About belief

I’m not so sure, but maybe the title of this piece should be “About doubt”.

I remember as a teenager in the 70’s being inspired and moved by Jacob Bronowski’s BBC documentary series “the Ascent of man”, which celebrated the rise of science. One programme traced the pivotal rôle played by doubt in the progress of scientific knowledge. Only by calling into doubt received ideas, especially when they do not match one’s observation of reality, is it possible for science to move forward. He ended the programme by visiting Ausschwitz where many members of his family had died in the holocaust. Standing in the pond into which the ashes of the dead had been tossed, he concludes that this is what absolute certainty leads to and pulls out a handful of slime... A powerful image.

It is of course the same kind of absolute certainty that leads young men to blow themselves up killing innocent bystanders in the name of Islam.
One should not be afraid of admitting that one is not absolutely certain.
So I myself am not sure; I don’t know if there is a god. Technically that makes me an agnostic (from the Greek for “one who does not know”).
From the point of view of intellectual honesty it seems to me to be the only tenable position in this world. We cannot know.
In its way, to be an outright atheist, taking for certain the non-existence of God, is just as much a leap of faith as to be a believer in God.
Of course, in a sense, belief is not a question of knowledge at all but of faith.

I think I was born without the gene for faith (or I have not been granted that grace, as the theologians may put it). I cannot remember ever believing. As a boy I found there always seemed to be something distinctly implausible and questionable about what I was told in sermons in churches, at Sunday school, in religious instruction, or “divinity” as it was bizarrely called at my grammar school.
Let me say straightaway here that I am grateful for having been taught bible stories and a working knowledge of Christianity as it enables me to make sense of large parts of the history, art and literature of Western civilization which is thoroughly imbued with it. In fact I think it’s a shame that many young people these days do not have that knowledge. Especially in the protestant countries, where from the Reformation onwards the Bible was made available in the vernacular as the first widely circulated printed text, biblical references inform a not inconsiderable part of the very language we use.
So it is important to be familiar with Chirtianity to understand many things around us in the West.
Christianity also offers a useful code of values for living in our society. These values are never fully adhered to of course, nor could they be within the context of how we have structured our society, but as an ideal they are worthy of respect. Religion in its established form is a useful vehicle for public morality and all the major religions seek to promote better social behaviour and none of them can be faulted on that count.
Religion also provides the necessary solemnity for the great rituals that surround the fundamental mysteries of life: birth, entry into adulthood, marriage and death; and in societies closer to nature and subsistence agriculture, the rotation of the seasons. Many of us go to church only at the times of such ceremonies. These are functions common to all the great religions that unify societies and help provide a shared identity. As such they are worthy of respect and most people are happy to go along with them and pay lip service to them. It’s just what one does.
However, actually believing in the whole thing is another matter. Real belief or faith is something quite personal and generally I am convinced that any religion has bits in it that an individual believes in fervently and others bits somewhat less so.

When it comes to Christianity I personally believe in hardly any of it at all.
Christianity contains many odd things which familiarity leads us not to think twice about, yet if you were to transpose some of these beliefs, only changing names, to some imagined tribal religion on a Pacific island or in darkest Africa, they would be dismissed as pure mumbo-jumbo. For the best part of two millenia theologians have struggled to provide plausible explanations for the basically implausible.

Let’s start with the virgin birth. I was taught about that before even being given any sexual education. How bizarre is that? For all I knew it may have been the normal way of having children. Only later did the penny drop. In many mythologies it’s common for gods to beget children on humans to create demi-gods. At least Zeus had the decency to assume human or animal form to do it. In Christianity there is no contact, it just happens. In part it’s all to do with squaring a whole series of gods with a notionally monotheistic religion which takes us into the difficult area of the Holy Trinity that is essentially having your cake and eating it.
The Virgin Mary herself looms much larger in Catholic countries than in England. She clearly subsumes and perpetuates a much earlier cult of motherhood. Motherhood is of course a fine thing worthy of celebrating, as indeed is apple pie. The trouble with doing it through Mary is that she is a virgin. This is actually quite disturbing and disrespectful of the fundamental laws of nature. I would go so far as to blame on this particular belief some very unhealthy attitudes towards women in Latin males and a more general difficulty the Church seems to have with sexuality.

