The GOD Delusion (5 page)

Except
that if you don't take it seriously and accord it proper respect you
are physically threatened, on a scale that no other religion has
aspired to since the Middle Ages. One can't help wondering why such
violence is necessary, given that, as Mueller notes: 'If any of you
clowns are right about anything, the cartoonists are going to hell
anyway - won't that do? In the meantime, if you want to get excited
about affronts to Muslims, read the Amnesty International reports on
Syria and Saudi Arabia.'

Many
people have noted the contrast between the hysterical 'hurt' professed
by Muslims and the readiness with which Arab media publish
stereotypical anti-Jewish cartoons. At a demonstration in Pakistan
against the Danish cartoons, a woman in a black burka was photographed
carrying a banner reading 'God Bless Hitler'.

In
response to all this frenzied pandemonium, decent liberal newspapers
deplored the violence and made token noises about free speech. But at
the same time they expressed 'respect' and 'sympathy' for the deep
'offence' and 'hurt' that Muslims had 'suffered'. The 'hurt' and
'suffering' consisted, remember, not in any person enduring violence or
real pain of any kind: nothing more than a few daubs of printing ink in
a newspaper that nobody outside Denmark would ever have heard of but
for a deliberate campaign of incitement to mayhem.

I am
not in favour of offending or hurting anyone just for the sake of it.
But I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of
religion in our otherwise secular societies. All politicians must get
used to disrespectful cartoons of their faces, and nobody riots in
their defence. What is so special about religion that we grant it such
uniquely privileged respect? As H. L. Mencken said: 'We must respect
the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent
that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children
smart.'

It
is in the light of the unparalleled presumption of respect for religion
that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my
way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any
more gently than I would handle anything else.

2

THE
GOD HYPOTHESIS

The
religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.

—RALPH
WALDO EMERSON

The
God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in
all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving
control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a
misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, fili-cidal,
pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent
bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become
desensitized to their horror. A
naif
blessed with
the perspective of innocence has a clearer perception. Winston
Churchill's son Randolph somehow contrived to remain ignorant of
scripture until Evelyn Waugh and a brother officer, in a vain attempt
to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war,
bet him he couldn't read the entire Bible in a fortnight: 'Unhappily it
has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before and
is hideously excited; keeps reading quotations aloud "I say I bet you
didn't know this came in the Bible ..." or merely slapping his side
& chortling "God, isn't God a shit!"'
¹⁶
Thomas Jefferson - better read - was of a similar opinion: 'The
Christian God is a being of terrific character - cruel, vindictive,
capricious and unjust.'

It
is unfair to attack such an easy target. The God Hypothesis should not
stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh, nor his
insipidly opposite Christian face, 'Gentle Jesus meek and mild'. (To be
fair, this milksop
persona
owes more to his
Victorian followers than to Jesus himself. Could anything be more
mawkishly nauseating than Mrs C. F. Alexander's 'Christian children all
must be / Mild, obedient, good as he'?) I am not attacking the
particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other
specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define the
God Hypothesis more defensibly:
there exists a superhuman,
supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the
universe and everything in it, including us.
This book will
advocate an alternative view:
any creative intelligence, of
sufficient complexity to design anything, conies into existence only as
the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.
Creative
intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe,
and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense
defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious
delusion.

Not
surprisingly, since it is founded on local traditions of private
revelation rather than evidence, the God Hypothesis comes in many
versions. Historians of religion recognize a progression from primitive
tribal animisms, through polytheisms such as those of the Greeks,
Romans and Norsemen, to monotheisms such as Judaism and its
derivatives, Christianity and Islam.

It
is not clear why the change from polytheism to monotheism should be
assumed to be a self-evidently progressive improvement. But it widely
is - an assumption that provoked Ibn Warraq (author of
Why I
Am Not a Muslim)
wittily to conjecture that monotheism is in
its turn doomed to subtract one more god and become atheism. The
Catholic
Encyclopedia
dismisses polytheism and atheism in the same
insouciant breath: 'Formal dogmatic atheism is self-refuting, and has
never
de facto
won the reasoned assent of any
considerable number of men. Nor can polytheism, however easily it may
take hold of the popular imagination, ever satisfy the mind of a
philosopher.'
¹⁷

Monotheistic
chauvinism was until recently written into the charity law of both
England and Scotland, discriminating against polytheistic religions in
granting tax-exempt status, while allowing an easy ride to charities
whose object was to promote monotheistic religion, sparing them the
rigorous vetting quite properly required of secular charities. It was
my ambition to persuade a member of Britain's respected Hindu community
to come forward and bring a civil action to test this snobbish
discrimination against polytheism.

