The End of Faith (10 page)

that our fellow human beings had better reasons for maintaining their religious
differences, if such reasons even exist.

We must begin speaking freely about what is really in these holy books of ours, beyond the
timid heterodoxies of modernitythe gay and lesbian ministers, the Muslim clerics who have
lost their taste for public amputations, or the Sunday churchgoers who have never read
their Bibles quite through. A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates
that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even
mandated, by recourse to their pages. It is only by the most acrobatic avoidance of
passages whose canon- icity has never been in doubt that we can escape murdering one
another outright for the glory of God. Bertrand Russell had it right when he made the
following observation:

The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash
their brains out: by this means they secured these infants went to Heaven. No orthodox
Christian can find any logical reason for condemning their action, although all nowadays
do so. In countless ways the doctrine of personal immortality in its Christian form has
had disastrous effects upon morals. . . .35

It is true that there are millions of people whose faith moves them to perform
extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. The help rendered to the
poor by Christian missionaries in the developing world demonstrates that religious ideas
can lead to actions that are both beautiful and necessary. But there are far bet- ter
reasons for self-sacrifice than those that religion provides. The fact that faith has
motivated many people to do good things does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary
(or even a good) motivation for goodness. It can be quite possible, even reasonable, to
risk one's life to save others without believing any incredible ideas about the nature of
the universe.

By contrast, the most monstrous crimes against humanity have

invariably been inspired by unjustified belief. This is nearly a tru- ism. Genocidal
projects tend not to reflect the rationality of their perpetrators simply because there
are no good reasons to kill peace- ful people indiscriminately. Even where such crimes have been sec-
ular, they have required the egregious credulity of entire societies to be brought off.
Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao: although these tyrants
paid lip service to rational- ity, communism was little more than a political religion.36 At the heart of its apparatus of repression and terror lurked a rigid ideol- ogy, to which
generations of men and women were sacrificed. Even though their beliefs did not reach
beyond this world, they were both cultic and irrational. To cite only one example, the
dogmatic embrace of Lysenko's “socialist” biologyas distinguished from the “capital- ist”
biology of Mendel and Darwinhelped pave the way for tens of millions of deaths from famine
in the Soviet Union and China in the first part of the twentieth century.

In the next chapter we will examine two of the darkest episodes in the history of faith:
the Inquisition and the Holocaust. I have cho- sen the former as a case study because
there is no other instance in which so many ordinary men and women have been so deranged
by their beliefs about God; nowhere else has the subversion of reason been so complete or
its consequences so terrible. The Holocaust is relevant here because it is generally
considered to have been an entirely secular phenomenon. It was not. The anti-Semitism that
built the crematoria brick by brickand that still thrives today comes to us by way of
Christian theology. Knowingly or not, the Nazis were agents of religion.

In the Shadow of God

WITHOUT warning you are seized and brought before a judge. Did you create a thunderstorm and
destroy the village harvest ? Did you kill your neighbor with the evil eye? Do you doubt
that Christ is bodily present in the Eucharist? You will soon learn that questions of this
sort admit of no exculpatory reply.

You are not told the names of your accusers. But their identities are of little account,
for even if, at this late hour, they were to recant their charges against you, they would
merely be punished as false witnesses, while their original accusations would retain their
full weight as evidence of your guilt. The machinery of justice has been so well oiled by
faith that it can no longer be influenced.

But you have a choice, of sorts: you can concede your guilt and name your accomplices.
Yes, you must have had accomplices. No confession will be accepted unless other men and
women can be implicated in your crimes. Perhaps you and three acquaintances of your
choosing did change into hares and consort with the devil him- self. The sight of iron boots designed
to crush your feet seems to refresh your memory. Yes, Friedrich, Arthur, and Otto are
sorcerers too. Their wives? Witches all.

You now face punishment proportionate to the severity of your crimes: flogging, a
pilgrimage on foot to the Holy Land, forfeiture of property, or, more likely, a period of
long imprisonment, probably for life. Your “accomplices” will soon be rounded up for
torture.

Or you can maintain your innocence, which is almost certainly the truth (after all, it is
the rare person who can create a thunderstorm).