Heaven and hell. This is a strange one as there is not actually any definitive passage in the Bible on them. However, they are very present in the hysterical hard sell of Christianity through the ages: “Believe the whole package or you will go to hell”.
I have just read Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in which the poet is taken on a tour of the after-life, first by Virgil through Hell and Purgatory, then by Beatrice through Paradise. The “‘Divine Comedy” is a work of fiction, a fantasy, not a divine revelation. It is Dante’s attempt to imagine the after-life by applying strictly the religious and philosophical tenets and beliefs of his age. Thus he needs to change guide after Purgatory because Virgil is not allowed into Heaven. No matter how good a poet he is, he cannot enter Paradise because unfortunately for him he was born prior to Christianity. It is rather odd if we are dealing in eternity that there should be this relatively recent cut-off point. Logically of course for Dante, Mohammed is also in Hell, as a spreader of wrong beliefs. It’s just as well Dante is not about today as there would be a “fatwa” out against him. “Inferno” is one of the finest works of literature I have read. “Paradise” , however, is rather boring. In struggling to get to grips with something that is just spiritual and not material, which is in fact a mystical experience that defies understanding, he presents us with something that is just too elusive.
If there is a Heaven, then it is beyond our grasp. It seems to me that all attempts to imagine heaven and even God, for that matter, run into the limits of our human experience. If there is a heaven, then surely entry into it cannot be conditional on having been born in the right century on the right continent. Also the idea that God should cast into outer darkness humans that won’t believe in him smacks of a petulance and vanity that are altogether human.
Anyway the whole craving to believe in an after-life strikes me in itself to be an act of human vanity, a refusal to accept that “this is it”, a sense of self-importance unwilling to consider its own end, an inability to come to terms with the fact that we are but a moment in the endless time of life, a temporary arrangement of matter that will be superseded by another.
I do believe in an after-life in my children in the sense that half of my genes are carried forward in them to assume a new form and that some of my personality and character rubs off on my offspring. It’s not eternal though. However, mortality doesn’t bother me and frankly I find this life in its positive and negative variety preferable to any notional paradise.
Partly of course that’s because my own life is comfortable. In the past, part of the Church’s connivance in the unfair status quo was to offer future Heaven as a sop to the downtrodden whose experience of this life might otherwise have led them to rebellion. Although it was Marx who coined the phrase “religion is the opium of the people”, curiously enough it was also a trick employed by the communist states themselves as they used to promise utopia tomorrow in return for sacrifice today.
No, I believe in neither heaven nor hell. I believe life goes on after us pretty much as before us, without our physical presence but with our having been here having some transient influence on those who come next, in most cases and in the case of a few exceptional individuals the influence stays for longer. Undoubtedly Christ himself was one of these people, for I certainly believe he existed. I’m not so sure everything written about him is true.

Which brings us to the holy book of Christianity, the Bible. The Bible is a strange book in that most of it, the Old Testament, is co-opted from another religion, mainly to serve as a legitimization in the prophets for the coming of the Messiah. I can’t help thinking that there's a lot of unnecessary baggage here. If you look hard enough you can find everything and its opposite in the Old Testament.
To turn to a part of it being debated today: every old culture has its traditional creation myth; most of which are attractive in their ways and can be taken as symbolic rather than literal. I don’t want to get into an argument as to whether Genesis is to be taken literally. Let me just say that I personally don’t believe it but I think it’s a nice story. I prefer Darwin’s version of the “Origin of the species”. We can never know all about creation, but it is certainly clear that it took longer than six days. However, even if science gets us closer to understanding “how”, it does not address the question “why”; of which more later.
If you’re actually interested in Christianity, then it’s the New Testament you should be reading with its four different versions of Christ’s life and texts setting out in greater detail his teachings and then bizarrely the rather odd book that is “Revelation”.
To believe the whole thick book that is the Bible is a bit of a tall order.

To return to the life of Christ, the miracles and the resurrection, I would say that I am at best sceptical.
However, my main problem is that I have never really got the central point of Christianity: the idea that somehow I am saved because Christ died for me on the cross.

