Thoughts at Christmastide
On religion, on its nature, and on ours
Of all the strange habits I have, none is more widely shared by others in this world than believing in God. While I call Him God, others have other names, like Jaweh, or Allah. Their conceptions of what God is and how it affects us, rules us, aids us, consoles us and determines what happens when we shake off this mortal coil, all differ, from one form of belief to the other. From one religion to another. My own, Christianity, places great store in the season we are embarking on this evening: as every Christian knows, Jesus’ birth was, when all’s said and done, far less significant in and of itself than His death. It’s His death that gave insight into our reason for being alive at all; it was His death that gave meaning to His birth: and His death could not come without His birth, however immaculately it was conceived.
When people are asked “Are you religious?”, the question is usually consequent upon the asker having observed some act of piety, devotion or insight. It’s an innocent, closed question, the answer to which is either “yes” or “no”. So, what is “being religious”? For you need to know what that is before you can answer the question. And the question ultimately allows of a great number of answers, beyond the two simple alternatives.
Religion is associated in the consciousness with being a member of a church, synagogue, mosque or other religious establishment. But simply being a member of an organisation doesn’t necessarily make of one religious: religiosity is a thing that springs from the sentiments, from the heart, and relies on the believer having faith – nothing more – in the promise of paradise. A place where worry is cast from us, and where existence continues in a state of spirituality, which none of us on this Earth can truly conceive of or know until such time as it befalls us. We dream of paradise and, for some, thus live our existence on Earth as a “fool’s paradise”, on the basis of a superstition for which there exists but scant evidence. Are the religious, therefore, foolhardy believers in paradise? To that comes a series of analyses that are worthy or not of endeavour:
- What difference does it make to me if I believe?
- What difference does it make to anyone else if I believe?
- Can I believe without being a member of a church?
My own belief system is predicated on what I hold to be two truths: first, that God’s existence, as something, is a fact. The form He takes, the nature of His existence and the role He assumes in the lives of us on Earth is open to question. My faith is blind, in pretty much the same way as my faith in an aircraft is blind: they fly, and sometimes come to grief. But their coming to grief does not shake my faith in aircraft as an idea. How they fly is beyond my ken. There are experts who know, and that is sufficient. Their expertise forms a basis for my reliance, backed up by observing aircraft in the sky. That may seem like a rational application of empirical observation and attested fact; but, in religion, it is the very existence of the fact that so often forms a stumbling block to the non-believer.
Facts do not need to be proven: facts of things that pertain to that fact, lacking proof, can, nonetheless, form evidence of that which one seeks to prove. We call that circumstantial evidence; or we reason that, although a fact is not proved, we can deduce that it must be so, because we can disprove any contrary theory. We call that a contrario reasoning.
Galileo’s observations of the sun, from which he deduced that the Earth circumnavigates the Sun, were correct. His deduction was flawed, however. Because two spheres circling one around the other will, from a point of view on the surface of either, appear to circle in exactly the same manner. What Galileo proved was that the one goes around the other, not that the Earth travels around the Sun. He just happens to have been right.
A friend once observed that our outer space is criss-crossed by asteroids and meteors and other flying bits of rock and, in however long, not one of them has hit the Earth. He found that frightening to conceive of. I replied that I thought it is nothing but reassuring. Because, if Earth remained unassailed by bits of flying rock, how could any science explain that fact? If no science can explain it, then is it not possible that God shields us from such harm? To be honest, I have no idea why Earth is shielded from such random missiles. Its atmosphere protects it to a large extent. Many planets have atmospheres, but do they protect them the way ours does us? I won’t go so far as to propound that God cares for his planet by diverting meteors, but I do invite the knowledgeable to assert why collisions are in fact so relatively rare.
The analysis by which we establish facts, in courts or in laboratories, sets down precepts, criteria and laws that govern the physical Earth. Even Albert Einstein was obliged to recant some of his findings about the physical world in the light of discoveries in the field of quantum physics. And there are aspects of quantum physics that defy explanation in terms of Newtonian physics: they just are.
Yet, when confronted by a non-believer about my belief in God, “they just are” is soundly rejected as a convincing argument. The a contrario approach to explaining the absence of collisions with meteors is rejected out of hand. And the “circumstantial evidence” is ousted as poppycock. Nonetheless, I retain an open mind. For the second of my truths is this: that God is not for everyone; He is for every one. The mere existence of a multiplicity of organised and unorganised religions on the surface of our globe bears testament to this. If all roads lead to Rome, then what matters is Rome, not the roads that lead there; nor is it important that we all group together for the journey. Some do, others travel alone. It is reaching the goal that matters, not the route taken to arrive at it or the company in which one undertakes the quest.
The word “religious” comes to us from Latin. The Romans had a strange religious belief system: that they had numerous gods is well rehearsed, but their belief structure extended far beyond the established gods of Aurora, Bacchus and Concordia and so on. Their gods were talismans invoked to accompany any endeavour and could even be personalised. In fact, the malleable concept of a god as applied by the Romans is so close to the notion of a universal God, it is a wonder that they never made that intellectual side-step themselves. What the Romans’ and Greeks’ preoccupation with gods demonstrated beyond all else was what we monotheistic religions would later take up and run with, with glee: the concept of religion as a unifying element that could be abused to pursue the aims of men, while conveniently forgetting the very aims of the god around which they unified.
Those who reject the notion of deity are nevertheless, on the whole, religious. The Latin word may stem from relegere, which means “to re-read”. Or from religere, “to bind tightly”. Before it came to be adopted in its current senses, it meant “careful, anxious, or scrupulous”, and that is a meaning it retains, even in a reflection of what its modern meaning in fact is: those who reject religion often in fact end up adopting it. Not with crosses or stars of David or signs of the crescent moon, but in the context of their lifestyles. Whether in the job they do, or the way they run their families or in their devotion to a sport or pastime. In short, everyone has something that they do religiously.
At work they may realise their employer has faults. They bind to it with devotion despite that. Because it holds for them a promise for the future. They forgive it its misdemeanours and pledge selfless commitment to it. They have faith in it, despite sometimes scant evidence of its faith in them. If these are things that defy explanation, then they are nonetheless sentiments that find an equivalent in religious devotion to a god. The confrontation between belief and non-belief is less problematic than the confrontation inherent in a yardstick that becomes flexible, according to whether it’s applied to others or oneself. But that is simply human nature.
God is above nature. Supernatural. We shall, I believe, be so one day as well. Until then, what distinguishes us on Earth from other living things is indeed nature, of which we are part. And, inspiring though Katherine Hepburn’s immortal line to Humphrey Bogart in the classic film “The African Queen” might be, we know that in many respects we in fact fall short of her maxim: “Nature, Mr Allnut, was what we were put on this Earth to rise above.”
I wish you all a very merry Christmas. I hope it means as much to you as it does to me.
In God We Trust: the mark of faith, which is trust, as emblazoned on US bank notes. It’s of course a perversion: the trust is in the might of the US economy to back its paper when it’s exchanged for hard goods. The trust is in the corporations that generate economic wealth, not in God. But it is God that will be prayed to when the corporations fail. When pushed to it, everybody prays.