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A Word from
the Ungodly
Hank Parnell
As I grow older, I find I have less tolerance and more contempt for
religious believers of all stripes. True enough, I never had much of
the one or a lack of the other to begin with; but more and more it
seems I cannot get past the two most salient traits of religious
believers: their arrogant conceit and their mendacious hypocrisy. Far
be it from me to kick the crutches out from under a cripple, or get
into some name-calling, hair- pulling contest with any particular
believer of any particular creed. As with the Democrats and
Republicans, there is not a dime's worth of difference between the
three major monotheisms; and the best that can be said for any of
them is perhaps that Judaism is the least offensive and most sublime.
But then it gave birth, more or less, to the other two, which have
about all the sublimity, to say nothing of the subtlety, of a wooden
stake with oil-soaked straw piled around it, or a jet airliner flying
into the side of a tall building. Whatever one can say for religion,
it seems to me one can say much more —and far worse— against it.
There seems little doubt that the origins of religion lie in the very
quality which differentiates man from the rest of the animal kingdom
(and which the major monotheisms have from the first identified as
the source of man's "Original Sin"). Most animals are aware of when
their lives are in danger; but only man can sit and worry about
thermonuclear war, "global warming", and the next asteroid impact
that may wipe us out like the dinosaurs. Religion represents man's
fears of his own mortality and frailties magnified to cosmic
proportions by his imagination. We occupy the central position
regardless. "Man is the measure of all things," even his "God", Whom
it is rather painfully obvious he created in his own image, not the
other way around. For Who is old Yahweh if not the stereotypical
Jewish patriarch, blown up to cosmic proportions? Only in the Book of
Job does He approach the terrible majesty and merciless grandeur of
what a real God of this universe might be like, when He appears in a
whirlwind and likens Himself to the leviathan. For the world as we
apprehend it in our daily lives is not the world as it exists in the
Bible or the Koran, no more than a TV sitcom is an accurate portrayal
of family life. It is rather the senseless rendered sensible, the
unintelligible rendered intelligible, the apparently meaningless
rendered meaningful. It is the wide, wonderful world of human wishful
thinking, where someday we'll all beat our swords into plowshares,
the lion will lie down with the lamb, and neither shall we make war
any more. Since this is nothing like the real world, the universe and
existence in which we must actually live, and is not likely ever to
be anything like it —we've got a war on right now, in case you
haven't noticed; the lion lies down with the lamb
after it breaks the lamb's neck to eat it; and you can beat my sword into a plowshare
when you've pried it from my cold, dead fingers, thank you!— then I think we are
justified in pronouncing the "hopes" and "ideals" of r
eligious believers everywhere to be mere fantasies and delusions, nothing less and
nothing more. Which is all perhaps humanly understandable; but it does not, to my
mind, offer much in the way of an excuse for religious b
elievers, at least at this late date. We now have a fairly accurate body of evidence
to account for our existence, called science; there may be a great disagreement on the
particulars and, indeed, an even greater one in t
he making over the evidence's ultimate interpretation and meaning; but the overall
picture is pretty clear, and there is not much of a way anybody can argue against it
without descending into complete fantasy and the outr
ight denial of reality. It seems certain that at some point in the past that there was
a formative event in which the universe came into being that we call "the Big Bang."
It seems even more certain that the Earth formed
some four billion years ago and that life appeared on its surface shortly thereafter.
