|
march / april 2007:
Dear God, You're Fired
In this sad, unfortunate letter, we have the displeasure of informing the Almighty that his services will no longer be required.
Essay by Bradford R. Pilcher
Author's Note: In the face of so much religious fundamentalism, especially in a post-9/11 society, there has arisen a slew of atheist voices from the wilderness. I knew there was a valuable story in trying to understand why they don't believe as they do, but the more I tried to write this article the harder it became. You see, I am not an atheist, though I share some of their concerns about biblical literalism and the polarization of religious discourse.
What I've finally, with great difficulty, delivered is the following: a meditation by a fictional author on the progression from belief to skepticism and ultimately to disbelief. His journey does not go, perhaps, as far as some atheists, and for that I can only blame myself. My own beliefs precluded my voice from going so far as to deny God outright, but I hope I captured something of the atheist thought process. It is a serious and, in some respects, noble thing, and that so many believers so flippantly dismiss atheism as an aberration is a shame.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear All Powerful and All Knowing Supreme Creator of the Universe,
I regret to inform you that your services will no longer be required, effective immediately. You should know that this decision in no way reflects on you personally. Your talents and abilities have never been in question, and your creation of the world in a mere six days will always stand as an exemplar of efficient project management. I have no doubt you will be able to find a new employer with little difficulty.
After so many years of dedicated service, you certainly deserve an explanation. This decision was not reached lightly and came only after careful consideration and much soul-searching. It started off innocently enough with an assignment from my editor.
“Go and write about atheism,” he told me. “There are a slew of new books about the subject, really militant books, preaching the gospel of godlessness. We should dive into this subject.”
So dive I did. First, there were the writings of Sam Harris poured open on my desk. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, in which he argues that religious moderates should be held accountable for shoring up the legitimacy of religious fundamentalists, was followed up by his newest tract, Letter to a Christian Nation. In that one, he far more succinctly and far more successfully responds to his religious critics.
Then I skimmed Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, in which the Santa Claus look-alike attempts to explain religion as a product of biology and evolution and attacks the notion that morality can only be derived from religious devotion. After that, I took to the pages of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Where Harris and Dennett opened up the anti-religious offensive, Dawkins comes in like a flame-throwing, one-man cavalry charge.
To be honest, these books were persuasive, but not entirely convincing. When Harris wrote, “There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life,” I was moved. When he continued, “But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions — Jesus was born of a virgin; the Koran is the word of God — for us to do this,” I couldn’t help but agree with him, but the two statements taken together sounded less like a proclamation of atheist triumph and more like a discomfort with exclusivist religious dogma.
Dennett referred to religion as a sort of meme, a virus-idea that infests the human population, but I thought this disconnected religion from the people practicing it a bit too much. When Dawkins called you “psychotic” and religion “nonsense,” I thought his rhetoric overshadowed his argument.
After reading these priests of the freethinkers, I had only the most minor qualms about you and your continued service as the One True God. Your job was entirely secure.
Still my assignment was not complete. Surely, not all atheists were as militant as these evangelists of the godless cause, and surely, not all people of faith are willful co-conspirators with fundamentalist zealots. I needed to go into the field.
That’s how I ended up in Alabama, the buckle of the Bible Belt and land of a 5,280 pound Ten Commandments monument. If an atheist was going to be provoked to belligerence, it would be amongst the denizens of one of the most conservative, religious states in our nation. Any doubts I may have had about the nature of my destination were dispelled when I crossed the Alabama border and found myself trailing a big sedan with a license plate that read “Psalm 1.” The one-fifth size replica of the Statue of Liberty — complete with continuously burning flame — overlooking the interstate as I curved past Birmingham was a nice touch amidst the various churches I spied.
I finally slid into Tuscaloosa, a college town dominated by the massive stadium in which the Alabama Crimson Tide plays. Upon arriving I went looking for a nice, non-theistic professor to answer some questions, and who I found was Jerome Rosenberg. A professor of psychology for the New College and the University of Alabama, Rosenberg looks like the kindly patriarch who always had a clever trick for the grandkids.
