My God

There has been much debate recently revolving around the utility, the morality, and the role of religion in our postmodern dystopia. Like all too many debates in America these days, the initiative is claimed and jealously guarded by those who aim to dismantle a fundamental foundation of our society and those who deny that any remedy is needed at all. Both views are wrong, of course, and both have much to fear from the middle ground, because the middle ground represents common sense, the ultimate threat to the faithful, regardless of where their faith lies.

One side, led by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, excoriates literally everything about religion, since religion is based, by definition, on blind faith, which is wholly incompatible with a rational, globalized, and militarized world. For the atheists, religious faith, even in its more benevolent incarnations, is a relic of a bygone phase of history, which should have been cast aside along with human sacrifice, alchemy, witch trials, and all the superstitious flotsam of the pre-modern era.

The other side, led by Dinesh D'Souza and other far less articulate thinkers, argues that without religion, there would be no morality, no sense of dignity for the individual, no social cohesion, no incentive to restrain the darker impulses of human nature, no broad rejection of slavery, and no reason to love our fellow man. For the theists, religious faith, even in its more sinister incarnations, is the foundation of human life, the water to the fish, which is more relevant and necessary now than ever.

Both sides are absurd in their reductionism, and both have a vested interest in ignoring the third way, the way of the deists.

The atheists have an airtight case, up to a point. I agree with the premise that blind faith is not a virtue in itself, and it can often be a serious retardant to moral and material progress. While it often serves to comfort, it just as often serves as an excuse to ignore evidence of one's own error or sin. And blind faith, when it is blind enough, can make men do things that an open mind would preclude out of hand. Like fly a plane into a building. Or invade Iraq.

So while blind faith can uplift, it can also excuse inexcusable behavior. To argue that religion is the source of human morality is to adopt a dim and ultimately self-loathing view of mankind. It is to suggest that, if it were not for the Torah or the New Testament or the Koran, people would be savages. It suggests that, prior to these revelatory works, people recognized no reason to refrain from theft and murder.

But ask yourself this: can we really believe that the civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, Greece or Republican Rome could have progressed as they did if their builders recognized no disincentive to murder and theft? Do we believe that the Jews survived forty years in the desert murdering and robbing each other before Moses was told that these acts were forbidden?

To suggest that morality comes from the Holy Books is to suggest that men did not write the Holy Books. To suggest that any book was written by God is, quite simply, ridiculous. Ridiculous. Morality comes from man himself. I do not believe in a theistic, personal God who is capable of either granting me eternal life or eternal damnation, but even so, I would never murder or rob. I know it's wrong without having to believe that the only reason I know this is that the creator of the universe revealed this secret to an illiterate nomad in the Sinai after allowing humanity to live a thousand centuries in barbarism.

To imply that humans would be incapable of morality, love, discretion, and just plain goodness without ceding their autonomy to a set of unbelievable, or at least unprovable, stories that differ from the Lord of the Rings only in the quality of writing (which is considerably poorer) is to take, as I said, a self-loathing view of humanity and to endorse of global cult of leader worship, where the high priests arrogate to themselves the right to tell us who the leader is and what he wants, since nobody has ever seen him or proven that he even exists. This is the crime of theism.

All this being said, I have seen the true Christianity of sacrifice and love personified in many, especially my father. This experience leads me to recognize the merits of Christianity which, in my opinion, completely outweigh whatever merits could be found in Judaism of Islam. If you have to pick a monotheism, Christianity is the clear choice, as it eschews Judaism's "chosen people" racism and Islam's glorification of violence (yes, jihad means killing).

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the brand of Christianity preached and practiced by my father is relatively new and relatively rare. For the balance of history, Christianity was dominated by the Catholic Church, which told children vicious and ugly lies for century upon century, teaching them to hate themselves and their bodies, that they were born into filth and depravity, that their very existence was proof of their sin, and that their only hope was to submit themselves to the worship of a long-dead Palestinian who was subjected to a brutal human sacrifice for their own good. A failure to give oneself to this message of "love" would be eternal torment. At least Judaism let the heretics go after death.

When my grandfather was my age, the Catholic Church was busying itself with accommodating Adolf Hitler's extermination of the Jews of Europe, excommunicating exactly one member of the Nazi Party. That man was Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. His crime? Aggressive war? Genocide? Nope. Marrying a Protestant. Apparently, the church of Saint Peter knows when to put its foot down.

The sins of the theisms are not equal, and they are not relative, but they all spring from the same delusion, which is shared even by the most benevolent sects of Christianity. That delusion is theism itself, the insistence that not only is there a personal God, but that we know what he wants. That works out fine when he wants us to love our neighbors, but when he wants us to kill them, the flaw is evident.

And it is not intellectually honest to argue that the premise of theism is sound, if occasionally abused. As soon as you grant someone the right to speak on behalf of an invisible master, you have no right to criticize him if he misunderstands that master from your point of view. You must reject the premise of an invisible master out of hand. It's sort of like nuclear weapons; they are unacceptable in principle, their is no "correct" way to wield them, even if nobody is hurt for the time being.

All this being said, the atheists' arguments indulges in quite a bit of willful blindness, especially as pertaining to the influence of Christianity on history. To argue that Christianity has held back Western civilization is like arguing that Bob Dylan held back songwriting. You don't need to endorse or embrace the former to appreciate its enormous impact on the latter.

To say that Christianity was incidental to the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, the spread of democracy, the legal protection of minorities, and the legal recognition of the inherent dignity of every individual is simply to discredit oneself. Many of the foundations of Western Civilization are taken for granted by atheists and theists alike. The culture of Christianity is a crucial component of our progress, as inseparable from our progress as the leg to the stool.

The middle ground of deism incorporates the positive attributes of both Christian theism and atheism. Rationality and discernible evidence is given its proper dominance, but not at the expense of blind faith. This blind faith, however, is directed not at discerning what God wants you to do, be it blow up a bus, refrain from masturbating, donating to charity, or dressing a certain way. Rather, it focuses faith, which is necessarily blind, and which is necessarily necessary, since there will always be unknowables, toward the Creator God rather than the Personal God.

The Creator God gives man his need for faith and spirituality without depriving him of agency over his own life or granting him agency over the lives of others. The Creator God allows us to understand that we don't need a Personal God to tell us how to behave, that we intuitively know right from wrong, and that, since we owe everything to the Creator God, we are reminded of and reinforced in our need for God after all.

In other words, we need not a God of minutiae, not a dictator God, not a peeping Tom God, not a vindictive or jealous God, not a human God, but a Creator God who gave us what, in the final analysis, makes us human, and that is consciousness and free will. We should thank God every day for those blessings; we must not insult his creation by deluding ourselves into thinking that we speak for him. We speak for ourselves. And that is freedom. And freedom is the point of creation.