Atheist's apology for Christianity Flashcards
My aim here is unlike either of those. Indeed, what I’m trying to argue is almost the exact opposite. De Botton takes ‘atheism’ to be the default position of the rational human mind, and then turn to ‘religion’ to see what can be salvaged from it without sacrificing their agreeable, rational disbelief in God. That doesn’t interest me. Empirically, religion is what most humans do. Atheists like me are in the minority, a statistically trivial aberration.
What happens when Christianity stops being a marginal sect, rejected and persecuted by the Roman Empire, and becomes, in a literal sense, the Roman Empire? The Islam described in the Qur’an is a religion consonant with the structures of social power. Crucial to it is the idea that submission to the law (since the law comes from God) is equally required for good social order and good spiritual health.
This is one of the beauties of Christianity as a world faith: the fact that Christ was a nobody; a commoner; a carpenter who had given up even that humble profession for a life of holy vagrancy.
Imagine Christ being incarnated as a wealthy Roman senator rather than a poor Jewish carpenter. He would have worn finer clothes, eaten better food and lived in a nicer house. Let’s extend the thought experiment, and imagine him becoming emperor, worshipped as a god by his people. By how much would these improvements diminish the gap between mortal existence and divine plenitude?
By how much less would such a figure have been transcendentally exiled than was actually the case? Clearly the answer is: by an infinitesimal amount. The difference between immortal, omnipotent God and any mortal human being is so great that the question of whether the particular mortal human being is rich or poor seems irrelevant.
Assume there is a God, and then ask: why does He require his creations to believe in Him? Putting it like this, I suppose, it looks like I’m asking you to think yourself inside the mind of deity, which is a difficult exercise. But my point is simpler. God is happy with his other creations living their lives without actively believing in him (which is to say: we can assume that the whale’s leaping up and splashing into the ocean, or the raven’s flight, or the burrowing of termites is, from God’s perspective, worship; and that the whale, raven and termite embody this worship without the least self-consciousness).
On those terms, it’s hard to see what He gets from human belief in Him — from human reduction of Him to human proportions, human appropriation of Him to human projects and battles, human second-guessing and misrepresentation.