I need to start here with the notion that I need to be saved. You see I don’t accept that I am bad and bound for hell (which I don’t believe exists anyway). I don’t believe that man is fundamentally bad. I’m not denying that there are people out there who are evil and have something pathologically wrong with them that leads them to deliberately commit the most horrendous attrocities. Evil exists and is a real problem that cannot be explained away. However, most people I know, including myself, are not intrinsically nasty. We do bad things not so much out of a conscious desire to harm others as out of too great a concern about ourselves and therefore an inability to realize the repercussions of our actions on others. Sometimes we may get bad ideas, sudden desires to harm others, but usually we discard them, because as Adam Smith explains in his “Theory of moral sentiments” our behaviour is dictated by a desire that others should think well of us. There’s a self-regulating enlightened self-interest in a normally constituted person.
At one and the same time we are all outright individualists, yet condemned to live in society. I think the real pulls in the conscience that we have to constantly use our free will to choose between are not so much the stylized black and white of “good and evil” but something much greyer: what is best for me and what is right for others. Ultimately they coincide, because in both a moral and practical sense, since I live in society, what is right for the collective is to my benefit. In the short term they may not appear to coincide and we may make mistaken choices.
People on the whole are good because they work at it, it’s a lifetime effort of trying harder to recognize the bad impulses and say no to them. The Christian virtues and teachings of Christ are all helpful here. But where does Christ himself come in, other than having been an interesting philosopher who lived 2000 years ago and whose teachings were recorded for our benefit?

Probably my mistake here is to forget that Christ is not just human but also divine. Assuming I can get my head around that one, how exactly does his dying a gruesome death, and then being resurrected so as to prove he wasn’t really human after all, mean (if I choose to believe in him) that it no longer matters how many times I made the wrong moral choice, I still have a place in heaven. I’m sorry, but I just don’t get the mechanics of that.
In some way it must be a throwback to propitiating the gods with an animal sacrifice as in Homer or a human sacrifice as with the Aztecs to the sun. Christ is after all the Lamb of God. But how am I redeemed by this sacrifice; what is the link between that historic event and me now ?
But isn’t this propitiation of a potentially vindictive god all rather strange and more in keeping with barbaric religions we have dismissed?
Also have you ever considered another wholly bizarre aspect of Christianity which is the cannibalistic symbolism of the communion: the wine and the wafer as the blood and flesh of Christ ? While I believe that the sharing of food is fundamental to the human experience of community, why should we imagine that we are eating Christ ?
Again we are back to some atavistic pagan beliefs of an ancient society which sit uneasily with a whole elaborate theology thought up by the founding fathers drawing heavily on the work of the Greek philosophers.

At another level it is also implied that as a non-believer all my moral efforts at being a better man are useless; I might as well sin as much as I want, then repent and say I believe. Where is the motivation to be good in that ? And how does the careful weighing in the balance of our good and bad deeds at the Last Judgement, before being allocated our appropriate place in heaven or hell, square with having a “get out of jail free” card in our back pocket because we believe in Christ ? (The answer in Dante is Purgatory.)
Again we’re back to “If you buy into this whole rather improbable set of beliefs, the actually unlikely but still possible after-life in hell will be avoided”. Christianity is reduced to an insurance policy: just in case it turns out to be true after all, you might as well have it - and generations have succumbed to this hard sell of the monopolistic Church.

So in Christianity there is a whole series of things I don’t really get or believe in. I’m not against it as a belief, it just doesn’t work for me.
I was brought up in a notionally Christian society, I say notionally becuase the contradictions between what was taught and what was lived were always flagrant to me. I recognize Christianity as the background noise of my culture. I think the King James Bible contains some of the finest poetry in English. I enjoy some of the greatest achievements of Western art which are inspired by Christianity: the great gothic cathedrals; the painting of Michelangelo and Caravaggio; the sacred music of Bach. Yet actually I believe all these works are a celebration of the creative force and spirit of Man as much as they are a glorification of Christ and God.
I’m happy with the core of the moral teaching without all the packaging it comes in. There is one patronizing argument which says that the packaging of any religion, the rituals, the rules, the stories, are there to pass on the message to those who otherwise are not interested in thinking through all the issues about life for themselves. I myself am ready to respect anyone’s system of beliefs on the evidence of their behaviour.
At a collective level, I see belief as a personal means to a social end. If people are happy to buy the ready made package with no questions asked, conform to it and thereby be good citizens, then I think that’s wonderful, whether that package is called Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism or whatever. In fact all the great world religions and teachings have on that level much the same content.
Where I start to have a problem is when a believer subscribes 100% to a perverted version of the religion, usually disowned by the mainstream and then takes it as a justification for harming even killing others. In that sense there probably is a need for organized religion to keep the flock together and prevent slippage into heresy. The downside is that organized religion like any other large organization tends to become self-serving, interested in its own preservation and fuelled on hypocrisy.

