“God’s Slow Death” by Daniel Baird | The Walrus

God’s Slow Death

Three atheists argue for reason in the face of faith

By Daniel Baird

Illustration by Sam Weber

BooksFrom the April 2007 magazine

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Reading The God Delusion, as with The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, one gets the sense that these authors have virtually no feeling for the impulse to faith and that their knowledge of religion is mostly second-hand and in translation. And despite their insistence on the importance of critical thinking, both Dawkins’s and Harris’s styles of reasoning are remarkably unreflective. Here is Harris, aping an argument Dawkins rehearses in The God Delusion: “If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself.” Naturally, the nature of the “complexity” in question is never examined.

There is something touching about the fact that both Dawkins and Harris think religion can be dispatched with arguments of this kind, as though faith and the religious world view, which have occupied some of the great minds of the last thousand years and more — Augustine, Aquinas, and Maimonides, for instance — were the result of a childish logical error. Faith in the modern era, I suspect, comes from a far darker, more anxiety-ridden place — the need to see the world and our place in it as substantive, as meaningful, from the point of view of the universe.

I was wandering across the rooftops of the Jewish quarter in the old city of Jerusalem. The city was quiet and luminous, its soft pink stone aglow. In one direction I could see the gorge that opens out onto the Judean Desert; scanning in the other direction, the Wailing Wall, the al-Aqsa mosque, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Then the Muslim evening call to prayer erupted, grand, aching, and melancholy, and I could see, in the Arab quarter, a river of the faithful cascading down toward the entrance to one of the most charged places in Jerusalem — the Haram al-Sharif. Entranced by the beauty of the muezzin’s voice, by the almost hallucinatory scene — the ancient city, the wooded hills, the shimmering desert — it suddenly dawned on me that this was the place where rivers of blood had flowed over competing holy books, prophets, and messiahs, and that among those who would soon be prostrating themselves in the al-Aqsa mosque were men willing to kill and be killed for their faith. A chill ran through me.

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.”

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10 comment(s)

jonzyApril 04, 2007 11:42 EST

Dear writter W O W!!!!___i humbly thank you for the research and heart felt insite.___with love/peace/understanding....daniel....p.s.? for Dawkins-if Design is not cumulative.How did Hu-mankind get to the MOON?or too AMERICA?___? anxiety-ridden place? no,i humbly think just Quest for "simple truth",which Jack Nicolson "think,s we/you can-not handle"; and John Lenon now knows.___not after life,just simply,extension of this one,but free of Darkness/only Light{LUV}

renahajiApril 12, 2007 13:13 EST

There is a lot of man's creation of God in the author's final question, with "really is" betraying the absence of God, for the author, despite the need. I fail to see how life or the world changes to the dramatic extent implied based upon the presence or absence of God in it. I have a theory that, offered a binding coin toss to determine the existence of God (binding, that is on God, not just on human belief in God,) non-believers would gladly accept the terms wanting only to know, while believers would refuse the terms wanting only to believe.

Brian Dixon-WarrenJune 12, 2008 16:20 EST

I agree entirely with the author of this fine article. TS Eliot, in his "Four Quartets" pointed out that "Humankind cannot bear very much reality".
Denial or delusion is often a comforting way to deal with the intolerable. Our ever increasing ability to see into the future has given us the Age of Anxiety, & this has generated also an Age of New Age Fads & Superstitions.
It is only given to the few to meet death with the grace of Socrates. The rest of us can hope to be helped along the Green Mile to the death chamber by someone like the character played by Tom Hanks in that film, "Its alright, we'll look after you. You're going to be O.K."

AyeshaDecember 13, 2011 20:19 EST

Then the Muslim evening call to prayer erupted.... and that among those who would soon be prostrating themselves in the al-Aqsa mosque were men willing to kill and be killed for their faith. A chill ran through me."

What? Notice that slippage? In this whole article, there is one paragraph devoted to a faith followed by 1.7 billion people in the world, and even in that one paragraph, it takes only one line to connect an evening call to prayer to an act of self-destruction and terrorism.

Recognize your own prejudices, namely Islamaphobia, especially when they appear so casually, as they do here.

JD HalperinDecember 14, 2011 09:43 EST

Ayesha: his point was it was a sublime, beautiful scene, and it's precisely that elevated power for which people are willing to kill and die. There was a paragraph about how he felt at Notre Dame, a Synagogue, and a Mosque. He's got nothing to apologize for.

I read somewhere that when Faulkner was asked about his alleged anti-Semitism he said, "Yea I'm an anti-Semite, but I hate everyone else too." This piece is written in that vein. It denounces all religions equally, and points to our preference for comfort over truth.

