Slouching Towards Atheism
It’s January in New Jersey and the sky is gray. Tomorrow promises to be grayer still and no change in the pattern will be evident until mid-April when we’ll begin to ruminate about planting tomatoes and whether we need to wear a mask at the garden center. For now, we’re still congratulating ourselves for choosing a resolution worth pursuing. Despite the pallor of weather and pandemic, for some, the new year is a time of promise. For others…
In the early morning hours of Friday, the first of January, a thirty-three-year-old woman was stabbed to death on North Stricker Street in Baltimore, marking the city’s first homicide of 2021.
Before breakfast, Columbus, Chicago, Philadelphia, Queens and Rockford had also tallied their first murders of the year. I imagined the coffee brewing in the tired offices of the murder police as they recorded the summation on the tote board. “04:15 report of cutting, DOA at hosp.”
And it was grayer still. For a moment I stopped thinking about tomatoes and wondered who might be praying for the suddenly dead or the families jolted by the news. We turn to religion for answers and we are enjoined to pray. When no solutions follow, we are asked to pray more, to pray harder.
Toward what end? Six-thousand years of religion and we’re still killing one another. We’re still cheating on our spouses, beating our children, warring, stealing, betraying, and pissing on the dishes. Six-thousand years, billions of adherents, millions murdered in the name of one god or another over sacred land or holy text, and we’ve learned nothing. We have been guided nowhere. We are still rapacious monkeys, fragile-hearted and tedious, pleading for some future reward—mantras for manna.
Prayer is our favorite palliative, easy to suggest and meditative in quiet places. There is an inclination to presume that good things happen by virtue of divine intercession, that wonder arises from otherwise disastrous events. The baby who survives under the rubble left from an earthquake is rescued by the hand of god. But for reasons we won’t face, the casualties that earthquake wrought are somehow not the fault of the same deity holding the power to lash a miracle to a tragedy.
After a school shooting, we thank god for sparing our child but don’t blame god for allowing the other kids to be killed. The proximate cause of death is evil but the failure or inability or indifference to intervene is brushed away as part of a plan we cannot know on this earth. Rather than believe that in violent situations, god chooses winners and losers, we choose to let reason run fugitive and latch on to whatever helps us get through it. The lies we tell ourselves become the stories we tell our children.
The Christian story of the annunciation is preposterous, as are many other scriptural stories, yet they persist. Why? What we’ve seen throughout history is the construction of a scholarly superstructure over desert tales as the monarchs of central religious authority sought to rectify the inconsistencies and violations of the laws of physics by attributing grandiose honors toward and serious examination of copper-age legends, gospels, the dictation of angels, and other apocrypha, as though they were stipulated to be true but in need of clarification for a modern audience. This practice, layered upon layers over the centuries, adds gravitas to a storyline that would be laughable were it to have been discovered independent of the religious infrastructure that now surrounds it. It’s a form of legitimacy creep we can see happening around wokeness.
Christianity is rooted in the story of an archangel visiting a fourteen-year-old reluctant wife to inform her of her extra-carnal pregnancy. We are expected to accept that the archangel Gabriel, or whomever sent him, did not realize Mary’s husband, Joseph, wasn’t home before making the trip to earth, something the knower of all things probably should have known. A simple fly-over would have done the trick. After Joseph returns and is rocked by Mary’s tale, the angel must make a second trip to earth to alert the dismayed husband, in a dream by the way, that in his absence his wife had not been a scamp, but that her womb was indeed blooming with the legitimate progeny of the lord. Crisis averted.
Thus, the creator of a universe so vast it is beyond human reckoning and so complex as to generate an unending state of marvel, couldn’t get the schedules of an obscure, small-town couple together in order to announce the arrival of the son of the creator of all that is seen and unseen.
Because of what has been shaped by the church of Rome over the millennia, we now ignore the fact that the predicate biography of the redeemer is built upon a ridiculous origin story. We focus instead on the liturgical arguments and disputations of the higher-level concepts of morality, purpose and consciousness. This pattern repeats throughout religious history from talking snakes and burning bushes to flying horses and six-month meditative trances. If the revelation stories are nonsense, then the legal concept of “false in one, false in all” should apply to the whole megillah.
At least two of the major religions have been trumpeted by angels, yet none have ever appeared before a politburo, a congressional subcommittee or zoning board. Angels have been both abundant and camera shy. Even the fallen angels have yet to establish a YouTube channel where, one might presume, they’d reach a wider audience.
