Atheism Considered
SERMON GIVEN BY REV LINDA HART AT RICHMOND & PUTNEY UNITARIAN CHURCH
The seed for this service on atheism was planted when Oscar handed me a book, Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. He commended it to me, said he thought that the first bit was good, but that Harris fell into polemics by the end and it wasn’t very interesting. “But,” he told me encouragingly, “the beginning bit is very good.” So I read it. And I agree wholly with Oscar’s assessment. The beginning bit is very good as Harris tries – and succeeds in large measure – in describing in some good detail the problems that the United States is now both facing and causing in the world due to the rise of Christian fundamentalism and the power that the Christian right wields in Washington, D.C. I was surprised to find myself nodding a good deal as I read his words.
He begins, for example, by stating a few assumptions that he comes into the work with:
You believe that the Bible is the word of God, that Jesus is the Son of God, and that only those who place their faith in Jesus will find salvation after death. As a Christian, you believe these propositions not because they make you feel good, but because you think they are true.
Quite a respectful start, which he furthers by acknowledging that he and the above mentioned people agree on a number of points. One of them is right and the other is wrong, the Bible is the word of God or it isn’t, Jesus offer salvation or he doesn’t. All of it, as I said, pretty respectful and accurate. He continues on with a bit of proof-texting, suggesting that Christians should be keeping slaves, that they are allowed to sell their daughters into slavery and lifts up a few other of the troubling passages in the Bible to suggest that it is unlikely that they truly have a firm belief in the Bible as wholly true.
This is where it gets interesting to me, though. He suggests that religion separates morality from the reality of human and animal suffering.
Indeed, [he says], religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral – that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains, [he goes on to say] why Christians like yourself expend more ‘moral’ energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide. It explains why you are more concerned about human embryos than about the lifesaving promise of stem-cell research. And it explains why you can preach against condom use in sub-Saharan Africa while millions die from AIDS there each year.
It is a stunning paragraph. And he continues on in this same way, attacking the Christian right’s seeming obsession with sex. He does get a bit cheeky when he suggests that their ‘principal concern appears to be that the Creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked. This prudery of yours,’ he continues ‘contributes daily to the surplus of human misery.’
It is, if you’ll pardon a blatant American sports metaphor, a slam dunk.
I’ll not replay the whole book for you, but I will say that it does go awry not too much further in. After a really elegant and well done argument for the importance of working to abate human suffering, he dives into polemical and unnecessary insult. While trying to point out in stark reality that there is no God, no presence to listen to the prayers of humanity, he lifts up the tragedy of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics only to be slowly drown there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Do you have the courage to admit the obvious? [he asks the Christians to whom this book is addressed.] These people died talking to an imaginary friend.
And the conversation doesn’t get much better after that. Still he says many things that I think are true and right.
Finishing that book made me want to find out more about these atheists whose names are popping up, whose books are selling well, who people are discussing with some energy and passion. Like them or hate them, you’re unlikely to be wishy washy about them if you care anything about religious life.
So, I took a look at Richard Dawkins. Actually, I bought the book and it sat for weeks. I was so certain that I wouldn’t like it, and I would be arguing with him throughout. It’s not a nice way to read a book, you know? Finally I began to read, and discovered, much to my surprise, that I am in substantial agreement with him on many points, just as I was in substantial agreement with Sam Harris.
Let me tell you more about what I agree with.
Both Dawkins and Harris are concerned, as I mentioned above, by the tremendous effect that conservative Christians are having on the political process, and the degree to which their beliefs shape public policy that leads to more human suffering. I truly do admire that Richard Dawkins is attempting to draw together people of like minds to become a more powerful force for their beliefs. The admiration grows from my sense that in large measure, his political agenda would be similar to mine in some important ways.
I was also surprised that he acknowledged that there’s some good religious thinking going on in the world. In his preface to the new paperback edition of his book, he responds to the criticism that he’s heard. Here’s some of the criticism and his response:
"You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best. You go after crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in."
If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible.
And I’m sad to say that I think he’s spot on again. The kind of religion that he’s talking about here is just the kind that I like to think we find in Unitarian churches, where we seek to speak the truth, where we are bound more by what we are able to learn from many sources in the world than by something written centuries ago. We’re more concerned with what helps people, what limits cruelty, what heals and makes whole than we are with arguments about heaven and whose going to get there.
