The Death of Illusions: Posturing Atheism & Faith

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Alexander Pope "Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot"

Quiet Atheism – A Personal Preamble

Despite an absurdly devout Anglo Catholic childhood, leaving the Faith was neither particularly difficult, especially dramatic nor in the least agonizing. If memory serves the moment of decision was made just after Mass on or around my 12th birthday. I recall that during the service there had been some stuff about weeping for Zion and this had struck me as more than a bit odd given that we were in Torquay and the congregation of Our Lady of the Assumption consisted largely of middle class shopkeepers.

“It’s all nonsense, isn’t it?” I asked as we left the church. After a moment’s thought, my father replied that it probably was and that I needn’t go along any more if I didn’t want to. That was more or less it. Downside was off, much to my relief, and I had to have a chat with a delightful old and strangely boisterous priest, the late and much lamented Canon O’Reilly. This exceedingly holy father confessor made a mild effort to convince me by using the design argument, but when I pointed out to the rose he was using as an illustration had black spot and thus didn’t say much for the Almighty’s gardening skills, he desisted and we parted amicably.

I look back on my early Catholic years and education with considerable affection. Being hauled off to confession most Saturday evenings was a bit of pain mainly because it got in the way of Dr. Who but otherwise I’ve no real complaints. The nuns in my first school were sweet and kind; I learnt a lot about art – true it was mainly bad, highly sentimental art – from the devotional cards they used to foist on us; and I picked up a lot of interesting stuff about saints, especially my favourite, Thomas Aquinas. As for the priests, there was one incident in which a priest expressed a fervent desire to brain me for causing an incense burner to explode over my fellow altar boys (see Pious Pirates and Swinging Thuribles); however, most priests were as kind as the nuns and, unless I have remarkable powers of suppression, I can’t recall being sexually assaulted or savagely beaten by either.

Doubtless had I been brought up in the reign of Bloody Mary, or in Spain during the Inquisition or even in Ireland under the Jesuits or Christian Brothers, my feelings might be different. As it is, I tend to regard my erstwhile fellow believers and members of the Christian clergy as slightly simple minded. Religion provides them with the same sort of comfort that a mother gives a weeping child when she tells him that everything is going to be alright. One doesn’t insist on revealing to the child that things are going to be very far from alright and mummy, daddy & he are sooner or later going to turn into insentient compost. Similarly, one doesn’t mock the dying believer by telling her that when she says her desperate prayers she is simply talking to an imaginary friend; or at least one doesn’t unless one’s name is Sam Harris (see the utterly fatuous and unspeakably vile Letter to a Christian Nation) .

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” wrote Eliot in Four Quartets. This, I think, is largely true. The bleak reality that we are merely a rather tatty bunch of apes clinging to a rock in space or that our mothers give birth to us astride open graves is rather too much for most people. The death of a child or partner is beyond agonizing and would render most of us somewhat simple minded. Even at the best of times, religious faith is an emollient for the great mass of not especially bright men against the meaninglessness of existence and the certainty of extinction. Unless there is a good reason, it would be an act of great cruelty to remove this comfort.

Noisy Posturing Atheism – Dawkins & Co

Richard Dawkins always strikes one as a somewhat quaint or even faintly comical ersatz 19th Century figure. He has suddenly discovered there is no God and is so endearingly anxious to tell us all about it all. It is easy to imagine him gleefully chip-chip-chipping away at the bedrock with his dear little geological hammer or skipping manfully across some fossil-rich Dorset beach, oversized top hat in one hand, ammonite in the other and a maniacal, almost messianic glint in the eye. To complete the picture, there would have to be a beard (we'd give the little chap a clip-on one). They all wore them, those hideously relentless and dangerously naïve Victorian proselytizers. Charles Darwin had one, and so did Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Psalmist’s fool was there first. He was there well before Hume, he was there before Marx & Engels, and he was most certainly there before latecomers like Dawkins & Co. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”. Actually, the fool is right on two counts: first, there is almost certainly no God, or at least not in the naïve bearded, ‘something up there’ sense (pace people like Don Cupitt there may well be no other). Second, the fool is dead right in keeping this dangerous truth to himself. It is a truth to be spoken very, very softly in one’s heart; it is not something to be yelled from rooftop, pulpit or television studio. To be fair to Dawkins’s hero, Charles Darwin had some reservations about publishing his findings; not so the others. “God is dead” cries Zarathustra at the top of his voice “I teach the superman”. “Hear! Hear!” bleats little Dawkins from the platform of his utterly daft atheist bus.

