Evangelism and Godless Woe

So I'm back from lectures. And since I probably won't post at the weekend, here's what I've been cryptically hinting at.

Warning: the rest of this post makes for extremely unpleasant reading. I'm going to follow it up with an antidode, but you'll find some bitter gall here. I advise you not to read it. It was written as a personal catharsis more than anything else.

The First Crushing Observation:

There are no gods. There is no justice or love in the world except for what humans make. The universe is a huge seething machine with no discernable design or purpose, and we seem to be the accidental organic froth on an insignificant cogwheel. Even the word "insignificant" is meaningless here, because it's only us who see significance in anything.

But in fact, this isn't all that bad. The first time people really grasp it, it is like a glacier carving out a sharp mountain gorge in their brain. When you're used to it, though, it becomes a source of wonder, even joy. Glaciers are uncompromising, but they are also beautiful. And when you're faced with the parochial and tawdry myths that others offer, you're positively glad they're false. But that's when the second crushing truth comes in.

The Second Crushing Observation:
There are no gods to blame.

If you phrased the First Observation as "everything good about religion is a human invention", you'd phrase the second as "everything bad about religion is a human invention." And my, isn't there a lot of that to go around. When Agamenmom sacrificed his daughter, it was to placate imaginary gods. When David presented Saul with 200 foreskins to buy his daughter, he did it to satisfy the whimsy of a deranged king. When the Knights Templar were raping women in the forecourt of the temple in Jersualem, they did it for the glory of a make-believe story. When Tomas de Torquemada probed defendants eyes with needles, he did it because voices in his head told him to. When the townspeople of Salem, Mass. hung many of their number, they did so to protect themselves from a threat that never existed at the instigation of a prophet that probably never existed.

So what, you might say. That was the brutal and ignorant past. That's true, but the beliefs are still there today. In the 90s a US Presidential candidate made it his election promise that he would root out all the Muslims, Hindus and Atheists from public office and he got a lot of votes. I have almost got into an argument with a freind over the carachter of Martin Luther, a man whom is quoted with the following:

What shall we do with...the Jews?...set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.
Quoted here

He also, for the record, preached that Copernicus was a fool and a liar. And yet there are people today who regard this man (who once said that there were more demons per capita in Prussia than anywhere else in the world) as an elightened messenger of a supremely benevolent being. To suggest that he may have been mentally ill is a good way to make enemies, but that's all it will acheive. Faith is inpenetrable. It has to be, or the sheer absurdity would have driven most religions into extinction before now.

Imagaine you opened your newspapers tomorrow and found that a senior churchman had said that he though atheists deserved to be given a lethal injection. Can you imagine it? Now imagine he'd said that was also true of other unbelievers, Hindus, Muslims, Jews. Now imagine he said that was also true of infants whose parents were unbelievers (except those that had converted to Anglicanism, of course). Now imagaine he'd said the injection should be slow-acting, so that it lead to the maximum pain acheivable for up to five months. Now imagine he's said that they should be hunted down in the most distressing manner possible, perhaps by masked men in helicopters. Now imagine he'd said that when the poor wrethes died, they should be burned, so the righteous could spit and stamp on their ashes.

Such a man would be declared insane, and evil beyond belief. We would ask how he ever got into the church. I would answer, that if simply multiplied his statements by infinity, he'd be paraphrasing the catechism. For those of you with Scripture to hand, try Revelation 9.

This is what Sunday School is about.

It is near impossible for a sane human being to imagine anything on par with what the church has done in history. Not even those accused of witchcraft were thought to do anything even on par with what the accusers believed their God did.

This is the main reason I don't like being evangelised to. "Glad Tidings of Great Joy" does not ring true.