So with my last article being on suicide, I figured I’d switch to a more cheerful topic. Hard to explain this one since it is of odd specificity, but I’d say it is certainly religious in nature.
It is perhaps not a particularly shocking remark to say that Christians are a twisted bunch. It’s a very morbid and anguishing religion. The Christian faith, like most other successful faiths, takes a deeply realist approach to things like death, and suffering, and pain and injustice.
Even our international symbol is a torture device. What’s that all about? Muslims have a moon, Jews have a star, and we have the Roman equivalent of a blindfold and a cigarette. You can tell who the middle child is.
Secular beliefs often prosper in places without war and famine and poverty, and in some ways that’s a good thing. I certainly believe that every faith should be welcome in society, barring certain obvious exceptions. But secular countries can also maintain quite the callous disposition towards suffering done outside of their borders.
When secularism is done in such a way as to produce a sense of spiritual detachment to the world, when it reduces everything into a scientistic dogma about energy and matter, when it rejects some of the more complicated stuff within the human condition, then we see a new kind of imperial doctrine. One in which violence is just a natural phenomenon produced by things like psychology rather than morality.
But I don’t think science tells us much about these things, and to be fair, that’s precisely why science is so dangerous. Science doesn’t punish or reward people for their actions, it just lets them get on with it. That’s why science is a very flawed moral system. Pretending like there’s a scientific position to be held on matters of war, human rights, culture and society is a good way to develop a fanatical and nihilistic position on matters of violence.
And in this sense, I don’t think Christianity gets enough credit. The Christian faith very much embraces the darker sides of life, in fact, that is the whole premise. Christianity doesn’t deny that the world is a dark and brutal place. In fact, it doesn’t even deny that God occasionally wakes up on the wrong side of the bed. Instead it embraces these facts of life and reality.
And I think Christianity’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Which is namely the understanding of suffering. In biblical gospel, suffering is inevitable. It’s impossible to be mortal and to not suffer. All human beings will know tragedy, and life can always get considerably worse than what we can even imagine it to get.
A good example is the story of Abraham and Isaac. People often like to use that story to make some claim about the cruelty of God. When God asked Abraham to sacrifice his child. But that’s only by very contemporary ideas about what’s considered ordinary experiences. If you were a Hebraic tribesperson during the bronze age, then losing a child was a normal fact of life. Most large families did some way or other.
And when you take a few moments to empathise with our ancestors, and look at what these themes represent. How it’s not so much a literal account of events that supposedly happened, but rather a more poetic story about the importance of feeling hope even during the most difficult moments of grief and pain, then I suspect it’s actually quite the comforting story.
Similarly you got the story about the great flood, and Noah’s Ark. Another supposed allegation about what a mad old dictator God is. But once again I would say that during biblical times there were a lot of droughts and earthquakes and volcanic activity. And unlike modern times, they had no way to deal with this stuff. Natural disasters that killed thousands of people was commonplace.
So the idea of a great flood was certainly more mundane to biblical people, and the fact that the story ends with how no such thing will ever wipe out humanity ever again is probably yet another story of great comfort to people.
The bible rarely invents the themes that it touches upon. It is a tale of people and the troubles that people faced. It’s a work of trying to understand pain rather than to deny it or idealise it.
And I think that if you’re an atheist, then that’s all well and good. In fact, I take no issue with it. But I do think it can be challenging to be an atheist since there’s no real manual for it. Maybe you live an ordinary and peaceful life, maybe you don’t need to fear tragedy too much, but it doesn’t change the fact that it is out there, and that it requires reconciling.
Because to simply reduce it to the meaningless causality of materialism, to say that it is all a matter of atoms and thermodynamic, and that the world is a random and indifferent place is to tell a fiction far more grandiose than even the most improbable of biblical miracles.
There’s nothing random or insigificant about any of this. The only reason why our minds declare it all to be arbitrary is because we cannot make any sense of it. But you know what? I can’t make any sense of Javanese either, but I doubt all those people in Indonesia are just making up random noises to mess with us.
I suspect their language makes just as much sense as all the other things I don’t understand, and I reckon it’s a matter of hubris to reject anything beyond my capacity of recognition as the mere happenstance of molecules.
Because that’s a descriptive justification in the end. And it’s not even a correct descriptive justification. It’s like asking a pilot how an aeroplane works and he just says “Well… it’s an aeroplane.” Or worse, it’s like asking a scientist how an aeroplane works and she (yeah that’s right) just says “Well… it’s matter and energy.”
So what if it’s matter or energy? You may as well say it’s dogs and cats. That’s not an answer. Doesn’t explain why it has wings, and a transponder, and makes your ears hurt. It doesn’t tell you anything. If you wandered into a patent office with “Matter and energy” written on a napkin then they’d laugh at you, and rightfully so.
And that’s why materialism cannot explain why suffering exists. It can tell us about psychology, and nerves, and brain chemistry, but it can’t in a million years explain how it all fits together with our purpose and relationship to the universe.
And even if you’re a nihilist and deny that there even is a purpose, then you’re still stuck having to figure out the relationship we have to the universe. And as far as I can see, we have either a really good relationship, or a really bad one.
Because as far as I can tell, the universe and our nature has certain rules. Take knives for instance. If you stick a knife into a piece of bread, and share food with your friends and your neighbours, then nature will reward such an experience quite positively.
But by the same contrast, if you stick that knife through your own hand, or maybe even into someone else’s hand, then chances are your experiences may somewhat differ.
