God is Not Great

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from a period of human prehistory where nobody had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs).

I don't argue with the above quote -- I'm not an overly religious person -- but there was something in Christopher Hitchens' tone in God is Not Great that got my back up (maybe it was the frequent use of puerile insults like "babyish" to describe the faithful) and, instead of always listening carefully to this audiobook, I kept distractedly framing counterarguments and I may as well begin with one: It would be very easy for me to write a book called Love is not Great : How Marriage Poisons Everything. I could have chapters on Bluebeard-type serial wife killers and on Warren Jeffs marrying off young girls to lecherous old goats. I could write at length about abused spouses who feel trapped in their marriages. Dowries and polygamy and Henry VIII -- it would be fairly easy to paint marriage as a social custom whose time has passed, a left-over of pre-Enlightenment thinking. And while, yes, there are extreme and terrible things that can be done within and in the name of "marriage", I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater -- religion and marriage are found in all cultures, they are among what the Anthropologist Donald Brown calls Human Universals, and I believe that they are both social goods, stabilising forces, and if they're seen by some to be as vestigial and useless as my floppy pink appendix, to me they still satisfy whatever they are meant to in my lizard brain. I believe that the fact that both religion and marriage are in decline in our western society can be seen in the various ways that our society itself appears to be in decline.

Hitchens spends a lot of time pointing out the contradictions within and outright fallacies of the various religious texts, and this was nothing new to me -- with respect to Saint Gabriel and the Holy Spirit, these books were written by mere mortal men after all. He also spends a lot of time describing extreme practises that the average person would be revolted by (female genital mutilation and the Hassidic practise of having the Rabbi remove a circumcised foreskin with his mouth) and instances of systemic rot (the Catholic cover-up of child rape and North Korea's "necrocracy"). He points out that various models of religious good works, like Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr, were not actually such good people after all. And again, none of this was news to me -- these are all the actions of people and people are capable of doing terrible things; especially people with power; and in many cases, religion is power. 

But I don't think that Hitchens makes his case that all religion is bad. To use his own example: A Sudanese cabdriver went to great lengths to return a large sum of money to the author and was offended when he was offered a reward -- he explained that his Muslim faith prevented him from profiting from doing the right thing. And while Hitchens was amazed by this, I think that the vast majority of religious people -- those who humbly follow the Ten Commandments/the Golden Rule/the Five Pillars/whatever basic precepts have stood the test of time -- are well-meaning non-fanatics. Again, the problem with organised religion is the ways in which the people in power corrupt the message.

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

After making that statement, asserting that the New Atheism is in no way a religion itself, Hitchens calls on Charles Darwin a dozen times, using his theory of Natural Selection and the resulting theory of Evolution as absolute proof that there could not have been a creator God (in a manner that sounded to me like Darwin's was the only true gospel) . I wonder, then, what Hitch would have made of his fellow atheist Thomas Nagel's recent book Mind & Cosmos that argues that the theory of Evolution can't explain human consciousness and should therefore be considered invalid or at least incomplete. Just this week, a group of scientists and intellectuals proposed that Evolution be one among many outdated beliefs that should be retired. Similar arguments could be made against the theories of Freud and Einstein, both of whom Hitchens also treats as canonical to his worldview. 

With the undeniably wicked deeds done in the name of organised religions, I certainly wouldn't try to make a case for their infallibility, but the onus here was on Hitchens to prove his thesis -- that God is not great and that religion poisons everything -- and I think he fell short. As I said, I'm not religious, but when I attend Midnight Mass and the choir is filling the vaulted ceiling with the soaring minor chords that I can feel in my bones, when the incense is burning and the candles are flickering, as I'm surrounded by hundreds of other people who have come together in a communal act of worship and praise -- the feeling of awe and belonging that I experience is unmatched by any secular experience that I know. Religion has endured because religion is necessary to the human psyche -- the rot is in the all too human actions of self-interested religious leaders.

Two things that I found very interesting: Hitchens' apparently original conclusion that ancient sanctions against eating pork was a guard against cannibalism (I've heard of the "long pork" many times) and his reference to the Gospel of Judas. (I might be a closet Gnostic.)

Christopher Hitchens was a noted intellectual and a fearsome debater -- I would no doubt have been a stammering jellyfish in his presence -- but on a topic like this that he was so passionate about, I expected more.

And in a final aside for my own remembrance, at one point Hitchens sneers: It could be argued that (Moses) preferred to speak of himself in the third person, though this habit is now well associated with megalomania. And although Hitchens died before Joseph Anton was published, I wonder what he would have made of his great friend Salman Rushdie's use of the megalomaniac third person in his own memoir.

