Christianity Irreplaceable, Says Confirmed Atheist

Chapter Four

THE PREDICTABLE FUTURE



"Christendom is no longer Christendom. The faith that Christ was
literally the Son of God, which dominated the Western world for fifteen
centuries, and effectively united all the men of our race for ten, has
become the faith of a minority.

It is vain to wish that this calamity had not happened, and nugatory to
try to blame our enemies for it, however cunning and malevolent they may
be. For it is our destinyâ??the destiny that is biologically innate in our
race and the only source of our greatness and of the power than enabled us
thus far to survive in a world in which we are a small and universally
hated minorityâ??to think philosophically about the external and physical
world, and to seek objective truth, at whatever cost to our vanity or
comfort. As Lawrence R. Brown says, in the book that I quoted before,
"Whatever has been easier to believe than to discover has never been what
created the unique greatness of our society. Not the comforting
satisfaction of inward belief, but the potential humiliation of outward
fact has been the last standard of truth in the West." And that has been
the principal cause of the waning of what was once our common faith.

We cannot expect, therefore, within the foreseeable future any increase in
the number of believing Christians, who now number about 12% of adult
Americans; on the contrary, a gradual decrease is possible and in some
circumstances likely, since the majority of them are now in or past middle
age.*

(* I need not remark that no one should take seriously the little bands of
hysterical adolescents who occasionally try to attract attention by
emerging from the communal squalor of their kibbuzim and yelling "Jesus!"
instead of "Peace in Vietnam!" Although some enterprising operators in the
evangelical business advertise such outbreaks as harbingers of a "revival
of faith," it is quite clear that the young derelicts, insofar as they are
not indulging in mere exhibitionism, are actuated by the hallucinations
that normally occur in minds that have been rotted by the drugs now
commonly used by children in the public schools, chiefly marijuana,
mescaline, lysergic acid diethylamide, and heroin. The febrile excitement
of derelicts "hooked on Jesus" is merely a variation of their
feeble-minded enthusiasm for every kind of occult posturing and
mystery-mongering, including witchcraft, black magic, Satanism, astrology,
oneiromancy, necromancy, and innumerable adaptations of various Oriental
cults. More disturbing are the reports of colonies of youngsters who,
reportedly without the help of hallucinatory drugs, exchange thoughts with
a superior race on Jupiter, chat with visiting spooks, or have at the top
of their skull a psychic opening through which the Holy Ghost whispers
instructions. Like the "hippies," these unfortunates are commonly
graduates of the cut-rate diploma-factories that are still called
"universities." That is a fact that will be terribly significant to those
who are not afraid to think about it.)

We have no reason to anticipate a drastic and revolutionary change in the
scientific evidenceâ??a discovery, for example, that the earth ceased to
rotate on its axis for a day or two when the Israelites invaded Canaan, or
that stars outside the solar system are optical illusions. Rightly or
wrongly, a great many men of intellectual integrity can now discern no
evidence of the existence in the universe of a conscious power superior to
man, and, precisely because they are men of intellectual integrity, they
are not going to change their deductions in the absence of radically new
evidence that is intellectually cogent to them. And precisely because they
are men of our race, who reason from dispassionately ascertained data, they
are not going to be swayed by the emotions of orating evangelists, and they
will be simply disgusted by attempts to equate "atheism" and "Communism."

No one doubts but that the power of manâ??which, for all practical
purposes, means the power of our raceâ??is small indeed. We and our planet
and our whole solar system are infinitesimal motes in a galaxy that is
itself an insignificant part of the known universe. No one doubts,
furthermore, but that for many phenomena we have no satisfactory
explanation. But knowledge cannot be derived from what is not known, and
to deify known natural forces is to resort to a mocking evasion, not
unlike that of Epicurus. In the 1930â??s, Leopold Ziegler thought that the
Second Law of Thermodynamics was a quite satisfactory "god" and others have
applied that term to biological evolution toward more complex organic
forms, to the fact of human consciousness, to instincts found in one or
more races that seem analogous to a growing plantâ??s heliotropic striving
for sunlight, to the theories of indeterminacy or of parity in sub-atomic
physics, and a wide variety of other phenomena. But no alert Christian
will be deceived. His God is a conscious being, a personal God, a God who
is aware of, and has concern for, the individual; He is a God to whom one
can pray.

Men prayed to the Sun when they believed that that incandescent globe was
a conscious being who could hear them; but nobody prayed to the Great
Mystery that [cannot render equationâ??Editor]. Christians rightly regard
the difference between an atheist and a "pantheist" today as the
difference between six apples and half-a-dozen. They can derive no comfort
from the prudential evasions of some writers.

