The GOD Delusion (6 page)

I am
aware that critics of religion can be attacked for failing to credit
the fertile diversity of traditions and world-views that have been
called religious. Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James
Frazer's
Golden Bough
to Pascal Boyer's
Religion
Explained
or Scott Atran's
In Gods We Trust,
fascinatingly
document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read
such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility.

But
that is not the way of this book. I decry supernaturalism in all its
forms, and the most effective way to proceed will be to concentrate on
the form most likely to be familiar to my readers - the form that
impinges most threateningly on all our societies. Most of my readers
will have been reared in one or another of today's three 'great'
monotheistic religions (four if you count Mormonism), all of which
trace themselves back to the mythological patriarch Abraham, and it
will be convenient to keep this family of traditions in mind throughout
the rest of the book.

This
is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the
book, one that would otherwise - as sure as night follows day - turn up
in a review: 'The God that Dawkins doesn't believe in is a God that I
don't believe in either. I don't believe in an old man in the sky with
a long white beard.' That old man is an irrelevant distraction and his
beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed, the distraction is worse
than irrelevant. Its very silliness is calculated to distract attention
from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot
less silly. I know you don't believe in an old bearded man sitting on a
cloud, so let's not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any
particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods,
anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have
been or will be invented.

The
great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism.
From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three
anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal -God is
the Omnipotent Father - hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in
those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.

—
GORE VIDAL

The
oldest of the three Abrahamic religions, and the clear ancestor of the
other two, is Judaism: originally a tribal cult of a single fiercely
unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the
smell of charred flesh, with his own superiority over rival gods and
with the exclusiveness of his chosen desert tribe. During the Roman
occupation of Palestine, Christianity was founded by Paul of Tarsus as
a less ruthlessly monotheistic sect of Judaism and a less exclusive
one, which looked outwards from the Jews to the rest of the world.
Several centuries later, Muhammad and his followers reverted to the
uncompromising monotheism of the Jewish original, but not its
exclusiveness, and founded Islam upon a new holy book, the Koran or
Qur'an, adding a powerful ideology of military conquest to spread the
faith. Christianity, too, was spread by the sword, wielded first by
Roman hands after the Emperor Constantine raised it from eccentric cult
to official religion, then by the Crusaders, and later by the
conquistadores
and other European invaders and colonists, with missionary
accompaniment. For most of my purposes, all three Abrahamic religions
can be treated as indistinguishable. Unless otherwise stated, I shall
have Christianity mostly in mind, but only because it is the version
with which I happen to be most familiar. For my purposes the
differences matter less than the similarities. And I shall not be
concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism.
Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as
religions
at all but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.

The
simple definition of the God Hypothesis with which I began has to be
substantially fleshed out if it is to accommodate the Abrahamic God. He
not only created the universe; he is a
personal
God
dwelling within it, or perhaps outside it (whatever that might mean),
possessing the unpleasantly human qualities to which I have alluded.

Personal
qualities, whether pleasant or unpleasant, form no part of the deist
god of Voltaire and Thomas Paine. Compared with the Old Testament's
psychotic delinquent, the deist God of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment is an altogether grander being: worthy of his cosmic
creation, loftily unconcerned with human affairs, sublimely aloof from
our private thoughts and hopes, caring nothing for our messy sins or
mumbled contritions. The deist God is a physicist to end all physics,
the alpha and omega of mathematicians, the apotheosis of designers; a
hyper-engineer who set up the laws and constants of the universe,
fine-tuned them with exquisite precision and foreknowledge, detonated
what we would now call the hot big bang, retired and was never heard
from again.

In
times of stronger faith, deists have been reviled as indistinguishable
from atheists. Susan Jacoby, in
Freethinkers: A History of
American Secularism,
lists a choice selection of the
epithets hurled at poor Tom Paine: 'Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog,
souse, louse, archbeast, brute, liar, and of course infidel'. Paine
died in penury, abandoned (with the honourable exception of Jefferson)
by political former friends embarrassed by his anti-Christian views.
Nowadays, the ground has shifted so far that deists are more likely to
be contrasted with atheists and lumped with theists. They do, after
all, believe in a supreme intelligence who created the universe.

