The GOD Delusion (53 page)

Robust
intellects may be ready for the strong meat of Bertrand Russell's
declaration, in his 1925 essay 'What I Believe':

I
believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will
survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver
with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless
true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love
lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne
himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us
to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows
of science at first make us
shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in
the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a
splendour of their own.

I
was inspired by this essay of Russell's when I read it in my school
library at the age of about sixteen, but I had forgotten it. It is
possible that I was paying unconscious homage to it when I wrote, in
A
Devil's Chaplain
in 2003,

There
is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though
it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep
refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the
strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the
starry ways'.

How
does religion compare with, say, science in providing these two types
of consolation? Looking at Type 1 consolation first, it is entirely
plausible that the strong arms of God, even if they are purely
imaginary, could console in just the same kind of way as the real arms
of a friend, or a St Bernard dog with a brandy cask around its neck.
But of course scientific medicine can also offer comfort - usually more
effectively than brandy.

Turning
now to Type 2 consolation, it is easy to believe that religion could be
extremely effective. People caught up in a terrible disaster, such as
an earthquake, frequently report that they derive consolation from the
reflection that it is all part of God's inscrutable plan: no doubt good
shall come of it in the fullness of time. If someone fears death,
sincere belief that he has an immortal soul can be consoling - unless,
of course, he thinks he is going to hell or purgatory. False beliefs
can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment
of disillusionment. This applies to non-religious beliefs too. A man
with terminal cancer may be consoled by a doctor who lies to him that
he is cured, just as effectively as another man who is told truthfully
that he is cured. Sincere and wholehearted belief in life after death
is even more immune to disillusionment than belief in a lying doctor.
The doctor's
lie remains effective only until the symptoms become unmistakable. A
believer in life after death can never be ultimately disillusioned.

Polls
suggest that approximately
95
per cent of the
population of the United States believe they will survive their own
death. I can't help wondering how many people who claim such belief
really, in their heart of hearts, hold it. If they were truly sincere,
shouldn't they all behave like the Abbot of Ampleforth? When Cardinal
Basil Hume told him that he was dying, the abbot was delighted for him:
'Congratulations! That's brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you.'
¹⁵⁵
The abbot, it seems, really was a sincere believer. But it is precisely
because it is so rare and unexpected that his story catches our
attention, almost provokes our amusement - in a fashion reminiscent of
the cartoon of a young woman carrying a 'Make love not war' banner,
stark naked, and with a bystander exclaiming, 'Now that's what I call
sincerity!' Why don't all Christians and Muslims say something like the
abbot when they hear that a friend is dying? When a devout woman is
told by the doctor that she has only months to live, why doesn't she
beam with excited anticipation, as if she has just won a holiday in the
Seychelles? 'I can't wait!' Why don't faithful visitors at her bedside
shower her with messages for those that have gone before? 'Do give my
love to Uncle Robert when you see him . . .'

Why
don't religious people talk like that when in the presence of the
dying? Could it be that they don't really believe all that stuff they
pretend to believe? Or perhaps they do believe it but fear the
process
of dying. With good reason, given that our species is the
only one not allowed to go to the vet to be painlessly put out of our
misery. But in that case, why does the most vocal opposition to
euthanasia and assisted suicide come from the religious? On the 'Abbot
of Ampleforth' or 'Holiday in the Seychelles' model of death, wouldn't
you expect that religious people would be the least likely to cling
unbecomingly to earthly life? Yet it is a striking fact that, if you
meet somebody who is passionately opposed to mercy killing, or
passionately against assisted suicide, you can bet a good sum that they
will turn out to be religious. The official reason may be that all
killing is a sin. But why deem it to be a sin if you sincerely believe
you are accelerating a journey to heaven?

My
attitude to assisted suicide, by contrast, takes off from Mark Twain's
observation, already quoted. Being dead will be no different from being
unborn - I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror
or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.
But the process of dying could well be, depending on our luck, painful
and unpleasant - the sort of experience from which we have become
accustomed to being protected by a general anaesthetic, like having
your appendix out. If your pet is dying in pain, you will be condemned
for cruelty if you do not summon the vet to give him a general
anaesthetic from which he will not come round. But if your doctor
performs exactly the same merciful service for you when you are dying
in pain, he runs the risk of being prosecuted for murder. When I am
dying, I should like my life to be taken out under a general
anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix. But I shall not
be allowed that privilege, because I have the ill-luck to be born a
member of
Homo sapiens
rather than, for example,
Canis
familiaris
or
Felis catus.
At least,
that will be the case unless I move to a more enlightened place like
Switzerland, the Netherlands or Oregon. Why are such enlightened places
so rare? Mostly because of the influence of religion.

But,
it might be said, isn't there an important difference between having
your appendix removed and having your life removed? Not really; not if
you are about to die anyway. And not if you have a sincere religious
belief in life after death. If you have that belief, dying is just a
transition from one life to another. If the transition is painful, you
should no more wish to undergo it without anaesthetic than you would
wish to have your appendix removed without anaesthetic. It is those of
us who see death as terminal rather than transitional who might naively
be expected to resist euthanasia or assisted suicide. Yet we are the
ones who support it.*

*
One study of attitudes to death among American atheists found the
following: 50 per cent wanted a memorial celebration of their life;
99
per cent supported physician-assisted suicide for those who
want it, and
75
per cent wanted it for themselves;
100 per cent wanted no contact with hospital staff who promote
religion. See
http://nursestoner.com/myresearch.html
.

