The Sin
of Faith
The Low Road to
Heaven
I
believe that faith is inherently immoral, and this initial step in the
wrong direction explains many of the so-called “abuses” of faith. Only
they aren’t exactly abuses since they stem consistently from faith’s
inner logic. People will agree to anything to avoid going to hell where
they can count on being tortured for eternity. I know I would, if I took
the threat seriously. It would cost me my self-respect, but I guess (as
in Bergman’s masterpiece The Shame) that can become a luxury we
can’t afford when conditions are dire enough. You are careful not to
share any opinion you think your boss might find offensive. How much
more must you monitor every word and thought if you fear your Heavenly
Boss will send you to hell for them? He must be right. You can’t afford
not to think so. You’ve got to kiss his omnipresent ass. This makes you
a sniveling yes-man.
Ivan Karamazov had it just
right: the price of the ticket to heaven is to let God off the hook for
the suffering of the innocent. Faith in the sense of religious
allegiance, unqualified assent to what God is said to have done, is the
fundamental moral compromise. Letting him get away with murder.
Christians are really admitting this if we listen to them closely. They
say, first, that whatever God does must be right even when it does not
look right to us. And, second, they hold that, even if there is not
a missing piece to the situation that, if known, would make everything
fall into place, the mere fact that God does it makes it ipso facto
right. This is to admit one is a servile spin doctor, like Lanny Davis,
and that whatever der Führer does is just fine as long as "he keeps on
blessin' and blessin'" as the sickening chorus has it. It is a
fundamental moral sell-out from which all subsequent "bad faith" (as
Sartre called it) stems like symptoms of a virus. How can it be
otherwise? When we see the blatant chicanery of apologists, creationist
debaters, Catholic child molestation PR men, it shouldn't surprise us.
They have sold out. And they admit it!
Look at C.S. Lewis' s essay
"On Obstinacy in Believing," where he tries to rebut such charges but
only winds up evidencing them. He says that while considering conversion
one must make the best judgment one can make on the best evidence. If
Christianity doesn't seem true to you, he says, then by all means reject
it! But once you are in, you are no longer responsible to weigh all
things. Indeed, you are responsible not to! This, he says, is because
conversion involves a choice analogous to the marriage bond, and to
reconsider faith would be like having a wandering eye! This is so
amazing, so outrageous, there is no other way to explain it but as
desperate self-deception.
Even if, as seems likely,
religion began without belief in life after death, we can see the same
principle involved: humans sought goods unobtainable by themselves from
imaginary higher entities they imagined could furnish them. Weather
control, riches, love charms, hexes. And the same obsequious “yes-man”
worship was the result. The riotously funny film Monty Python's The
Meaning of Life has a scene in an English boy's school chapel with a
litany that starts, "Forgive us, Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying."
That about sums it up. I won't rock the boat, because if I did I might
go to hell. .
That Leap
Is the choice of a
particular religion simply arbitrary? Do you just pick one out of a
phone book? If it were a sheer leap of faith, it would amount to luck.
No one means that. Of course most believers, if they think about it at
all, just rationalize the inertia of their membership in the religion of
their parents. But suppose you don’t like that one, and you are shopping
for a new creed; how would you decide? I have often heard apologists
claim that, while you can't demonstrate the truth of any religion, even
if it is true, you can at least eliminate some from the competition if
they contradict themselves or depend upon statements that are
demonstrably false. And then they glibly point out scriptural
difficulties or theo-philosophical contradictions in Islam, Mormonism,
Buddhism ("You're supposed to desire not to desire? Yuk
yuk."), etc. And then they pivot around and start the special pleading.
Obviously the same sort of stuff can be thrown at Christianity by the
bucket-full, but they marshal painfully silly clichés in place of
arguments that they would never let their opponents get away with: "God
doesn't send anyone to hell! People choose to go
there!" Why don't they see their silliness? Why don't they recognize
what they are doing as special pleading? Because of that damn "faith,"
which is just the art of the spin-doctor. The epistemology of
stonewalling and propaganda. Thus faith corrupts their whole approach.
They think the other creeds
have failed the tests of consistency, evidence, etc., which they imagine
Christianity passes with flying colors. And yet having passed the test,
they readily admit, Christianity is not thereby proven true. It still
requires a faith commitment. They often like to say it is a step
of faith, not a leap of faith. And there is a point to this, but
they are equivocating on the meaning of faith. They are mixing up the
epistemological cheat of leaping the evidential gap with the
pietistic/revivalist notion of having "faith" as a "heart-warming"
encounter with Christ. The latter would be fine and dandy if we
knew there was such a Christ to have a relationship with. The
uncertainty of it means one must predicate one’s most important
commitment on something one must merely hope or wish to be
true. The ensuing neurotic attempts to convince oneself by convincing
others only show loudly and clearly that one do not, deep down,
really believe it. One only wishes one did. The faith-commitment
to Christ would not be threatened, eroded, or contradicted in the least
if we knew for a fact that Jesus existed, died for sins and rose from
the dead. James 2:19 says it: "You believe that God is one? Good! So do
the demons! And they tremble!" The two "faiths" are logically distinct,
and to mix them is to try to make virtue of necessity, as if swallowing
intellectual dishonesty were, like yielding one’s rebellious will to the
savior, a virtuous deed, so virtuous in fact that one will be damned for
not doing it!
No Breaking Point
A faith prepared to allow
for infinite flexibility in its expectations for God, a readiness to
excuse and absolve any seeming atrocity as long it is God who commits
it, leads to moral nihilism, since there are no consistent criteria for
“goodness.” But more than that, it also produces theological nihilism, a
“belief” that is vacuous and incoherent. Faith is confidence in God
to—what? Well, it can’t be that you expect God to see that good always
prevails over evil, because it’s obvious that he doesn’t. The believer’s
(spin doctor’s) job is to rationalize or minimize God’s failure to do
so. “Yes, he’s a Being of infinite compassion and justice who governs
the world with divine providence, but there are certain mitigating
circumstances. Even if we have no idea what they are! One day, in the
sweet by and by, we’ll find out.”
In the final analysis, the
only content that the belief, the faith, in God possesses is confidence
in the guarantee that he will honor that ticket to heaven he supposedly
issued you. Here’s a troublesome thought. Suppose you get to the Day of
Judgment and God cancels the ticket. No explanation. No appeal. You’re
just screwed. Won’t you have to allow that God must have reasons for it
that you, a mere mortal, are not privy to? Who are you to, like Job, to
call God to account? All that would be left to you is the masochistic
perversity of the Hopkinsian Calvinists who claimed they’d rejoice to
burn in hell if that were God’s pleasure—because, for all you know, it
might be.
By Robert M.
Price