Christians are demonstrably right when they insist that if we and the
other nations of the West were still Christian nations, we should not find
ourselves in our present plight. We should have other difficulties, of
course; we should, no doubt, continue to quarrel among ourselves, and we
should have to face, as now, the open hostility or covert hatred of the
rest of the world. But if we Occidentals were still Christian nations, we
should have no need to worry about International Bankers, Illuminati,
Bolsheviks, Jews, "Liberals," or any other internal menace that you may
choose to name or imagine. Recognition of that fact, however, will not
produce a religious revival. It is a peculiarity of our Indo-European mind
that for us truth is not demonstrated by either comfort or self-interest.
We cannot believe a proposition to be objectively true just because we
wish that it were or because our personal safety depends upon it. No
exposition of present danger, therefore, can create faith.

Is there any hope of a significant increase in the minority that now
believes that Christ was the Son of God?

Some Christians anticipate that the trend will be reversed by divine
intervention, but there is little agreement about the nature of the
expected miracle. Some expect the Second Coming of Christ, which will
provide visible evidence of the truth of Christian doctrine and thus start
a wave of conversions, while others count on Godâ??s application of a
psychological force that will change menâ??s minds and force them to
believe what now seems unreasonable. Others as positively expect a
virtually total loss of faith with miraculous suddenness. Not infrequently
one encounters a Christian, usually a lady, who is quite certain that on a
day in the very near future she and 499 other persons will soar aloft into
the atmosphere, apparently to a level above the cumulus and below the
cirrus cloud-formations, and there float in ecstasy while the rest of the
earthâ??s population is condignly destroyed in a succession of
catastrophes. But the majority of Christians, I am sure, do not count on
impending miracles.

One common ground for hope is, at best, uncertain. We Americans, thanks to
our folly, will soon undergo a considerable amount of physical suffering:
domestic violence, economic collapse, probably some starvation, quite
possibly conquest by foreign invaders and resident revolutionists. It is
true that, as history shows, such afflictions usually induce a revival of
religion, and many Christians expect such an effect here. That is not
likely in the future that we can foresee. For one thing, the historical
effect requires an unremitting and prolonged sufferingâ??thirty years or
more. The Crusade to Save the Soviet in 1939â??45 inflicted great
suffering on many nations of Europe, especially Germany and Poland, but
produced no significant religious revival. Secondly, if there should be
such an effect, it probably would not benefit Christianity. The Protestant
Churches as a whole have long been disgraced by the pinks and punks of the
National Council. The Catholic Church is now committing suicide by
repudiating its own doctrines and burlesquing its traditions. In the eyes
of non-believers now, the religion has been compromised by the antics of
the greater part of the professional clergy, and despite the admirable
loyalty of "traditionalist" and "fundamentalist" minorities, it is likely
that the coming disasters willâ??unjustly, but understandablyâ??make
Christianity seem a religion that failed. Thus any revival of religiosity
will benefit cults that will have the attraction of novelty and a new
"revelation," possibly including some doctrine of metempsychosis.

We are left, therefore, with the present situation and very little hope
that it will or can be soon altered. So we had better reckon with it,
whatever our personal desires or convictions.

The visible consequences of the withering of our religion are enormous,
overshadowing, frightening. Christianity was much more than a religion
comparable to the religion of Osiris in early Egypt, the worship of the
Olympian gods, the Orphic mysteries, or Mithraism. Unlike those cults in
their time and place, Christianity for a large part of our history was the
whole formal basis of our entire culture, the absolute from which were
deduced our moral codes, our laws, and our political systems; it largely
informed our art, inspired our literature, animated our music, and
sustained our men of science. The void that has been left is so great that
few can peer into the dark abyss without vertigo.

There is, however, no rational escape from a question to which there can
be only two answers. Was Christ the Son of God?

Christians answer Yes. And on that faith they found their lives.

The majority of adults today, including most of the persons who are doing
business in the pulpits, answer No. The negative answer cannot be covered
with verbiage about "great Teacher," "social vision," "moral earnestness,"
and the like. There is no escape from logic.

If Christ was not the Son of God and an Incarnate God, then he was, on the
record, a lunatic with delusions that he was. And a lunaticâ??s views on
morality and justice are simply worthless. From this simple alternative
our "modernist" clergy try to escape by claiming that all the passages in
which Christ speaks of his own divinity, or miraculous proof of it is
given, are forgeries concocted by clumsy interpolators, but if that is
true, there is no passage that is exempt from the suspicion of forgery,
and we have to conclude, as did Father Loisy in his famous work on Le
mystère chrétien (1930), that there is no authentic record of what Jesus
saidâ??and, indeed, no certainty that He is not, like the words attributed
to him, merely an invention of the clumsy "interpolators." At the very
best, if Christ was not literally the Son of God, his opinions are of
infinitely less value than the opinions of learned, earnest, and
thoughtful men, such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius in
antiquity, and in modern times, David Hume, Schopenhauer, and Renan. From
that clear alternative there is no escape except in the kind of patter and
chatter that stage magicians use to distract the attention of the audience
from a trick of prestidigitation.

