Things Written Randomly in Doubt Read online

  Of course the Protestants were not be outdone in their craziness: they believed in the literal truth of the Bible, something that even a cursory reading, such as mine, demonstrates to be impossible as it is full of inconsistencies and contradictory assertions. It is more literature than philosophy, full of myth and opaque allegory. God Himself appears to behave differently in different books of the Bible.

  Protestants also ran off with the Augustinian concept of predestination, a possible contribution from the cult of Isis, which reflected the huge burden of their contempt for humanity and ran counter to humanism and a belief in man’s potential. Scientifically and philosophically there are good arguments in favour of necessity – the secular version of predestination – but the existential void it creates undermines ethics.

  It is however with my atheist friends that I most wish to engage in argument. They claim to be rationalists, and sometimes are, but as with other faithful believers there are areas of discussion that are taboo and make them feel uncomfortable. They suffer from the irrationalism of rationalism, which is an almost religious belief in the knowability of everything and, worse, the idea that a human being is a naturally rational animal and therefore, if released from want, capable of living in a rationally organised society. This was the act of faith that motivated the great socialist and communist societies of the twentieth century, to which I still harbour a profound allegiance. At this stage in the argument, I am probably confusing you, just as I’m unsettling myself, in spite of the many times I have rehearsed this in my head. Here I will restrict myself to this assertion: one of the great failings of those deeply flawed societies was precisely their desire to interfere with areas of people’s private lives that were not a concern of the state, the most important of which was the area of religious belief (those societies were not alone in this). The justification for this policy on religion was that religion is irrational, superstitious and divisive, and thus undermines the proper functions of society. If leading figures in those societies had read Zamyatin’s We, instead of banning it and persecuting its author, a long-time Bolshevik who abandoned the Bolshevik Party soon after the Revolution, they would have learnt an important lesson: the good society must be tolerant of the bad and the irrational; it has to leave space for the profound differences in human nature, for the good of everyone including the good, whoever they may be.

  Lenin wrote an essay on religion, in which he very liberally accepted that believers should be able to join the party, adding with the irritating superiority of those who have worked it all out that such people would have to live with the “contradiction” between their beliefs and their membership. I pity the person who does not carry a few contradictions around.

  Religious tolerance is the product of the conflicts resulting from the fragmentation of Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the more rationalist thinking of the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and that tolerance is quite simply a social good in itself – one that we must defend whatever the good or bad effects of religion. But I will argue here that the prejudice against other people’s religions is still with us, particularly in Western Europe, and religion may have as many benefits as drawbacks. Atheists often suffer from smugness and intellectual rigidity, which resemble the religious dogmatism they despise. It is true that some religions are dogmatic and quixotic in the rejection of truths that science has discovered, forcing impossible and unnecessary dilemmas on their followers, but that is not the principal subject of this essay and has been adequately covered elsewhere. Readers of this essay will probably take that as a given anyway.

  Some of the positivist intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century worried about how ethics would be maintained, if God and His revelations were abandoned. This did not undermine their atheism, but merely posed a problem for the good order of the societies they lived in. There was, however, no discernible loss of morality amongst atheists – quite the opposite: socialists who often disseminated such ideas were clearly motivated by a well-defined morality, whereas those who claimed religious orthodoxy often appeared to lack one. Much later Sartre claimed to have solved this problem in his fascinating but not wholly relevant essay, Existentialism is a Humanism. That no immediate change was detectable should not surprise us, as people were still growing up with religious education, and churchgoing, which was already much lower than expected in late-Victorian Britain, was only declining slowly. My generation was probably the last in which religion was generally taught and in which we became familiar with religious concepts and stories. They were little more than an ethical language or shorthand. The miracles were not believed, but the ethos rested somewhere at the back of our brains, muddled in with our youthful ambitions, desires and curiosities.

  I find that atheists under fifty are unlike atheists of my age (ten years above that line and on the way out), because they have no understanding of what religion is. They only see a caricature. They have lost the perception of our moral interdependence, which can be retained at the same time as rejecting religion with all its impossible claims. The positivists’ ideas have completed their course, and the loneliness Nietzsche predicted is here but undetected in an orgy of material consumption. There are several reasons for my qualified defence of religion, as will become clear, but one of the principal ones is that without religions being practised somewhere, many people will not come into contact with the useful consciousness they can engender. That philosophy can do this so much better is not the point; philosophy is currently an elitist pastime. In a better society with better universal education, philosophy may be able to fill the gap, but that moment is still far off (and probably never would be for everyone).