The folly of these 19th Century proselytizers is and was to replace one blind faith or superstition with another. Liberate the masses from their illusions, smash the mind-forged manacles, take away the opium of the proletariat and all shall be well (one is tempted to add "and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well"). Having knocked off God, the bearded ones hoped to locate omnibenevolence or, at least, perfectibility in Man. They blithely assumed that with the removal of Original Sin, man’s natural goodness would ineluctably rise to the surface like some sort of richly nutritious cream.

With the 20th Century we moved from theoretical to applied scientific atheism; from the study to the test bench. There was little cream and the Übermensch was considerably less than super. Indeed, the only instance in which man proved himself in any way divine was in the creation of circles of hell. The liberated ‘blond beast’ did this on an unprecedented scale in places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, the Soviet Gulags, My Lai, or – stretching blond a little – in Nanjing and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. In the face of such evil one can only echo the words of Conrad's Kurtz:

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath—"The horror! The horror!"

If the 19th Century saw the death of God, the 20th witnessed the demise of the apotheosis of Man.

Preserving the Noble Lie

Richard Dawkins notoriously described atheists as ‘brights’. Well, the tediously vocal atheist is slightly brighter than the average Christian but not by any appreciable margin. Part of the trouble is that his battle was won centuries ago; the blunt truth is that no one of any intellectual account is an old-fashioned theist. Given this and given that a moderately intelligent 12-year old can see through the teleological argument why does a pint-sized Zarathustra feel the need to waste so much ink refuting it? It is as though a pub bore were constantly wittering on about he had disproved the existence of Santa.

Christianity acts as a prop for the feeble minded (the vast majority of any population); it is a needless cruelty to attempt to kick it away. It comforts the majority by giving some sense of meaning to their otherwise empty lives and by assuaging the horrors of death and agony of bereavement. The claim that the unconsidered life was not worth living only holds true for those capable of sustained reflection on life; for others, a flat-pack cosmology supplied by Rome or Canterbury will more than suffice.

Mindless hectoring atheism is also exceedingly dangerous in that religious belief acts an instrument of social control – a kind of Noble Lie. Looking back at the unprecedented horrors of the last century and at the near total breakdown of order in our modern urban wastelands, it would seem that depriving the masses of their opiates was profoundly unwise.

Moral rules are obviously not grounded in the authority of a divine being. This is a point made over & over by the born again atheists and is entirely valid (such a shame it was first made over two and a half thousand years ago by Plato). However, there is a snag: the alternatives are somewhat intellectually demanding. A frenzied mob is unlikely to be particularly influenced by consequentialist calculations. Nor is it going to be especially easy to persuade it to embrace deontological ethics; Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is pretty heavy going.

Science cannot step into the breach as it is morally neutral. A scientist might be engaged in the quest for a cure for AIDS or developing higher yielding crops; he might equally well be weaponising anthrax or vivisecting Jews. On the other hand, religion can provide moral guidance even though this is imposed though irrational or false doctrines and a reward/punishment mechanism that is ultimately specious. The thug’s boot is poised over the pensioner’s head – does it really matter if he is restrained from kicking through a fear of hell fire or an internalised albeit artificial belief in the sanctity of human life?

The Rapier & the Blunderbuss

There is no doubting that Christianity has had a pretty chequered past. However, Savonarola and Tomás de Torquemada are long dead and, much as one might sometimes regret it, it is exceedingly unlikely that Richard Dawkins will be charcoal grilled à la Jeanne d'Arc . True there are things about the Church that raise politically correct hackles and it is doubtless deeply unfair that we are unlikely to see a lesbian Archbishop of Canterbury or a single mother holding the Keys of St. Peter for a good few years. Who gives a damn?