And some personal stories about religion:

My mother resents her Catholic upbringing on the one hand and put us into Catholic schools when we were kids on the other. Having never even been to a church since Baptism, the first time there was a mass at St. Mark's,  Ken and I were embarrassed to be the only two kids who didn't seem to know the required actions and responses -- and when Communion began and everyone was lining up, I shot a desperate look at my big brother and he motioned for me to join the line. That was how we became practising Catholics even if we might have been acting like goggle-eyed  bumpkins. Being young enough, Kyler was the only one of us to have an actual First Communion ceremony -- and I don't remember even then my mother wondering what became of me and Ken; she probably just figured that it was "taken care of" at school.

At St. Mark's, naturally, my friends were all Catholics and I eventually became a member of that community -- especially since my friends all lived out of town and it was convenient for sleepovers if I met up with them at a Saturday mass or was dropped off at the one on Sunday.  How strange that my mother didn't resent me joining in the religion that must have disappointed her so much. And I don't even know the details of her self-exile except for some unflattering stories about the nuns who taught her and the one time she spat out that she would happily rejoin the church if they started to ordain women priests -- and this is my first example of how religion poisons everything.

My mother often comes up with these radical feminist statements, even though she really doesn't have any feminist background, but I will concede that I'll never know what it was like to live before the radical changes of the 70s. (I'll digress for a story: When my parents had three babies in under four years, all failures of birth control, my father said, "You have to do something about this. If you keep having kids we'll end up in the poorhouse."  Being a dutiful housewife, my mother went to her doctor to ask about a tubal ligation. He told her she would need to appear before a panel of doctors, and when she did, these wise and judicious men told her that she was too young to have the operation. When my father heard this, he went to a doctor himself and had a vasectomy within weeks. Reproductive control is not the least of what the radical feminists achieved; something we take for granted today.) But when my mother made her statement about ordaining women priests, I made some smart-alec statement about how she should just join the Anglicans or Uniteds if she wanted to see change, and while she was at it, she could ask that dwindling congregation how they like their lesbian bishop and if they agreed that they should just stop talking about God altogether (like some church in Toronto recently did -- wish I could find the article -- because they wanted to focus their resources on social justice instead of spiritual matters). My point wasn't about gay-bashing or a sneering contempt for people who focus on justice, but so many churches, in reaction to the changing times, have changed their purpose for being -- so many churches don't seem to be churches anymore -- and if the Catholic Church wants to make a claim to be the one, true church that represents the will of God, then it needs to remain consistent. I don't have a problem with only men being ordained priests, women are capable of serving in their own ways, but I will risk sounding hypocritical by saying that I do agree that priests should be able to marry -- not only to curb sexual repression but because I believe a pastor's partner can be a great help. Anyway, this is all I know about my mother's resentment, that and:

At the end of my grandfather's long and saintly life, he was profoundly disturbed and shaken by the early reports of the child rape that had happened at the hands of parish priests and he wanted to talk to his own priest about it. I won't project any motivations on the man, but he refused to talk with my Pop about it, and this rebuff just added to my grandfather's sorrow.

Meanwhile, I married Dave, in the Catholic church and by the same priest who had married Dave's parents so many years ago, and that same Father Williams baptised Kennedy (but retired before Mal was born), so I have felt a continuity and sense of community in the church (even if Dave only barely and grudgingly goes along with it). I put the girls through Catholic schools, which was not the fish-out-of-water experience it had been at first for me, and I don't think they've been damaged by the experience (no matter what Christopher Hitchens says about early exposure to religion equalling child abuse). And I took the girls to mass regularly when they were little (Father Dunne did a beautiful job of providing comfort and perspective on the Sunday after 9/11), and I even took my turns leading the Children's Liturgy -- an experience I loved but abandoned due to the interference of the new priest we received at the parish (a story I've told here before). So, I don't have any personal grudge, but as for my brother Ken:

Ken met and fell in love with the daughter of our aunt's good friend. As she was still in university and he was newly moved back to Ontario, Ken and Laura lived together in my parents' basement before moving out to an apartment of their own. When they decided to get married, they met with the priest at Laura's childhood parish -- the same church where our aunt Judi and her mother Barb sang in the choir and pampered the priest with home-cooked treats and small gifts, "Father does love his angels" -- and the priest refused to marry them because they had been "living in sin". Only after much pleading from Judi and Barb did he consent to having a willing priest from a neighbouring parish come do the deed. This bothered Laura so much that she severed whatever connections she still had to the Catholic church and told Ken that if he wanted any future children to be raised Catholic, that was up to him and him alone.