While the mechanisms of evolution can be debated —see Paul Weber's "The Orthodox
Church of Evolution" in The Texas Mercury for one of t
he most cogent summations of the debate as it currently exists— the fossil record is
pretty clear as to when and where, if not how or why, life arose on Earth. There has
been a lot of life on this planet before us, and ou
r own span in comparison is so brief as to be almost nonexistent. If indeed "God" made
the universe and the Earth for us, He was apparently in no particular hurry to get to
us, and hasn't really put much time or effort in
to us, which seems at the least a bit odd for the presumed be-all and end-all of His
creation. Of course, one can simply shut one's eyes, invoke Bishop Ussher, and pretend
the whole of science will thereby go away. Yet th
e problem with science is that it is not just another human worldview; it is not a set
of answers engraved from "on high," but a means of asking specific questions about the
world around us, and getting consistent and pre
dictable answers to those questions. And that is all that science is, a means of
asking questions and the body of knowledge accumulated from that process. Science may
be able to "tell" you how to live better; but science
cannot begin to tell you how to live. And yet every hour of every day, science is in
danger of being mistaken for a religion and, indeed, it seems most people can't tell
the difference. The so-called "environmental moveme
nt" is, for example, more a kind of ersatz religion, a secular faith, if you will,
than something based on scientific understanding. As the Danish statistician Bjorn
Lomborg has found out by daring to publish a book expos
ing the many fallacies and frauds of popular environmentalism, the only thing that
keeps one from being burnt at the stake today by one group of "true believers" or
another, the way Giordano Bruno was by the 16th-century
Catholics, is a secular society's laws against assault and murder. Bruno, born as he
was into a non-secular religious society, had no such luxury; and this, I remind you,
is the kind of society religious belief produced,
up until a very few centuries ago. A religious believer would argue that what happened
in the bad old unenlightened past is "unimportant" compared to God's message of "love"
for all of us, and His desire to save us from t
he damnation of Hell which, it must be remembered, is the "loving God's" invention
also. That the evidence for "God's love" can be found only in the believer's mind is
not the terrible imposition upon the believer that on
e might think, since, as a measure of the believer's arrogant conceit, he can perform
all sorts of complex mental gymnastics in order to find "God's love" in the most
unlikely places; places where "God", were He any kind
of self-respecting Entity at all (which, judging by the testimony of those who profess
to believe in Him, He decidedly is not), surely would not Himself claim to have put
it. The believer says, "God makes life tough for u
s so we can better ourselves." I think about that every time I see some starving
child's picture somewhere, belly swollen, flies crawling around his mouth and eyes,
about how God is trying to get that poor child to better
himself by making life so tough for him. "God the Father" practices a form of "tough
love" that would have gotten a human father arrested in any decent municipality long
before our current mania over "child abuse." But,
you see, I am an ungrateful, petulant child who wants "paradise now," unwilling to sit
back and wait for God to hand it to me on a platter after I die, as a reward for being
His good little infant and slave. "God", the fi
rst great collectivist and socialist, wants us to "be less selfish" and be willing to
"sacrifice ourselves for others." We are, after all, "our brother's keeper." That the
concept of a "keeper" must invariably include a w
hip and a cage does not bother the religious believer; indeed, he secretly relishes
the prospect. Nothing fills the empty man up, or makes the dwarf spirit feel more
gigantic, like bossing other people around, deciding wh
o gets burnt at the stake today (for "their own good," of course) and who doesn't. And
the sad and ugly truth is that even the least obnoxious religious believer still can't
keep his dirty, nose-picking, crotch-scratching
, earwax- gouging fingers out of another person's soul except under threat of superior
physical force and/or arrest and prosecution by the civil authorities. If he could do
that, then he wouldn't have a religion at all, j
ust a morality; and religious believers will tell you that no morality can exist
without religion because God is the supreme source of all morality. Resisting the
temptation to break out into peals of hysterical laughter
at the inanity of such a contention, I will simply ask where "God's", or more properly
I suppose, "Allah's" so-called "morality" was on the morning of September 11, to say
nothing of His supposed "love" and "mercy" for th
e weak, helpless and innocent? Well, the religious believer says, evil men can twist
"God's word" to justify all sorts of wickedness. And I will admit that yes, they can,
and have, all throughout human history. For such a
n inflexible would-be moralizer, God's "word" has proved pretty elastic over the
centuries. One might almost get the idea that it doesn't really mean anything except
for whatever interpretation one chooses to give it at t
he time. Today we burn Bruno at the stake and fly an airliner into a crowded building.
