Belief

I told you so

What follows is a restatement, a rehash, an amalgamation, and stirring of the pot, of ideas, notions and convictions that I carry around with me wherever I go, whenever I go there. And, at some time in the near or distant future, I will restate, rehash, amalgamate or stir them again, because, unlike a Baedecker’s guide, they are not definitive. They are the product of an exploration of which I am unable to give final answers to every last aspect. What I can say to you with certainty is that the life of him or her who does not believe is easy. I don’t know how it’s easy, but it is easy: it is easier to push from oneself evidence of anything than it is to accept the task of examining it with an open mind and declaring oneself prepared to accept it.

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First, though: on 17 October, Robert Roberson III, an inmate in a Texas prison who is condemned to death for a crime that is increasingly being said never to have occurred, will be executed. He is one of a raft of several hundred prisoners across the states of the US that allow execution as a criminal punishment whose guilt has been cast into serious doubt by jurists, judges, professors of law, police officers and personalities. Mr Abbott, the Governor of the State of Texas, remains unmoved by the pleas made in Mr Roberson’s behalf, as does the highest court of the land. I have signed the petition addressed to Mr Abbott at this location and invite you to do likewise, if your conscience moves you to do so. If you live outside the US, you may have difficulty in entering your telephone number, so arrange it in a style of 123 456 7890. Yes, you must identify yourself in order to stand with a voice.

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Christianity is belief in Christ. It’s not a movement and it’s not even a church. The Lutheran Church, as an example, is a church that embraces Christianity, but Christianity is not the Lutheran Church, nor the Roman Catholic Church, nor the Church of Scotland. The CDU—the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands—is a political party in Germany and not a church but a movement, which, despite its name, is also not Christianity, but rather rests on sentiments of Christianity in its politics (at least it says it does).

Christianity is a belief that Jesus was the son of God and was sent by Him to dwell with Man and bring a message of eternal life. That is the core belief. Jews believe in Jesus, but do not believe that He was the son of God. Likewise Muslims. There are more similarities between the belief systems of Muslims, Jews and Christians than you can shake a stick at, but this core difference on the matter of who was Jesus divides them irreconcileably.

Jesus’s message is a message that has, over 2,000 years, been embraced and believed by millions, and whether any of it is true or not, not a single one of them is here to attest to. Much has been attested to by believers during their lifetimes, but sceptics always demand proof, and proof positive is scant. However, even the Roman centurion who witnessed the final moments of Jesus’s life as he expired on the cross was moved to remark, “Truly, this was a son of God.” The temporal and spiritual links that churches contend exist between God and Man are worthy of note (the apostolic succession of the Popes, for instance), but, again, proof there is none. None that would withstand scrutiny in a court of law, and whether that is a test that we particularly want for a matter of belief is really the 64,000 dollar question.

It is in any case a test that those in politics which found in any way on Christian belief might well eschew. In politics, data, proof, evidence, records, documents and attestations are all sought for all kinds of events, facts and policies, but no politicans call for evidence of their own belief; instead they profess belief, and trust that applying a simple two-dimensional badge to their identity will be sufficient to get those who likewise profess their belief to follow them. What politicans profess is often a pipe with a tune worthy of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn.

During His lifetime, Jesus refused to be goaded into declaring Rome His enemy, to rise up against the imperial occupier. One reason why Jesus may have been born into times of occupation in the Middle East is precisely to illustrate the difference between a god who is supposedly on one side or another of a political or military divide and a God who preaches forbearance in even the most trying of circumstances. Once Jesus was dead, His human resistance to applying the word of God to the political battles of His fellow countrymen died with Him, and this allowed free rein among those who so wished to adopt the message He had brought with Him, but as a rallying banner: movements whose main purpose is not to unite peoples under the word of God, but to particularise the word of God and weaponise it against so-called non-believers. It is but a short step from Jesus was the true son of God to Jesus was the true son of God and all who naysay it shall be put to the knife. The hypocrisy in the sentiment falls into a blind spot, from which it can rarely emerge.