  Religions are about the principal areas of human doubt, but they claim to provide some certainties that supposedly resolve the problem. In the case of Christianity, I have never thought that it does. This religion, which I was born into, only starts to make sense if Jesus was a man and not just “God in disguise”, to use John Cowper Jones’s expression. If Jesus was a man and not God on holiday to see how the other half live, then Christianity can provide me with a series of complex intuitions about the humanity to which he belonged. And his death, so like many other deaths suffered by the innocent and guilty alike, becomes a symbol of our tragic but also heroic existences. That he died for suggesting a series of divine ideas such as loving your enemy deepens that symbol with further meanings that are all the more intense for being a little vague. Vagueness lies at the heart of religion, but churches and other organised religions marshal that vagueness into an unnatural orderliness.

  For the first millennium of Christianity, heretics were constantly rebelling against the idea that God can be a man, and a man a god. Only in antiquity and modernity has this impossibility appeared to present no problems. The Virgin Birth is another impossibility, and Christianity attempts to prove it by evading all sensible argument. But religions are not just these assaults on human reason; they are institutions and they have many functions. It would be useful to list them, though the list is probably not exhaustive:

  1. Religions provide off-the-peg philosophies for those who have other things to do in life.

  2. Religions provide a set of ethical commands, which have to be obeyed simply because they were supposedly laid down by God. It is better to educate people to formulate their own morality, but as a system it does at least set a minimum about which most of us can agree, although some of the Ten Commandments have remained more relevant than others. Christianity has the merit, in theory if not in Church practice, of emphasising that morality is about our own behaviour and we should not judge others.

  3. Religions require people to gather together regularly and meditate in public on things beyond their own personal interests. This is a mental and spiritual exercise, and can have a profound influence on how individuals perceive themselves.

  4. Religions require peopl
e to gather together for what is at one level a purely social occasion. In societies where everyone belongs to the same religion (organic societies), this has the function of inclusiveness, and often such religions are reasonably tolerant as long as their adherents don’t challenge fundamental beliefs too publicly; in societies where religion is fragmented, the fragments can split over minute questions of dogma, and tolerance is often very limited, but given the fragmentation, a space is created for the irreligious to avoid oppressive religious conformism.

  5. Religions provide a collection of parables and moral dictums that become an ethical language for that religious community. In fact, nearly all religious ideas are included in each religion, but they are expressed in the ethical language of a particular religion. Quakers may resemble Sufis in some ways, but Sufis pray to saints and in that they resemble Catholics, but all Christians, dogmatic or liberal, draw on the same biblical stories, just as all Muslims, dogmatic or liberal, draw on the same Koranic ones. The ethical language changes but more or less the same range of religious ideas are represented.

  6. Religions organise rites of passage. Sometimes these are obscure or even dangerous, but more generally they’re innocuous and reassuring for the religious community.

  7. Religions that are functional place limits on the powerful, such as the restrictions on usury that were once in force in Christianity and still are in Islam. It took Christianity a very long time to eradicate slavery within Christian society, although once Christianity had become a state religion, free Christians could not be enslaved. Islam had a very similar approach, and slave traders adhering to both religions had to go in search of pagans to enslave. Religions therefore have a mildly egalitarian element, but that relative equality was restricted to members of the religion. Today most Christian Churches place little or no restrictions on the powerful, and the cult of poverty has all but disappeared.

  8. Religions organise redistributive policies which resemble a rudimentary welfare state. With the birth of the modern state these functions were taken over by secular institutions, which initially were more brutal, as in the case of British workhouses. When the welfare state starts to crumble, religions become more important. That the welfare state recedes is a tragedy, but no one should criticise religions for assisting those who have been abandoned (as long as they don’t attach strings).

  9. Religions provide an identity, which can be sought out now in all parts of the globe. Most human beings like identities, although some of us are distrustful of them. If identities bring people pleasure, why should they matter, as long as the identities don’t spill over into intolerance and violence? In this, religions are no different from secular organisations such as political parties, clubs and aficionados of particular kinds of music, dance or leisure activity.

  10. Religions provide succour to those who have suffered terrible losses or are in fear for their lives or for other people’s lives. In early modern literature there is the often repeated example of the ship in a storm: as soon as it hits the ship all the passengers rush off to pray to their God, who could be Christian, Islamic or Jewish or any of the varieties within those religions. They pray fervently throughout the storm, promising their God all manner of penances, but if they don’t go down to a watery death and survive the storm, they immediately return to their former nonchalance and forget the divinity they promised never to forget. Is there anyone with a seriously ill child who has not been tempted, however atheistic their beliefs? Is it right to condemn such behaviour? It seems to me that it is entirely understandable. I knew of a woman who suffered the death of her only child and then of her husband a few months later. Previously uninterested in religion, she turned to it for the only small relief she could get. Isn’t that understandable, and is that a worse way to be treated than to be handed a packet of pills? An interventionist God is more likely to be believed in by the downtrodden and the afflicted, because they are in more need of Him. Should any comfortable Western intellectual snort with disapproval at such things? It’s true that this very human need leaves the way open for religions to abuse their influence in order to assist the powerful. Not all religions do, and not all clerics do, but this is another temptation. This leads to the final point.