In
the same vein, what are we to make of the observation of a senior nurse
of my acquaintance, with a lifetime's experience in running a home for
old people, where death is a regular occurrence? She has noticed over
the years that the individuals who are
most afraid of death are the religious ones. Her observation would need
to be substantiated statistically but, assuming she is right, what is
going on here? Whatever it is, it doesn't, on the face of it, speak
strongly of religion's power to comfort the dying.* In the case of
Catholics, maybe they are afraid of purgatory? The saintly Cardinal
Hume said farewell to a friend in these words: 'Well, goodbye then. See
you in purgatory, I suppose.' What
I
suppose is
that there was a sceptical twinkle in those kind old eyes.

* An
Australian friend coined a wonderful phrase to describe the tendency
for religiosity to increase in old age. Say it with an Australian
intonation, going up at the end like a question: 'Cramming for the
final?'

The
doctrine of purgatory offers a preposterous revelation of the way the
theological mind works. Purgatory is a sort of divine Ellis Island, a
Hadean waiting room where dead souls go if their sins aren't bad enough
to send them to hell, but they still need a bit of remedial checking
out and purifying before they can be admitted to the sin-free-zone of
heaven. In medieval times, the Church used to sell 'indulgences' for
money. This amounted to paying for some number of days' remission from
purgatory, and the Church literally (and with breathtaking presumption)
issued signed certificates specifying the number of days off that had
been purchased. The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose
gains the phrase 'ill-gotten' might have been specially invented. And
of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must
surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval
equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.

As
recently as 1903, Pope Pius X was still able to tabulate the number of
days' remission from purgatory that each rank in the hierarchy was
entitled to grant: cardinals two hundred days, archbishops a hundred
days, bishops a mere fifty days. By his time, however, indulgences were
no longer sold directly for money. Even in the Middle Ages, money was
not the only currency in which you could buy parole from purgatory. You
could pay in prayers too, either your own before death or the prayers
of others on your behalf, after your death. And money could buy
prayers. If you were rich, you could lay down provision for your soul
in perpetuity. My own Oxford College, New College, was founded in 1379
(it was new then) by one of that century's great philanthropists,
William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester. A medieval bishop could
become the
Bill Gates of the age, controlling the equivalent of the information
highway (to God), and amassing huge riches. His diocese was
exceptionally large, and Wykeham used his wealth and influence to found
two great educational establishments, one in Winchester and one in
Oxford. Education was important to Wykeham, but, in the words of the
official New College history, published in 1979 to mark the sixth
centenary, the fundamental purpose of the college was 'as a great
chantry to make intercession for the repose of his soul. He provided
for the service of the chapel by ten chaplains, three clerks and
sixteen choristers, and he ordered that they alone were to be retained
if the college's income failed.' Wykeham left New College in the hands
of the Fellowship, a self-electing body which has been continuously in
existence like a single organism for more than six hundred years.
Presumably he trusted us to continue to pray for his soul through the
centuries.

Today
the college has only one chaplain* and no clerks, and the steady
century-by-century torrent of prayers for Wykeham in purgatory has
dwindled to a trickle of two prayers per year. The choristers alone go
from strength to strength and their music is, indeed, magical. Even I
feel a twinge of guilt, as a member of that Fellowship, for a trust
betrayed. In the understanding of his own time, Wykeham was doing the
equivalent of a rich man today making a large down payment to a
cryogenics company which guarantees to freeze your body and keep it
insulated from earthquakes, civil disorder, nuclear war and other
hazards, until some future time when medical science has learned how to
unfreeze it and cure whatever disease it was dying of. Are we later
Fellows of New College reneging on a contract with our Founder? If so,
we are in good company. Hundreds of medieval benefactors died trusting
that their heirs, well paid to do so, would pray for them in purgatory.
I can't help wondering what proportion of Europe's medieval treasures
of art and architecture started out as down payments on eternity, in
trusts now betrayed.

*
Female - what would Bishop William have made of that?

But
what really fascinates me about the doctrine of purgatory is the
evidence
that theologians have advanced for it: evidence so
spectacularly weak that it renders even more comical the airy
confidence with which it is asserted. The entry on purgatory in the
Catholic
Encyclopedia
has a section called 'proofs'. The essential
evidence
for the existence of purgatory is this. If the dead simply went to
heaven or hell on the basis of their sins while on Earth, there would
be no point in praying for them. 'For why pray for the dead, if there
be no belief in the power of prayer to afford solace to those who as
yet are excluded from the sight of God.' And we do pray for the dead,
don't we? Therefore purgatory must exist, otherwise our prayers would
be pointless! Q.E.D. This seriously is an example of what passes for
reasoning in the theological mind.

That
remarkable
non sequitur
is mirrored, on a larger
scale, in another common deployment of the Argument from Consolation.
There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not,
life would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaninglessness and
insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic
falls at the first fence? Maybe life
is
empty.
Maybe our prayers for the dead really
are
pointless.
To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion
we seek to prove. The alleged syllogism is transparently circular. Life
without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren and empty, but
this unfortunately doesn't stop her being dead. There is something
infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of
children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your
life meaning and point. It is all of a piece with the infantilism of
those who, the moment they twist their ankle, look around for someone
to sue. Somebody else must be responsible for my well-being, and
somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar
infantilism that really lies behind the 'need' for a God? Are we back
to Binker again?