Far
better, of course, would be to abandon the promotion of religion
altogether as grounds for charitable status. The benefits of this to
society would be great, especially in the United States, where the sums
of tax-free money sucked in by churches, and polishing the heels of
already well-heeled televangelists, reach levels that could fairly be
described as obscene. The aptly named Oral Roberts once told his
television audience that God would kill him unless they gave him $8
million. Almost unbelievably, it worked.

Tax-free!
Roberts himself is still going strong, as is 'Oral Roberts University'
of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its buildings, valued at $250 million, were
directly commissioned by God himself in these words: 'Raise up your
students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim, where My voice
is heard small, and My healing power is not known, even to the
uttermost bounds of the Earth. Their work will exceed yours, and in
this I am well pleased.'

On
reflection, my imagined Hindu litigator would have been as likely to
play the 'If you can't beat them join them' card. His polytheism isn't
really polytheism but monotheism in disguise. There is only one God -
Lord Brahma the creator, Lord Vishnu the preserver, Lord Shiva the
destroyer, the goddesses Saraswati, Laxmi and Parvati (wives of Brahma,
Vishnu and Shiva), Lord Ganesh the elephant god, and hundreds of
others, all are just different manifestations or incarnations of the
one God.

Christians
should warm to such sophistry. Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention
blood, have been squandered over the 'mystery' of the Trinity, and in
suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria,
in the fourth century ad, denied that Jesus was
consubstantial
(i.e. of the same substance or essence) with God. What on
earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance?
What 'substance'? What exactly do you mean by 'essence'? 'Very little'
seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom
down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered that
all copies of Arius's book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by
splitting hairs - such has ever been the way of theology.

Do
we have one God in three parts, or three Gods in one? The
Catholic
Encyclopedia
clears up the matter for us, in a masterpiece
of theological close reasoning:

In
the unity of the Godhead there are three Persons, the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from
another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: 'the Father is
God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not
three Gods but one God.'

As
if that were not clear enough, the
Encyclopedia
quotes
the third-century theologian St Gregory the Miracle Worker:

There
is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the
Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once
had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has
never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this
same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever.

Whatever
miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname, they were not
miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey the characteristically
obscurantist flavour of theology, which - unlike science or most other
branches of human scholarship - has not moved on in eighteen centuries.
Thomas Jefferson, as so often, got it right when he said, 'Ridicule is
the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions.
Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever
had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the
mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.'

The
other thing I cannot help remarking upon is the overweening confidence
with which the religious assert minute details for which they neither
have, nor could have, any evidence. Perhaps it is the very fact that
there is no evidence to support theological opinions, either way, that
fosters the characteristic draconian hostility towards those of
slightly different opinion, especially, as it happens, in this very
field of Trinitarianism.

Jefferson
heaped ridicule on the doctrine that, as he put it, 'There are three
Gods', in his critique of Calvinism. But it is especially the Roman
Catholic branch of Christianity that pushes its recurrent flirtation
with polytheism towards runaway inflation. The Trinity is (are?) joined
by Mary, 'Queen of Heaven', a goddess in all but name, who surely runs
God himself a close second as a target of prayers. The pantheon is
further swollen by an army of saints, whose intercessory power makes
them, if not demigods, well worth approaching on their own specialist
subjects. The Catholic Community Forum helpfully lists 5,120 saints,
¹⁸
together with their areas of expertise, which include abdominal pains,
abuse victims, anorexia,
arms dealers, blacksmiths, broken bones, bomb technicians and bowel
disorders, to venture no further than the Bs. And we mustn't forget the
four Choirs of Angelic Hosts, arrayed in nine orders: Seraphim,
Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities,
Archangels (heads of all hosts), and just plain old Angels, including
our closest friends, the ever-watchful Guardian Angels. What impresses
me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly
the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as
they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.

Pope
John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past
several centuries put together, and he had a special affinity with the
Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated
in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and
attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: 'A
maternal hand guided the bullet.' One cannot help wondering why she
didn't guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of
surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of
the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided. The
relevant point is that it wasn't just Our Lady who, in the Pope's
opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady
of
Fatima.
Presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of
Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of
Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on
other errands at the time.

How
did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such
polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite,
or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a
manifestation of Wotan, or a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short
to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination
and many. Having gestured towards polytheism to cover myself against a
charge of neglect, I shall say no more about it. For brevity I shall
refer to all deities, whether poly- or monotheistic, as simply 'God'. I
am also conscious that the Abrahamic God is (to put it mildly)
aggressively male, and this too I shall accept as a convention in my
use of pronouns. More sophisticated theologians proclaim the
sexlessness of God, while some
feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating
her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a
non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the
ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might
indeed be a less salient attribute than gender.