I myself am happier with the idea of personal belief.
That’s because at the individual level, I see belief as a personal means to answer the basic riddle of life, why? what is life for? It is a question you can only answer for yourself because as Pascal says, you die by yourself. This is a question which at some stage must cross all human minds. Animals we take it don’t bother about it, they just get on with life; but it is axiomatic that self-aware human beings always have been bothered by the question.

So having discarded the trappings of Christianity, while recognizing its place in our Western culture and its value to society as a moral teaching, do I believe in God? God, after all, is a concept that goes beyond Christianity. In principle, the three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, share the same single God. So as Lessing’s Nathan says: “Why fight over it between the three?” (that protest is as relevant today as it ever was, thinking of Al-Qaeda and Palestine).
In a broader sense there is through most cultures a belief in the existence of the divine, the numinous something beyond our world that created it and maintains its order. Usually and optimistically, this God, for want of a better word, is benevolent. How could he be otherwise if he has given us the world and life ? However, it need not be the case. Kleist in one of his depressed moments pondering the reason for man’s existence wondered “What if there is a God and he is malevolent ?” That’s perhaps not a belief worth entertaining (Kleist killed himself).
I do see room though, as in some systems of belief, for both a god of creation and a god of destruction, a good cop and a bad cop, God and Satan. However, I don’t actually see the dichotomy in moral terms, because when an individual suffers from being on the receiving end of nature, it is purely random. Beliefs such as “God sent hurricane Katrina to punish the evil people in iniquitous New Orleans” or “God created AIDS to punish homosexuals” are strictly unacceptable in the modern world. The truth is there is a lot of unpleasantness out there in the world and nature that it is hard to account for. The Christian trick is to finesse this by saying that “God moves in mysterious ways”, thereby solving the many problems of disaster, disease, untimely death, injustice, evil and so on, without actually providing a valid explanation, merely stating “God knows what he is doing, even if we don’t”.
In hesitating, then, whether to believe in God or not, I am considering only the existence of a benevolent or just God. But to be honest, I don’t know if there is one.

Nor am I sure that the certainty of God’s existence would increase the meanigfulness of my life. I’m not convinced that “God” is actually a useful shorthand answer to the question “what is life for ?”
I believe we are all part of something larger, society and nature.
I believe the meaning of life clearly transcends the individual.
What exactly it may be is something elusive, but it is worth seeking in many ways, in many places, in many teachings, in many books. There is a real yearning in many people for a spiritual dimension to their lives. The feeling that mere material gratification is not enough is what prompts the present revival in religion in a world that until recently we mistakenly thought to be post-religious. There is a void at the heart of the life of modern man which, if he perceives it, he is eager to fill. I’m not sure the existence of God would fill it for me. I think the answer is to be found more in a mixture of greater physical and spiritual self-fulfilment, a greater engagement with others, starting with our immediate family and those near to us (the Christian “love thy neighbour”), greater recognition of our value to society and greater awareness of the rest of nature. I believe these kinds of experience can enhance our life and give it meaning.

Ultimately the answer to the question “what is life for ?” is simply “life is for life”. The continuing cycle of life, including the further propagation of our species within the society in which we live, is an end in itself.
The rest is properly a mystery and we cannot know, though we may profitably speculate.

Pascal after his many “Thoughts” on the subject reached the conclusion that believing in God is a better bet than not believing in God.
For my part, for the time being as it is not yet time to hedge my bets, I say simply “I do not know”.