Comments Inspired by Hitchins’ “God is Not Great”

September 30, 2007 by Alpha.

I am in the odd position, historically, of having been raised sans religio, that is to say that no one successfully inculcated in me a sense of full-throated belief in something I’ve never seen any evidence for.

My parents are not religious, though both are deeply ethical people, and it seems to me that they sought in particular to shelter me from the certain fundamentalisms and fanaticisms that plagued the area where I grew up. And no, I’m not from Basra.

The lessons I treasure most from my childhood really are simple ones, but truly rare nonetheless. My mother taught me that goodness is contingent upon nothing but itself. My father taught me that nothing is so awesome as the world we live in, seen clearly and honestly. And my brother taught me, rather abjectly in some times of his tutelage, that power is not to be found in ‘what,’ but in ‘how’ and ‘why.’

My first real interaction with religion came when I was five or six (I think) when my mother sent me into a “Story Wagon” at the annual (”World Famous”) rodeo/fair in town. Neither of us had any idea just what kind of story it was that I was going to hear, but it turned out to be a very clever bit of proselytizing that went on. There were maybe ten kids in this awful plastic-topped faux-wagon, and one adult. He gave us each a little book, about two inches square, made of a variety of colors of paper.

I don’t pretend to remember all of the colors, or what each of them represented, but I remember that it started with Black, which was to represent to Void (I now begin to wonder how one has black in a proper Void). Then it went something like this: Brown to represent the Earth, then Green to represent the plants, then some fleshy type tone to represent animals, approximately.

Then came to grand finish, and as with all good endings, it comes in several falls. First, we got to the last bit of paper, which was Red, to represent Eternity in Hell which is the Wages of Sin. Then after we’d finished the little book, he said something to the effect of (add creepy Sith voiceover) “There is another way…”

He then offered to each of us, a little bit of white paper. This, he said, was to represent Jesus, and, if we would flip the paper over (I’d already looked. It wasn’t cheating. He didn’t tell us not to.) we would see what Jesus could offer us. Anyone want to guess what was on the other side of the paper?*

Then came the one which was not like the other, the triumph. He had us all bow our heads, and repeat a prayer after him. This practice, praying with someone else’s words, always seemed stupid to me. I figure that if God made you, he probably pretty much gets you. This runs in the same vein as the old Christian tradition that if it isn’t Latin it doesn’t count, and the persistent Muslim insistence that a Qur’an must be in Arabic to be the Qur’an. It just seems dumb.

Anyway, I didn’t pray. I placed my hands on my lap and I half-bowed my head and I was silent and patient and as respectful as I could be, but I did not pray. After this man and the other children finished saying someone else’s words, the Pastor, as I now recognize him, turned to me.

Referring to me first by my name, he said, “You didn’t pray.” I remember it being one of those sentences that hangs in the ether between statement and question.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“Can I ask why?” Another one of those horrid sentences. The question he asked isn’t the one he wanted answered, and I respectfully skipped the unnecessary bits of dialogue.

“I didn’t pray because I don’t believe in God.”

“Why not?” While this an effective way to frame the question, when you’re an adult debating a child. It is, however, exactly what is wrong with most religious arguments–it offers an entirely false set of premises.

The ‘answer’ is an obvious one, which comes from a man that I love at least as much as Hitchins does–William of Ockham.

“Why,” I countered to the pastor, “should I?”

“Don’t you want to go to Heaven?” At this point he probably thought he had me on the run, but he clearly hadn’t anticipated running into a genuinely curious and thoughtful little member of the Cult of Reason on this day.

“I would love to. But I haven’t ever seen any evidence that it exists.”

That did it. I think he realized that he and I could play this game all the way out, but that serve to weaken the impact of his presentation with the other kids. He then delivered the best incarnation of the evangelist’s surrender I’ve ever heard: “We will all pray for your soul, son.” And then they did. Everyone else in that little wagon, led by this monumentally creepy youth pastor (perhaps a redundancy) actually used my name in their prayers.

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“Hate the sin, love the sinner,” the Christian maxim goes.

I don’t hate religious folk. I try very hard not to hate anyone at all. In fact, I have a great deal of respect for those who delve deep into the reasoning of the arguments and conclude, in spite of the tremendous improbability of it all, that they have faith.

I have no scorn, but only sadness, for those who uncritically accept as true that which cannot be proved. The defense that their belief, or theory, also cannot be disproved is no defense at all.

Do you know what the philosopher calls a theory that can not be proved and cannot (hypothetically) be disproved?

Bullshit.

*The reverse side of the Jesus-White piece of paper was, of course, Gold. What else could it be?

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