In fact, Dawkins is himself just this sort of religionist, too. Listen to what he says about Einstein who often spoke of God:
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself:
“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”
In this sense I too am religious with the reservation that ‘cannot grasp’ does not have to mean ‘forever ungraspable.’ [He goes on:] But I prefer not to call myself religious because it is misleading. It is destructively misleading because, for the vast majority of people, ‘religion’ implies ‘supernatural’.
While I think he is onto something here, I’m not sure I wholly agree that it is the vast majority of people who equate religion with supernatural.
So enough of my agreements, allow me to say ‘and’ to add to this conversation. And, I think Dawkins and Harris both tend to harsh, insulting, dogmatic arguments, that don’t further their cause. Whilst both say that they are truly not making arguments about a straw God, both, it seems to me, fall into just that trap, taking shots at a God that I honestly think isn’t what most people mean when they use that term.
Karen Armstrong, author of several books on human understandings of God through the ages, tells us that there have always been a variety of ways that people approached the concept of God. In every age in the three religions of the book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – there have been those who claimed to know precisely what and who God was, those who understood God, as Dawkins suggests him to be, as a supernatural being that has interest and power over human endeavours. As well, there have always been the mystics, whose understanding of God diverged radically from those who had a materialistic perspective of God. That is, there have always been those who sought to experience in depth a relationship with all that is, a mysterious and unlimited Absolute, what Tillich called the Ground of Being.
Armstrong goes so far as to suggest that this understanding of God may be the most logical alternative to the God that Dawkins goes to such lengths to prove does not exist. Armstrong says:
This God (of the mystics) is in tune with the atheistic mood of our secular society, with its distrust of inadequate images of the Absolute. Instead of seeing God as an objective Fact, which can be demonstrated by means of scientific proof, mystics have claimed that he is a subjective experience, mysteriously experience in the ground of being. This God is to be approached through the imagination and can be seen as a kind of art from, akin to the other great artistic symbols that have expressed the ineffable mystery, beauty and value of life.
Armstrong’s read on the God of the mystics is right on target. This God has never held the center position throughout the history of the three major religions of the west. This has been marginalized or outlawed over the centuries, but there are always pockets and practitioners who sought this sort of relationship. We see some of it, I think, in the spiritual- but-not-religious talk that we hear from large numbers of people. It is reflected in the growing popularity of practices like meditation and yoga. Armstrong adds a cautionary note, though:
Mystics often insist that human beings must deliberately create this sense of God for themselves, with the same degree of care and attention that others devote to artistic creation. It is not something that is likely to appeal to people in a society which has become used to speedy gratification, fast food and instant communication. The God of the mystics does not arrive readymade and prepackaged. He cannot be experienced as quickly as the easy ecstasy created by a revivalist preacher, who quickly has a whole congregation clapping its hands and speaking in tongues.
It is the cultivation of a relationship with the ineffable, the absolute, the ground of being that upholds and sustains us, the source of life and the home to which we will eventually return as we breathe our final breath, it is the cultivation of a relationship with that ultimately unnameable reality that I seek in my spiritual life, to inspire me, to keep my feet firmly rooted on the ground, to open me to the wonder and the tragedy of our lives.
With some reservations, I do applaud the work that this new strain of vocal atheists are doing. Though more harsh and disrespectful that I think is helpful in the world, still they are lifting up what has become an inadequate – and often dangerous – God, and are urging people world round to seek for what is next. Armstrong notes this more blandly:
When religious ideas have lost their validity, they have usually faded away painlessly: if the human idea of God no longer works for us in the empirical age, it will be discarded. Yet in the past people have always created new symbols to act as a focus for spirituality. Human beings have always created a faith for themselves, to cultivate their sense of the wonder and ineffable significance of life. The aimlessness, alienation, anomie and violence that characterize so much of modern life seem to indicate that now they are not deliberately creating faith in “God” or anything else – it matters little what – [and because of that] many people are falling into despair.
I hope that we can be in the work of creating that whatever comes next. The world is well set for what might come next, for a new awakening of spiritual life, and I think we have the opportunity to be a force for that creation.
The goose hunters of our story got captured in an argument that kept them from their goal. Let us not get captured in the same way, fighting about whose God we are or are not reaching out to, calling upon, gathering to explore and understand. Let us instead, continue to keep open our community, and work to build a vibrant home ourselves and all who would join us in this great ongoing search and journey.