“I probably would define myself best as a secular Jew,” he told me, but not until well into our conversation. “I really have tremendous difficulty believing in God. After you spend thirty years studying the Holocaust, that gets harder.” The words flowed through his gray-haired goatee, giving them the air of wise counsel from a learned elder, but they weren’t tinged with vitriol or disdain for belief. I knew then I wasn’t talking to an invective-tossing acolyte of Dawkins & Co.
Somehow, Rosenberg was nothing like what I had expected. Where I was prepared for arguments about all the evil perpetrated in the name of religion — crusades, jihads, Madonna’s children’s books — the kindly professor tossed me levelheaded reasoning. My practiced retorts about the evils of atheists like Stalin or Pol Pot stayed securely in my holster, while Rosenberg spoke eloquently of the inherent intolerance of organized religion. I had gone looking for a militant, frothing-at-the-mouth heretic and I’d found a pleasant grandpa. How was I to respond to his perfectly sensible arguments?
“We live in a world where learning bigotry and prejudice is normative. You have to be taught tolerance,” he told me. “A lot of the belief system in many religious institutions is the notion that there is one God, we know that God, there is one truth, we know that truth. So there isn’t much room for tolerance.”
I offered up a token protest, pointing out that not all religions are represented by Jerry Falwell. “Some religions do recognize that regardless of how we define it, we all believe in one God,” he responded. “What bothers me is so many religions find themselves needing to defend that God. They’re determined to stamp out heresy.”
I’m sorry God, but the man had a point. I was beginning to sway to the dark side. The Force was not strong with me. Use whatever metaphor you want, but the bottom line: I found myself in total, albeit uncomfortable, agreement with the professor.
Still I remained unsettled by the strident tone being trumpeted by atheist missionaries, so I asked the more politic Rosenberg to explain if we weren’t merely trading intolerant zealotry on the one hand for intolerant rationalists on the other.
“Atheists have felt they are under attack,” he replied. “All of a sudden it is very popular, almost a necessity, to wear your religion on your sleeve, and you really feel for somebody who gets up there and says, ‘I don’t believe in God. I believe in human beings.’
“A lot of people have said, ‘I don’t know how to articulate what atheism really is,’” Rosenberg continued. “That put pressure on people who really felt they could articulate what atheism really is to come out and give their own kind of bible.”
At the end of our conversation, Rosenberg returned to this point, and I have to admit this is when he sold me. “Every institutional idea ultimately has to give the clearest definition of what the belief system is, and you do this not on a middle ground, but by arguing the core of what that belief system is.” He pauses before adding, “You cannot write a middle-of-the-road book on atheism.”
I got back in my car and back on the road, heading back from whence I came. The last thing Rosenberg said to me kept reverberating in my head, and I recalled that license plate I’d trailed halfway across Alabama: “Psalm 1.” Somewhere near the faux Statue of Liberty, I pulled over, whipped out my copy of your book, and flipped to Psalm 1.
“Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law does he meditate day and night.
“Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish.”
It would appear that you can’t write a middle-of-the-road book on God, either.
It all started to come together in the next few hours as I returned from my journey. Like the puzzle pieces just falling into place, every cue led me further down the path away from faith. On the radio was a song by John Mayer, “Belief.”
“Everyone believes / In how they think it ought to be,” he sang. “Everyone believes / And they’re not going easily.” By the time the song wrapped up with, “We’re never gonna win the world / We’re never gonna stop the war / We’re never gonna beat this / If belief is what we’re fighting for,” I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a sign from God.
But you wouldn’t send a sign encouraging disbelief in you? Would you?
Nevertheless, I wanted to believe. There remains something comforting in your presence, God, but no longer can I ignore the rather unfortunate effects of belief. Cordoned off in my cocoon of liberalism, I’d been able to pretend the Crusades were mere history, the terrorist Islamists mere extremists, Christian evangelicals mere home-schooled irritants. Yes, some misguided souls used their holy texts as justification for violent impulse, but genuine faith could be a force for good.
Or maybe not.
