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In the film Bruce Almighty Jim Carrey is allowed by God to run the world for a day. He’s a nice guy and says yes to all prayers. Both he and the world quickly spiral into chaos. While the film reminds us that this is God’s world and not some human invention, trying to see how we are in fact better off with God can be bewildering in the face of unforeseen death.
Now and the hour of our death; these two moments in life are inevitably drawing closer together. For the 26 Polish pilgrims killed so tragically in a coach crash in France on their way home, the two moments unexpectedly became the same moment. The knowledge that they had been visiting the shrine dedicated to the Virgin Mary at La Salette only underlined the poignancy of this sudden, unmerited death.
They will have recited the Hail Mary many times on their pilgrimage and maybe they were reciting it at the moment their coach crashed through the safety barriers; perhaps its concluding phrase was on their lips in their final agony: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” The image of good and devout people saying that prayer just before they died will be a comfort to their relatives. But in the many stages of grief their families may also experience anger with the God who allowed this to happen.
When bad things happen to good people, it is hard to suppress our indignation: and because religious believers are sometimes tempted to see faith as keeping our side of a bargain with God, we can be just as indignant. Why does God allow it?
It is scant consolation to the relatives of the Polish pilgrims that some kind of brake failure or driver error may have been the cause of the crash. Even if human fallibility had a hand in causing the tragedy, we can still ask God: why then, why pilgrims, why? The same question is asked of moral evils such as murder and war: why does God not protect the innocent? And we can ask the question even more forcefully when facing natural evil such as earthquakes, where there are no human agents – only human victims.
Our first response to such tragedies is the same for atheist and theist alike: we want to help. The Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 that killed 200,000 people evoked a tidal wave of generosity. The deluges currently striking our own country are not on that scale but they too evoke waves of loving kindness: the passer-by who swam to haul a driver to safety through the car’s sun roof; people whose own homes were flooded piling sand bags to save other people’s houses; a hotel opening its doors to the elderly.
But the question still nags. How can God either allow or, even worse, cause such suffering? For the atheist, the answer is: God does not allow or cause such suffering because God does not exist. The agnostic may want to believe in God but simply cannot see how evil and God can coexist. For the indifferent, Cardinal Newman’s words may apply: “To them, the difficulty is only so much gain, for it gives them an apparent reason, a sort of excuse, for not going with God’s rule, for deciding in their own way.” Yet atheists, agnostics and the indifferent are unable to dislodge the persistence of faith in others.
Which leaves the believer affirming that since God is all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful, God must have made the best Universe that it is possible to make. The interplay between human freedom, the laws of nature and the love of God is the right mix. Sometimes personal pain and suffering may eclipse the vision of God but the faithful wait for the light to return; this holding on to faith is the virtue of hope. And if we want a role model for hope, then we need look no further than Job.
The Book of Job tells the story of the archetypal just man who perseveres in hope. When he experiences the sudden loss of his wealth and his children, he still prays: “God has given and God has taken away, blessed be God.” When he loses his own health and sits in the ash pit scraping the pus from his sores, even his wife tells him it’s time to curse God. But he refuses. He cries out to God and demands to know why he is suffering. His comforters insist he must have done something wrong and that he is being punished for it. But Job has a clean conscience and refuses to accept that there is any link between his suffering and moral wrongdoing. Job simply does not understand what is happening to him, yet he refuses to let go of faith in God. When God finally addresses Job it is to affirm that faith: God is the all-powerful creator of the Universe, whose plans cannot be understood by human beings; so Job falls silent in the face of God’s overwhelming wisdom.
For reasons known only to God, the world is as it is. We are invited to join in God’s creative act of world-making which we now know is not a seven-day wonder but a continuous bringing to birth. To hold on to this vision in the face of injustices and natural disasters is the very act of faith; it is to believe that caring for victims and striving for a just society are the very heart of life.
A classic image of Mary in art is that of her cradling the corpse of her son, Jesus. Amid the floods and the coach crashes, faith invites us all to join Mary in cradling the living and even the dead, knowing that these acts of faith and love are filled with hope, now and at the hour of our death.
Christopher Jamison is the Abbot of Worth and author of Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for Everyday Life
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Am I my brother’s reviewer? A word of explanation is needed here. Some of you may know that I have a brother, Christopher, who disagrees with me about almost everything.
Some of those who read his books and articles also know that I exist, though they often dislike me if so. But in general we inhabit separate worlds – in more ways than one.
He is of the Left, lives in the United States and recently became an American citizen. I am of the Right and, after some years in Russia and America, live in the heart of England. Occasionally we clash in public.