Tomorrow we repent and feel sorry and claim that wasn't what "God" wanted us to do at
all. Religion, the father of all collectivism, t
he mother of all evasion of responsibility for one's actions, certainly does have a
great deal to "teach" us; but the true lessons aren't at all what the religious
believer likes to pretend they are, "morality" being the
last and least among them. In the end, to be sure, we are faced with death. And here
is the point at which the religious believer is at his emptiest and smallest. If there
is a Hell, I plan to go there. Believers will sne
er and scoff; just as they assure us there are "no atheists in foxholes", they know
that no one would willingly choose Hell over Heaven. I would maintain that this
depends on whether or not one has a true morality, whethe
r one sets standards for oneself and tries to live up to them; or whether one simply
accepts whatever standards already exist and allows them to be imposed upon one from
without, by "God", "religion", "society" and other
semantic constructs and conceptual nonentities. Philip Wylie once observed that in
truth there could be nothing but atheists in a foxhole, since a battlefield is the
last place one would expect to find evidence of God and
His "love", "mercy", "compassion", "brotherhood", and all that other gushy-gushy,
gooey-gooey religious stuff. (Religious believers would open a cesspool and claim they
smell perfume.) Likewise I expect Heaven to be the
last place one would find a genuinely decent person possessed of an authentic
morality. There cannot, after all, be anybody in Heaven who is not some sort of
pitiful cross between a child and a slave; "no one comes to the
Father but by me," said Jesus, whose true message was in fact not that we should all
"love one another" but, as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson insist on reminding us,
"submit to Jesus or burn in Hell forever." Hell is w
here I expect to find anyone worth knowing; and if I have to put up with a lot of
murderers, thieves, tyrants and thugs for the rest of eternity, well, frankly, I doubt
I'll be able to tell much difference between Hell an
d life right here on Earth, so what's the big deal? At least I'll be free of all the
arrogantly smug conceit and contemptible hypocrisy I have to put up with in this
world. But actually, I expect there to be nothing, as t
here was before I was born. Unbelievable as it may be to the believer, this does not
frighten me, though it does piss me off a little —I may not care much for the world
and the rest of you people; but I am kind of fond of
myself. Still, all the evidence points to the conclusion that the universe itself
will eventually die someday; the difference between tomorrow and billions of years
hence is not one that's going to matter greatly, I susp
ect, when the time comes. At least four times in my life I have faced the certain
possibility of death; in none of those times did I call upon, feel the "presence" of,
or even the need to ask for the "help" of God. The re
ligious believer would insist that I am either lying or insane, possibly both. And
this, to be sure, is in a nutshell my objection to the religious believer: that he is
a self-deluded hypocrite, attempting to sugarcoat an
d/or deny the very horrors and uncertainties I try to come to grips
with by facing them honestly. It seems the twain shall never meet;
and I can see no recourse for the religious believer and the
nonbeliever like myself to be able to live in peace except under the
laws of a secular, civil society, where we are each free to believe
as we choose as long as we don't try to force the other fellow to
agree with us. At which point the question arises: is this not too
much to ask of the religious believer, since his whole raison d'etre
is tied up in not only saving his own soul, but mine as well? It is
not, I think, a question to which any religious believer would give
me an honest answer, no more than I expect he would on any other
subject under the sun.
Hank Parnell
End<{{{
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
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"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe
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believe in anything merely on the authority of Teachers, elders or wise men.
Believe only after careful observation and analysis, when you find that it
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all.
Then accept it and live up to it."
The Buddha on Belief, from the Kalama Sutta
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A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled
one is truly vanquished. -Johann Christoph Schiller,
German Writer (1759-1805)
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It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that
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"Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart
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Universal Declaration of Human Rights
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--- Ernest Hemingway
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