GODS

1 Types of religion

Revealed religion is empirical religion. Hence the knowledge that it gives is at best probable and not conclusive. And the god that it reveals is contingent and not necessary.

The proofs that there is a god are not necessary for the believer, and not sufficient for the unbeliever.

If the essence of a being implies its existence, then it must be a figment of our own brains. And a being whose existence is logically necessary is not even possible.

Theology is the science of imaginary causes. And so till recently it has had more real effects in this world of illusions than the rest of the fields of thought.

Natural religion gives fanciful causes for real effects, such as the order of the cosmos. But in the revealed religion of miracles and messiahs not even the effects are real.

If there were a God, he would no doubt have inspired all of us with the one true faith. But since there is no god, people in past societies had to be forced to accept one established faith.

Why does the Lord delegate rich minds like Pascal to act as his apologists, and then fit them out with such fatuous arguments?

The oldest religion and the newest science are the best. ‘The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest,’ as Blake wrote.

2 Types of gods

In an expanding universe God is receding farther and farther from us.

We call God transcendent as a polite way of ushering him out of existence. It’s a halfway house on the road from being all in all to being nothing at all.

The gods are local and mortal emanations of our ubiquitous and perennial need of illusion.

Cursed by his omniscience and omnipotence, God lacks the two enviable powers which we are blessed with, the power to forget and the power to die. Will he have his redress by rendering us sharers in his detestable gifts?

A personal god would be too paltry to be worth our adoration. And an impersonal god would be too detached to have any use for it.

Theologians tell us that God’s essence is unknowable. In that case we can’t know what it is that we believe in when we say that we believe in God. And when we talk about God, we have no idea what we’re talking about. So what is the worth of our belief and words?

The one great God of monotheism is narrower than each one of the gods in a broad polytheistic pantheon.

A monotheist has a single idea, and it is a bad one.

In the beginning was the lie, and the lie was with God, and the lie was God.

You can’t escape from God, because he is everywhere. But you can’t find him, because he is nowhere.

3 The hierarchy of religion

The most wholesome creeds, like hinduism, biblical judaism or paganism, are strong and mentally fresh. Islam is an abstract, otherworldly and sand-blasted judaism, universalized and purged of its local history and ethnic roots. It is vital, energetic and healthful, but arid and straitened. Buddhism is languid but clean and rigorous. But christianity stinks of decay and the soiled fever bed, dank, feculent, leprous and subterranean. It was the noisome and degenerate netherworld of rabbinism, apocalyptic, spiteful, sectarian, perfervid, poisoned by maleficent spirits, shoddily theatrical, overwrought, and corrupted by its idolatrous cult of personality.

From its birth the christian religion was prey to a rancid excess, too many gods, too many testaments, too many gospels, canons, covenants, mountain tops, priestly peoples, apostles, demons, councils, schisms, sects, sacraments, relics, and too much history. It was an anti-semitic monotheism which set up a jewish man as one of its three gods, and claimed that it was fulfilling the law when it was founded on a flagrant breach of its first commandment. It sprouted as a rotten offshoot of judaism, to be grafted on a worm-eaten imperial roman stem, and then transplanted to celtic and germanic soils.

The God of the israelites is the paramount deity of singleness, order and uniformity. The hindu gods are unequalled emanations of creative fire and multiplicity. They are the perfect reconciliation of the local and the pagan with the universal and transcendental.

4 Religion and idolatry

Mortals can’t touch a god without reducing it to an idol. Our greedy creeds taint its transcendent purity. Belief turns truth itself to a lie. A god enters the brain, and comes out an idol. A truth goes in, and comes out a lie. The heart is a furnace that casts an unwaning file of fetishes. And the mind is a lush equatorial wild, in which fabulous superstitions bloom and fester. Many venerate the Lord with their lips, but all enshrine shibboleths in their soul.

A culture that has smashed its idols of stone and wood will be all the more in bondage to its idols of the mind.

It doesn’t matter much which god you kneel down to, since this is not the real god you adore. That is the idol you shape for your own use.

God is what I worship, idols are what the rest of the world bows down to. And yet I know that my God is the true one only because others worship him too.

5 Gods of language, idols of stone

The kind of gods that we create is determined by the form in which they are conceived. An idol is an image which lives in stone or wood. A god is a character who lives in words. It is an incarnation of language. God made the heavens and the earth by an act of speech, and we made him in the same way.

Idols are the works of peoples whose gift is for the plastic arts. Gods are the works of literate ones. If mortals had not learnt to write, there would be no gods. Idols don’t last long in the poetic ether of a lettered age. And gods don’t last long in the dry air of a scientific one.

6 The gods are part of culture

The gods are part of culture not of nature. And like all works of culture the idea of God needs to be drilled into us. No child is born with it. And it’s plain to all that they have a body, but they need to learn from others that they have a soul. The soul is the image of God, which is to say, it is a fiction that we forge to flatter ourselves. We may declare that truth is a need of the soul, but the soul is an illusion which is one of the needs of our self-importance.

The gods evolve more rapidly than animals, but not so fast as machines.

Religion is a blend of customs which we use to commune with our fellow mortals, not with God. So its flock don’t much care whether there is a god or not. But they won’t put up with people denying it or worshipping a strange one.

Pious people warn us not to put our trust in human contrivances. But what is God, if not the most human of all contrivances?

When custom used to ordain the gods, the gods were of course assumed to have ordained custom.

7 The social circuit of religion

People love God as they do the rest of their friends, not so much for what he is, but for the things they do in the company of their fellow-believers.

A private religion is no more possible than a private language.

God is a social illusion, not a metaphysical one. He is a product of social interactions, not of abstract speculations. He helps us to feel at home, not in the immeasurable void of space, but in our own small social world. Though he may be a metaphysical mistake, he is a worldly fact. And they are the only kind that we care about.

Faith is not a personal. It is a social practice. And each time we pronounce the formulas of our creed, it enters further into reality and becomes a social fact. And social facts are the sole kind that have any sway with us.

If people had souls of their own, they would not put up with religion, which is all authority, custom and conformity.

Creeds last so long, because most people can’t be budged from their customary allegiance by an inward movement of the spirit.

A true faith would be all astonishment, but religion is numbed routine and repetition. Our creeds are an affront to faith, and our faith is an affront to God.

If you have faith because others have faith, then it is not real faith that you have. But if no one else shares your faith, you will have no faith at all.

8 The afterlife of the immortals

Like the rest of our productions, the gods are hopelessly mortal. We launch them on the broad sea of eternity. But they sink shipwrecked and forgotten a short way through their everlasting voyage.

To be a god is to be pulled this way and that by the fiends on earth who want to use you as a screen for their devilry.

The afterlife of the gods is more tranquil and dignified than their first life. No longer fawned on or fought over by mortals, they can take their ease in the empyrean of myth and art. Their lives are not immortal, but posthumous.

CREATION

9 So free we seem, so fettered fast we are

Free will is so precious, that God gave it to us, though we might damn ourselves by its use. And yet if we are to win grace, we must give up our free will, and merge it in his divine will.

God was jealous of our free will, but consoled himself that it would bring us to a bad end.

If God lets a few of us in to heaven, he will have to strip us of our free will and share with us his own will not to do evil. So why did he not bless us with this from the first, so that none of us would have had to go to hell?

10 The horror of creation

The Book of Genesis tells the story of God’s aghast evacuation from the horror that he had made. He left it like a man in flight from an inferno. ‘Allah has created nothing more repugnant to himself than the world,’ according to the muslim holy man. ‘And from the day he made it, he has not glanced at it again, so much does he loathe it.’ What gruesome memories of it must turn his paradise to a hell. Is he more indignant with us for the mess that we have made of his earth? Or is he more ashamed of himself for having created it?

The world is a mirror, in which God can see his true self, and into which he therefore does not care to look. And when he saw what we are like, he wished to put an end to the whole thing.

When the most high made mortals in his likeness, how horror-struck he must have been by what he saw. It was a fit reward for his narcissism. If we are made in the image of God, is that not the strongest of all reasons not to worship him? Would it not be beneath our dignity to bow down to such a sorry being?

We have not killed the deathless gods. They have washed their hands of this doomed and degraded globe.

God was the first utopian. He hoped to perfect the world by killing off nine-tenths of its occupants in the flood.

11 God’s original sin

Who will absolve God from the sin of having besmirched the timeless silence by engendering this blaring world? He trespassed when he made it. So he had to raise up Satan as a patsy to blame for his own bungling. But Satan’s sin was to humble God by tempting his pride to make a display of his might by creating the world. And then as an atonement God had to send his son to be put to death by the victims on whom he had unleashed it. God is our model of how conscience works.

All sins are attempts to fill voids, Weil said. So what of God’s attempt to fill the void by his creation of the cosmos? Was not this the mother of all sins?

When Adam ate of the tree of knowledge, he learnt that it was the Lord who lied and the snake that told the truth. God is truth, but as soon as he began to speak to us, he had no choice but to deal in lies. And when we draw near to him, we must do the same.

12 The red religion of blood

Only a cannibal god, red-fanged and ghastly, could have laid it down that life would flourish by feeding on life. It exacts from its creation the homage of blood. The smell of nature is the smell of death. Plants and trees alone make life without killing it. All the rest of life lives by cannibalism. If the leopard were to lie down with the lamb, the whole world would starve.

Who, looking at the world, could come to the conclusion that God is love?

God must have the sensibility of a crook who starts cock-fights. He flings a bone into a pack of slavering dogs, and gets his fun from watching them tear each other limb from limb.

God made this world of scarcity, in which your gain is my loss so that we can’t help hating our fellow beings, and then he told us to love one another.

God ordained a moral code fit for angels, and then placed us in a world in which we would have to act like devils to survive and thrive. And then he damns us to hell when we do so.

The world that God made proves him to be monstrous or criminal. And his apologists defend him by arguing that he is merely incompetent, and that he did the best he could do. They claim that he is not fit to plead.

13 Fatuous creation

Did the Lord set this world spinning to amuse himself, and then lose interest in the show? It’s as if he formed us to be his clowns and zanies, and then found that he had no sense of humour. Or did our murderous pranks and high jinks strike him as too disgusting to be funny?

How perverse or incompetent of God, to have made a world all the features of which are so out of joint with his own. God, we say, is love and life. So why did he make a cosmos most of which is loveless and dead? And he is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-caring, so why is his noblest work so weak, ignorant and cold?

God made the world by withholding from his creatures his own supernal attributes. The creation was his act of self-negation. He set his hyperactive creation running, and then retired to rest.