We disagreed about the Iraq War – he was for it, I was against it. Despite the occasional temptation, I have never reviewed any of his books until today.
But now, in God Is Not Great, he has written about religion itself, attacking it as a stupid delusion.
This case, I feel, needs an answer. Most of the British elite will applaud, since they see religion as an embarrassing and (worse) unfashionable form of mania.
And I am no less qualified to defend God than Christopher is to attack him, neither of us being experts on the subject.
People sometimes ask how two brothers, born less than three years apart, should have come to such different conclusions.
To which I’d answer that I’m not sure they’re as different as they look, and that it’s not over yet.
Christopher has quite often written and spoken about our upbringing and background, whereas I haven’t, but I think I’m now entitled to give a small account of what we have in common.
Because my father was in the Navy, we were brought up in a very old-fashioned Britain. Looking back, it often seems to have been a sombre landscape of grey warships and the stench of fuel-oil – but also of cathedral towers, bells and choral evensong.
Our boarding-school education, mainly on the edge of Dartmoor, took place in conditions closer by far to the Thirties than to now.
Our ancestry, so far as I have been able to dig it up, is a volatile mixture. On my father’s side, fierce West Country nonconformists mixed with gentle, rather saintly Hampshire Anglicans. One grandfather was a pioneer of the National Union of Teachers and a straggler from the First World War, saved from the trenches by being sent to India.
Well into the Sixties his house was a museum of the world before 1939: no telephone, no TV, but a quietly singing kettle always on the hob and a mangle in the porch, and he refused to read fiction because he thought it immoral.
As for the other grandfather, I have yet to track him down, and we were always told he was "killed in the war", which is true in the sense that he was run over by a bus in the blackout.
From what I can gather, nobody was sorry about this, least of all his wife, my mother’s mother, who had long before thrown him out of the house for his misdeeds.
She was partly Jewish, granddaughter of an immigrant from Prussian Poland, who confused things greatly (from the point of view of the racially obsessed) when he married a nice English girl.
There’s enough material in that background for quite a lot of fraternal variety, I think.
Christopher is an atheist. I am a believer. He once said in public: "The real difference between Peter and myself is the belief in the supernatural.
"I’m a materialist and he attributes his presence here to a divine plan. I can’t stand anyone who believes in God, who invokes the divinity or who is a person of faith."
I don’t feel the same way. I like atheists and enjoy their company, because they agree with me that religion is important.
I liked and enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anybody who is interested in the subject. Like everything Christopher writes, it is often elegant, frequently witty and never stupid or boring.
I also think it is wrong, mostly in the way that it blames faith for so many bad things and gives it no credit for any of the good it may have done.
I think it misunderstands religious people and their aims and desires. And I think it asserts a number of things as true and obvious that are nothing of the sort.
At the heart of this book are two extraordinary, bold statements. One is a declaration of absolute faith, faith that religion has got it wrong, a mental thunderbolt of unbelief.
Christopher describes how at the age of nine he concluded that his teacher’s claim that the world must be designed was wrong. "I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong."
At the time of this revelation, he knew nothing of the vast, unending argument between those who maintain that the shape of the world is evidence of design, and those who say the same world is evidence of random, undirected natural selection.
It’s my view that he still doesn’t know all that much about this interesting dispute. Yet at the age of nine, he "simply knew" who had won one of the oldest debates in the history of mankind.
It is astonishing, in one so set against the idea of design or authority in the universe, how often he appeals to mysterious intuitions and "innate" knowledge of this kind, and uses religious language such as "awesome" – in awe of whom or what?
Or "mysterious". What is the mystery, if all is explained by science, the telescope and the microscope? He even refers to "conscience" and makes frequent thunderous denunciations of various evil actions.
Where is his certain knowledge of what is right and wrong supposed to have come from?
How can the idea of a conscience have any meaning in a world of random chance, where in the end we are all just collections of molecules swirling in a purposeless confusion?
If you are getting inner promptings, why should you pay any attention to them? It is as absurd as the idea of a compass with no magnetic North. You might as well take moral instruction from your bile duct.
Two pages later, speaking for atheists in general, he announces: "Our belief is not a belief."
To which one can only reply: "Really? And that thing in the middle of your face. I suppose that’s not a nose, either?"
Christopher is not tentative about his view on God. He describes himself as an "anti-theist", so certain of his, er, faith that he wars with bitter mockery against those who doubt his truth.
Well, I wish I were as certain about any of these things as Christopher is about his anti-creed.
He reminds me rather more of the bearded Muslim sages of the Deoband Islamic university in India I met last year, than of the cool, thoughtful Anglicanism that we were both more or less brought up in.
