of bringing up a child really to believe in hell . .
. how do you think that would compare in trauma terms with sexual
abuse?' She replied: 'That's a very difficult question . . . I think
there are a lot of similarities actually, because it is about abuse of
trust; it is about denying the child the right to feel free and open
and able to relate to the world in the normal way . . . it's a form of
denigration; it's a form of denial of the true self in both cases.'

My
colleague the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey used the 'sticks and
stones' proverb in introducing his Amnesty Lecture in Oxford in
1997.
¹⁴¹
Humphrey began his lecture by arguing
that the proverb is not always true, citing the case of Haitian Voodoo
believers who die, apparently from some psychosomatic effect of terror,
within days of having a malign 'spell' cast upon them. He then asked
whether Amnesty International, the beneficiary of the lecture series to
which he was contributing, should campaign against hurtful or damaging
speeches or publications. His answer was a resounding no to such
censorship in general: 'Freedom of speech is too precious a freedom to
be meddled with.' But he then went on to shock his liberal self by
advocating one important exception: to argue in favour of censorship
for the special case of children . . .

. .
. moral and religious education, and especially the education a child
receives at home, where parents are allowed - even expected - to
determine for their children what counts as truth and falsehood, right
and wrong. Children, I'll argue, have a human right not to have their
minds crippled by exposure to other people's bad ideas -no matter who
these other people are. Parents, correspondingly, have no God-given
licence to enculturate their children in whatever ways they personally
choose: no right to limit the horizons of their children's knowledge,
to bring them up in an atmosphere of dogma and superstition, or to
insist they follow the straight and narrow paths of their own faith.