How often God must have said to his angels, What a lovely planet earth might have been, if I had spent a few more days on its making, or else had stopped on the fifth.

14 It means nothing to God

If we are to read God’s disposition in the book of the world, he must be like a schoolboy with a chemistry set. He loves spectacular effects, flares and explosions, but has not figured out what to do with most of it. The universe is proof of what mischief a bored deity will get up to when left on his own for an eternity.

If we read God’s nature in the book of the world, we would be well advised to do all we can to keep out of his way.

God is all-knowing, but like most polymaths, he does not think much, and he has few ideas, and most of these are the same as the crowd’s.

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, because God cares only for form and quantity. Its moral significance is lost on him. In his eyes all events are no more than statistics.

God knows all things. And so all things mean intensely to him, but none of it interests him.

We are the futile fools of time, and God is the futile fool of eternity. And the Lord, who is tormented by everlastingness, took his petty revenge by making creatures who are tormented by time.

15 The needy and all-sufficient deity

What pathetic need drove God, a perfect and self-sufficing being, to make a world so much inferior to himself?

God, we say, does nothing in vain. And yet we don’t doubt that his most purposeful act was to make this vain world and beings like us to live in it whose every deed is vanity.

Whether or not God’s existence gives a meaning to our life, our existence proves that God does not suffice to give a meaning to his own. He exposed his inner poverty when he made this world.

It’s easy to believe that there is a god who made the world. But it’s hard to see why he would have wished to do so. Since he has the power to do everything, he has no reason to do anything.

‘The universe is a flaw in the perfection of non-being,’ as Valéry said. God is a flawless being. To exist is a glaring flaw. Hence God does not exist. He is a necessary entity who therefore has no place in this contingent world.

For a perfect being, to act at all is a sign of some lack which needs to be filled. All the acts of a necessary being would have to be quite unnecessary. God is a necessary being all of whose acts have been quite unnecessary.

Why did God make this life to test whether we merit a place in the next one, when he already knew the answer?

16 The imperfections of a perfect being

God must have more power than knowledge, and more knowledge than wisdom.

For an all-powerful being, God seems baffled at every turn by his own impotence. For an all-observing one, he seems to be ignorant of most of what goes on in the world. And for an all-wise one, his designs seem to border on madness. It’s clear that the world is his handiwork, since it is so imperfect, contingent and supererogatory.

If God is all-good and all-powerful, he must be so lazy that he might as well be impotent and indifferent.

How could such a botched and aborted world have been brought forth by a perfect begetter? And how could a loving father have sired such a detestable lump? The world is a wound in God’s perfection.

How could God make a world that is better than himself? And why would he want to make one that was worse?

You needs must forgive God, since he so conspicuously knows not what he does. If he knew what his creation of this world would lead to, how could he have dared to do it? And if he were all-powerful, he would have contrived some means to unmake it.

A perfect being would have to be boundlessly evil as well as boundlessly good, or else it would be deficient in some respect.

17 God the celebrity

‘Man,’ according to Ignatius of Loyola, ‘was created to praise.’ How human of the creator, to make a world so that he might wallow in its worship. He must be like a celebrity whose aim is to recruit as many fans as he can to adore him. Is he so insecure that he needs us to prop up his sense of himself?

God is a reclusive celebrity. He made a world to bask in its adulation, and then went into hiding to keep out of the public eye.

God is vain rather than proud. He does not suffice for his own regard. And so he had to lower himself to put on a show so as to win the applause of beings who are not worth impressing.

How could a deity that craves our reverence be worthy of it? What man or woman would be gratified by the veneration of a slug or a fly? How could you have faith in a god who cares whether or not you have faith in him? And yet this is the sole kind of god that you can care for.

18 Hungry for love

What pitiful hunger drove the Lord to create beings so unworthy of his love in the vain hope that they would love him? And if he knows our hearts, how could he want or expect to win our adoration? Is his faith in himself so fragile, that he needs such motes of dust as we are to have faith in him? He too testifies that to act is not worth a pin on its own, if you lack the notice of worthless witnesses. Like everyone else, he cares about none of your opinions save the one that you hold of him.

If God thinks that people love him, he must be far from omniscient. And if he knows why they pretend to love him, he must be quite disillusioned.

God gives us unconditional love on condition that we love him to the exclusion of all else. And yet no one really loves him at all. What they love is an idea that affirms their own significance.

God puts up with the fellowship of the dreariest souls, so they at least claim, on condition that they sing him loud hosannas. Does he too get the adorers that he deserves?

The Lord must be down and out indeed, if he needs to seek out the cramped habitation of a human soul to squat in.

CARE AND CRUELTY

19 We cannot love God

In order to love God, people need to misunderstand him. They do, and yet they still don’t love him. People may believe in God, but they can’t love him. But they still love the devil, though they have ceased to believe in him.

There can be no love of an infinite being for a finite one, nor of a finite being for an infinite one. Take the gap that divides us from an amoeba, and multiply that by infinity. That is infinitely less than the gulf between God and us. So ask yourself, how could he love us? And the broadest crevasse that we can bridge with our love is the tiny one that sets us apart from a dog. Is it more presumptuous to believe that God loves us or that we could love God? We are too selfish and limited to love him, and he is too transcendent to care for us.

Of all God’s infinite attributes, love must be the least of them.

How could we love God, when we can’t know what he is? And what relations could we have with a being that is so transcendent?

The prophets tell us that God’s ways are not our ways. But if that is so, what dealings can we have with him?

We can’t love God, because he is not real to us. And we can’t love our neighbours, because they are all too real.

20 The religion of the father

Are there any three things more loathsome than a father, a fatherland, or a father god? Yet these have been the three things that we have pretended to love the most, and the source of all value.

If God is a father, that is good reason to hate him.

God acts most like a father in his lack of care for his offspring.

We are God’s children, and the world is a sadistic boarding school to which he sends us, to get us out of his way and to toughen us up for the rigours of the next life.

Is God so obnoxious because he is a father? Or are fathers so obnoxious because they think they are gods?

A god of love is one of the more patent projections of our own voracious self-love. And we had to conjure up a being as vast as the cosmos to love our cosmic dust.

Love is need. God needs nothing. Therefore God is not love and cannot love.

God loves us so much, that he gave us the free will to love him or not. And then in his mercy he made hell for those who fail to.

21 The religion of hate

A religion is cherished not for the light that it gives but for its heat. And hatred and acrimony give more heat than love. ‘Men hate more steadily than they love,’ as Johnson points out. A religion of love won’t last long, if it fails to provide its flock with some foe to loathe. It wins them by preaching charity while inflaming them to practise hate. But the lambs no longer have sufficient faith to excommunicate each other, or burn schismatics, or put infidels to the sword, or plan torments for their enemies in the world to come.

They can’t love the world which God has made. So they profess to love a God which they have made.

God may be a god of love, but we love him on account of his frightening power and to bribe him to use it on our behalf.

What a cruel joke, to control people by terrifying them with the bogey of a god of love.

Jesus taught his followers to love their enemies, but they showed that it was not in them even to love their friends.

22 The gods of the tribe

The gods used to do what the state does now, that is, unite us with those of the same tribe as us and separate us from foreign ones. A private religion would make no more sense than a private language. And a world religion would be as bland and bloodless as a world language, like esperanto. There could be no world religion, because one of the chief functions of a religion is to assert the primacy of our own tribe.

23 The divine despot

The god of the cosmologists is too vast to be of use to us. And so we can have dealings only with the petty tyrant who might help or harm us. As Muhammad asked, ‘How can you worship what can neither benefit nor harm you?’

God is a king, and heaven is his court. The saints are his courtiers, and the one question that fills their minds is that of precedence. Shall my seat be in the front row or the back, at his right hand or at his left? Will it be a throne or a stool?

Christ is king, and we know that a king outranks all gods.

A god is any being strong enough to make hell for those beneath it.

We truckle to God by ascribing to him the qualities of the type that we find most enviable, that is to say, the despot. Where a governor is flattered for his mercy, you know that he must be a tyrant. Mercy is the virtue of an arbitrary autocrat, not of a lawful sovereign.

Mercy is in the realm of the moral life what miracles are in the realm of nature. God lays down rigid laws, and then demonstrates his goodness or power by disobeying them.

God is an all-controlling but distant autocrat, and we are like those peasants who at each new enormity would cry out, ‘If only Stalin knew of this.’

24 Divine malevolence

God must be as innocent as a child, who still takes pleasure in torturing kittens and demolishing ants’ nests.

God’s blessedness, like that of a Torquemada, would not be complete if he could not hear the simpering of the saints and the damned gnashing their teeth.

It seems that gods and mortals rile one another like a mismatched couple, and bring out each other’s genocidal tendencies.

The Lord had no choice but to wipe us from the face of the earth, once he found that we share his own bent for violence and righteous deceit.

We claim to be made in the image of God. If this is a lie, how will he chastise us for libelling him? But if it is true, what barbarous cruelty might we not have to fear at his hands? He serves us as the mirror of our self-satisfaction, and we serve him as the mortification of his pride.

God couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive us for eating his apples till we had splayed his son on a cross. Such is the ineffable logic of divine charity, which looks much like a crazed mortal cruelty.

25 The cannibal god

Our vitality feasts on all the death that we make. We dance on the roof of the shambles. The deaths of others make us feel more alive. We count our own lot richer for their loss. I love life as it has not yet seen fit to butcher me.

God built this slaughterhouse to teach us to be as kind to our fellow creatures as he was.

Saint Francis did well to preach to the birds. They have as much need of his teaching as we do, since they hate one another just as sourly, and they are just as apt to heed it.

It would be easier to believe that this madhouse of cramming, copulating and killing is the work of a crazy satyr than of a serene spirit. Could the God of love not have thought of a gentler way for life to thrive than by devouring its fellow forms of life?

If life were not such a cannibalistic feast, we would never have got it into our heads that a good God made it, or that we had to go to great lengths to appease his wrath. We would have lived at our ease on the bounty of nature, at peace with all our fellow creatures.

God looks down on us from a brazen heaven, which is too high for our cries to reach.

26 Religion and the fiend

Heaven is the perfect totalitarian state. There the saved have no will to resist, and no one cares for the recalcitrants who are racked in the concentration camp below.

The difference between God and the devil was in origin one of relative power. God is a king, and so his privilege is to rule. Satan was a subject, and so his duty was to obey.

God is a fiend’s notion of a supremely felicitous being, who has the unchecked power to do his will with impunity. And it may be that God is a name we give to the devil to flatter him, so that he will favour us. God is the devil with more power, worse taste, less honesty, and a clear conscience. The gods are masks that the devil has worn to do his work in this world.