In response, your jailers will be happy to lead you to the furthest reaches of human
suffering, before burning you at the stake. You may be imprisoned in total darkness for
months or years at a time, repeat- edly beaten and starved, or stretched upon the rack.
Thumbscrews may be applied, or toe screws, or a pear-shaped vise may be inserted into your
mouth, vagina, or anus, and forced open until your misery admits of no possible increase.
You may be hoisted to the ceiling on a strappado (with your arms bound behind your back and attached to a pulley, and weights tied to your
feet), dislocating your shoulders. To this torment squassation might be added, which, being often suffi- cient to cause your death, may yet spare you the
agony of the stake.1 If you are unlucky enough to be in Spain, where judicial torture has achieved a
transcendent level of cruelty, you may be placed in the “Spanish chair”: a throne of iron,
complete with iron stocks to secure your neck and limbs. In the interest of saving your
soul, a coal brazier will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because
the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded with fat to keep it
from burning too quickly. Or you may be bound to a bench, with a cauldron filled with mice
placed upside-down upon your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the
iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in search of an exit.2

Should you, while in extremis, admit to your torturers that you are indeed a heretic, a
sorcerer, or a witch, you will be made to con- firm your story before a judgeand any
attempt to recant, to claim that your confession has been coerced through torture, will
deliver you either to your tormentors once again or directly to the stake. If, once
condemned, you repent of your sins, these compassionate and learned menwhose concern for
the fate of your eternal soul really knows no boundswill do you the kindness of strangling
you before lighting your pyre.3

THE medieval church was quick to observe that the Good Book was good enough to suggest a
variety of means for eradicating heresy,

ranging from a communal volley of stones to cremation while alive.4 A literal reading of the Old Testament not only permits but requires heretics to be put to death. As it turns out, it was never difficult to find a mob willing
to perform this holy office, and to do so purely on the authority of the Churchsince it
was still a capital offense to possess a Bible in any of the vernacular languages of
Europe.5 In fact, scripture was not to become generally accessible to the common man until the
sixteenth century. As we noted earlier, Deuteronomy was the preeminent text in every
inquisitor's canon, for it explicitly enjoins the faithful to murder anyone in their
midst, even members of their own families, who profess a sympathy for foreign gods.
Showing a genius for totalitarianism that few mortals have ever fully implemented, the
author of this document demands that any- one too squeamish to take part in such religious
killing must be killed as well (Deuteronomy 17:12-13).6 Anyone who imagines that no justification for the Inquisition can be found in scripture
need only consult the Bible to have his view of the matter clarified:

If you hear that in one of the towns which Yahweh your God has given you for a home, there
are men, scoundrels from your own stock, who have led their fellow-citizens astray,
saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” hitherto unknown to you, it is your duty to look
into the matter, examine it, and inquire most carefully. If it is proved and confirmed
that such a hateful thing has taken place among you, you must put the inhabitants of that
town to the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destructionthe town and everything
in it. You must pile up all its loot in the pub- lic square and burn the town and all its
loot, offering it all to Yahweh your God. It is to be a ruin for all time and never
rebuilt. (Deuteronomy 13:12-16).

For obvious reasons, the church tended to ignore the final edict: the destruction of
heretic property.

In addition to demanding that we fulfill every “jot” and “tittle”

of Old Testament law,7 Jesus seems to have suggested, in John 15:6, further refinements to the practice of
killing heretics and unbeliev- ers: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a
branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are
burned.” Whether we want to interpret Jesus metaphorically is, of course, our business.
The problem with scripture, however, is that many of its possible interpretations
(including most of the literal ones) can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the
faith.

The Holy Inquisition formally began in 1184 under Pope Lucius III, to crush the popular
movement of Catharism. The Cathars (from the Greek katharoi, “the pure ones”) had fashioned their own brand of Manicheanism (Mani himself was flayed
alive at the behest of Zoroastrian priests in 276 CE), which held that the material world
had been created by Satan and was therefore inherently evil. The Cathars were divided by a
schism of their own and within each of their sects by the distinction between the
renunciate perfecti and the lay credentes (“the believers”) who revered them. The perfecti ate no meat, eggs, cheese, or fat, fasted for days at a time, maintained strict celibacy,
and abjured all personal wealth. The life of the per- fecti was so austere that most credentes only joined their ranks once they were safely on their deathbeds, so that, having lived as
they pleased, they might yet go to God in holiness. Saint Bernard, who had tried in vain
to combat this austere doctrine with that of the church, noted the reasons for his
failure: “As to [the Cathars'] con- versation, nothing can be less reprehensible ... and
what they speak, they prove by deeds. As for the morals of the heretic, he cheats no one,
he oppresses no one, he strikes no one; his cheeks are pale with fasting, ... his hands
labor for his livelihood.”8

There seems, in fact, to have been nothing wrong with these peo- ple apart from their
attachment to certain unorthodox beliefs about the creation of the world. But heresy is
heresy. Any person who believes that the Bible contains the infallible word of God will
understand why these people had to be put to death.

