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Thursday, March 28 2024 @ 08:11 AM CDT

Whoever Designed the Universe Made a Right Mess of Religion

Conspiracies

God, sang the late John Lennon, is a concept. At the time, this prompted several profound questions, questions such as: “So?”, followed by: “And?” The former Beatle then launched into a primal scream of a tune in which he explained that by this concept we “measure our pain”. Big fan that I am, I was none the wiser.

by Ian Bell




Where religion is concerned, some of us are like that. Either we are too stupid – always a safe bet – or too smart to fall for catch-all explanations. You choose. Recent debates over evolution have, for example, illustrated the divide with an amusing clarity. Listening to fundamentalist American Christians attempting sophistication with this year’s “proof” of a deity’s existence can provide hours of fun.

Our universe is just too damned complex, they now say – without the D word, obviously – and too utterly implausible to have come about by mere chance. It can only be explained by design, and by the agency of a designer. That would be Him.

This sounds good, mostly, until you risk the old human vice. Thinking, they call it. Fortunately for the less evolved, Scotland’s own David Hume did a lot of that for us, many years ago.

Unlike some philosophers I could mention, le bon David had a sense of humour. He liked to ask silly questions. Why just one designer?, he would inquire. Why not tribes of them, as many gods as you could hope for? But if there is just one, are we not entitled to ask who might have designed him? Might there not be a whole assembly line of designers? The important question: why not?

I paraphrase grotesquely, of course, but the point is that Hume was one of the most acute sceptics in the history of civilisation. He thought long, hard and successfully about many things, but notably about faith and religion. His doubts were supremely logical. He was hugely influential across Europe and young America. And it made not a blind bit of difference.

The clerics still prosper. Their words still carry weight. Their controversies still arouse passions, still bring comfort to some, death to others. Even in this mostly-secular country we pay attention when leaders of the faiths conclude, rightly, that it would be immoral and insane to replace the Trident missile system. When they band together and decide to march from Faslane to the Scottish parliament to make the point, politicians are obliged to take notice. The word, I think, is authority.

Yet no-one, least of all anyone in power, stops to ask the simple question: who are these people? Judged by attendances, admittedly a crude measure, the churches are of far less relevance than, say, the National Trust. They have no vast constituency, no real democratic legitimacy. Still they manage to seize headlines and make themselves heard. This is odd, to put it no higher.

Not so long ago Gordon Brown gave a speech supporting the multi-billion pound scheme to replace Trident. Will he now tell the Catholic hierarchy, or the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, to mind their own business? Jack McConnell, faced with that very choice in parliament last week, took enormous pains to avoid even the suggestion that such a reaction is, or ever could be, conceivable.

We remain their flock, at least in their minds, rebellious or not. The devoutly secular among us might wish it otherwise, but the concerns of religion, and the petty disagreements of the religious, still shape our world. Pope Benedict XVI attempts to discuss the notion of holy war – the Vatican has some historical form in this area – and manages to infuriate the parliament of Pakistan. Benny, otherwise His Holiness, quotes a 14th century Christian emperor on the “evil and inhuman” legacy of Islam’s prophet. Incautious, no doubt, but think about it: the 14th century? This can still provoke even a minor “clash of civilisations”?

That self-serving Christian fundamentalist phrase has wider applications, nevertheless, than its devisers imagine. Even while Scotland’s Catholic leaders were speaking for humanity in their opposition to Trident last week, they were simultaneously indulging in an old cruelty. The parliament towards which they were marching intends to liberalise our laws on adoption. One consequence will be that gay couples – after the usual, rigorous scrutiny – will be allowed to give a child a home. The church doesn’t like it.

They sense an “attack on the family”, whatever that means in the 21st century. They regard homosexuality as unnatural. So they lose my vote, not that such a vote is being sought, least of all from this quarter. Yet they take for granted their right to oppress a minority of ordinary, loving people and this presumption, this authority, is also taken for granted. If some of us oppose them, we create our own, tiny, clash of civilisations. But the first question remains the best: who are these guys?

Or rather, who do they think they are? One oddity of the war on terror, so-called, has been a certain unease among Christian leaders over the attention paid recently to “leaders” – I use quotation marks because the word is disputed hotly – of Britain’s Muslim communities. Why defer to Islam for the sake of security, is the implicit suggestion, when believers in Christ can be ridiculed or marginalised in this fallen Western world?

In a way, the question answers itself. Islam commands the sort of obedience for which the Christians, these days, can only yearn. You could call it a triumph of faith or authoritarianism, according to taste. Two facts remain. First, if those notorious Danish newspaper cartoons had mocked Christ rather than the Prophet, no-one would have batted an eye. Secondly, the Christian churches resent their loss of command.

Still, and despite such complaints, a diminishing number of the devout continue to insist on the attention of the godless. Is this a mere habit, accepted on both sides of the religious gulf? Is Europe driven by remnants of its past, or by the fact that America’s power is today accompanied by America’s own brand of fundamentalism?

Israel’s recent Lebanon atrocity was fascinating, in that regard. What moulded the near-instinctive support of the United States? Geopolitical interests or a strange coalition of faiths? A born-again White House and militant Judaism? The victims, in any case, came from all religions, and none.

I no longer seek to provoke those who believe, even for fun. I seem to manage that without trying. In a grudging sort of way, I actually admire the ability of the Vatican, or any mullah, or some minor Presbyterian, to insist on the sort of moral authority that long ago ceased to be plausible in the real world, at least when measured in terms of those who still believe in the tooth fairy. But why, really, do we still listen?

In a sense, the issues themselves do not matter. It happens that I, too, think that spending £25 billion on nuclear missiles in order to make the world a more dangerous place is indecent. I meanwhile also believe that stitching a metaphorical pink triangle to the lives of gay couples is an outrage. Why should I need to argue for, or against, people with gods to arrive at that conclusion? Why does a world more interested in decent health services than in the supernatural still think in terms dictated by a theology to which it does not subscribe?

Power becomes a habit. The men (usually men) of God are no different from our temporal rulers. Both provide us with hokum, more or less, but both believe they are entitled to lay down their laws. What other use could power offer? John Lennon was almost right. It would have stretched the lyric somewhat, but God is a concept by which we measure our ability to listen, believe, and obey. Like it or not – and I don’t, much – that concept remains potent.

We who doubt and disbelieve, we of a Humean temper, if not a Humean intellect, cannot simply fling the odd joke against the fact of religion’s persistence. This is the nature of our world. There is a religious fanatic in the White House, another in Downing Street, a third somewhere in the hills on the Afghan-Pakistan border, a fourth in the Vatican, a fifth in the house just up the road.

If that has happened by design, can I do my own drawings?

http://www.commondreams.org/
© 2006 The Sunday Herald


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