A Response to Atheism

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By Garret Merriam, Thresher Staff

The recent child abuse scandal in the Catholic Church has catalyzed, for many people, a crisis of faith. The role and purpose of religion in society has been called into question. The devout insist that organized religion is still a meritorious institution, the only one that can address mankind's deepest spiritual quandaries. Then there are those of us who have actually learned to think for ourselves.

Maybe I'm just a cynic, but the recent scandal seems like nothing new to me. Organized religion is notorious for exploiting and manipulating the weakest elements of the human psyche. Karl Marx famously characterized religion as the opiate of the masses. When you realize that both opiates and religion mollify the subject, contort his view of reality, make him susceptible to suggestion, induce fits of fantasy, drain all of his money and consume his life, Marx's comparison makes a lot of sense. It certainly would explain the seduction of - and our apparent addiction to - this spiritual shell game.

Besides deluding millions of lemming-like followers, organized religion is a nexus of human suffering. As Bertrand Russell said, religion is a disease born of fear, engendering untold misery upon the human race. It is more pernicious than any other social institution, a cradle for tyranny and a nativity of demagogues. It is the only socially acceptable form of voluntary slavery.

Religion has been the rallying point behind uncountable historical malignities. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Ku Klux Klan, and televangelism are all exemplars of religious endeavor. The war in Afghanistan reminds us that even today, zealots are still willing to send other people's children to massacre thousands of innocents, all the while dogmatically secure in their own minds that God is on their side. And let's not forget the terrorists those zealots are hunting, who fall prey to similar faulty logic.

I'm not saying all organized religions are bad. Some are atrocious. It's important to make such distinctions. A bad religion will tell you that you're a born sinner, inherently inferior, and the only way to salvation is through unquestioning faith. An atrocious religion will do those things, then pass the collection plate. It takes true audacity to fleece someone's billfold after fleecing their soul. Come inside, my child, unburden your soul, but first, unburden your wallet.

And at the center of it all, there is the figurehead himself, the great absentee landlord - the father, the son, the holy hood-ornament - God. If you take a look at the bible, you can't help but come to the conclusion that God has all the consistency of a vat of cottage cheese. He grants us free will and threatens us with eternal punishment if we exercise it in discordance with His will. He is vengeful and wrathful, yet benevolent and merciful. He is all-knowing, all-powerful, and for some reason he cares where you spend you Sunday mornings. The Judeo-Christian God is the ultimate prima donna with an ego so fragile it requires an ever-expanding circle of sycophants to support it. The Cliff's Notes version of the Old Testament goes something like this: Suck up to me or thou shall burn in hell!

I ask myself how anyone can believe in a deity as insubstantial and amorphous as an overextended metaphor. I've come to the conclusion that, quite simply, we believe in God because we're too afraid to face existence alone. Sheep that we are, we create a father figure to guide us, think for us, receive our worship and to give us purpose. We stick our heads in the sand because the view above ground is a source of too much anguish. We'd rather have happiness in slavery than torment in liberty.

The appeal of this quiescence aside, I cannot understand why an intelligent rational person would willfully and knowingly subjugate themselves to such an inherently patriarchal, oppressive institution. Life outside of the orthodoxy can be terrifying. But if we continue to delude ourselves with escapism we disavow the only thing truly human about us, our will.

Garret Merriam is a graduate student in philosophy.

Rejoinder to Mr. Merriam's Diatribe Against Religious Orthodoxy

It is perhaps one of the most awkward journalistic mistakes one can make to begin an article with an unverified generalization about society. The recent Catholic Church scandal has not provoked a "crisis of faith" for "many people," as Mr. Garret Merriam alleges in his short essay against religious orthodoxy. For most Catholics know (as G. K. Chesterton once remarked) that one of the great weaknesses of modern news media as a picture of our world is that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a plane has fallen in Korea; we do not announce on flaring posters that a plane has landed safely in Korea. Busy editors cannot be expected to write in their papers, "Mr. Cheney, Still Safe," or "Prince Charles, of Wales, Not Dead Yet." The newspapers can only be expected to give us the peculiarities of life. And when they declare that they have discovered a few bad priests, it is only an indication that the great bulk of priests must be in fact good men. A religious crisis is not even on the distant horizon. But then it is usually the cynic who takes a special exception and formulates a rule of religion from it.