Great article!

RosemaryDecember 14, 2011 09:43 EST

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. Romans 1:25
Men seek because God put the knowlege of Himself in us. Like the athiest who spoke in London, On and finished his speech by saying, "Thank God for getting me through that!" The Spirit bears witness...I suggest that your Mennonite friend never really truly knew God because he would not have spent 30 trying to disprove something he already had experienced. Try asking God to show himself to you...you won't be disappointed.
If we are all to live by man's rules, whose rules do you suggest we live by? Hitler's? Stalin's? But no one ever speaks of the rivers of blood that have flowed from the mandates of the religion if Humanism!

Isaiah 53:5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

But by the blood of One are we saved!

CoryDecember 15, 2011 23:59 EST

Rosemary, your comment "Try asking God to show himself to you...you won't be disappointed" is something I've heard before from religious folk in one form or another. Now I've asked god to show himself to me and he never has. I wasn't disappointed because I am strong in my atheism and knew there would be no response. So in a sense your statement is true.

The conversation that follows with religious people is always based on circular logic. The religious person makes up an excuse for why god didn't respond. Well, I didn't really ask god because if I did he would have responded is always the gist of the response. This is like the circular reasoning of AA. A true alcoholic can only stop drinking with the help of AA, and any alcoholic who really tries AA will be able to stop. Someone who is able to get their drinking under control without AA is not really an alcoholic (a term with no real medical definition). If someone does their whole AA schtick and ends up drinking again, well they weren't really doing it right or it would have worked because... and the circle is complete.

You can't use quotes from a book not all parties in a discussion agree are the immutable and infallible word of god (most recent translation mind you) to prove the existence of god. I can't write a piece of historical fiction and say "Well there are plenty of facts asserted in here that are born out by historians, so all the rest of the crazy shit must be true because the book says it is."

As to the question of whose rules we should live by, there is nowhere on earth that actually follows the laws prescribed in the bible. I can quote verses too:

Matthew 5: 18-19 "For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven."

So the laws of the old testament are all still to be followed until the end of days, and since the bible is infallible any quote you could counter with to show this to be untrue would have to be some sort of misunderstanding because a contradiction wouldn't be possible in an infallible document. So if you've ever eaten a shellfish or worn a mixed-fabric garment touching your skin then you have committed abomination. If you have ever not killed someone you knew to be a male homosexual you have broken the laws of your god. I say again that no country on earth does or ever has lived according to the rules of your bible, and none ever will. Those rules were drafted by people in a cultural milieu that has almost zero relevance today (except for those golden rule type laws that are hardly unique to judeo-christian cultures). Switching to a theocratic form of government based strictly on biblical laws would be a nightmare, and most religious people have no desire to see such a thing. Sure secular governments have done horrible things and killed many, but there are some secular governments that are much less bloodthirsty. According to a Gallup poll in 2007, 83% of Swedes consider religion to be unimportant in their lives, and they have one of the highest standards of living in the world. There are plenty of similar examples in Europe.

I feel confident saying that there's no good empirical evidence for the existence of god, and therefore no good reason to have faith in him/her/it. I hope you don't spend your whole life deluded by this thousands of years old fable that's a rehashed version of far older fables, but if it makes you happy and leaves you feeling fulfilled then more power to you.

The UlcerJanuary 02, 2012 21:59 EST

I like the idea of faith because even in the most ignorant it is an acknowledgement of something greater than ourselves. I am sometimes jealous of the faithful because it seems like a nice way to view the universe. However, like Renahaji's allegory of the coin-toss, I would rather know than believe.

Another allegory: imagine yourself on the surface of another planet. Now, imagine how you got there. Did you construct a rocket in your mind, or did you allow for some supreme force to transport you? Either way, you are dealing with an unknown and I like to think that it is our ability to imagine beyond ourselves that provides us with a taste for the mystical.

DeanJanuary 04, 2012 14:45 EST

Maybe the truth of human religious experience is like human sexual experience: We long for it but just don't really understand why. If only we could figure out a way to embrace both our "Christian body" and our sceptical mind.

DanJanuary 10, 2012 10:16 EST

Of course you understand why you long for it, or at least your body does. You long for it because it feels good and that is anathema to the religious .

I could never understand how a thinking person could begin with the assumption of a creator of the universe which, if we look at the unimaginable grandeur and complexity of all that is around us, is not an unreasonable idea, especially to a bronze age mind and extrapolate from that possibility that the assumed creator could in any way resemble any in the array of psychopathic deities that are described in what can only by suspending understanding of the concept, be referred to a holy books.

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God’s Slow Death

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