Address: “God is Not Good” (Second
in series following “God is Good”)©
The Rev.
The state of
This summer, one of the lovely retired ministers
on the island – a man who has devoted his entire career to serving urban
congregations and doing outreach to children-at-risk -- told me his favorite
sermonic story. It seems that his father
served in World War II in the army. When
he came home from the war, he brought with him an unusual souvenir – a belt
taken form the body of a dead German soldier.
On the belt buckle were three words: Gott Mit Uns. God with us.
Roger, my retired clergy friend,
used this story often to warn his flock of becoming arrogant or righteous about
their beliefs. I use it here to
illustrate everything I think is wrong with God and religion: its claims to
exclusiveness, its justification of destructive, racist and authoritarian
ideologies, and its ability to stir people to the heights of destructive
fanaticism. The “In God We Trust” that
is found on every bill in your wallets carries the implication that God is on
our side – the side of democracy, capitalism,
The current role of religion in the
public square in our own nation is frankly frightening. The influence of the Christian right on our
current administration has meant that stem-cell research has been severely
hampered, a woman’s right to choose threatened, and an evangelical tone applied
to the misguided War on Iraq, which generations to come will pay to price
for. I wonder if religion is behind the
administrations unwillingness to sign the
We have, in fact a quartet of
current writers and critics who have made God bashing a sport of late. Christopher Hitchens may be the most
entertaining of these, coming at the subject as he does with a lot of wit and a
journalist’s eye. He is joined in his
loathing of all things religious by the scientist Richard Dawkins, author of The
God Delusion, Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter
to a Christian Nation, and finally Daniel Dennet, the professor of
cognitive studies who wrote Breaking the Spell.
Each of these men has contributed to
a thorough whipping of monotheism in all of its forms. Some of you have told me that agree with
everything they say in their books, while others have shared that they couldn’t
finish the books because of the harsh and arrogant tone they all, perhaps with
the exception of Dennet, take on with gusto.
In my opinion, while they point out
many truths about the dangers of dogmatism in the religious sphere, they fail
to notice their own dogmatism about the wonders of science and rationality. At times they each cross the line and simply
become sloppy and crass. Harris writes that “most Muslims are utterly deranged by their
religious faith.” Dawkins and
Hitchens denounce the religious education of children as child abuse. Dawkins picks particularly on the Amish,
writing sarcastically:
There is
something breathtakingly condescending, as well as inhumane, about the
sacrificing of anyone, especially children, on the altar of “diversity” and the
virtue of preserving a variety of religious traditions. The rest of us are happy with our cars and
computers, our vaccines and antibiotics.
But you quaint little people with your bonnets and breeches, your horse
buggies, your archaic dialects and your earth-closet privies, you enrich our
lives. Of course you must be allowed to
trap your children with you in your seventeenth century time warp, otherwise
something irretrievable would be lost to us: a part of the wonderful diversity
of human culture.
Dawkins loses me at this point. Remember the horrible shooting in the Amish
schoolhouse? The Amish, who are
committed pacifists, responded to this by reaching out to the family of the
killer, declaring their forgiveness of the murders, and even setting up at
scholarship for his children. Surely
their way of life could teach us something about the spirit of community, and
living in a sustainable partnership with the earth, unlike those of us who
drive cars and are addicted to our computers.
But they are religious, so for Dawkins, they are unworthy of our
respect.
I don’t think that aiming a
poisonous pen in the direction of the Amish, Mother Theresa, the Dalai Lama,
St. Francis of
If the goal is to cut out a cancer
that is polluting life on earth, why isolate religion and God alone? Why not try to understand better where hatred
comes from, and how it might be overcome?
What about ethnic violence, rape, material greed, selfishness,
environmental damage, and ideological fanaticism that stands outside of
religion, a la Pol Pot and Stalin?
It has suddenly become a sort of
vogue for science to study religion.