When they did have kids, it for some reason never seemed to be the right time to have them Baptised, and so poor Conor and Ella were sent unprepared to Catholic school just like we had been, and why wouldn't Ken have known better? Anyway, Conor's First Communion was approaching and the school was asking all grade twos for Baptismal Certificates and so Ken finally contacted the church -- and was told that since his kids were now 7 and 5, and no longer innocent infants, they would be required to take a short course and confess their sins before receiving any sacraments. Ken was incensed by this, believing that his children were indeed still "innocents", made some rant about "no wonder church attendance is dwindling" and refused to sign his kids up for the course. And yet, he continues to send them to Catholic school, where they are obliged to go to another classroom when sacrament preparation courses are happening, and yet also obliged to attend school masses. I'm sure Ken would use this as an example of religion poisoning everything -- there might be a case to be made about needless bureaucracy -- but although I will continue to state that I'm not a particularly religious person, religion is only relevant to the extent that it is rigid. There must be rules or what's the point?

Can anyone seriously make the case that society is better off with the anything goes view of marriage -- the smirking young men who show up on Judge Judy, proudly claiming that the four kids they have with their three different Babymamas are being taken care of just fine, are an unhappy view of family life to me.  I do believe that with one life to live, none of us should be stuck in a miserable marriage, but I do wish that more children were born within marriage and that more parents decide to commit to making a happy and stable family life for the kids they brought into the world.

As for abortion, since Hitchens brought it up as an example of churches over-reaching, here's what I think:  Although the practise is ugly to me, as the mother of daughters, I agree with Bill Clinton when he said that abortion should be available, safe and rare. Rare is the critical word for me there -- while I would never want my girls to desperately seek some back alley butcher, it's disgusting to me that so many women consider abortion to be just another form of birth control. I've read that in Quebec something like 60% of pregnancies end in abortion because, here in Canada, birth control costs money and abortions are free. That's horrifying to me -- and as an aside, I have come to the realisation that perhaps here in Canada, birth control should be free and abortions cost money, but I'm sure anti-poverty advocates would shout me down; likely lead by the United Church.

And this is all to make my larger point: Any actions of the Catholic Church that have hurt the people I know (and this is the only religion I can claim to speak from inside of) were the actions of people; those who enjoyed wielding their power and those who didn't act in a WWJD manner. People can criticise that the church is out of touch on birth control and traditional marriage and divorce, but I believe it must stick to its conservative foundations, at least aspirationally (and am simultaneously grateful that Pope Francis appears to be a man of acceptance and loving outreach). If Hitchens criticised Mother Teresa's anti-condom views, well, you know what? Abstinence is the only way to prevent the spread of AIDS and other STDs. I, much to Dave's bewilderment, supported traditional marriage myself. Not because I fear gay people -- here in Canada their unions were already recognised by the government and they enjoyed all the rights of straight people, as they should -- but I did object to the changing of the definition of marriage itself. I think as an institution, marriage has been decaying for so many years but is as important as it has ever been -- anyone who points to the divorce rate as proof that marriage is a failed institution (a common argument for expanding its definition) seem to have missed the point: This is all the more reason to try and reclaim its sanctity.

Here's an analogous point: Recently in The New York Times, the columnist David Brooks argued that, while he himself smoked pot as a teenager, he didn't think that its legalisation was such a great idea:

Many people these days shy away from talk about the moral status of drug use because that would imply that one sort of life you might choose is better than another sort of life. 

But, of course, these are the core questions: Laws profoundly mold culture, so what sort of community do we want our laws to nurture? What sort of individuals and behaviors do our governments want to encourage? I’d say that in healthy societies government wants to subtly tip the scale to favor temperate, prudent, self-governing citizenship. In those societies, government subtly encourages the highest pleasures, like enjoying the arts or being in nature, and discourages lesser pleasures, like being stoned.

In the same vein, I believe that in healthy societies religion wants to subtly tip the scales in favour of temperate, prudent, and self-governing behaviour -- and I fully acknowledge that my positions may seem as self-contradictory as the formerly pot smoking David Brooks arguing against its legalisation.

As a community and a fellowship of like-minded people who gather to submit to a higher power and join in thanksgiving, religion can be a beautiful thing. And, again, I say this in the full knowledge that these concepts have been twisted and exploited by the power hungry and self-interested throughout all of history.