27 The unhappiness of God

God’s state is indeed kingly. No one loves him, his entourage of minions curry favour with him to get what they want, and no one tells him the truth.

We taunt a defunct god like a cashiered dictator, who has lost the power to hurt us.

If God is all-knowing, then he must be all-pitiful too. Omniscience is the curse of a being who is condemned to know so much that is trivial and disgusting. But he is clearly not all-pitying. Like any powerful being, he has no doubt used up all his pity on his own case.

Many things are not worth knowing, as Aristotle said, and most of what God knows must be of this kind.

Was the Lord corrupted, first by his elation at his own omnipotence and success, and then by his resentment at how we wrecked what he had made? Whatever he feels for us and this sad world, it can’t be love, or his heart would break a million times a minute. Was he dumbfounded more by the resilience of human kind or by its depravity? Having failed to drown it in the flood, he then failed to redeem it on the cross. He found that it cost less bother to make a world than to save it, at least when he had made it so hastily.

God did not know remorse, till he made this world. But since that evil hour, he has known nothing else.

28 Jehovah and son

The God of the Old Testament slaughters his foes, and we derogate him as a vindictive tyrant. The God of the New Testament tortures them till the end of time, and we dote on him as a merciful father. They form a cruel dynasty. ‘My father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.’ Who could love such a God? ‘Fear him, which after he hath killed hath power to cast into hell.’ People look on Jesus as a god of love because they believe that he didn’t mean the anathemas that he spewed forth or that he meant them only for their enemies.

God seems to have been an absent-minded father, unsuspecting for most of time that he had a son. Could it be that he was so disappointed in the milksop, that he gave him no thought till he had the chance to dispatch him to this world to have him lynched? Having seen how he dealt with his own firstborn, we might pause before claiming to be his children.

29 Imperial religion

How the devil must smirk, to see how the sects have spread their smudge over the clean earth. The gods were shipped round the globe like germs, decimating whole populations that had not yet been inoculated against them. Jesus came as a scourge to the first americans to chastise them for their incorrigible innocence. He let loose his fiends on them, to show them how much need they had of his saving grace.

God loves the cruel and self-righteous, and helps them to torment the weak.

How the Lord must hate the sinlessness of indigenes and animals, and prefer us and our rapacity, duplicity and machinery. So he has called us up as his death squads to hunt them from his earth. What loathing he must feel for his creation, to put its fate in our hands.

30 Luck trumps providence

God’s providence may rule your life, but dumb luck must choose which god’s providence it will be your lot to be ruled by. Cross the river, and you must worship a strange god. ‘We are christians by the same title that we are périgordians or germans,’ as Montaigne wrote. If we had faith as big as a grain of mustard, we might remove mountains. But since we do not, mountains and rivers change the course of faith. On this side of the hill we have one God, on that side dwell the devils.

In the old principalities religion was a tool of statecraft. Now it is an outdated name for the caprices of demography. Faith cometh by breeding. In matters of religion God proposes but man disposes. Divine grace is no match for the least chance of birth.

A religion proves its truth not by advancing rational arguments but by its adherents breeding like rabbits.

Most people are no more responsible for their religion than they are for the colour of their skin.

The cosy creed of providence is a doggerel in which the creator rhymes too readily with his creation.

31 The incompetence of providence

The cosmos is testimony to God’s surpassing power and deficient wisdom.

The world is such a mess, one could well believe that there’s a god presiding over it. And his existence is such an appalling possibility, that one could well fear it might be real. We must hope that he will show his mercy for us by not existing.

We doubt whether there is a god, because the world that he made seems so evil. And yet if there were no evil in the world, what would be the point of believing in a god to shield us from it or inflict it on those we hate?

God helps those who don’t need his help. ‘For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.’

If the cosmos is a contraption designed to rescue castaway souls, why is it so ill-fitted to its task? What a world of blood, waste and wonders God has made for us to ply the starved christian virtues in. ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ Why so broad a stage for so paltry a play? Why fourteen billion years of starburst and carnage for a few dingy centuries of salvation?

God help any cause that needs God’s help to succeed.

32 The favourites of religion

God manifests his compassionate grace when he plucks his favourites from a cataclysm in which he dooms multitudes to die. When he sets his mind to put the world to rights, you know there will be slaughter. ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.’

Providence is not general good salvaged from particular evil. It is our own partial good purchased at the expense of general evil.

God is a maudlin soul, who weeps for the fall of a sparrow but winks at mass extinctions. And the sparrows keep falling nonetheless.

Sermonizers can’t quite make up their mind whether turpitude is proved more by the filthy bliss that it wallows in or by the buffets that it brings on its own head.

33 The egoism of religion

The job of providence is not to make everyone happy, but to make me and mine happier than everyone else. I would know only half of God’s love for me, if I didn’t see him persecuting those whom I hate. It’s as clear that it is at work when it rains blows on others as when it heaps blessings on me. A god that fails to take our part would be no god at all.

The more mayhem we witness in the world, the more just we think the divine care that shields us from it.

We love God because we know he hates our enemies. His role is to deal out an indulgent mercy to us and a harsh justice to our foes.

What would be sin in us is virtue in God. Such is his jealousy, pride, wrath and vengeance. And we want him to practise on our behalf the sins that are forbidden to us.

Providence is the power that preserves my life. God knows what preserves the lives of others.

34 The brutality of providence

If all is in God’s hands, he must have a lot of blood on them.

We know that the geological record is the history of God’s intervention in the world, because it is littered with carnage and mass death.

We would do well not to trust the good will of any deity that would let loose our murderous kind on the rest of his creation.

The god who keeps this world turning must be numb to our sufferings and an accessory in our sins. He acts as the stern warden of our prison-house, superintending all the violence that keeps this pandemonium in a roar.

It is a proof of God’s wisdom, that he knows how to use the foolish, the wicked and the false to serve his plan.

God alone, the theologians say, has the true freedom not to do wrong. But he has kept it back from us, in order to prove how right he is to damn us.

All things forward the devil’s work, not least the labour of the saints.

35 God loves the rich and the great

Providence justifies the fortunate, since their good fortune is blessed by God and will go on for all time. And it comforts the unlucky that their bad luck will one day be paid back in full.

The poor know that God loves them because he loves the poor. And the rich know that God loves them because he has made them rich. Providence is the complacence of the prosperous and the consolation of the afflicted.

God visits the sins of the rich and powerful on the poor and helpless. And he punishes the strong for their sins, but not till the world has stripped them of their strength, and set up stronger ones in their place. And he puts down the guilty, but not till he has made the innocent pay the price for their guilt.

God loves the rich so much, that he sent his creeds to tell the poor that it is they that he loves, so that they won’t rise up and kill the rich.

If the guilty never prosper, then all the great ones of the earth must be innocent.

Monsters of selfishness are sure that God is on their side. And all that goes on in the world shows that they are right.

MESSIAH

36 False messiah, false religion

Anyone who sets out to save the souls of others is lost. A saviour must try to save the world, since he is too attached to it to let it go. Jesus, unlike Buddha, never laughs.

A messiah is a heretic and blasphemer come to unshackle the elect from the old sire’s tough edicts. He brings the glad tidings that by his merciful intercession his father has damned no more than nine tenths of us to burn in ever-living flames.

In two thousand years there has not been a single born christian, not even the one who died on the cross. He was too drunk on his messianic errand to be a sober pilgrim. He was both the most influential and the most impotent man who has ever lived. So he may have been God after all.

Jesus seldom communed with seraphim, but he was fretted by legions of devils. Like all who claim to show us the way to heaven, he seems to have had more fun fantasizing about the lurid torments of hell.

37 Bound to the world for eternity

The quest for the life everlasting has been one of the desultory pastimes of desperate mortals.

Was it such a good thing for Lazarus to be brought back from the dead? Must he not have felt that fiends were snatching at his soul, and dragging him to hell? He seems to have been caught up as an unwitting accessory in a magic trick. Isn’t it odd that a religion whose sight is so fixed on the next world should prove its miraculous power by returning a man to this one?

We might desist from hankering for heaven, if we could get our fill of our worldly desires, or if we could let go our grip on them. Craving is craving, whether it’s for earthly trash or for heavenly tinsel. And even the search for nirvana serves as one more excuse for clinging to life.

A sage like the Buddha must have an uncommonly strong will to live, to have seen through the world and how worthless it is, and still to go on living.

This world so fills our hearts, that it brims over as a belief that there must be an even better one which will cater to all our worldly wants, in which we will live for all time. But eternal life in the true sense would be to cease to exist as an individual, and to let go of one’s self, and to be absorbed in God. And to most believers that would be worse than being dead.

38 The imitation Christ

Perhaps the true Jesus of self-forgetting wisdom was left in the tomb, when the false egoist was raised up by Paul and the evangelists.

We ought to give Jesus the benefit of the doubt, and not blame him for instituting the cult of his personality.

It’s clear Jesus was a fraud from how eagerly he touted for followers and how fiercely he insisted that we must have faith in him. His personality type was not that of a self-effacing sage but of a manipulative and self-aggrandizing cult-leader. As Kierkegaard wrote, ‘A man who could not seduce men cannot save them either.’

Jesus has all the marks of a parochial charlatan, the narrow horizons of thought, the fierce invectives against his competitors, the tight band of mesmerized dupes, the claim to work miracles, the contempt for forms and customs that don’t suit his own needs, the myth of the stab in the back, the dividing of the world into those who are for me and those who stand against me.

39 The narcissist Jesus

Jesus is each one of us, a frustrated solipsist, God’s loveless and forlorn child, sure that he could heal the multitude if they would have faith in him, and that the cosmos could be saved if it would love him to the exclusion of all else, a self-believer who needs us all to believe in him, one who would curse a fig tree if it failed to yield him fruit out of season, a bad actor, fanatical yet evasive, all the while playing to the gallery and permitting the momentary effect to trump the truths of eternity. He is touched by people only when he can cast them as pathetic extras in the melodrama of salvation in which he stars. If you aimed to follow his lead, you would take up faith-healing, exorcism and millenarian ranting.

A messiah lives in the eyes of others, and can’t bear to be alone. The question that means most to him is ‘Whom do men say that I am?’ And since his kingdom was not of this world, it could not have been within him. It must have been out there, in the hearts of his sheep, who shored up his faith that he was the son of God.

Jesus calls on you to submerge your egoism in his. But unlike a sage such as the Buddha, he does not mean to give up his own.

40 The despairing redeemer

A redeemer must have sounded the soul to a lower depth than a mephistophelean tempter. So how could he grant that it has any right to find grace? ‘O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you?’ Hell hath no fury like a saviour scorned.