For the purposes of this book, religion is identified as a fanatical certainty. No doubt there are plenty of zealots who suffer from this problem.
But it is obvious to anyone that vast numbers of believers in every faith are filled with doubt, and open to reason. The Church of England’s greatest martyr, Thomas Cranmer, was burned at the stake for changing his mind once too often.
The noblest thinker of that Church, Richard Hooker, enthroned reason, alongside tradition and scripture, as one of the governing principles of faith, and warned against crude literal use of the Bible to justify or prohibit any action.
Yet Christopher repeatedly asserts that believers "claim to know", not just to know, but to know everything. This simply is not true. Nor do we take the Bible literally.
I never imagined that scripture had the fact-checked authenticity of, say, an account in The New York Times – though as we know even that grand newspaper sometimes publishes made-up stories without realising it.
Did the Supper at Emmaus really take place? How I hope that it did, but I do not know that it did, in the way that I know a British soldier has recently been flown home dead from Basra or Helmand, or even in the way that I know that another such soldier will soon make the same sad journey.
Many decades have passed since I fancied the story of Adam and Eve was literal truth, if I ever did. Rather more recently I have realised the great warning against human arrogance that is contained in it, the serpent’s silky promise that if we reject the supposedly foolish, trivial restrictions imposed on us by an interfering, jealous nuisance of a God, then we shall be liberated.
As the serpent promises: "Ye shall be as gods." These may be the most important words in the whole Bible.
Take the enticing satanic advice, and you arrive, quite quickly, at revolutionary terror, at the invention of the atom bomb, at the torture chamber and the building of concentration camps for those unteachable morons who do not share your vision of a just world.
And also you arrive at the idea, embraced by Christopher, that by invading Iraq, you can make the world a better place.
I hesitated about mentioning this. Was it unfair, a jab below the belt? No.
Much of his book is devoted to claiming that religious impulse drives Man to do, or excuse, or support wicked and terrible things in the name of goodness.
Is this not a perfect description of the Iraq War, which he backed?
On the few occasions where Christopher is prepared to admit that religious people have done any good, he concludes that they did so in spite of their faith, not because of it.
He even suggests that the atheist Soviet tyranny was itself a form of religion.
You can’t win against this sort of circular absolutism.
Yet he has this absurdly backwards. Religious and unbelieving people have both done dreadful things, and the worst of them have committed their murders and their tortures in the belief that they were doing good.
Nothing is proved by either side in this argument, by pointing to the mountains of skulls piled up by evil atheists, and evil theists.
What they have in common is that they are human, and capable of the sin of pride. The practice of religion does not automatically prevent this, and nobody said it did.
It sometimes joins in with it, as Christopher points out.
But if there is a voice raised against such arrogant pride in the heedless modern world, it is usually a religious one, and the death camps and dungeons of dictators always contain their ration of the faithful who – at the cost of all they held dear in the world – have listened to their consciences even when the message was so unwelcome.
Perhaps they are just mad: I do not think so.
My claims, you see, are much milder than his. When I skulk in the pew of a nearly-empty church, repeating the lovely, poetic formulas of the Church of England, I do not imagine that I am saved for all eternity.
For all I know, Christopher is absolutely right – my prayers are pointless and a meaningless oblivion awaits. But if he is right, what a dispiriting, lowering truth it is.
Atheists like to claim they behave no worse than believers, and often better. I don’t deny it, in my case. It would be easy for almost anyone to have lived a more virtuous life than mine.
But why should atheists care, or use such terms as "good" and "virtue" anyway?
If we are weak and poor, we can all summon up self-interested decency, behaving in a kind way, in public, towards those from whom we hope for decency in return.
But as soon as we have the power to do evil, we generally do. What is to stop us, unobserved, doing and planning acts of selfish unkindness against others, as so many of us do – for example – in office politics?
What is to stop us, in the privacy of the home, taking advantage of the goodness of others more generous than ourselves? Who will ever know?
If we become rich or mighty, how much worse the problem is. We can rob, wound and defraud our fellow creatures without any fear that they will be able to take revenge. A surprising number of us have power to act in this way.
Look at the annual massacre of unborn babies, done away with for the convenience of adults.
In the harsher parts of our great cities, strong, violent people rule their neighbours with pre-medieval savagery, demonstrating a fine understanding of what it means if there is no God: that if something works for you, and you can get away with it, then you may do it without fear of consequence in this world – and there is no next world.
That is practical atheism. Those who follow it probably cannot even spell it. Comfortable, suburban unbelievers hate to have this pointed out to them.
