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God would be an atheist...
A rational look at religion, morality, politics and daily life |
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HOME / This Week About GWBAA WEEKLY COLUMNS Previous Print column Why subscribe? Schedule Terms & Rates Subscribe Online column Subscribe BASICS Definitions Atheism Faith God Religion etc Analysis The meaning of life Morality etc NEXT STEPS Buy Discuss Join Read REVIEWS CONTACT Link to this site All Rights Reserved World Copyright © Martin Foreman PREVIOUSLY... One of our greatest failings as human beings is our inability to understand other people’s emotions and thinking. We almost always give much greater weight to our own perspective on the world than to that of those around us. The rhetoric of death or the tools of life? Within the parameters of culture we create our own God, and like love, we each experience God differently. And we do so because God does not creates us in his own image; we create him in ours. Make me a god... People kill to protect their faith. They kill to force others to accept it. They kill with a clear conscience because their imaginary God tells them it is acceptable, even desirable, that others die so the “true” faith can prosper. Kill God, save lives Let us be generous and accept the Family Research Institute’s definition. American society should support the ideal family of one husband and one wife living with their children, free of grandparents but holding fast to the option of divorce when times get rough. Nice theory, pity about the facts Chapter three tells us how Eve is tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit. She then persuades Adam to do the same. Suddenly they both realise they’re naked. Any other young couple would consider this a significant step forward in their relationship, but Adam and Eve aren’t that bright. The confused Christian creation myth Because I wasn’t ready for sexual abstinence, total vegetarianism and being nice to everyone 24-7, I kept postponing the moment when I would sit down and learn by heart the Four Noble Truths or the Eightfold Path. A would-be Augustine, I suggested to the God-who-didn’t-exist to make me Buddhist, just not yet. Make me Buddhist... |
Column 98: From one fantasy to another Anne Rice and the seven year old Christ By © Martin Foreman Word Count: 792 words Publication date: March 4, 2007 Print publications wishing to syndicate the column should click here. Individual subscribers wishing to receive columns by e-mail should click here. I do not consider myself one of Anne Rice’s fans. I find her vampire novels overwritten and portentous, the characters unsympathetic and the plots unimaginative. I know I am in a minority. Over 75 million copies of Rice’s works have appeared over the years and her books are often assigned in high school and college classes. I make an exception for her “Sleeping Beauty” trilogy, published in the 1980s under the pseudonym A N Roquelaire. Her depiction of a fantasy world, where teenage princes and princesses are held as sexual slaves, is erotic and elegant. Given this background of the occult, eroticism and unbridled sexuality, many have been surprised to learn that Rice has reconverted to the Roman Catholic faith she was brought up in. The author is currently devoting her creative energies to a trilogy narrating the life the Jesus Christ in the first person. The first volume, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, appeared in 2005. In that book, seven year old Jesus returns to Nazareth from Egypt after the death of Herod. It is a difficult time for the whole family, and a time of questioning for the boy increasingly aware of a power within him capable of causing others to die or to return to life and which can control the forces of nature. Rice writes competently. The story flows easily and Jesus and his family are portrayed sympathetically but with little depth. The greatest weakness is lack of tension, which is at least partly due to our familiarity with the tale she is telling. Out of a possible five stars she gets three. Rice is not the first writer to examine Jesus’ life. Others covering the same ground include Nobel Prize Winner José Saramago in the early 1990s. Nor is the plot unique. Roman soldiers attempting to impose order on a land on the edge of chaos following the death of its despotic ruler foreshadow Iraq. A young man discovering supernatural powers is the theme of the television series Smallville. Given her sympathetic portrayal of a man who probably did not exist, it was inevitable that Rice’s work would be widely praised by Christians seeking to bolster their faith. Much more interesting than the book itself, however, are the afterwords that appear in the hardback and paperback versions describing her return to faith. Although she pins her conversion on a specific date (December 6, 1998), it is obvious that her vision of the “Infinite Mercy of God” was the culmination and consequence of years of yearning for certainties that atheism did not offer her. In her eagerness to believe, her emotion sweeps aside her reason. Firstly, she assumes that her vision of God and his mercy has any validity outside her own experience. Like all believers who claim to experience God, she fails to understand that no matter how powerful a vision is, it is an internal experience which can never be more than a reflection of one’s own state of mind. Her second mistake is to assume that because she searches for “meaning” in life, that such “meaning” must therefore exist. This assumption, which is neither logical nor proven, reflects her need for reassurance, not the reality surrounding her. Lastly, even if life does have “meaning”, there is no reason to assume that the “meaning” Rice has found is the correct one. If there is a God, he is as likely to be Allah as the Christian Trinity, or Odin or Shiva or any other deity worshipped by humans at any time since our species achieved consciousness. Rice’s apologia rationalizes her faith; it does not justify it. It was not reason that brought her back to her childhood religion, but a desire to return to the illusion of love and forgiveness that comforted her decades ago. The fact that she is creating her own faith rather than accepting a universal truth becomes clear when she states the terms of her belief, accepting dogmas that she likes and rejecting those that displease her. In other words, like believers the world over, Rice creates God in the image that corresponds most closely to her emotional needs. Because this is how she sees the deity this is how the deity must be. As far as the novel is concerned, her faith is irrelevant, an unnecessary addendum. The text, not the author, should be the focus of our attention. Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt resembles its vampire predecessors in that it offers a half-familiar, half-fantasy world that suggests that there is more to reality than our everyday experiences. It is, in short, escapism, a light read which even atheists can enjoy. Look for it in your local bookshop, on the same fiction shelves where the Bible ought to be.
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If God existed, he would... If God existed, he would be an atheist. www. visionforeurope.org |
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