God and the devil battle for human souls, on which neither of them could set any value.

What small fry Jesus must have deemed the human soul, to have dubbed his apostles fishers of men.

‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Jesus died in lucid despair, and was raised by his disciples’ hopeful delusion. And when in this world does greedy mortal gullibility fail to win out over divine despair? From then he was doomed to live on as the false fetish of all that his soul abhorred and that the world loves, a triumphant usurper who stole God’s place in the hearts of his flock. The cost of his success was to have the gold of his message melted down to forge one of the most brazen of the world’s idols. He had to lose his soul to gain the world.

God lost his faith when he made the world, and his son lost his faith when he tried to save it.

When God took on man’s flesh, the sum of all he learnt was that his divine father had left him in the lurch.

41 The spiritual demagogue

A saviour is a spiritual demagogue. A true sage is a spiritual aristocrat. But there may not be much to tell them apart once their followers have finished with them.

Sermon-mongers trust that they heal others by the homilies that they preach. But it is their own sick souls that they cure by their play-acting. They gorge their own egoism by admonishing you to starve yours. The sole salvation that they crave is an adoring crowd. They hope to be redeemed by the ears of their hearers and to be rescued from despair by the faith that others show in them. They are borne up not by their own faith, but by the faith of their fellow mortals. ‘No siren did ever so charm the ear of the listener,’ Henry Taylor wrote, ‘as the listening ear has charmed the soul of the siren.’

42 Shepherds and butchers

Beware of those who set up as shepherds of a flock. The sheep are sure to end up fleeced or butchered.

Saints don’t aim to save one soul but multitudes, since they know that no soul is worth saving but their own. They want to do their salvation business wholesale, not retail. And they hope to make it big in their career of meekness.

If we are to believe his prophets, God is as narrow-minded, self-righteous and vengeful as themselves.

FAITH

43 Faith and religion

All the creeds have at least served to hide from us our lack of faith.

True faith would be the one great scandal and stumbling-block to our worldly hearts. So God makes sure that the one scandal pious people never put in our way is that of true faith.

We have a deep propensity for superstition, but next to no gift for real faith. Religion is the crust, superstition is the core. Our hopes and fears are so sharp, that they stick even into unreal things if they promise to help or harm them.

Superstition is an abject fear of things that are out of our control, which prompts us to a mad presumption that we are able to control them.

Faith is the evidence of things not seen. All the things that we can see cast doubt on there being a God. And since God sees all the things that we get up to, how could he have faith in us?

44 Faith and knowledge

A religion will soon die out once its believers start to care whether or not it is true.

Any prejudice that needs to be fortified by reason will in the end be felled by it. ‘To give a reason for anything,’ Hazlitt says, ‘is to breed a doubt of it.’ A faith that could be brought down by countervailing evidence would scarcely be faith at all. All healthy faith is immune to reason. And the more absurd the creed, the more tightly we cling to it, since we thus prove that our power can bend truth to its will.

The two wellsprings of faith are scripture and tradition, but if you made a study of these, you would lose all grounds for faith.

Faith alone can be certain, since it knows nothing. If you lack faith, you cannot be sure. And if you have faith, you cannot be honest or wise. Certainty does not spring from cool reason. It is the heat given off by our snug solidarity.

The just may live by faith, but the honest must live by doubt, irony and despair.

Knowledge can no more dissolve faith than light can counteract gravity.

45 The foolishness of faith

‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.’ He loves the fools so much, that he has made this life as a test which they are best qualified to pass. And he has made heaven as a reward which they will be best equipped to enjoy.

Solomon taught that in much wisdom is much grief. Jesus solved this problem by replacing wisdom with the foolishness of faith.

Religion does not train people to think in a certain way. It makes the most of the fact that they don’t think at all. Its shepherds relieve their sheep of the burden of thinking, which can’t have weighed very heavily on them anyway.

46 Religion hates religion

Even more than reason, faith hates rival faiths, and the faith next to it most of all. A religion is a thing baseless, pernicious, primitive and oppressive, unless it is one’s own. In that case it is common sense, consoling, useful and liberating.

All believers are of the same view, that the one real choice is between their own religion and no religion at all. They could see themselves being frank atheists, but how could they swallow the sacrilegious hogwash of a rival religion?

Converts assent with such fire and zeal not so much from love of their new creed as out of hate for their old one. The persecutor’s cold fury mutates into the convert’s crusading fanaticism. No views strike us as so baneful or preposterous as those that we once held as our own. And in order to prove that we are now in the right, we have to excoriate them for causing us to go so wrong.

Credulous believers mock the credulity of those whose superstitions differ from their own.

47 The proof of numbers

A sect proves that it is the true one by how many minds it convinces or conquers and by how long it lasts. Its success in this world is the test of its divine favour. We don’t have faith in the Lord. We have faith in certain mortals who declare that they have faith in the Lord. It’s not ideas that we believe or disbelieve. It is people that we trust or distrust. But who now could muster enough trust in the human race to credit its puerile forgeries of the godhead? Belief in God calls for too much faith in man.

Many people believe things whose absurdity would be clear to all, were it not that so many people believe them. A faith is a sacred Ponzi scheme, which rests on the mutual credulity of its dupes.

We believe that we believe in our religion, because we believe that others believe in it.

48 The survival of the fittest religion

Wilde notes that ‘truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.’ The gods, like all living things, are subject to the laws of natural selection. An extinct religion must be a false religion. We take it that a living god must have a living flock, since it is not God but his faithful that we have faith in. Who these days could do homage to the deities of Egypt or the aztecs? It’s useless to try to bring a dead god back to life, as Julian the apostate found when he tried to resuscitate the divinities of Rome.

A religion proves its truth by surviving. But the ideas that are fittest to survive amongst our incorrigibly deceived and deceiving species are bound to be lies.

49 The proof of zeal

The chief appeal of a creed is the zeal of its flock. But when you know what coarse chaff feeds their fervency, you’re apt to be made sick by it.

Zeal is not one of the gifts of the spirit. It is an aggressive assertion of self which proves the absence of them. Faith ought to teach a wise detachment, not least from the zeal of faith. True religion would negate the ego. Zeal inflames it. What a pity that both of the creeds that have conquered the world have nothing but zeal. Even their message of peace they preach with a violent minatory zeal. Their adherents don’t know how to be devout without being fanatical, or to be wise without becoming infidels.

It is your faith and zeal that win people over, not your reasons. And you get your faith and zeal from others. It is more common to have the courage of other people’s convictions. Faith, like life, is imitation, not conviction. ‘Every man is a borrower and a mimic,’ as Emerson wrote, ‘life is theatrical and literature a quotation.’

50 The proof of blood

Martyrs die for their creed, which they love more than life, as they lived for their creed, which they loved more than truth. Laodiceans love the world more than their faith. Zealots love their own zealotry more than their faith. And the god-fearing love their faith more than they love their god.

A sect that begins by revering martyrs will soon be revelling in carnage. If truth is proved by blood, it can be proved as well by the slaughter of its opponents as by the sacrifice of its acolytes.

The most spiritual faith grows fat not on the belief of its devotees but on the blood of its adversaries.

Martyrs seduce believers, not by the light of their faith, but by the lurid violence of their tortures and by the lust for revenge that they rouse. And they are loved, not so much because they offer up their own blood, but because they give their fellow lambs a licence to shed the blood of their foes.

Why do those who claim to put their trust in the spirit hold that the best proof of truth is the shedding of blood?

51 The religion of the man-god

The gravest sin against God is to set up a man in his place. And yet many people know no other way to worship him.

The incarnation is an even more ridiculous miracle than the resurrection. Is it not more ludicrous that the great God should be born and die as a man, than that he should be able to come back to life? But we find it more marvellous that he should do what no mortal could do than that he should have done what no deity would deign to do.

First the one God killed the rest of the gods, and then the son of man usurped the place of his father. When God took on human form, it was inevitable that humanity would one day appropriate the role of God.

The notion that a god would take on man’s shape is so flattering to our human vanity, that it never occurs to us how degrading it is to his divine dignity. But this seems to us the most godlike thing he ever did.

52 The worldly grounds of religion

Mortals have faith in the godhead on such weak grounds, that when they cease to have faith, it’s on grounds just as weak. And those who cling to their creed do so because they don’t care enough to doubt. They trust in supernatural things from mundane causes, and they trust in rational things from irrational ones. And the mundane and irrational causes are the same, usage, inheritance, expedience, conformity, slothfulness and self-interest. As Swift said, ‘It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.’

Where their ever-living soul is at stake, people will sink their trust in the laziest absurdities, which they would spurn out of hand if it concerned their welfare in this world. And it seems worth a flutter, since the stakes are so low.

A religion spreads, not when it converts the world to its holiness, but when the world converts it to its worldliness.

The pious know that the world is a den of lies. So why do they take it that their faith proves its truth when it wins over the world?

Our mouths gape to praise God, but then gulp down the world. Our hearts are so empty, that they can swallow this world at one swig and have room for the next one as well.

It is the things of this world that we have faith in, though we may call them God.

53 The sterility of religion

If people had real faith, they would have no need of religion. And if there were a god, they would have no need of faith.

Faith is a stock of self-serving fantasies which mocks the world. And the world is a stock of self-serving fantasies which mocks faith.

The soul soaks up faith as a dry rock soaks up rain, but won’t soften or breed a thing from it. Faith is sterile, till it has been fertilized by hypocrisy.

‘Act as if you had faith,’ said Augustine, ‘and faith will be given unto you.’ That is to say, act as you see those acting who have been at it for so long that they have come to assume that they believe for real. What devious unbeliever could have set out so glaringly the all too fleshly origins of faith? Faith is one of those roles that we play with more feeling the longer we have been playing it.

We don’t doubt, because we don’t really believe.

Religion is not mystical bliss or holy terror. It is a tepid, polite social custom.

54 Faith in this world

It’s not the incredulous but the elect who show by their frigidity and negligence where their real treasure lies.

Our hearts take refuge in faith because our troubles in this world weigh a great deal more with us than the religious remedies which we unthinkingly take up to lighten them. We bandage a sham spiritual sore with belief, so that by curing this we might bear our real workaday ones with more ease. God served as one of our worldliest fabrications. And the most unworldly faith is for use in this world and not in the next. Pious people fix their gaze on paradise to help them get through the trials of this life, not to score a place in the next one.

Those who feel that they are at work in the vineyard of the Lord have got their pay in advance here on earth.

We never come to the end of our worldly credulousness. But we quickly wear out our capacity for true conviction.