The Inquisition took rather genteel steps at first (the use of

torture to extract confessions was not “officially” sanctioned until 1215, at the Fourth
Lateran Council), but two developments con- spired to lengthen its strides. The first came
in 1199 when Pope Innocent III decreed that all property belonging to a convicted heretic
would be forfeited to the church; the church then shared it both with local officials and
with the victim's accusers, as a reward for their candor. The second was the rise of the
Dominican order.9 Saint Dominic himself, displaying the conviction of every good Catholic of the day,
announced to the Cathars, “For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness,
preaching, praying, weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, 'where bless- ing
can accomplish nothing, blows may avail.' We shall rouse against you princes and prelates,
who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against this land. . . .”10 It would appear that sainthood comes in a variety of flavors. With the founding of
Dominic's holy order of mendicant friars, the Inquisition was ready to begin its work in
earnest. It is important to remember, lest the general barbarity of time inure us to the
horror of these historical accounts, that the per- petrators of the Inquisitionthe
torturers, informers, and those who commanded their actionswere ecclesiastics of one rank
or another. They were men of Godpopes, bishops, friars, and priests. They were men who had
devoted their lives, in word if not in deed, to Christ as we find him in the New
Testament, healing the sick and challenging those without sin to cast the first stone:

In 1234, the canonization of Saint Dominic was finally pro- claimed in Toulouse, and
Bishop Raymond du Fauga was washing his hands in preparation for dinner when he heard the
rumor that a fever-ridden old woman in a nearby house was about to undergo the Cathar
ritual. The bishop hurried to her bedside and managed to convince her that he was a
friend, then interrogated her on her beliefs, then denounced her as a heretic. He called
on her to recant. She refused. The bishop thereupon had her bed car- ried out into a
field, and there she was burned. "And after the

bishop and the friars and their companions had seen the business completed,“ Brother
Guillaume wrote, ”they returned to the refectory and, giving thanks to God and the Blessed
Dominic, ate with rejoicing what had been prepared for them."11

The question of how the church managed to transform Jesus' principal message of loving
one's neighbor and turning the other cheek into a doctrine of murder and rapine seems to
promise a har- rowing mystery; but it is no mystery at all. Apart from the Bible's
heterogeneity and outright self-contradiction, allowing it to justify diverse and
irreconcilable aims,12 the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself. Whenever a man imagines that he need
only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidencethat unbelievers will go to hell,
that Jews drink the blood of infantshe becomes capable of anything.

The practice for which the Inquisition is duly infamous, and the innovation that secured
it a steady stream of both suspects and guilty verdicts, was its use of torture to extract
confessions from the accused, to force witnesses to testify, and to persuade a confessing
heretic to name those with whom he had collaborated in sin. The justification for this
behavior came straight from Saint Augustine, who reasoned that if torture was appropriate
for those who broke the laws of men, it was even more fitting for those who broke the laws
of God.13 As practiced by medieval Christians, judicial torture was merely a final, mad inflection
of their faith. That anyone imag- ined that facts were being elicited by such a lunatic procedure seems a miracle in itself. As Voltaire
wrote in 1764, “There is something divine here, for it is incomprehensible that men should
have patiently borne this yoke.”14

A contemporaneous account of the Spanish auto-da-fe (the pub- lic spectacle at which
heretics were sentenced and often burned) will serve to complete our picture. The Spanish
Inquisition did not cease its persecution of heretics until 1834 (the last auto-da-fe took
place in Mexico in 1850), about the time Charles Darwin set sail on the

Beagle and Michael Faraday discovered the relationship between

electricity and magnetism.

The condemned are then immediately carried to the Riberia, the place of execution, where
there are as many stakes set up as there are prisoners to be burnt. The negative and
relapsed being first strangled and then burnt; the professed mount their stakes by a
ladder, and the Jesuits, after several repeated exhortations to be reconciled to the
church, consign them to eternal destruction, and then leave them to the fiend, who they
tell them stands at their elbow to carry them into torments. On this a great shout is
raised, and the cry is, “Let the dogs' beards be made”; which is done by thrusting flaming
bunches of furze, fastened to long poles, against their beards, till their faces are burnt
black, the surround- ing populace rending the air with the loudest acclamations of joy. At
last fire is set to the furze at the bottom of the stake, over which the victims are
chained, so high that the flame seldom reaches higher than the seat they sit on, and thus
they are rather roasted than burnt. Although there cannot be a more lamentable spectacle
and the sufferers continually cry out as long as they are able, “Pity for the love of
God!” yet it is beheld by persons of all ages and both sexes with transports of joy and
satisfaction.15

And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of
their fellow human beings was no less dis- graceful. Public executions were more popular
than ever: heretics were still reduced to ash, scholars were tortured and killed for
impertinent displays of reason, and fornicators were murdered without a qualm.16 The basic lesson to be drawn from all this was summed up nicely by Will Durant:
“Intolerance is the natural con- comitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith
loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”17