There are lies & there are damned lies. As I see it the born again atheist would be far better advised to forgo the blunderbuss and take up the rapier. Religious extremism and bigotry rather than religion should be the targets. Here there can be no quarter and no pusillanimous attempts at appeasements like the Incitement to Religious Hatred Act.

A Clunking Fist Full of Flaws: Gordon Brown & the Mock Heroic

We may feel intensely sorry for the hopelessly beleaguered and utterly hapless Gordon Brown. But our sympathy is mixed with an equal measure of irritation and even a degree of Schadenfreude. Our pity is that which one might feel for a petulant wailing child who has spoilt the only toy he has ever really, really wanted, the premiership. We are not mourning the downfall of a great tragic hero. Gordon is neither Sophocles’ Oedipus nor Shakespeare’s Othello. And despite his absurd claims of a few years ago, he is most definitely not Heathcliff. For one thing, the latter broods; Gordon sulks.

Oedipus was a noble character brought down by a couple of somewhat unfortunate misjudgements: killing Pa & marrying Ma. His nobility of character is demonstrated through his acknowledgement of guilt and acceptance of responsibility. Once certain of his guilt, Oedipus blinds himself and then demands that he be sent into exile. Gordon Brown shows no such nobility. For one thing, saying sorry appears to be complete anathema for him; for another, he seems to more than unwilling to allow himself to be sent into exile. Indeed, if rumour has it, the door of Number Ten is now firmly barricaded and superglued against the likes of Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt

There are a few genuinely Shakespearian characters in the Cabinet. Sadly, Hoon and Hewitt may have failed their recent auditions as Cassius and Brutus, but think of Jack Straw cast as the feckless and ponderous Polonius; Peter Mandelson as the deeply sinister and malevolent Iago; or John Prescott as the linguistically challenged and plebeian Bottom. However, one suspects that Gordon was not born to play the Dane, the Moor or any other hero. There are far too many flaws, too many misjudgements. Indeed, the mere thought of him sweatily strutting his stuff in hose and codpiece prompts one to hurriedly move on.

I suppose the issue comes down to one of scale as well as basic integrity. Gordon Brown lacks moral stature and belongs to the subterranean world of the Nibelungs not to the world of heroes. To return to Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights: on the blasted moors above Haworth, the silhouette of a great granite crag might be seen, its massive outline broken by a single great fissure. Barely discernable beside it is the silhouette of a small heap of gravel.

On Being an Absolute Stinker

On Monday, I visited the grand opening of a newly refurbished Georgian hotel in my town and was utterly horrified by what I saw as the cheap, incredibly insensitive and utterly tasteless ‘restoration’. I sent a long splenetic text to a client who, as an interior designer, might be expected to share an interest in such things:

Can hardly bear to look at it. The combination of the words ‘Georgian’ & ‘boutique’ has me reaching for my horsewhip. As for the MFI-style chaise lounge, of which they are evidently so proud, the putrid colour scheme (Diary-of-an-Edwardian-Lady twee meets trendy coordination from a DIY ‘Bugger Up Your Home on the Cheap’ guide) and the hateful little bowls of artistic twigs … sorely tempted to borrow a muck spreader from Mike [a farming friend & fellow programmer].

On Tuesday, I go into a major panic when Mike tells me that client was the designer behind the refurbishment. However, ever the resourceful cad, I realised an ever-so-slight volte face was in order and penned the following:

So you were the interior designer for the hotel, were you? I suspected as much while gazing in stunned admiration and awe at the place last night. Such flair, such sheer elegance could only be your doing. Even ironically postmodernist little touches like the red grouting on the black tiles or the droll little jars of twigs spoke of a consummate artist. As for that exquisite chaise lounge, words fail me and tears course down my cheeks in mute eloquence. The town is surely unworthy of such a palace of sensual delights. I salute you.

By the bye, I suspect that my email & text messaging systems may have been hijacked by some contemptible rustic philistine. Ignore anything I might appear to have sent you. Loyalty prevents me from so much as hinting that Mike is entirely to blame.

Not sure if it will work.