They would never behave like that, surrounded as they are by the invisible web of ten centuries of Christian law and morality, which still protects the nicer parts of our country.
But it is the application of what they preach, the worship of self and power.
Faith and belief can be and often are restraints on this arrogance of power. They offer the possibility of justice where human society fails to provide it – as it almost always does fail.
There is one chapter in this book whose implications are sinister. It is Chapter 16, which attempts to suggest that religion is child abuse.
On the basis of such arguments, matched by similar urgings from Professor Richard Dawkins, I can see a movement growing to outlaw the teaching of faith to children.
Then what? Liberal world reformers make the grave mistake of thinking that if you abolish a great force you don’t like, it will be replaced by empty space.
We abolished the gallows, for example, and found we had created an armed police and an epidemic of prison suicides. We abolished school selection by exams, and found we had replaced it with selection by money. And so on.
We are in the process – encouraged by Christopher – of abolishing religion, and so of abolishing conscience, too.
It is one of his favourite jibes that a world ruled by faith is like North Korea, a place where all is known and all is ordered.
On the contrary, North Korea is the precise opposite of a land governed by conscience.
It is a country governed by men who do not believe in God or conscience, where nobody can be trusted to make his own choices, and where the State decides for the people what is right and what is wrong.
And it is the ultimate destination of atheist thought.
If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power, whether it is Kim Jong Il, Leon Trotsky or the military might of George W. Bush. In which case, God help you.
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Ann WIDDECOMBE
12 July 2006 - The Daily Express
IT IS supposed to be a crime to stir up religious hatred but the Gay Police Association either doesn't know this or doesn't care. It has recently run an advertising campaign for which it is difficult to find any description other than Christophobia.
There is a picture of the Bible and the headline is: In The Name Of The Father. It then goes on to claim that in the past 12 months, the Gay Police Association has recorded a 74 per cent increase in homophobic incidents, where the sole or primary motivating factor was the religious belief of the perpetrator.
It would be interesting to know the nature of the homophobic incidents. Christianity specifically forbids hatred, not just acts of hatred or expressions of hatred but the feeling itself. No Christian can abuse or assault a homosexual "in the name of the Father". Yet, by choosing that very famous line of Christian worship the advertisement suggests that Christianity almost uniquely is responsible for hate crime.
Can anyone imagine the Koran rather than the Bible being featured? Yet the teaching of both faiths (and, indeed, others) is against homosexual acts. Why pick on Christianity?
Perhaps this increase in "homophobic incidents" includes the response of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, to an interviewer's question about the Muslim view of the issue.
Or the opinions of Lynette Burrows, the respected children's author, who said she did not believe the adoption of children by gay couples to be normally advisable. Or the action of a Christian couple from Lancashire who asked their local council if they could display Christian literature in register offices carrying out civil partnership ceremonies.
The reason I cite these three cases is that we know the police became involved in all of them but none of them would fulfil a reasonable person's view of the definition of abuse or assault.
What we are now faced with is not equality but a hierarchy of equalities.
When any human right comes up against homosexual rights the latter must always win.
The human right to express a religious or conscientious view or to hear religious teaching must give way to a homosexual's right never to feel offended. There is a set of proposed regulations, coming before Parliament in the autumn, which takes this to extremes. It will almost certainly be railroaded through.
Under its provisions someone who supplies bed and breakfast in his own home will be able to refuse a double room to an unmarried heterosexual couple but not to a homosexual couple.
A church will not be able to refuse to hire out its own hall for civil partnership celebrations. You can bet your last penny that it will be Christians rather than other faiths who will be picked on for test cases.
What, other than Christophobia, determines that Christmas must be renamed? That Christmas lights must be called festival lights? That nativity displays must be forbidden?
That hot cross buns are banned from some schools? That it is acceptable to mock Christ in shows such as Jerry Springer – The Opera in a way that would cause riots if done to the Prophet Mohammed? That inspired this Government, which made such a parade of Christian socialism before 1997, to try to eliminate prayers from the millennium celebrations?
It is an offshoot of exactly the same political correctness which allows an artist to be seen eating a foetus on television but imprisons an octogenarian for circulating pictures of aborted foetuses.
And the same PC madness which forbids teachers to dispense aspirins or Elastoplast but encourages them to refer underage girls for abortions unbeknown to their parents.
Hitherto, Christians have fought with argument and protest and the powers that be, including government, the BBC and police, have brushed us off.
The time has come to use the very weapons which have been so successfully used against us.
We should complain formally of hate crimes and the stirring up of religious hatred and demand our human rights to religious freedom and to freedom of conscience.
The Gay Police Association advert might be a very good place to start.
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