It
is conventional to assume that the Founding Fathers of the American
Republic were deists. No doubt many of them were, although
it has been argued that the greatest of them might have been atheists.
Certainly their writings on religion in their own time leave me in no
doubt that most of them would have been atheists in ours. But whatever
their individual religious views in their own time, the one thing they
collectively were is
secularists,
and this is the
topic to which I turn in this section, beginning with a - perhaps
surprising - quotation from Senator Barry Goldwater in 1981, clearly
showing how staunchly that presidential candidate and hero of American
conservatism upheld the secular tradition of the Republic's foundation:

There
is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious
beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than
Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme
being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God's name on one's
behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are
growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with
wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following
their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups
on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a
loss of money or votes or both. I'm frankly sick and tired of the
political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if
I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who
do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the
right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as
a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who
thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll
call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every
step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all
Americans in the name of conservatism.
¹⁹

The
religious views of the Founding Fathers are of great interest to
propagandists of today's American right, anxious to push their version
of history. Contrary to their view, the fact that the United States was
not
founded as a Christian nation was early stated
in the terms of a treaty with Tripoli, drafted in 1796 under George
Washington and signed by John Adams in 1797:

As
the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense,
founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and
as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility
against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no
pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an
interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The
opening words of this quotation would cause uproar in today's
Washington ascendancy. Yet Ed Buckner has convincingly demonstrated
that they caused no dissent at the time,
²⁰
among
either politicians or public.

The
paradox has often been noted that the United States, founded in
secularism, is now the most religiose country in Christendom, while
England, with an established church headed by its constitutional
monarch, is among the least. I am continually asked why this is, and I
do not know. I suppose it is possible that England has wearied of
religion after an appalling history of inter-faith violence, with
Protestants and Catholics alternately gaining the upper hand and
systematically murdering the other lot. Another suggestion stems from
the observation that America is a nation of immigrants. A colleague
points out to me that immigrants, uprooted from the stability and
comfort of an extended family in Europe, could well have embraced a
church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil. It is an interesting
idea, worth researching further. There is no doubt that many Americans
see their own local church as an important unit of identity, which does
indeed have some of the attributes of an extended family.

Yet
another hypothesis is that the religiosity of America stems
paradoxically from the secularism of its constitution. Precisely
because America is legally secular, religion has become free
enterprise.
Rival churches compete for congregations - not least for the fat tithes
that they bring - and the competition is waged with all the aggressive
hard-sell techniques of the marketplace. What works for soap flakes
works for God, and the result is something approaching religious mania
among today's less educated classes. In England, by contrast, religion
under the aegis of the established church has become little more than a
pleasant social pastime, scarcely recognizable as religious at all.
This English tradition is nicely expressed by Giles Fraser, an Anglican
vicar who doubles as a philosophy tutor at Oxford, writing in the
Guardian.
Fraser's article is subtitled 'The establishment of the
Church of England took God out of religion, but there are risks in a
more vigorous approach to faith':

There
was a time when the country vicar was a staple of the English dramatis
personae. This tea-drinking, gentle eccentric, with his polished shoes
and kindly manners, represented a type of religion that didn't make
non-religious people uncomfortable. He wouldn't break into an
existential sweat or press you against a wall to ask if you were saved,
still less launch crusades from the pulpit or plant roadside bombs in
the name of some higher power.
²¹

(Shades
of Betjeman's 'Our Padre', which I quoted at the beginning of Chapter
1.) Fraser goes on to say that 'the nice country vicar in effect
inoculated vast swaths of the English against Christianity'. He ends
his article by lamenting a more recent trend in the Church of England
to take religion seriously again, and his last sentence is a warning:
'the worry is that we may release the genie of English religious
fanaticism from the establishment box in which it has been dormant for
centuries'.

The
genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America, and
the Founding Fathers would have been horrified. Whether or not it is
right to embrace the paradox and blame the secular constitution that
they devised, the founders most certainly were secularists who believed
in keeping religion out of politics, and that is enough to place them
firmly on the side of those who object,
for example, to ostentatious displays of the Ten Commandments in
government-owned public places. But it is tantalizing to speculate that
at least some of the Founders might have gone beyond deism. Might they
have been agnostics or even out-and-out atheists? The following
statement of Jefferson is indistinguishable from what we would now call
agnosticism:

To
talk of immaterial existences is to talk of
nothings.
To
say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they
are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot
reason otherwise . . . without plunging into the fathomless abyss of
dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with
the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about
those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.

Christopher
Hitchens, in his biography
Thomas Jefferson: Author of
America,
thinks it likely that Jefferson was an atheist,
even in his own time when it was much harder:

As
to whether he was an atheist, we must reserve judgment if only because
of the prudence he was compelled to observe during his political life.
But as he had written to his nephew, Peter Carr, as early as 1787, one
must not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its
consequences. 'If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will
find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in
this exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.'