Back in my office, the examples of faith run amok poured in, but one stuck out for me. You’re God, so you can step back in time a little bit and see this scene. It’s New Jersey, September of last year, at Kearny High School, a public school. In particular, it’s the sixth-period American history class, presided over by one of your more devout, David Paszkiewicz.
At the moment, the good teacher is ridiculing smart people, which is a bit bizarre for a man allegedly educating people. “You’re a believer,” he says in the mock nasal voice of said smart folk, “Your argument is based on faith, but I believe in evolution. My ideas are based on fact.” I should reiterate this is a history class, not a science lab.
“The smart people,” Paszkiewicz continues, “never once will you see them crack open a Bible. Never once will you hear them quote it, and never once will you hear a prayer uttered from their lips.”
When one of the students, skinny Matthew LaClair who happens to have a tape recorder in his pocket, shoots up his arm to ask if Paszkiewicz advocates teaching religion in school, the teacher begins by sounding almost sane.
“The public schools shouldn’t teach religion,” he says before whipping out this gem: “But the scriptures aren’t religion.” Come again?
“If you take Christian faiths, you have many varieties. They differ on church government, things like that. But they all agree on one great book, the Bible. We should be able to bring that into the classroom, read it, and it shouldn’t be threatening to anybody.”
Except the non-believers, Muslims, Mormons, and anybody else who hasn’t agreed on that particular book. They hardly matter though, because as Paszkiewicz informs his pupils, “they belong in hell.” He also makes sure his students are aware that dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark and the Big Bang theory doesn’t make sense, because firecrackers explode and don’t create universes. Is anybody surprised the Richard Dawkins of the world feel compelled to pipe up in the face of such ignorant hubris?
It’s impossible at this point to deny the many good and moral people who became good and moral without the aid of religious belief. Such skeptics now face fundamentalist cuckoos like Paszkiewicz, the dumbing down of our children by dogmatic religious leaders, and the intolerance of those whose faith has given them an arrogant salvation complex. Frankly, we should be surprised it took this long for them to rise up in defiance.
This began as a simple assignment, but it has led inexorably to this painful decision. I need you to pack up your desk and turn over the office key. A nice letter of resignation that can be sent to the faithful would be very helpful in easing the transition.
I know it’s all so cliché, but I feel like I should say it isn’t you. It’s us. There’s just too many of us taking you, well, literally, though I wish you’d helped out a little more here. Perhaps a disclaimer just before Genesis: “Please take the following with seriousness and conviction, but please don’t take it so literally.” Would that have been so much to ask?
For all the conversations I had, for all the reading and thinking, you’ll be happy to hear nobody put forward a single good argument for your non-existence. I think it’s because no good argument exists; one either believes or they don’t. What we’re really arguing over is what people do with that belief.
As long as I’ve thought about religious belief, I’ve held fast to the notion that faith doesn’t need reason to justify it, but that faith can only serve us well if it remains in harmony with reason. It would appear that some people, far too many people, don’t find much resonance in that argument, and I’m not just speaking of those who start wars or set off terrorist attacks in your name.
The religious conviction that the Bible is the literal word of God interferes with our ability to fight sexually-transmitted disease, seek life-saving treatments from stem cell research, and recognize the basic human rights of homosexuals. That’s just for starters, and that’s just in this country, and so far you’ve done very little to try and point out the error of our ways.
Can we believe in you and not believe the authors of the Bible were telling the literal truth of creation when they wrote our sacred texts? In a world as polarized as ours, I’m not sure we can reasonably assert one without the other, not in a world where true believers kill doctors for providing abortions and pelt innocents with stones for driving on the Sabbath.
Enough is enough. Maybe one day we’ll be able to grapple with religious belief without rejecting reasoned knowledge, to believe in you without demanding a literal mythology. Perhaps we’ll come to understand that religion isn’t about certain answers, but about humble wisdom.
For now? We’re a bunch of idiots warring over nonsense, and frankly God, if you’re not going to jump in with a burning bush of clarification, we’re going to have to get by without you.
In the meantime, human resources has some forms for you to fill out and information on your severance package. I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors and hope there are no hard feelings.
If you'd like to comment on this article, email us a Letter to the Editor.
|
