… and I know this must be true because of all the moronic blog posts flying around, trying to add up who has killed more, atheists or religious.
It is quite likely that I am being over-sensitive, as I too was once one of these idiot atheists who mistakenly believed it logical to ask why a wise, just and loving God instructs His representatives on earth to stone, torture, burn, imprison and maim other people (who may or may not also claim to be his representatives on earth). Or at the very least, if these weren’t His divine instructions per se, why He completely fails to stop these things being done in His Holy Name. It’s the classic post 9/11 joke: I don’t know if faith can move mountains, but I’ve seen what it can do to tall buildings.
But this of course is a stupid question asked only by those who may be clever in the eyes of the world, but foolish in God’s ways. Because it is undoubtedly true that you do not need to be religious to kill vast numbers of people. You do not need to be religious to kill small numbers of people either, but the rise of non-religious people happily coincides with the rise of technology, so atheists can kill more people in a short span of history.
From what I can glean, the argument goes something like this: religious people have committed atrocities but the quantity of people killed has been spread over millennia. Whereas atheists have killed huge numbers of people with the span of 100 years. Therefore, atheists are much worse than people who murder in the name of God.
Or maybe the argument is not that they atheists are worse, but that they are no better. Which doesn’t seem like a great argument to me: is the best apologetic for religious cruelty really that atheists behave badly too?
Let’s see. Take your common-or-garden evil dictator, possibly a communist. Brought up without any notion that God exists, that human destiny is forged by humans, that there is no higher authority to determine what is right and wrong than other humans. If it is just men who say what is right and wrong, an aspiring evil leader is likely to reason: well it might as well be me.
Compare this to your common-or-garden Christian. Baptized as a baby perhaps, when their inherited original sin was washed away. Still, they have an unfortunate propensity to sin but they get an extra dollop of Holy Spirit to help them along at confirmation. If they are fortunate enough to be catholic or orthodox, then they will also be receiving the God into themselves through the Eucharist. Now, it may be that such a person becomes the sort who participates in atrocities, possibly against communists, or muslims who may think they are religious, but might as well be atheists since their God is not the true God.
Now, as a no-longer-atheist-but-still-thinking-something-is-not-quite-right sort of person, I might think that the murderous actions of those whose lives have been filled with sacramental graces is worse than the murderous actions of those people whose lives have been lacking such gifts. However, if I am to follow the excellent example of the highly respectable Christians voicing their opinions on t’internet (and I have to follow someone’s example, because I don’t have the authority to try and follow Jesus’ example all by myself, and apparently all The Tablet readers in my parish are not to be trusted), then I need to recognize that is just pol pot calling the kettle black.
How mysterious are God’s ways.
Some months ago I read an article online about what appeared to be a highly credible explanation for the evolutionary mechanism that gives humans a propensity to believe in the supernatural. Not a ‘gene for God’ but something that meant our default position is to believe in the supernatural (so that atheism is, in effect, us breaking our programming).
Alas, I completely failed to blog about it at the time, bookmark it or make any note of the link, and now I can’t even remember what this amazing mechanism of consciousness was…
It was one of those things that was very interesting but in a way also somewhat useless.
If you’re religious, you can look at such a mechanism and say, “Aha! This proves that we were created to turn towards God.” If you’re an atheist, you can look at it and say, “Aha! This explains why people persist in believing in God even though we know there isn’t one.”
So. The point of this singularly uninformative post? That it probably is natural to believe in God, or at least, some supernatural dimension and beings, and there are good evolutionary reasons for it. But whether or not that counts as evidence for the existence or non-existence of God depends on what you already believe.
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update: Anna Arco posted this related link on twitter a couple of hours ago – not the evolutionary mechanism thing, but interesting look at the action of the brain.
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further update: Am feeling very zeitgeisty. The same day I posted this, it turns out there was an article in The Times about some Bristol research, under the title ‘We Are Born To Believe In God’ (which turns out to not be what the author of the study was saying, as he clarifies in his blog ).
Filed under: the scenic route | Tags: atheists, incarnation, jesus, saints, trinity
Saint Athanasius
The Trinity is at the heart of everything I’ve puzzled over. I’ve accepted it readily, because if you don’t believe in God then the big hurdle is believing in Him in the first place. Once you believe in a supreme being, then why not believe in the Trinity?
The puzzling thing is why God’s people didn’t know God was three persons in one until the Incarnation. A faithful Jew would have been stoned for blasphemy to suggest such a thing. This was why (as I understand it) the high priest tore his robe when Jesus declared his identity in front of the sanhedrin.
But it’s that puzzle that has allowed me a way in. Sometimes God’s people get it wrong. The only nation following the true God before the incarnation was Israel, but they didn’t have full understanding. Many, many of their laws (I like the King James heading ‘divers laws’) were human rather than divine. I hear people today talk that church teaching can never change but then I also know that the church teaches the development of doctrine.
The ojective truth doesn’t change, but our understanding of it changes. I think often people have difficulty with this because they think it must therefore imply relativism. I can’t quite work out how to articulate why it doesn’t; it’s more that you accept a working reality as fact, and what is true and what is false has to be measured against those parameters – but at the same time you have to acknowledge that you can’t say 100% that this is correct. Even the pope is only infallible within certain parameters.
Incidentally, I think that is the ‘probably’ in the atheist bus slogans. It doesn’t mean wishy-washy atheists. If Richard Dawkins says (I don’t know whether he has or not) that he allows an infinitesimal possibility that there is a god, that doesn’t mean he’s having doubts about his atheism. It means he’s a good scientist.
I used to think (well, ok, I still do to a large extent) that Jesus was good but that religion was very very bad. But then I always have the question, ‘who was Jesus?’ and without the Trinity there is no answer, he remains a puzzle.
For anyone in the North East getting a bit anxious about flu or relegation, from the late great Douglas Adams:
