It’s a cold winter day and I’ve been reading a book about
atheism by Christopher Hitchens called “God is Not Great.” The book is as cold as the day. Strangely, I don’t ever seem to feel
threatened or annoyed or angered by these sorts of somewhat self-righteous
screeds against religion. God knows,
religion deserves all of the abuse that it gets. There are parts of Christianity that are
every bit as ridiculous, tyrannical, and divisive as the Hitchens says they
are. Our faith tradition has caused wars
and created injustice and promoted ignorance and, yes, we should be a little
sheepish about being associated with all of that. Of course, the same could be said about any
human enterprise. Religions are as
flawed and corrupted as we are and so is every human endeavor. But all of the recently assertive writings
against religion by our current crop of atheists are just so shallowly
inadequate in their understanding of who we are and what faith is all about,
that it’s hard to take them all that seriously.
The problem with atheism is that it asserts a certainty
where certainty is not possible. It is
precisely the same problem that fundamentalism has. Where most of the important things about life
and the cosmos remain and probably will always remain beyond our comprehension,
on the subject of what we can know, we must always be agnostics; seekers rather than asserters. Atheists assert. They tend to presume to know
things that cannot be known. It’s the
same thing for which they condemn religious beliefers. Oh the irony.
The deeper issue though, is the problem of absolutes and
where we find our meaning. How do we decide
what is right or wrong? How do we locate
the real meaning and significance of our lives?
For a person of faith, the answer is that we have something that we
consider absolute. Our relationship with
what we call God is the one thing that determines who we are and what we most
value. Atheists tend to think that
religion is about some particular doctrines.
They think that life is this intellectual puzzle and religion gives
people a set solution to the puzzle in the form of what we are told to believe. Of course, that is not what religion really
is. At heart, religion is not what you
believe, but what you choose to live for.
It is about what you give your life to.
And we all, regardless of what we believe, give our lives to
something. There is always some meaning
that makes us get up in the morning and do something rather than nothing; that
makes us choose whether to be selfish or generous, kind or cruel, loving or
hateful. Our faith is not the contention
of our mind but the commitment of our heart.
What this really means is that there in no such thing as
atheism. Every day that we live, every
choice that we make, every relationship that we enter is a religious
issue. We do one thing rather than
another because something in life has value for us more than other things. Some people label that ultimate something in
their lives “God,” others give it a different name. Hitchens says he believe only in the power of
science. As I say, it seems a cold faith
to give ultimate value to an abstract process, and in his case, an angry faith
that needs to assert its sole claim to truth.
The real question is whether that thing that we give our
lives to is worth what we are giving.
Does what we value most ultimately really have an ultimate value? Does the object of our faith deepen and
enrich our lives? Does it connect us
deeply with each other, with our forbearers, with our future? Does it do justice to the beauty, to the
mystery, to the magnificent sweep of life?
Or is it too narrow, or too limited, or too parochial to really fit the
highest aspirations of our lives and the deepest agonies that we face?
The reason that our religious communities are and always
will be essential, is that we all need to continue together to examine what we
are living for, to plumb the depths of what our faith is, to search for that
reality of meaning in a God as grand as our hopes and as deep as our
fears. I hope that in our little faith
community, you find your God always growing, your faith always surprising you,
your relationship to the love of God always getting deeper and richer and more
compelling.
I feel warmer already.