Did God lend us faith as a blindfold, so that his shining would not sear our weak eyes?

Most of us don’t lose our faith. We just find how little of it we had in the first place.

55 The futility of faith

Salvation is by faith. That is, an imaginary virtue wins an imaginary reward.

Faith is the fake satisfaction of a shallow need.

Faith is the flag of God’s withdrawal. We have had to call on its aid, since the hidden God has turned in disgust from the earth and ceased to speak to us face to face.

If faith is a wager, and God a gamble, then the soul is not worth playing for.

We don’t really believe the dogmas that form our creed, and we don’t practise the precepts that form our moral code. By a strange reversal we act out our creed through its rituals of assent, and assent to its moral code as a theory fit only for some other world.

‘Religion,’ as Pavese wrote, ‘consists in believing that all that happens is very important,’ though we don’t need religion to tell us that. But religion is at a loss to make us take the great truths of life seriously. The best it can do is to make us take its own frivolous fables seriously.

It’s clear which are the core doctrines of a creed. They are the ones that its flock fails to believe in or understand, much less practise.

56 Delegating salvation

The faithful pin their hopes on a saviour, so that they won’t have to give any thought to their own salvation. If they could be saved, they would have no need of a saviour. And if they could win deliverance, they would have no need of creeds or sects. They need to keep on finding deliverers, so that they can go on doing the things from which they need to be delivered.

We can’t save ourselves and don’t want to. So there must be a saviour who will do it for us.

Why do we keep on seeking our salvation from the cackling messiahs who fool us so outrageously and the ingenious machines which will ruin us so lucratively? We are as crafty as gods, and stupider than parasites, which have more sense than to wear out their host.

57 Religion of the unredeemed

There is no salvation, and no soul to be saved. And if there were, the soul would not be worth saving, and salvation would not be worth attaining.

If we are so far gone from the right path that only a god could save us, how could we be worth saving, or what god would want to?

The preachers of the good news proclaim the kingdom, and then put a hundred obstacles in our path to prevent us from getting to it.

If people’s depravity didn’t prevent them from practising the ideals of their religion, the institutions of their religion would have been sure to.

Salvation ought to be for all, yet who could have faith in a salvation that claims to be for all, when most of us are so mundanely irredeemable and so unmindful of our soul’s fate? We have to be herded like geese to a deliverance which we don’t much care for or desire. ‘The fewness of the elect,’ as Baudelaire wrote, ‘is what makes paradise.’

58 The cares of this life

The most trivial desire or distraction is enough to drive from our hearts the love of God or the fear of hell. ‘Each day,’ wrote Maistre, ‘even the most submissive religionist risks the torments of the afterworld for the sake of the paltriest pleasures.’ The fiend’s best bluff was not, as Baudelaire claimed, to make you believe that he does not exist, but to assure you that you believe in your heart that God exists.

Our fears for how we will fare in the next world pale in comparison to our cares in this one. The dread of damnation for all time costs us less anguish than the loss of a job.

We need a gospel according to Lazarus, to bring to the daylight what he found out in his shroud. But no one seems to have cared to ask him its mysteries, and they may have slipped from his mind too by the time he came to sleep his second sleep.

Most people spend far more care on their clothes than they do on their souls.

59 Heaven can wait

If you believed that you were headed for heaven, would you not curse each day that you had to stay in suspense here on this low earth? ‘Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this,’ Browne wrote, ‘it were a martyrdom to live.’ But we are by no means keen to loose our grip on the cheap toys of this life in order to claim our fabulous birthright of bliss in the next. Most believers would be content to put off their eternity for an eternity. And they would give up their hope of paradise for one more day in this purgatory.

You may believe that you will live on after death, but in the meanwhile you have to go on for seventy years in which eternity is a thought that comes and goes at rare moments.

People long for a second life, since they can’t break free from their attachment to this one.

60 Religion of the body

Religion keeps our bodies busy with prayers and litanies, pilgrimages and fasts, vigils and penances, so that it won’t have to deal with our unredeemed hearts. It proves that our souls are too dull to rise above earthly things.

The state makes use of religion to regulate the body by pretending that we have souls.

The priest transubstantiates wafers of bread into the body of Christ, so that we don’t have to do a thing to change our souls.

If God were here with you, why would you need to set out on pilgrimage? And each step on your path lands you farther from God.

61 An inward and spiritual vacancy

Believers think that they take part in the rites of their creed because they believe in it. But in fact they believe in it because they take part in the rites, and they take part in them because others take part in them too.

A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual void.

Ritual turns miracle into mundane routine. Faith is wonder, religion is custom.

We recite our creeds, to keep from noticing that we don’t believe a word of them.

We need to take part in rituals, because we have no faith. And we need to cling to our faith, because our rituals are vain and inefficacious.

The feast days of a religion give rise to a lot more masticating than meditating.

We mark the feast days of our creed to congratulate ourselves for not practising its precepts on all the rest.

Worshippers don’t see that their rituals are hocus-pocus, since they don’t see any magic in them at all. Religion stupefies them rather than awing them. It renders the miraculous banal, rather than making the ordinary seem miraculous. Each Sunday millions of catholics take part in the most stupendous miracle, and it seems to them as routine as chomping on a cracker.

Once it is established, a religion can work its miracles to order. How could Hume say that no miracle was ever witnessed? Few things are more commonly attested.

62 Religion is first hallucination, then hearsay

A faith begins in hallucination, but soon fades into hearsay.

After the first divine visitation a revelation turns into dry instruction. Faith without words would be dead.

‘Faith cometh by hearing.’ That is, not by the spirit, but by the letter of instruction. People believe, not because they see, but because they hear the professions of those who do believe. And then they begin to see once they believe. ‘Ghosts,’ says Scott, ‘are only seen where they are believed.’ Faith is a derangement of the senses. Believing is seeing. The saved don’t have faith because they have seen miracles. They see miracles once they have got faith. And if they don’t see miracles, then they have no real faith. We witness what others believe, and they believe what they have been told. ‘And he did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.’

Thomas is the patron saint not of toughminded sceptics but of the hysterically credulous, who have learnt how to work themselves up into hallucinating the chimeras which their creed has told them are real.

63 Miraculous stupidity

Miracles used to confirm faith, now they confound it. Believers have to explain them away, in order to prove that their beliefs are plausible.

Why have the omniscient gods stultified mortals with miracles, instead of enlightening us with their insight? Do they know us so well, that they have gauged what shoddy dodges we deserve to be deceived by? ‘God’s contempt for human minds,’ wrote Valéry, ‘is proved by miracles.’ Marvels are an index of how gullible we are, not of how mighty God is. They don’t show his supernatural power, but our all too natural stupidity. They stun our reason but don’t stir our wonder. If they were real, they would prove God’s lack of wisdom. But since they are not, they prove our lack of brains.

To what depths of crassness will God not stoop to impress his crass mortal flock?

Miracles give themselves away as fictions by their use of suspiciously exact numbers and piquant but irrelevant details.

64 The mystery

Magic tricks need a high degree of skill and sleight of hand. Miracles have no need of that. They are all the work of their audience.

Conjurors can’t believe how credulous their audience is. But a messiah is shrewd enough to let his own disciples deceive him. He is a sorcerer who is cozened by his own tricks. And the one fault of his followers in his eyes is that they are not credulous enough. Faith and credulity are the first of the virtues.

Each sect is sure that it is the true one, since it holds the key to the inane mysteries that it has trumped up.

Were it not for all its ridiculous mysteries, a religion would seem to most people to be not worth believing.

Any madman can get it lodged in his brain that he is Jesus, but it takes seven years of methodical formation to learn how to turn bread into his body.

65 Against the law

A miracle is not a promise of our salvation, but a parable of its impossibility. There’s more chance that the order of nature will be turned on its head than that our soul could be saved.

God made the world through his immutable laws, and mortals believe in him for his trivial transgressions of them.

God needs to work miracles, because he lacked the foresight to plan for all eventualities. Miracles are the addenda and corrigenda of the divine script.

A true genius is at least half charlatan, and judging by the accounts of his miracles, so is God.

God providently sends each age and place the type of miracles that it is prepared to be taken in by. We have eyes only for those signs and wonders that our faith has told us we will see. Pagans used to glimpse capering fauns or the god Apollo, catholics see visions of the virgin Mary.

Would the true messiah stoop to fool us with the sort of shabby stunts that would lure the gullible to greet him as the messiah? It might not be so hard to believe that Jesus was the son of God, were it not for the all-too-human miracles that prove it.

66 The end of an illusion

The sole proof of the Gospels is the miracles, and the sole proof of the miracles is the Gospels.

Jesus held in his palm the power to cast out devils, but lacked the plain sense to grasp that they are not real. Anyone now who set up to cure the lunatic by exorcising evil spirits would be judged to be raving or else a cunning quack. If Jesus was not God, then he must have been mad, or he may have been both, or not quite one or the other. If he and his disciples were not insincere, then they must have been insane.

Christianity was a hysterical apocalyptic cult. Its first and last miracle was to live on through the world not ending in the way that its founder had foretold. ‘This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.’ But one mark of the decline of faith is the decrease in the number of times that Jesus fails to come back to earth.

Jesus could afford to preach such an impractical ethic, because he was sure the world would end so soon that no one would be practising it for long.

CREED AND CHURCH

67 Creeds and religion

Either God gave us religion to mock us and to add to our sins, or the devil gave us religion as a mockery of God.

A religion is a set of precepts for morally and intellectually straining at gnats and swallowing camels. It makes its devotees harmless as serpents and wise as doves.

Of course the faithful fight over the trivial details of their religion. Trivial details are all their religion is made up of. And since the fate of souls rests on just such small points of doctrine, pedantry must be one of the chief theological virtues.

We can only hope that God will forgive us all our blasphemous creeds. We will have to give an account at the judgment of all the palaver that we have yammered in his name.

God’s essence is infinite, unknowable and ineffable, which gives us a licence to talk no end of nonsense about him.

Heresies are the diseases of a religion. Some come in its springtime, and some in its senescence and will lead to its death.

68 Changing gods

In this world of change, things that don’t change die, and things that have not died have changed so much that they have ceased to be themselves. A nation that won’t periodically change its gods will find that it has to change the grounds on which it believes in them. God is a measurelessly elastic illusion, a single name for a succession of fantasies. Words and names last longer than things or people or even gods. ‘You can change your faith without changing gods, and vice versa,’ Lec wrote. Jews and christians pray to a divinity whom father Abraham and the patriarchs would not recognize.

