A Vaccine for Christianity
This morning on Post Secret someone shared, “Not believing in God has helped me love people even more.” What a beautiful sentiment. This secret reveals an even more tragic secret. Religion can prevent you from loving people because you are not allowed to accept them for who they really are. How many people have been shunned by their families and communities because they have not been able to conform to some twisted, anti-human religious ideal?
As an American and recovering Catholic I, of course, speak mostly of Christianity, when I talk of religion because this is the dominant religious experience in our society and therefore my dominant experience. I suspect that Judaism and Islam share this terrible and outrageous irony. I see evidence of it, but the limitations of my experience keep me from commenting too boldly on it.
Christianity is my native religious tongue; my dialect is Catholicism. Even as a skeptic who is becoming a convinced atheist with each passing year I still speak Catholic Christianity. It seems that I can’t quite give it up. Given my great disdain for the church as a moral authority this always troubles me. It’s like having a chronic medical condition that doesn’t trouble you every day, but still flares up painfully and embarrassingly from time to time. Is there no cure?
Some would say that this is my god given conscience. I have these painful flare ups because god is reminding me of his presence in my life. These people generally seem to believe that morality and goodness all come from god and blind themselves to all the evidence to the contrary. I believe these flare ups are the result of indoctrination that started for me at birth and continued well into young adulthood.
I am not one of those skeptics that pins the blame on religion for all our woes. That would be unfair and untrue. I also believe that ethics and morality do not require religion or a belief in a god of any kind, but we also cannot deny that these twin pillars have played a large role in the development of our moral consciousness. Religion has left its seemingly indelible mark on the collective human psyche, at least as far as I can see with my limited vision.
Religion seems to engender hate and violence. We start out with the premise that God is Love and then all hell breaks loose - literally. God is Love, it seems, if you are among one of his chosen. What that means exactly depends largely on the sect or denomination within your chosen monotheism. Religion creates division. It’s us against them. It is those who get to go to heaven and those who will get condemned to hell. It is the righteous vs. the infidel; the saved vs. the unsaved. It isn’t unlike the secular politics of our day. Devotion to a political ideal or party line can come from a religious like zeal.
With this kind of thinking the focus is always on the afterlife and in the cases of some more fascist forms of Christianity a pending end of the world crisis - the last stand at Armageddon. This mentality is what keeps the world burning. Instead of trying to make it a better place, a more peaceful and loving place we imagine great bloodletting battles of good vs. evil. Sometimes we actually go out and wage these wars. Given our species war like nature I prefer it when the obvious impetus that unleashes the conquering worm is open greed and desire for power and empire. That at least is more honest than trying to blame an unseen and imaginary authority whose divine will is behind the evil we do.
God is Love, but oftentimes his devotees are the least loving people. Some such as Fred Phelps want you to know that God hates fags and that he hates America because we are tolerant of the homosexual lifestyle. The Westoboro Baptist Church’s message is that Americans have been raised on a steady diet of “God is Love.” They counter it with almost comic hatred and bigotry, which if they actually didn’t believe their own bullshit so righteously, would be somewhat funny.
Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church are extremists. They certainly represent a minority fringe element in Christianity and it would be disingenuous to use them as the example that condemns this entire category of monotheism. Ironically, the Westboro message is having the opposite effect in many places. The more insanely vitriolic they get the more loving and gentle their opposition is in response. Some young people are using the old “kill them with kindness” tactic.
In fact if Christianity were a disease, Fred Phelps might actually be the vaccine. Vaccines often use a dead virus to create immunity against the more powerful living virus. The more Fred and his followers hate, the more inclined others seem to be to love in response. This is at least true to my experience here in Colorado where the Westboro Family has visited several times recently.
Fred’s message of hate, unpalatable as it is, may be more inline with the god I encounter in the bible, especially in the Old Testament. In the New Testament it is Paul who sets up the formula that God is Love. Jesus never actually uses those words. Jesus seems more of a militant anti-establishment reformer than a loving deity in human form. He seems a lot like any political activist - pissed as hell about what he sees as injustice. But, Judaism with all its messianic zeal is an elitist position. They are, after all, God’s chosen from among all the nations of earth. Christianity and Islam follow suit with this type of us vs. them thinking.
The Christian concept of God seems way too limiting. For a god that is supposedly both infinite and ineffable there seem to be no shortages of people who are ready to give you definite answers regarding his will or absolute truth. This is an absurdity. Equally absurd is God is Love. He often behaves in ways that seems the exact opposite of loving. The response is always up there with “my ways are not your ways,” which is just god saying, “I’m god I can do what I want.” He gives the same answer to Job from this whirlwind. In reality this is not god speaking, but very human people who can’t reconcile their faith with the very reality at hand. The response is designed to end the conversation and to keep them from having to look too deeply into their own beliefs.
God is love. This is utter nonsense. God’s expression of love often prevents us from being really loving. God’s love is not fathomable because it is not human. If we can’t understand this love in light of our humanity then serves no good purpose for us. If we are forced to hate people for being gay or not a member of our group that it is not love at all, but a hatred of our humanity. Let’s face it if God is love he seems to be disgusted by our humanity. He is a lot like a father who won’t kiss his child because he has a dirty, sticky face or won’t change the diaper because he can’t stomach what’s inside it.
God is not love. But, then god is not.