At first, it was hard to be Christian: by all accounts, early Christians suffered persecution. We have the striking images of Andrew on his saltire cross, Peter crucified upside-down, Catherine on her wheel, Sebastian pierced with multiple arrows, the flight to Ethiopia—the first Christian nation on Earth. Later, as Christianity took hold, most significantly with the conversion of the Roman Empire to the religion, Christians themselves began to enforce their belief, such as in the Crusades towards the end of the first millennium.

Belief is not a weapon of war. When it nevertheless is wrought into a weapon, it very quickly ceases to matter whether those who parade under its banner ever themselves truly believed: it simply becomes one side of a line drawn in the sand. Belief is like love, hatred, hope and fear: it is visceral and arises from the heart, and not the head. You cannot reason yourself into belief: it is an epiphany that dawns upon you and, in civilised society, he who does not believe from his heart can nonetheless suppress his cynicism (for want of proof) of those who do profess belief, just as he can suppress his hatred of others, regardless of whether he can or cannot prove his accusations as grounds for his hatred. You can lead evidence in court for an act impelled by belief, but you cannot prove in a court of law the belief itself. Belief rests in the individual’s, let us call it their sixth sense. Evidence will be accepted in a court based on perceptions witnessed through any of the other five senses: what we see, hear, feel or touch, smell, and taste. These are the fundaments for all judicial evidence. But no court will lend credence to anything that is sixth-sensed even though there might be multiple evidence of its existence: it remains apocryphal.

In this regard, belief has special meaning. We use the verb to indicate that evidence has convinced us to hold something to be true. Therefore, when courts hear evidence of allegations contained in pleadings, they will evaluate the version of events put forward by one party against that put forward by another and decide which of them they believe. That is belief by the head, using reasoning. But that is not how we believe in God. Belief in God is not something that is absent any evidence, but if it were simply a question of the evidence, nobody would believe, because the concrete evidence is absent. It is possible to reason and conclude in the existence of God by a process of elimination, and if you check my index of articles, you will see a number that try at least to do this. Neither love, not hatred, nor fear nor any other visceral reaction springs from nowhere, and the same is true of belief. It always springs from somewhere. Just as I cannot reason to myself, absent any such trigger, that I am afraid or in love, so I cannot reason that I believe in God. But once I am afraid, even if I may be able to whistle Rodgers and Hammerstein’s little tune, I will never really not be afraid until the cause of my fear is removed. So, I will also believe until the cause of my belief is removed; and, to date, it hasn’t been.

What men and women of politics do is pick up this insubstantiality of belief and turn it to their account. They use belief as a means of banding together in order to conduct battle. If they are Christians, they thereby pervert the very message that Jesus brought to mankind. A perversion sounds like a complete opposite of what is intended, and yet it’s rarely so: a perversion is—there is another word for it—a twist. The picture is not inverted, but it is twisted out of focus. The focus is directed elsewhere. The movement, the belief, the apocryphal story, is hijacked for ulterior ends.

A religion is like a guided tour of a strange place. Up front in the bus is a guide who explains all you need to know to be able, upon conclusion of the tour, to explore the city yourself and find more personal experiences—do beware, part of their job is to entertain you. You must of course have faith that the guide is honest, and truthful, and that their tips and tricks are worth the listening. For, if they misguide you, you will never have the opportunity to truly discover the place you wanted to learn about. It is of course possible to venture forth without a tour bus and guide, and take with you just the guidebook. It is harder, and you will make more mistakes, because your path will be directed not by a pre-arranged guide but simply by your own faith.

Spiritualists, finally, have no bus, no guide, no guidebook. They search, sometimes erringly and sometimes unerringly, for the truth that underpins their faith. They are susceptible to no movement, to no party, to no banner, they simply search for unity. And, to repeat my allusion from the start, whether they ever find it is known only at a time when it is too late for either the believer or the sceptic to say, “I told you so.”