God’s Slow Death

Written in the tradition of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals and Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, French philosopher Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is less burdened by a reductive view of reason and science and an underestimation of the religious temperament than either Dawkins’s or Harris’s books, but it has similar aims. Having described the many places of worship and prayer he has visited — a mosque in Benghazi, a synagogue in Venice, an Orthodox church in Moscow, a voodoo temple in Haiti — Onfray comments, “Everywhere I saw how readily men construct fables in order to avoid looking reality in the face. The invention of an afterlife would not matter so much if it were not purchased at so high a price: disregard of the real, hence willful neglect of the only world there is.” Atheist Manifesto is an attempt to unravel those fables and the demonic power they have over us, and to rekindle the Enlightenment. “Not faith, belief, fables,” he writes, “but reason and properly directed thought.”

According to Onfray, the three great monotheistic religions — Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — are equivalent in their deeper origin and structure. The drive to construct these fables rises from the subconscious as a response to a primordial fear of death, the void, and meaninglessness. “When a soul collapses before the cold body of a loved one,” Onfray writes, “denial takes over and transforms this ending into a beginning.... God, heaven, and spirits come forth to dispel the pain and violence of death.” Monotheistic religions were fabricated as the very opposite of the human, Onfray claims, and in that rest the seeds of their destructiveness. Human beings are mortal, God is immortal; human beings have limited knowledge, God is omniscient; human beings are material and riddled with desires, God is ethereal and pure.

Atheist Manifesto argues that what the three monotheisms share in common is a profound hatred of humanity — of intelligence, of life, of the present, of sexuality — and that the repression, torture, executions, and genocide these religions have so relentlessly perpetrated throughout history are not incidental but internal to them, lavishly supported by their sacred texts. But more importantly, Atheist Manifesto aims to promote an “atheistic atheism,” a vision of the world wholly free of the influence of religion. This raises an essential question: can we really imagine, and live in, a world without religion?

The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The God Delusion, and Atheist Manifesto are all strident in their insistence on making atheism a dominant world view, beginning with properly educating children on the death of God. “We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty,” Harris writes. “Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith.” “The knowledge that we have only one life should make it all the more precious,” Dawkins claims. “The atheist view is correspondingly lifeaffirming and life-enhancing.” Onfray: “The laughers, materialists, radicals, cynics, hedonists, atheists, sensualists, voluptuaries. They know that there is only one world, and that promotion of an afterlife deprives us of the enjoyment of the only one there is.”

Yet the issue surely isn’t the appreciation of our own subjectivity (Harris), or of the wonders of nature and science (Dawkins), or of our minds and bodies (Onfray), or of, in short, our relatively brief passage through our one life on Earth. If we are genuinely reflective, it is rather our experience of life and the world as having a higher, integral meaning — that is the gap, the fear, the isolating wound that faith and religion fill. It is the fear of the abyss of meaninglessness, of the void, of evil, of “desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him without opening or end,” as William James puts it in The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is that which a creator and redeemer allays. Perhaps the reason the religious impulse has survived the Enlightenment and beyond is that we cannot otherwise honestly read our experience of the world as substantive.

I was at a beautiful old Orthodox synagogue in Kensington Market in Toronto, attending the Kol Nidre service on the eve of Yom Kippur. Wrapped in his white, fringed shawl, the cantor literally wailed out the service, his tone tragic and pleading. Clustered near the rabbi and the cantor were mostly older men, swaying back and forth, mumbling prayers in Hebrew, singing; women looked on from their separate section on the balcony above. Occasionally a few distinguished senior members of the congregation carried heavy Torah scrolls sheathed in embroidered cloth out from the ark, its wooden doors flung open. I had brought my six-year-old daughter to this moving service, not because I wanted to poison her mind with divisive tribal superstitions, but because I wanted her to be exposed to the rites of many of her ancestors and to a world view that is deep and powerful. But I was also there with an Israeli-Canadian who was raised in the Orthodox tradition. At one point he turned to me and said, “I would never go to this service in Israel. There religion is a political statement.”

A few weeks later, I went to the office of a professor of divinity, expecting to discuss the nature of faith in the twenty-first century. The shelves in his narrow, congested office were packed floor to ceiling with books — on theology and the history of religion, of course, but also on cognitive science and evolution. Raised and educated a Mennonite, he had spent thirty years of his career attempting to resolve the apparent conflict between science and religion. It was not long before he told me that a few years earlier he had, finally, lost his faith. “But I still have a Christian body,” he told me. “My lifestyle is still the same as it was before.”

“Do you think it’s possible that we simply can’t bear to see life and the world as it really is?” I asked him.

“Yes.”