Notes on the Romanesque

Pining for Romanesque ecclesiastical architecture in a country dominated by the ghastly and barbarous Northern Gothic, I recently made the lamentable mistake of visiting the Italianate Church of St Mary and St Nicholas at Wilton. This was foolish as although the façade is acceptable from a distance, the 19th Century church’s detailing & interior should be avoided like the plague.

Having recently re-visited the utterly perfect San Miniato al Monte, I found the gross vulgarity of Victorian ersatz architecture almost too much to bear. With its lovingly hewn stone & marble, the Italian basilica is a testament to a profound faith – albeit one grounded in humanity – and is the product of generations of skilled artisans; Thomas Henry Wyatt’s concrete neo-Romanesque construction is the product of engineering and Victorian acquisitiveness. It seems that the crass yet somehow aptly named Hon. Sidney Herbert couldn’t bring back an actual church as a souvenir of his grand tour so instead had one knocked up on his estate. Were he alive today, he would doubtless be the proud possessor of a plastic tourist reproduction of Michelangelo’s David or even an oh-so-droll kitchen apron featuring the statue’s penis.

Having said all this, Wilton Church serves a purpose but only if firmly kept in one’s peripheral vision as though it were an afterimage of the real thing. The purpose is, of course, to act as a mute reproach to the horrors of Northern gothic and to the vulgar excesses of Northern nature itself.

To make a proper comparison between the commendable restraint of Italian Gothic and the ill-bred exuberance, or gushiness, of Northern counterpart, take nearby Salisbury Cathedral, a building created by skilled stone masons and other craftsmen rather than by penny-pinching architectural purveyors of holiday souvenirs.

Much lauded by upwardly-gazing dribbling rustics and tourists, Salisbury veers towards an unthinking celebration of the thrust of nature pointing ever upwards. Calling to mind a cabbage run to seed or – more obviously and crudely – a rampant rampaging phallus, the thing is out of all proportion both aesthetically and spiritually. A lapidary ode to vascular congestion, Salisbury is at one with the perfectly foul club-wielding Cerne Abbas Giant and is, incidentally, the subject of Golding’s novel, The Spire (the title is revealing in its use of a synecdoche). Its one redeeming feature is that, being an example of Early English Gothic, it is less infested by the writhing stone tendrils of, say, York Minster or Gloucester Cathedral.

Northern Gothic in whatever form involves a craven submission to both the supernatural and to nature; and by nature I don’t just mean the grossly all-pervasiveness green stuff we find all around us, but also the baser urges so celebrated by writers such as D.H. Lawrence. In the case of Salisbury one might go so far as to see it as at one with the kind of reductionist thought exemplified by the likes of Richard Dawkins. One might speculate that the early Church was so anxious to dominate primitive beliefs and cults through assimilation that it became infected.

A clue to the Romanesque’s superiority to the Northern Gothic is in the name (coined by later art historians). Yes, it possesses Gothic elements but these are subject to severe classical restraint.

Take, for example, the exquisite San Miniato. The building sits full square on the earth; there is no turgid thrust for the skies. The undemonstrative polychrome patterns on the façade are elegantly geometrical; there are no wildly twisting and thrashing organic tendrils. The five arches on the lower register and the decorative ones above are Roman and suggest calm stability (were they Gothic there would be a rippling tension). The building is comfortable as its own focus; it is not pointing elsewhere to some false transcendence. Above all, it is a building that does not seek to brow beat the viewer into submission to some entirely other divinity; rather, it respectfully invites calm contemplation. For its builders the divine and the human were one and the same and both transcended brute nature.

On Not Grasping the Rules

I was slightly preoccupied with code yesterday when my wife asked if a particular handbag was “OK for Florence”. I never really understand questions like that so I grunted in a vaguely positive way. This, it transpired, was something of a mistake.” You aren’t really taking this holiday seriously, are you?”

Trying to redeem myself, I pointed at another handbag & told her with huge, almost maniacal enthusiasm that I thought that one was perfectly lovely and just the thing for Tuscany. It turned out I was digging a far bigger hole for myself. Any halfway decent husband would have remembered that his wife had carried that one last year.