God is, as Feuerbach said, the projection of the human essence, which is to say, he is not a stable or universal entity. He alters from age to age and from place to place, as culture and social needs decree.

A god, like a nation, retains the same name for centuries, though its whole nature and constituents have changed.

Jehovah unrolled his law to polygamists and slave-holders, and seemed to see nothing amiss in polygamy and slavery. And though we take his laws to be the most exalted code, we now count these as the most abominable sins.

69 The banality of belief

The godhead is a vast poetry which we shrink to the meagre parlance of a creed.

A religious tradition smothers the fire of its founding revelation in the foul rags and blankets of dogmatic pedantism, as vain interpreters do the text of Shakespeare.

The world takes its revenge on God by setting up religions. A sect is the desolation of the sacred. A faith needs a church to pervert it into longevity.

God can work miracles, but not even he can inspire a pastor with a ten minute sermon that is more than banal. ‘The most tedious of all discourses,’ Emerson wrote, ‘are on the subject of the supreme being.’

70 Church, faith and religion

The church is God’s cage, where his keepers feed him milk and clover and see to all his needs. A timid flock needs a tame god.

The pious keep God pinned like a butterfly in the inlaid cabinet of the church.

The christian state was the leopard that lay down with the kid and devoured it. The prince of peace has ruled over a realm of mayhem and death. What a victory for the world. What a humbling of the spirit.

To punish us for presuming to build the tower of Babel, the Lord sent a confusion of tongues. And to punish us for expecting the kingdom, he sent us the church.

Jesus’ teaching is so shifting and inconsistent, that all kinds of cult might be true to some aspect of it, except for his established churches.

The church spent the first half of the twentieth century vainly traducing the modern world, and the second half vainly truckling to it.

71 Crucified by religion

Divine grace falls on the soul like a bolt of lightning. It chars it but can’t change it. Its flock would go mad, if they held for real what their religion tells them is true. Real saints are martyred by their faith. Plaster saints are canonized by credulous sheep. Faith comforts a tepid disciple, but would crucify a true one. And false disciples use it to crucify their foes. It is the good news only for smug half-believers.

The Lord is not a lamb. He is a prowling tiger. And if you loved him, you would be torn limb from limb.

72 Heretics and laodiceans

A saint is a lunatic inflamed by fanaticism and stupefied by orthodoxy.

A church does not live by the zeal of its flock but by its cold compliance. It is founded by fanatics, administered by careerists, and populated by laodiceans.

A real believer would have no choice but to be a heretic. The place of a true christian would be outside the church. But most christians stick to their religion so that they can stay inside a church.

If there is no salvation outside the church, then there is no salvation at all.

The godly brand as heretics those who can dream of a bigger god than their own.

Religion has three foes, indifference, false fanaticism, and true faith. But it has one prop which is stronger than all these, self-serving conformity.

The church can put up with a few holy fools in its ranks, since their foolishness will prevent their holiness from causing too much harm.

Mysticism is a genre of rhetoric. And like all rhetoric it begins with the pretence of rejecting rhetoric and all mere words. Yet even for the most god-intoxicated mystics the point of their intercourse with the divine seems to be to blather about it at great length to their fellow mortals.

Mysticism is not the first fresh morning of a religion. It is a late, florid outgrowth of scholasticism.

73 The needful disciples of religion

A religion is betrayed by its most devoted evangels. Would a true prophet be more appalled to be crucified by his foes or to be deified by his flock? It is a fearful thing for a living god to fall into the hands of his or her most loyal devotees.

We take the precepts of the most self-denying sages, such as Buddha, and turn them into a cult of their personality and a cause to fight for.

Jesus could have made shift without the rest of his disciples, but he did need one to betray him and one to betray his message by publicizing a false version of it. Even Socrates had need of both Plato and his accusers.

Even a messiah needs a promoter to popularize and distort his glad tidings. Jesus mediates between us and his father, but we still need a mediator between us and him. We take things at second-hand if we must, but we prefer to take them at third-hand.

74 The religion of Judas

The Lord left a lot to chance when he sent his son into the world to be crucified. If Judas was free to act or not to act, then the salvation of the world was no more than a chance event that might just as well not have come to pass. But if his course was foreordained, then God was complicit in the most monstrous deed in history. Judas was pivotal to God’s plan, and yet it was the prompting of Satan that set him on.

To save mankind, Jesus had only to lay down his life. Judas had to lose his soul and be damned for all time, so that we Judases might have eternal life. ‘Since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.’ So if like can be saved only by the sacrifice of like, then we could be saved only by the death of a traitor like ourselves.

75 Second-hand religion

Humans are a credulous but faithless breed. They boast that they have won through to their faith by a bold lunge into the unexplored. But they have just relapsed into the pusillanimous assumptions of their flock. Even most converts reach for the religion that lies closest to hand.

We hold that faith should be a free personal relationship with God. But a faith can be transmitted only by precluding a free personal relationship with God. What preserves a communal religion paralyses a personal faith.

Religion can now speak only to the individual soul. And all the conditions that make for individual souls will be the death of religion.

Religion is a heritable disease. It spreads by contagion, and then is handed down by inheritance. ‘When a religion has become an orthodoxy,’ says William James, ‘its day of inwardness is over. The faithful live at second hand exclusively.’

Faith is passed on by parents, whose love for each other will soon prove to be as much of a lie as their love of God.

We think that there are creeds and churches because men and women have faith. But men and women have faith only because there are creeds and churches.

76 The illusions of religion

An individual may thrive with no help from a real faith. But a state can’t last if it lacks an established clergy and communion, with its seasonal feasts and yearly calendar of ceremonies, its network of shrines and holy places and its canonical rites and liturgies.

Faith will fall off, not because the spread of knowledge has shown it to be false, but because the economic system that required the spread of knowledge has no more need of faith.

The story of the manger forecasts the whole course of the christian religion. It is only kings and donkeys who have had much use for it.

77 God is ordained by the powers that be

The existence and nature of God have not been discovered by thinkers, but decreed by rulers. The gods are ordained by the powers that be. Their faith is one of the things that people used to render unto Caesar.

Subjects have faith because rulers have found how useful religion can be.

God ordained the powers that be and all the laws and customs that they set up. No doubt. But in that case, he must change his mind a lot.

States made use of religion to unify themselves till they gained the strength to replace it. They went from having a national religion to making a religion of the nation.

In epochs of strong faith people were keen to fight and kill for their beliefs, which they were willing to change a year later at the behest of their prince.

The pious trust in the authority of their god solely because they see it on show in mortal institutions, edifices and customs. They are led to have faith in him by the pomp and prestige of his worldly assets, his lands and monasteries, his processions and regalia, domes and cupolas, robes and mitres.

The first holy books were manuals of hygiene and eugenics which entrenched the power of the caste or tribe that made them.

78 Religion and the cult of power

The one proof that persuades us is the proof of power, because we know that power is the one thing that might help or harm us. And we are so in love with power that we worship it even when it takes unreal forms.

The gods are at their root might, not truth or goodness. They are the creations of our impotence and of our lust for dominion. We bowed down to them, not because we believed that they were good, but because we hoped that they would prove good for something, to give us wealth or victory. We propitiated them because we feared them or hoped to gain some benefit from them, not because we loved them. No matter what gods we may pray to, it is brute power that we covet and our own selves that we adore.

Because the creeds have been male, the chief passion they appeal to is the lust for power.

Religion is authority, and faith is obedience, not to God but to his deputies on earth.

79 Religion, an obsolete technology

The gods are one of our obsolete technologies. Having made them to get what we desired, we have now unmade them, and have become as gods. They are worn-out tools which we have sold to fund our shiny new ones. If they tried to save us, they would be no match for our machines. And now that these can remove mountains, why would we put our faith in anything else?

Religion is not primitive science. It is primitive technology, an attempt to bend natural forces to our own will.

Why do we always look to powers outside of ourselves to save us? First it was the gods, then kings and great men, and now our machines.

The faithful may claim that God is infinite, yet the god that they have business with seems a sadly circumscribed being. He needs constant reminders of how he ought to act. And even then he plays his part with scant competence.

We employ the Lord as an otherworldly Jeeves, astute and dependable but subservient, whose job is to do our bidding and get us out of our mortal scrapes. He serves as a handy adjunct to our faith in our own self-worth.

HOLY BOOKS

80 Religion is a misuse of literature

Religion is a misuse and distortion of literature.

A religion begins as law and ends as literature.

One precondition of faith is the common inability to draw the line between literature and life.

No one would have thought that they could feel love for God, if it had not been written about in books, and told them by others.

When they die, the gods go back to being what they were in the beginning, that is, to mere literature.

81 Sacred texts

Is the Lord, like a prickly author, vexed that his first book garners so much less praise than his far worse second one? Or is he like all writers past their prime, who are sure that their best work must be their latest?

Like all authors, God put his best into his books, and would no doubt be quite unpleasant to meet face to face.

A rich sacred text, such as the book of Isaiah, is a revelation not of the power of God but of the power of the word. The style of a strong prophet is fierce, urgent, original and bizarre. A priestly style is leisurely, conventional, smarmy and oily.

Prophetic books are proof of the power of words, but also of their powerlessness to change our souls.

‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.’ Jesus believed that the words that he spoke were worth more than the world that his father made. The real faith that fires a prophet is the faith he puts in the power of his own words.

The word became flesh, but if the flesh had not become words again, its message would have been lost.

Religious writers, such as Dostoevsky or Flannery O’Connor, who want to prove to us that there is a loving God, warn us that this world would be hell if there were not. And then they show us that this world is hell.

82 Faith is a misreading

Where a religion is inscribed in a book, how could faith be more than a misreading?

The Lord has ceased to hand down new scriptures, since he has seen how the faithful keep garbling them, and how they distort what they read to mean what they want. Like all fastidious authors, he found that his books were wasted on those who read them.

Christian theologians act like callow critics, who treat God, who is a character in a book, as if he were a real being, and a real man as if he were a god, that is, a character in a book. Since Jesus did in fact exist, how could he be God?

A lutheran must first of all be a literary critic. Grace springs from an act of interpretation. And since all such acts are partial and provisional, our salvation must be singularly precarious. ‘Thou read’st black where I read white,’ as Blake warned.

Fundamentalists insist that every word in holy writ must be read literally, and so they have to ignore two thirds of it.

83 Old and new tables

The New Testament can’t be true unless the Old Testament is true. But if the Old Testament is true, then the New Testament must be false. The new covenant boasts that it fulfils the old one, but the old one gives the lie to the new. If Jesus is referred to in the Hebrew Bible, it is as one of the strange gods or false prophets which the one Lord warns the children of Israel not to trust. His cult was one chapter in the long history of misreading. The evangelists had to twist what the Old Testament meant so as to make it seem a christian book. And then christians had to twist what the New Testament meant so that they might keep on their false path which they had mistaken for christianity.