It seems like some stuff we do makes us friends, and other stuff we do makes us enemies. It seems like when we build things, life gets better, and when we destroy things, life gets more difficult. It seems like when we think about how to solve problems, we find solutions. But when we act all pessimistic and think life’s hopeless, then life sort of becomes hopeless since that’s all we’re paying attention to.
Seems like generally speaking, love makes people sort of happy, and hate makes people sort of miserable. Fear is generally not desired, but serenity usually is. We like animals that are soft and friendly, but we’re not big fans of animals that are sneaky and full of poison.
And some of this stuff can be explained away by evolution. Kind of. I don’t deny evolution, in fact I know a lot about it. Which is why I know that there isn’t a single evolutionary biologist on this planet who could possibly explain how a bunch of single celled creatures in a barren, prebiotic ocean somehow managed to replicate themselves into the people who built the Stonehenge and painted the Mona Lisa.
They can throw around some theories about how certain habits and certain physical traits resulted in increased brain power, but they can’t explain precisely why that brainpower is being allocated towards tasks that most other animals would consider moronic.
Imagine if we could talk to a squirrel and explain what we’re getting up to at the moment.
“What the fuck is an NFT?! WINTER IS COMING YOU NEED TO HIDE FOOD YOU IDIOT!”
Most other animals would be absolutely shocked if they had any idea what we’re doing. They would look at us and think we’re all Gods with severe brain damage. They would see a species of demented magicians, merrily dancing a jig inside a burning building. Nothing we do could possibly be justified by the imperatives of evolution.
When most animals want to find a partner they got some sort of ceremony, they sing a song, or build a little nest or perform a dance or what have you. None of them would invent an elaborate service industry comprised of everything from internet dating to Rexona commercials.
If the point of evolution is to propagate the species, then why has our evolution only resulted in more and more elaborate and quite frankly, nonsensical ways of doing things?
It can’t all be libidinal is what I’m saying. There’s a certain element of mystery to how heightened brain functions also bring within it a kind of madness.
And I think the answer lies in creativity. And creativity is probably one of the strongest arguments for religious faith. Because it really is the defining characteristic of sapience. Most animals like doing stuff, but very few of them like making stuff.
And creativity is only nonsensical when you examine life without any kind of spiritual nuance. Because another big trend in secular cultures is to make a mockery of art and creativity. We got a bunch of high street galleries creating empty black squares and putting up million dollar urinals with some pretentious chin stroking discourse that can roughly be summarised as “But what does it all mean?”
It means your worldview is extremely bleak, that’s what it means. It means your wealthy Bohemian lifestyle has completely robbed you of any attachment to the outside world, to the point of where you’re stuck in big and clinically lit rooms full of other jaded hipsters, resonating with works of art whose central theme reflects the very same emptiness that you see in the lavatory mirror every morning.
You don’t need to be a headshrink to put those two together.
And I think that creativity when examined in its relationship to the spiritual is a fascinating thing. Because I suspect that the real goal of most religious teaching, Christian and otherwise, is to look upon the world in its true form. Warts and all. To see the nature of suffering, strife, hardship, pain, tragedy and loss, and to then use the spiritual as a way in which to find one’s innocence. To be able to trust in spite of betrayal. To be able to forgive in spite of cruelty. To be able to make peace in spite of war. And to be able to be kind in spite of profit.
So that no matter how difficult life gets, you still want to live it. You still see the good, and the possibility for good. And that’s why it is so vital to be creative. Because spiritual creativity is what allows us to imagine a better tomorrow. It is what allows us to hope that doing what is good and what is righteous will be rewarding, even when all state of affairs would indicate the contrary.
I think this is why religious faith is such a dark thing. Because the world we live in challenges us to either deny it, and make ourselves numb, and only live half a life. Or it challenges us to embrace it, and feel its many cold nights, but to also be given its many warm days.
And that is why God cannot be a genie in a bottle. That is why faith cannot be self-affirming. Because if that is what faith was, then such a faith would be leading us like cattle to the knackering yard. Faith is meant to be two sided. It is meant to guard us. To guard something is equal part compassion and violence. It is to both know innocence and brutality.
I deny the idea that God does everything for a reason, because, in fairness, literally the first chapter of Genesis makes that clear. We have free will, we are the authors of our own deeds. So when a drunk driver takes out a family of 3 on Christmas morning, God’s not the person to ask about that.
You’ll have to ask the driver.
All God would say is “Look in the book I gave you. I tell people not to drink too much. And yet people drink too much. I tell people to consider others, and yet people are thoughtless. I tell people to be kind, to be neighbors, and yet there are those who drink alone on Christmas morning.”
Truth is that tragedy happens for many reasons, but what’s so beautiful about our circumstance is that when we learn to understand those reasons, then tragedy does not have to be so very tragic. It can be opportunities to do kind things, to act with innocence, to make sure things don’t spiral out of control.
That’s why I find it a bit tedious when I hear men like Christopher Hitchens ask about why God would allow the terrible things happening in Africa. He doesn’t need to ask God about that. Both his parents were in the Royal Navy, just ask them why the British empire decided to enslave and loot that entire continent. Weird thing to scapegoat God about.
Truth is that we’re grownups. The universe isn’t just some fishbowl that God keeps on his big desk. We were given a life, and a set of advice, but what we decide to do with all this is really just up to us.
And I think that’s why it’s so vital to see the world for what it is, both in its joys, but also in its many tragedies.