  11. As organised religions are preoccupied with ensuring their continuance, they are tempted to buttress existing political hierarchies in order to receive their support in return. Almost all religions are guilty of this, and the exceptions are small religions that live on the margins of society, often suffering discrimination. Religion as an instrument of government has been known about probably since the earliest states were formed in agricultural societies. Whether or not people were conscious of it, it must have been there. Instrumentum regni is the Latin term still current in Italy and probably other countries. Supposedly eternal truths are used for the contingent interests of a political clique or more simply as social order. As religions often have a fair range of eternal truths, different ones can be used in different circumstances. I have said that modernity has in many ways damaged religion and made it barmier than it was before. This was not always the case: both Christianity and Islam were the voice of rationalism and whatever limited scientific activity was taking place during the middle period of the Middle Ages (thus from the very beginning in the case of Islam). However modernity has brought one advantage for religion: it has secularised society and cast religion free from the chains of power – or rather it has pretended to have done this, but only partially implemented it. It has opened the way for religion to change its tone, accept the discoveries science has placed before us and is placing before us at such an increasingly hectic speed we struggle to keep up with, and take on a more subversive role in society that puts humanity as a whole at the centre of its thinking. Many religious people have been doing this for a very long time, but the principal institutions have proved to be much more rigid.

  Freud writes, “The religions of mankind too must be described as examples of mass delusion.” In part, he is right. I find it very difficult to understand how people can believe in the Immaculate Conception, the Eucharist, the divinity of Christ, the Resurrection and all the miracles. But the scriptures were written in a different time, when historiography as we know it simply didn’t exist. The Greeks might have come close to it, but theirs was an exceptional society. People engaged in the laborious task of making written records for their own ideological reasons, and to some extent, little has changed if we examine the great majority of writing today, including journalism.2 When they did get round to recording religious accounts, it was long after the event, and was based on oral records. We need therefore to treat these extravagant claims with a little more subtlety. Religions can still contain wisdom, even if we reject the literal truth of their narratives.

  Besides, do we believe that all followers of religion believe in these things throughout their entire lives? Only a fanatic could do that. Nearly everyone has their doubts, although they may not reveal them publicly. Religions are not alone in this: political organisations also demand unity of their members, who are required to change their positions in line with the changing positions of their leaderships. And for the most part they do.

  Freud also believes that religion is means to overcoming unhappiness, albeit an unreliable one. In fact he interprets human behaviour as a constant search for happiness, which in turn is a method for resolving our inability to satisfy our drives. Religion is one of a few strategies we deploy, none of them very successful, according to him. This is not all that religions do, and this function of placating the troubled psyche really only concerns the idea of life after death and of a perfect one at that. If you remove this delusion, religions are not left with nothing. Religious believers don’t cling any less to life than do non-believers, and it therefore seems logical to conclude that they don’t believe that much, and yet continue to practise their religions.

  Freud’s analysis of civilisation ignores entirely the wretched conditions of the working class at the ti
me he was writing. In that class, the wretchedness suffered by individuals in Freud’s analysis would not have appeared to be much of a problem. Freud was charting the alienation that arises from the market economy and particularly affects isolated egos of the middle class, in which so much more is expected of life. Surely some of the most terrible blows we suffer in life are not the ones that affect us directly but the ones that affect people who are close to us. It is in our human relationships that we find happiness, because they take us out of ourselves, but they also make us vulnerable. If the people we love are taken away from us or suffer disabling conditions, we are bereft. It is that vulnerability that Freud appears to find so intolerable. He is right to mention the risk, but the vulnerability is more tolerable if we learn to approach it with greater passivity, and religions can help us to do that. That part of religion is not a delusion. Philosophy might achieve the same without delusions or with far fewer of them, but it may be a harder road.

  Leaving aside whether there’s life after death, believing in life after death is harmful to the psyche and to a good life. It leads to an obsession that interferes with our ability to live a meaningful life in human society, something that is a concrete possibility, though not always easy to achieve. The next life is used by organised religions to impose hierarchies and discipline. It may get people to carry out “good acts”, but they are carried out for the wrong reasons, and more importantly, religions end up claiming that they at least have a hand in opening the way to a blissful afterlife and thus entrance to the next world is governed not by justice or divinity but by powerful men and committees.