The Hebrew Bible is a grand and savage myth of a great people. The Christian Testament is the parochial fraud of a small sect. It is a transcript of the pathology of a few fanatics and their febrile time. Like all sequels, it lost a lot in force and freshness. And the best things in the New Testament are the quotes from the Old. But it is in such bad taste, that it was sure to touch the heart’s deepest strings.

84 Sacred fictions

Myths are sacred fictions which tell deep human truths. And we drain them of their wisdom, when we read them as if they were reports of dry fact. Myth is a form fit for the gods. Parables and harangues are for smallminded moralists.

The gods are essential fictions, which help to quicken our imaginations and curtail our boisterous appetites. They are poetically fruitful and politically useful. The best were the work of a broad wisdom and vision, the worst of a narrow fanaticism.

A creed is priceless not for the pedantic and delusional catechism which it promulgates, but for the terrific and stark myths which it presents.

All the faiths are true as fictions, and all are false as fact.

The gods are lesser works of art. But like many such lesser works, they have inspired a lot of far greater ones.

The creeds may not have saved anyone, but they have fired a wealth of infernal art.

Like poetry, the gods spring from the soil, and then ascend to the pale firmament.

Gods were begotten by imagination, but are kept alive by the dearth of it.

85 The hammer of the gods

The gods are the hammers that have forged the souls of their peoples on the anvil of vision and woe. Their job is not the trivial and vain one of saving souls, but the great one of helping to form and hand on culture.

Religion is one of the codes that people have used to make themselves more human, that is, less like an animal, more like a devil, nothing like a god, and more mortal than ever.

The gods were the first masters of style.

God is as parsimonious in his writing as he is prodigal in nature. So wasteful in his creation, he does not waste words.

God is like all great authors. His books live on long after he has died.

God, like all the great anonymous artists, is the name for a tradition, which is a far more precious thing than a mere living being.

SALVATION

86 End of my days

Most of us trust that we will live for all time, since we must outlast the world, or else that the world will soon be consumed by fire from heaven, since it must not outlast us. And we don’t believe in the wrath to come if we don’t expect to be saved from it.

An apocalypse that’s timed to swallow the earth a second after I’m gone is of no concern to me. And if the world does end a short time after I leave it, it will be one last proof that it must have been made for me. When we have to depart the world, we will take comfort in the thought that it will be losing more than we are.

Those who are sure that the world will finish in their lifetime don’t seem at all shocked when they come to an end and it has not.

87 The worldly world to come

Our hearts are so full of the world, that they can take in what does not belong to it only by converting it to their own worldliness. They forge their rarefied paradise out of their gross earthy wants. And they remake their great inventor, so that their faith won’t remake them. How could a kingdom which is not of this world find a place in it, if it weren’t usurped by one that is?

People deem Jesus unworldly, because he said that his kingdom is not of this world. But from which world if not this one did he get the notion that the next world must be a kingdom?

The next world must be still worse than this one, since it is made to answer our sordid desires. Heaven must be furnished in the worst taste.

88 The kingdom of God is not within you

The kingdom of God may be within us, but faith and hope draw us out, and goad us to make hell for ourselves and others.

If the kingdom of God is within us, it must be a dark and seedy neighbourhood, never at peace but enviously eying the spoils of foreign domains. The dirty human soul is of all things the least deserving of everlasting life.

We would have no use for the true heaven. So it may be that God will reward us with the false one of our desires, which is the same as hell. ‘So I gave them up to their own hearts’ lusts, and let them follow their own imaginations.’

Which of the many selves that make up your self do you expect God to reward? No doubt the most sneaking, calculating, self-serving and self-deceiving one, the one that told you that you love him and your neighbour. Our ego is the one thing that we want to take with us to the next world, which is why we will never get there.

The kingdom of God is within us, like all that is cheap, grasping, false and base.

89 The stratagems of salvation

Jesus taught that the self is vile, but that you must efface your own self for your neighbour’s equally vile one so as to gain your reward in the hereafter. ‘For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye?’ God, who sees the secrets of your heart, commands you to try to dupe him. He wants you to act as if you were selflessly labouring for the sake of your fellows and not coveting an eternal prize. And that’s how you win an eternal prize. ‘When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, that thine alms may be in secret, and thy father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.’

It is no more possible to love your neighbour than it is to hate yourself.

The entrance to heaven will be an unbecoming crush, with the saints shoving aside their brethren in their lust to come first in the kingdom, by claiming to have been the last here on earth.

Godly people don’t much care how many souls the devil may snatch, so long as their own is not one of them. In the struggle for salvation it’s every soul for itself. And yet they can think of no better way to save themselves than by meddling with the souls of others.

90 Outfoxing God

The faithful trust that they will win the Lord over by the mean tricks that they have used to thrive in this world. When they strive to draw near the loftiest, they still have to call on the same shabby manoeuvres by which they’ve snapped up the lowest. They use on him the same bribes, legal trickery, self-deceiving righteousness, formulas and excuses that have worked in their dealings with this world of sin. The most high is their affable stooge, easier to outfox than the wary world and readier to grant them all that they want. They hope to cheat him with the same beaming self-belief by which they hook their customers.

In order to find grace, both you and God need to pretend to bluff each other. You feign to hold that you have not earned your place in paradise, and the celestial paymaster feigns not to note that you are feigning. We act out our salvation in this life and the next as a farce of mutual deception. And that might be the closest we can get to loving God.

God cannot love us, and he knows that we cannot love him. And yet he who does nothing in vain made us so that we would love him, and we hope to win his grace by pretending to.

We auction our souls to the highest bidder. Most of us hock them to gain the world. But the god-fearing get paradise as a bonus. ‘All this, and heaven too.’

91 The meek have inherited heaven

The meek are sure that they are due an eternity of bliss with God and his seraphic choir, enjoying the pageantry as each foe who has triumphed over them fries in inextinguishable fire.

The most demure theists don’t doubt that the almighty is there to justify them, assist them, uplift them. Faith is a belief in an entity greater than our own small self whose function is to aid and affirm our own small self.

Does the Lord feel more disgust at the obsequious truckling of his attendants or at their impudent familiarity? Those who abase themselves in his sight are in no doubt that they know what his wishes are or what they ought to be.

Atheists feel sure that they can get on without God. And the faithful feel sure that God can’t get on without them. They know that they are nothing without God, and they don’t doubt that God is nothing without them. ‘My business is to think of God,’ Weil said, ‘it is for God to think of me.’

92 Cosmic egoism

How enormous we seem in our own eyes, when we prevision our souls in the presence of an infinite deity. Faith is a flattering perspective. Our religiosity was a vast cosmic conceit. Now we make do with our vast earth-bound conceit.

There’s no limit to the tasteless presumption of the humble soul that does not doubt it is due a seat at the right hand of God.

Our faith in our own feeble self is as boundless as our reliance on an all-powerful divinity is pale and half-hearted. And our adherence to our fickle and flighty selves stands as firm as our faith in a changeless deity wavers.

Religion takes such hold of our minds because it is as trivial and as pretentious as we are.

We frame our faith out of what we don’t know but believe. For how could we bear to frame it out of what we know but don’t dare hold to, our utter inconsequence and the certainty of our extinction and the vastness of the cosmos with its billions of cold galaxies which care nothing for us?

93 Commanding God

Pray in hope, and your prayers are as good as answered, since the continuation of your illusions is then assured.

Why when the faithful talk to God are they so prone to use the imperative mood? ‘The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise.’ And every fool knows the thoughts of the Lord. We speak to God as if we were cheeky but irresistibly charming children and he had no choice but to wink at our endearing monkey tricks and naughtiness. Our prayers are abject yet presumptuous. We flatter God in the most servile fashion, yet we don’t doubt that he is at our beck.

Our prayers and petitions fail to sway God, but they serve to harden us in our godless schemes. They are not a surrender to his will, but a means of stiffening our own will.

The meek love to talk to their great designer, as they can be sure that he is the one person who won’t interrupt them. A prelate would cry out in fury, if you claimed that God spoke back to you when you prayed.

How could God answer our prayers, when it is not him that we are praying to?

The congregation chants hymns more to glorify and fortify its own faith than to praise the goodness of God.

How meanly believers must think of their God, if they deem that their crabbed acts can add to his glory.

94 The divine accountant

What a job for a supreme being, to keep a bill of all our snivelling sins and grudging good works.

The best we can hope is that the gods will care no more about our sins than they do for our sorrows. What deity would deign to take thought for our dirty little souls? If they stoop to that, what petty spitefulness might we not have to fear from them? God can’t forgive us. So we had better pray that he will forget us. ‘O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, until thy wrath be past.’

God’s failure to ensure that justice is done in this world is held to be an indisputable proof that he must exist, in order to see that it will be done in the next. We take it that he must have made a heaven above, since he has let loose such a mad anarchy down here. But how rash would it be to trust him to get things right in the world to come, when he has made such a bad job of this one?

We are told to hate the sin but love the sinner, yet God seems to do the reverse. He flogs the sinner through the vast tracts of the next world and leaves the sin to flower in the foul marsh of this one.

95 We live as if we were immortal

No one believes that they are going to live for evermore, if they don’t behave as if they were ready to die and be weighed in the scale today. But if they don’t expect to die this very day, then they take it that they will go on indefinitely here on earth.

Each of us is a little town besieged by death. But life in it goes on as if it had never heard of the threat.

People doze through time, and dream that they will wake for eternity. They die like beasts, and hope to live on like gods.

The belief in the immortality of the soul has no grounds other than human presumption. No wonder then, that it is the most widely held belief in the world.

96 Immortality as lack of imagination

It is not our faith but our failure of imagination that makes us feel that we must be immortal. We think that our life will go on for ever, because we can’t see it coming to an end. I can’t imagine not being here for the years to come, which I can’t imagine. Nothing is more unremarkable than the death of others or more inconceivable than our own.

We don’t honestly hold that our souls will live for an eternity after death, because we don’t feel in our hearts that we are going to die. The foremost wonder, as Yudishtira says, is that each day death comes, and yet we live as if it could not touch us.

How many days till this one have there been on which I have not died. And so how likely is it that I will die today? Each day adds to the sum of days on which I have not died, and so makes me more sure that I will live for ever. ‘The older a man gets,’ George Eliot said, ‘the more difficult it is for him to retain a believing conception in his own death.’