We believe in guardian angels, legions of them, millions strong, watching over us, so long as we aren’t teenaged girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, or Yazidis slaughtered in the Iraqi hills, their daughters sold as sex slaves to their ISIS captors, or the hundreds shot at a Las Vegas concert, or a boy sacrificed by a Mayan chilan who cut out his beating heart then threw his body onto a heap of festering juvenile corpses. Perhaps the world population has grown too large. Perhaps the heavens can’t churn out new angels quickly enough and the training is lacking. We can only speculate.
However you feel about the existence of god is your business to reconcile with reality. Perhaps you believe god is in the smiles of crippled children or the waves crashing off Kenya or the spectacle of the Aurora Borealis or the choral glory of the Miserere, but know this.
He wasn’t at Verdun. He wasn’t at Stalingrad. He wasn’t at Somme, Gettysburg or Cannae. He wasn’t at Mỹ Lai, or Tuol Sleng or the rape rooms of Hussein.
He doesn’t walk the streets of St Louis, Caracas, Ciudad Victoria, or Juarez. He isn’t helping the Uyghurs. He’s never been to North Korea. He wasn’t at the death camps, or on the trains that led the Jews along the rails of Holocaust.
He watched heretics burn alive. He watched families starve to death in Ukraine and Ireland. He watched Che Guevara murder men for being gay. He rode with Genghis Khan.
He was silent when the popes sold indulgences and prayed with Nazis. He knows which priests raped your sons, and the dread your daughters feel of being molested again by their fathers. He knows the crippling fear of an abused child. He knows your preachers enrich themselves in his name. His scriptures promote violence, fear, and the stoning of young girls for losing their virginity. His commandments do not forbid rape, genocide, child abuse, slavery and war, but he knows precisely how much human suffering would not have happened, had there been a third tablet. He knows every agonizing death. Every hanging. Every burning. Every gassing. Every plea for mercy.
He wasn’t on the slave ships or at the auctions. He knew about the human sacrifices of the Aztecs and Polyxena, yet sent his son to suffer the same fate, and on Sunday, you will eat his flesh.
He lets you subjugate women. He gives you hope and others, misery. He gives you celebrity chefs and mineral water and others, malaria, dysentery and cholera.
You believe men carry the burden of stigmata and women, the mark of the beast.
He takes five million children every year before the age of five, his only act of kindness. He takes them before the age of reason, before they are lied to by their rabbis, imams and men of holy vestments, before they dare to imagine the depth of human depravity generated in the minds created by your god, in his image and likeness.
He isn’t in your churches. He isn’t in your temples. He isn’t by your side. His demons are imaginary. His cruelty knows no bounds.
Believe what you want, as hard as you wish. Believe what gets you through another year, or one more day. Believe he has a plan for you if that gives you comfort, but know that on this earth, his plan includes rage, insanity, vengeance, disease and malice.
He isn’t risen, coming again or even for the first time. It’s just a story. He was never here. He isn’t here now. He won’t be. He can’t be. And if he ever did exist, he left us all forever, a very long time ago.
But here is one more thing I know.
I know that notwithstanding the lofty discussions of morality and how it could or couldn’t exist without god, it exists because humans designed it. Despite the endless droning about what is or what ought to be or how we derive one from the other, we have evolved into incredible creatures with fertile minds capable of imagining things we cannot yet build or comprehend. We can look into our own futures and imagine what it might be like to look back on days that have not yet happened. We can build flying ships and decode disease. We can describe how every force of nature in the known universe works. We can paint pictures from memory and arrange musical notes in just the right order to make others cry.
We can level cities and rise from ashes. We can write literature and imagine love.
The best part is this. We did it all on our own. We invented morality and laws because we learned that our hamlets and tiny societies flourished when we followed rules and treated one another kindly. We learned that mutual respect makes us better citizens. We learned, as the Japanese say, that none of us are as smart as all of us. We can take heart in knowing we were not divinely inspired but inspired by each other, and we will continue to be, so long as we begin to accept just how remarkable we are. There is enough majesty and splendor right here, under the sea, among the stars and in our minds, to keep us wondering and learning all the days of our lives. And it means that for all we have accomplished, we are capable of so much more. There is no problem created by humans that cannot be fixed by humans, so long as we trust and love.
So, let go. Let go of your fears and your attachments to mysticism and sorcery. Embrace science. Seek out your own answers to questions you have not yet formed. Let go of your fear of death. Let go of your hopes for an afterlife and make the best of what you have right now, with whomever you choose to share it. This is the only brain you’ll ever dream with, the only heart that will ever ache, and the only life you’ll ever have, but you can make it beautiful.