Neurologists are looking at whether a belief in God is hard-wired in the
brain, and evolutionary theorists are looking to find an answer to the
persistence of religion in the process of natural selection. Since religion has often impinged on the
realm of science, with the effort to impose the theology of “Intelligent Design”
on public school science curricula providing only one recent an unfortunate example,
I suppose scientists might be justified in their counter-incursions into the
realm of religion.
Not long before his death Steven
I don’t think we can completely
separate science from religion, any more than we can separate economics from
politics, or human nature from human nurture.
I think scientists should be able to comment about God if they want,
just as theologians should be able to comment about science, but I wish that it
could be done with mutual respect and mutual humility.
I fear uncritical claims that
science is the salvation of humankind just as much as I fear religious
demagoguery. There is a place for
rational discourse, but there is also a place for imagination, intuition, and
spiritual longing and mystery. I look at
pictures collected by the Hubble Space telescope and I am truly humbled by the
stunning beauty of our cosmos. One
doesn’t have to believe in a creator God, good, bad or indifferent, to be awed
by images of the Orion Nebula, where thousands of stars are forming even as I
speak, or of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, which is a dying, sun-sized star which looks
like the eye of the universe shining through time and space. One doesn’t have to be a traditional theist
to see majesty in nature and feel a deep oneness with our world. But beauty, love, wonder…these are things
that move beyond the realm of cause and effect, and into something more difficult
to taste, or see, or prove.
We are animals and something more, we humans, and
it is difficult to capture the meaning of it all. Writes DH Lawrence in Insouciance,
written in 1928,
When it
comes to living, we live through our instincts and our intuitions. Instinct makes me run from little
over-earnest ladies; instinct makes me sniff the lime blossom and reach for the
darkest cherry. But it is intuition
which makes me feel the uncanny glassiness of the lake this afternoon, the
sulkiness of the mountains, the vividness of near green in thunder-sun, the
young man in bright blue trousers lightly tossing the grass from the scythe,
the elderly man in a boater stiffly shoving his scythe strokes, both of them
seating in the silence of the intense light.
If we actually could somehow imagine along with
John Lennon a world with no heaven and no religion too, would it result in
peace on earth? If we could surgically
remove religion and God from the story of humankind, past present and future,
what would we gain, and what would we lose?
It’s almost impossible to say, of course, but along with the boost to
rational inquiry and we would lose the inspiration for some of the most
beautiful architecture, music, visual art, and poetry of the ages. We would miss the impact of the
Judeo-Christian scriptures on the law and society which arguably led to
constitutional government, the establishment of hospitals and charitable
institutions, and the proliferation of the written word. We would lose lifetimes of devotion to higher
principles of love, right alongside all of the release and relief we might gain
from divinely inspired tyranny and oppression.
We might still be left to grapple with fanaticism in non-religious
ideological forms, because this seems to be the shadow side of brotherly love
and sisterly compassion.
It may be fun to bash God and
religion, but I’m not sure what it gains us beyond a sort of catharsis for
atheists who rightly feel oppressed by the dominance of religious believers in
this country. But beware the temptation
to think oneself superior, treating others as intellectually less-than oneself,
and blithely dismissing and disrespecting those who hold a faith different than
ones own. We all put our faith in
something. And, whether that faith is in
science or nature or love or an omniscient, omnipotent being, holes can be
poked in your faith just as easily as you poke holes in the faith of
others.
“Imagination is an important part of
reality.” Writes my colleague Charlie Ortman who serves our congregation
down the GSP in
The God that Dawkins and company
would deny is a childish, crass and life-denying God who ordains violence in
his name, loathes true freedom, and demands single-minded loyalty expressed in
empty rituals. This is a bad God, and I
don’t like him either. As a critic
writing for the Washington Post put it, “If
this is religion, then by all means we should have less of it. But the only people who believe that religion
is about believing blindly in a God who blesses and curses on demand and see
science and reason as spawns of Satan are unlettered fundamentalists and their
atheistic doppelgangers.”
The world is not black and white,
and religion is not of necessity the enemy of science or vice versa. If there is to be room for diversity of
thought and belief it will require, as Gould suggests, respectful dialogue and
mutual humility.