As Mr. Merriam would have it, the deplorable ruse of religion is that it saps us of our wits and denatures us into a race of dullards; it goes on to contort our view of reality, drain our money, etcetera, and finally, with bracing irony, religion ends up as the "most pernicious institution" we have. Now, a few of the past religions mankind has practiced have indeed been terrible-those requiring prostitution or cocaine, for example. But as regards to that specific religion which we all understand Mr. Merriam to be assailing, I cannot think of an answer to his statements more startling than that they are simply flat contrary to the facts.

To begin with, he uses the famous but trite comparison of religion to drugs, because the latter (and presumably the former) contorts a person's view of reality. Since it is obvious that religious people do not have any more doubt in gravity or the circulation of the planets than do agnostics, it is evident that by reality Mr. Merriam must be referring not primarily to nature but to the supernatural-such things as angels and hell. And so for him (as for any agnostic) a believer's "distorted view of reality" essentially means his odd inclusion of the spirit world into Reality. Mr. Merriam has not shown that religious people are moderately hallucinogenic, any more than they can prove him so for his nonreligion; he can only point out (and condemn) religion's disagreement with him on how far Reality stretches.

But let us speak in more down-to-earth terms. Religion has the approximate effect of an opiate? Despite Marx's quip, it is a sobering fact that many more people renounce drugs (the hard and solid kind) by joining the local church than by joining the local university. Religion drains our money? Then it is must be only an erratic fact of life that most of the organizations that provide some of it to the moneyless are precisely the religious. We will concede that philosophers are the world's greatest bewailers of the current revenue inequality-but bewailing is as far as they will go. And does religion really provoke untold misery upon the human race? I do not recall the last time a secular philosopher began a club whose members visited prison inmates to relieve their pain, or when I ever saw a young man decide to move to a foreign poverty-stricken country as the result of reading an inspirational book by Sartre. Young and bold agnostic people often seem more concerned about alleviating the suffering of trees and cattle than of mankind.

As for Mr. Merriam's assessment of religion as "atrocious": he seems especially perturbed by those religions that pass about a money plate, and here the only one that comes to mind is Christianity. Now, I have read a plethora of nonsensical writings in my time, but I must say that the prattle in this man's essay, as they say, takes the cake. Who would refer to as "bad" a religion which enjoined love for neighbor and enemy, care for widows and orphans, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned? Very few of these principles can be found with such rigor in the secular philosophies that a college freshman is likely to be fed. And what of the fact that the great majority of humanitarian causes in the previous centuries were led by Christians, from abolishing the slave trade to establishing hospitals and schools? This is why I called Mr. Merriam's statements nonsensical-they disregard the basic facts of social history and are (in my opinion) an unbearable affront to common sense.

The examples of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition as forms of social calamity wrought by religion are probably Mr. Merriam's only supportable arguments for the bad side of (Christian) religious fundamentalism. But if these were to persuade us to do away with religion, then we must do away with atheism first. For the Inquisition caused the death of around two thousand, and the Crusades produced local, intermittent wars between two cultures; whereas the great atheistic governments formed in Russia and eastern Europe during the last century (under the auspices of Marx) managed to achieve the death of tens of millions and ignited a global war-and have provided us with lasting memorials to the greatest oppression ever administered by human rulers. Religion has been used in times past with the aim of oppression, but would substituting an atheistic tyranny for a religious be a necessary improvement? History has proven otherwise. I should prefer the solid grip of a Constantine or Louis XIV to the iron fist of a Commodus or Stalin. And it behooves us to remember that approximately every Western nation which we today call "free and democratic" has by majority a Christian populace. In comparison, the fanatically atheistic governments we've had-Nazi, Fascist, Communist, etc-granted humans true misery. Contrary to his belief, Mr. Merriams's assertions will simply not stand up to the full test of history.

The author dislikes the apparent contradiction between God's "wrath" and "benevolence." This is understandable, given that by the benevolence of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His kindness. What would really satisfy us most would be a God who said of anything we liked doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" But, as we learn even from nonreligious thinkers, Love is something more stern and demanding than mere kindness: it labors for the perfection of the beloved. A father who would allow his young son to commit his life to the drug market would not be considered loving. According to Christian doctrine, God reveals His wrath against humans' worst defects in order to tell them, "Shape up. I would have you perfect." This Wrath of God naturally springs from the Love of God, and both together make up that thing we call His Benevolence. A mere kindness would be useless, nay, possibly harmful. The druggie son, without being shown his father's wrath, will stay a drugie son. Thus, a mere distaste for God's "wrath" is too simplistic a view.

But this leads us to the God Egoist assertion that Mr. Merriam presents: why should a God, even out of Benevolence, require perfection of us-and impose his wrath when needed-if against our will? That is, if we ourselves are satisfied to ignore God every moment of our lives, why could He not return the compliment and resign His arrogance? The religious answer to this is simple: that man was not made for his own sake and therefore cannot realize happiness (or what psychologists call "self-actualization") in his own ends. When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. That is to say that those divine demands which sound to us most like those of a Despot and least like those of a lover, direct us where we would want to go if we only knew what we wanted. But here we come up against a hopeless impasse: the acceptance of this teaching (not mine) rests not in its intrinsic value but rather on whether one originally believes that God exists or not. If so, it makes perfect sense: if not, than religion and its God will remain insolent tyrants, jealous of our personal liberty.

Again, this compels us to ask a question about Hell-the place medieval literature and modern cartoons take primarily to be a colossal valley set on fire. The Merriam's Notes of the Old Testament inform us only of the fact that Merriam must never have read it; for hell is never associated with burning or fire therein. It is rather referred to as an Abyss. However, the fiery image will do us well to remind us of hell's great insufferableness. The question is, What kind of silly religion would picture a loving God casting souls into a tortuous fire merely because He is upset that they refused to obey the majority of His rules? The dilemma of this inquiry arises from its conception of hell as a positive retributive punishment inflicted by God. Christian theologians (I cannot vouch for nonChristian) have commonly described hell in an opposite sense: as the place where souls who never wished to commune with God are finally given their wish. As C. S. Lewis once remarked, the doors of hell must be locked on the inside. And wherever God is not is by religious definition, Hell. A man like Mr. Merriam might feel in his stomach a horrible aversion to a doctrine of eternal agony-it is an aversive doctrine even to myself-but religion believes that God will force no person to abide in His presence who really does not want to.

The writer gives us his personal conclusion of why we insist on believing in God-a conclusion strikingly similar to that given by the vast majority of introductory philosophy professors-that we are only seeking deliverance from the troublesome Real World. But now two of the charges Mr. Merriam presents in his paper are directly opposed to one another. One accusation, introduced via B. Russell, was that religion prevented humans, by morbid threats and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the present life and subjecting them to "untold misery." But now the accusation is that religion comforts humans with a fictitious providence, and places them in a rose-filled nursery. He had hardly got done calling religion a nightmare before he began calling it a fool's paradise. The charges seem inconsistent; the state of the Christian could not be so comfortable that he is a coward to cling to it, and so miserable that he is a fool to give up his will to it. Religion is either painful all the way through or else it is ignorant bliss all through. Mr. Merriam has fallen into the great contradiction of all the modern debunkers of religion.

One last remark is in order. In one of the author's paragraphs, he has taken to himself the liberty to criticize the Christian idea of God-Trinity. Now what I have noticed from philosophical writing is that a person will usually limit his criticisms (especially the sorely scornful) to the subjects that he knows intimately, or at least moderately well. Marx never tried describing moving bodies in space, and Newton never spoke of an inexorable law of history. And so while contemporary ministers are exhorting their own flocks not to mind the incomprehensibility of this particular doctrine, the thought that someone as Mr. Merriam would mock it is quite incredible. I certainly understand why the Trinity would not agree with his tastes; but one would have more decency when talking of other people's beliefs.