If Christ was not literally the Son of God, the entire morality on which
our civilization was consciously based for so long seems to collapse, to
vanish as an illusion, to be as unfounded as the old nation that the earth
was flat. And this apparent dissolution includes all of the ancient
Indo-European morality that guided our peoples in the many centuries that
preceded our adoption of Christianity.* That is obviously what is
happeningâ??has happened today, when we witness everywhere tacit and
explicit repudiation of all moralityâ??not only Christian teaching, but
the antecedent and basic morality without which civilization is flatly
impossible. And, what is even more disheartening, there seems to be no
basis left for any morality.

(* Christianity, of course, introduced very little that was novel in the
practical ethics governing human conduct in society, most of which were
not only traditional in our race but were common to most civilized
societies, including the oldest of which we have adequate knowledge.
(Clergymen who impudently talk of "Judaeo-Christian ethics" try to give
the impression that the prohibition of theft, adultery, etc. in the Ten
Commandments was some kind of dazzling and miraculous invention, but if
they were honest they would speak of "Sumerian-Christian ethics" in that
connection.) About the only element that can fairly be called a Christian
innovation was the great emphasis on forgiveness as a duty rather than an
act of unnecessary generosity. (Its doctrine of rewards and punishments
after death tended to enforce observance of the whole moral code, but that
is another matter.) The historical antecedents, however, will not help us
now, for our religion was so long regarded as the one and only basis for
morality and the unique source of all right conduct that the earlier
traditions have vanished except insofar as we still instinctively regard
certain actions as dishonorable. Even those feelings, however, may be
consciously repressed as "relics of superstition" by persons who have
reacted strongly against the religion and are proud of having
"emancipated" themselves from it.)

For a long time, men, except a few romantic and evangelical atheists, have
agreed that a viable morality must be based on a religious faith. Hesiod,
whom some scholars place in the ninth century B.C., warned the judges of
his day that Zeus had 30,000 invisible and immortal observers who go
through the whole earth and report the evil deeds of men. A discerning
correspondent, whose letter reached me yesterday, remarks that
"unfortunately, most people need to feel that they are watched by a
superhuman power."

For Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, civilized society must be based on a
generally accepted and uniform religious faith. And, with few exceptions,
the thoughtful non-Christians of our world have held the same opinion.
Renan, for example, took leave of Christianity with elegiac sadness and
deep apprehension: "What is ominous is that we cannot foresee for the
future any means of giving men a code of conduct that they will generally
accept . . . I frankly admit that I cannot imagine how it will be possible
to restore, without the ancient illusions, the foundations of a noble and
serene life."

On a quite different level, the pragmatic and cynical Augustus believed
religion the indispensable basis of political stability, and many rulers
and statesmen, before him and after him, had the same conviction. And some
of the worldâ??s most acute minds have drawn the conclusions that
Machiavelli, perhaps, stated most bluntly:

Principalities and republics that would save themselves from decadence
must above all other things keep uncorrupted the ceremonies of their
religion, and hold it always in veneration; for there can be no greater
symptom of the ruin of a state than to see divine rites held in contempt.
. . They should therefore use every opportunity to foster and augment
their religion, even though they perceive it to be false; and the more
prudent they are and the more they know about natural phenomena, the
greater their obligation to do this.

It is now too late to heed Machiavelliâ??s warning. The disaster that he
apprehended has come upon us.

It is vain to dream of a religion to replace Christianity. Comteâ??s
notion of a "Religion of Humanity," whereby congregations would throng
temples to venerate Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Werner von Braun as
"benefactors," was one of the ideas that occurred to him when he was out
of a straight-jacket, but it should have suggested to his friends and
keepers the need to hustle him into one. True, there have been serious
proposals by eminently sane men, who, however, seem to forget that a
religion must be based on faith, not speculation or psychological
peculiarities. Captain Ludovici is a highly intelligent and earnest man,
and when he wrote his Religion for Infidels (1961), he must have known
that his "rational religion" could appeal only to a few, and had no chance
whatsoever of meeting our societyâ??s need for a unifying faith.

If the faith of Christendom was an error, alien gods can command no true
pietyâ??not even in the little circles where they may enjoy a passing
vogue. The Oriental cults that make wealthy dowagers beam and write
cheques are not for men. Christianity is irreplaceable."<<

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