97 Faith, hope and charity do not abide in heaven

God has arranged heaven so neatly, that the elect have no need to do good works there. These bought them the ticket of admittance, which they paid so dear for on earth, but which they can throw away once they’ve gone to glory. The watchword of the saints, according to Emerson, taunts the reprobate ‘You sin now, we shall sin by and by.’

Most of the godly, as Spinoza showed, look on devoutness as an irksome burden, which they had to shunt through life but hope to shuck off when they’re dead. They deem that they ought to be refunded for the pain of upholding faith, hope and charity in this world by not needing to in the next. The banner above heaven’s gate will tell them to abandon not only hope, since they will have all that they want, but faith and charity as well, since they will see their God face to face, and there will be no call for their world-redeeming kindness.

98 Paradise and pandemonium

We strut and suffer like players in this world, so that we can sit at our ease as an audience of angels in the next.

The celestial city will need to have many mansions. How else could the just put up with the insufferable virtues of their fellow saints?

With heaven so crammed full of saints, if God were not love, there would be no love in it at all.

How could we presume to sully eternity with our shabby bliss? God is the great exterminator, who won’t want any mortal vermin infesting his spotless abode. Having seen what a shambles we have made of the undefiled earth, why would he let us in to his resplendent dwelling? He would do well to take out insurance, lock up his supernal silver, and nail down his movables. An hour after we get there, we will have turned paradise to pandemonium.

We know nothing of heaven, save that it was made for us.

99 Death does not change us

If death fails to change us, then we surely won’t have earned a home in God’s high heaven. ‘Where there is anything of mine, there is not one thing divine,’ as Montaigne wrote. And yet if it does change us, how could it be we who have earned it? Our souls could not be saved without an influx of grace. But if there’s one thing that this life shows us, it’s that there is no grace.

The damned in hell have the privilege of remaining their cursed selves. The saints must give up their souls in order to gain the kingdom.

100 The immortal blasphemy of religion

To believe that we are immortal is the great blasphemy, since we thereby lay claim to the same status as the divine. When we dared to assert that we would live for all time, we arrogated to ourselves the prerogative of God. We stretched forth our impudent hand, and took also of the fruit of the tree of life, and ventured to swallow eternity. We flatter ourselves that death will be swallowed up in victory, because we are eaten up with pride.

In the beginning the iron gods laid it down that we must die and return to dust. ‘When the gods made man,’ Gilgamesh was told, ‘they allotted to him death, but life they held fast in their own keeping.’ But now we maintain them as rickety automata to ensure that we live for ever. God used to be the withholder of eternal life. But now, as William James wrote, he is its producer.

We have dreamt up an immoral hell, and an irreverent heaven. We don’t doubt that each of our paltry doings on this ball of mud will reverberate through the whole of time.

Our idea of heaven shows the insipidity of our fancy. And our idea of hell shows the ferocity of our hatreds.

If heaven is the terminus, earth is a queer place to start from.

101 The sickness of the soul

The body is our Eden. But then the body fell from grace, and became a living soul. The soul has learnt to know good and evil, and so has corrupted it. It is through the soul that Satan enters the body. The body was made to live in the moment. But the soul dreams that it was made to live for all time. And when it wakes from this dream, it will be dead.

The body condemns the soul to toil for its gross desires. And the soul condemns the body to exile from its sound instincts.

The soul is the body’s scourge, and the body is the soul’s recreation.

Having brought forth this corrupt world of matter, the demiurge compounded his sin by breathing into it a yet more corrupt soul.

The soul is one of the imaginary diseases of the body.

The body lives by its delusive greeds, and the soul lives by its greedy delusions. An ascetic diets the sinless hankerings of the loins, to glut the sinister lusts of the soul. The body may be a donkey, but the soul is a devil.

The soul conceives its deeds of darkness. The mind plans the crime. And then the body has to pay for their guilt.

There won’t be much soul left worth saving, once life has done with it.

Few things come cheaper than human souls. They are made in an instant, killed with ease, sold for a pittance, and bought in a job lot by those who want only the use of their bodies.

The body is a car prone to break down, and the soul is a crazy driver.

102 The nothingness of the soul

If the next world is proportioned to the breadth and depth of our souls, it won’t be a heavenly manor but a shabby suburban bungalow.

God wished to hide the kingdom in the one place where we would never find it. And so he put it within our own hearts. And it gets farther from us day by day.

What deity would be so rash as to leave the jewel of a deathless soul in the trust of a being as careless as a mortal? What a leaky tub to stow an ambrosial cargo in.

The nothingness of death seems a reward well matched to our own nothingness. How could our tepid souls be worth rehabilitation or hellfire?

103 Our less than mortal souls

Far from enduring through the whole of time, our souls linger barely till we draw our last breath. Living will use up our souls as it does our flesh. And at the expiration of seventy years the best they’ll be ripe for will be dissolution. ‘What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?’ asked Browning.

Senility is a bad augury for immortal life. If we enter the kingdom in the same state as we leave this world, heaven must be full of dribbling half-wits. Life which has a beginning is bound to come to an end. And a life that ends in such foul decay is not likely to start up again in the pure beyond.

The soul dies and is good for nothing. The flesh dies and is at least food for turf and trees. Yet the miasma that a soul leaves in its wake may poison the air for years.

We come from nothing. So how likely is it that we are bound for eternity?

104 Insipid bliss

Won’t the sweets of paradise be too fine for our coarse stomachs and too narrow for our roving minds? It has no room for sex or for science. None but an imbecile angel could bear its insipid bliss.

It is only because we have bodies that we think we care whether our souls will live on after death. Any pleasure or pain that could touch our bare souls would seem bland and nugatory. As Heine wrote, ‘Mental torture seems more readily endured, alas, than physical pain. And if I were forced to choose between a bad conscience and an aching tooth, I would settle for the bad conscience.’

How could we merit or endure a state of grace or damnation? We fail to win redemption for the same reason that we are not worth relegating to hell. And what should such creatures of an hour do in eternity? Would our littleness not be lost in its immensity?

The angels have to sing the whole time, since how could their heavenly sire stand their inanity if they paused to speak?

All that effort, just to get rid of such an ephemeral speck, and to bring to nothing what is already so near to nothing and will so soon be gone.

ALL PAGANS

105 Profane redemption

Why did Nietzsche, who denounced the nazarene faith for its baseness and rottenness, not applaud the dark history which its oversensitive defenders now wince at, its unholy annals of a proud feudal coterie enforcing its unpitying sovereignty in the name of a God of love? Should he not have seen a profane providence in the barren cross blossoming into ferocious violence and unmatched fecundity?

Christianity gave us a few eunuchs, eremites, masochists, fantasists and fanatics. The church gave us Giotto and Montaigne, Raphael and Piero della Francesca. The sole fruitful thing in christianity has been its crookedness, perversity and idolatry. It peevishly damned the world, but the world indulgently forgave and redeemed it. The church has served as the most trustworthy prophylactic to counter the contagion of faith. It kept the west safe from the gospel of the pale galilean. The Lord showed his care for his fold by sending his church to neuter the christian faith. Then Luther uprooted the prodigal hypocrisy of Rome, and tried to resow the parochial and arid deceits of Nazareth.

One of the worst sins of christianity was to found the church. And one of the best deeds of the church was to put down christianity.

When the one Lord decamped into petulant transcendence, what was left to enchant the world but sin?

106 The paganism of every religion

Even the most unearthly and austere religion is perpetuated by its paganism, which pays due homage to the multitude of divinities by its multitude of rites. It lives by its dark or gaudy carnality and by its profane superstitions, which are fleshly, local, tribal and enchanted.

People are such born pagans, that in order to become good pagans, all they need do is follow nature, obey authority, revere the old ways, and take part in the rites. But the christian faith is so at war with our unspoiled instincts, that the most it could do was bind its flock to capitulate to an attenuated paganism, and follow nature, obey authority, revere the old ways, and take part in the rites. But it has now grown so virtuously modern, that it has ceased to be vigorously heathen. We are, as Baudelaire said, ‘too worthless even to be idolaters.’ It is no longer its paganism that gives a religion life. They all now turn into a kind of protestantism, which is individualistic, westernizing and on-the-make. Their paganism was as natural as the earth, their protestantism is as ugly as the world.

107 Waning religion

‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ What vitality could we hope for from a sect whose sole sacred tree was a dead plank on which a man bled out his life?

Our fallen nature could never soar to the angelic ethic of any of the creeds. And so all the creeds have had to sink to suit our nature.

The bright gods were all the things that we don’t dare to be, mercurial, uncaring, caustic, exigent, partial, irresponsible, playful, mischievous. The primordial divinities, more fortunate than Tithonus or the sibyl, were blessed with unfading youth, but spared everlasting life. They were too strong to be of help to our feebleness, and so we allowed them to expire. Good gods die young, before they have time to grow old and bitter and putrid.

108 Sacred time

Sacred time is cyclic and pagan. Christianity tried to end that, and urged us to wait for the coming of the kingdom. Then the church with its calendar of saints’ days, feasts and seasons brought back pagan time. Now progress has put a stop to it for good.

Life is a purposive intrusion on recursive sacred time. We want to redeem time’s futility by turning it into a progress to some grand end.

How could any time or space be sacred, when they are the very things that don’t exist in heaven?

109 Religion and the end of enchantment

Art and paganism enchant the world but don’t claim to transcend it. The christian faith sought to transcend it, and so profaned its sacred awe and magic. It hewed down the groves, banished the nymphs and the great god Pan, threw down the altars and upturned the hearths, sealed the temples, and dispersed the household spirits. With its maudlin man-god it was predestined from the first to sink into a decrepit and self-applauding humanism. And when Jesus told us that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath, it was goodbye to all true piety.

The gods helped to demystify the green world by emptying it of the old spirits. They were indispensable aides in our enlightenment and disenchantment. They were one of the illusions that human kind used to grope its way to the truth. It was they that trained us to trace effects back to unseen causes, to credit entities which we could perceive only with our minds, and to see through to the universal laws at work behind the chaos of appearance. Religion is one of the forces which orders and trains the human mind to the point where it can no longer put up with religion. Even superstition got us used to a prudent putting-off of present pleasure in the hope of controlling the future.

110 Sacred kitsch outlasts religion

We have done our best to drive the savage and the sacred from the earth, and to cram it with the tame and profane. We have domesticated the terrifying angels as chubby dimpled cherubs to sell chocolate.

The cult of Jesus was the kitsch of judaism. And the church was a plaster paganism, and now it has become a plastic one. They embalmed a crude version of creeds and forms whose meaning and majesty they had long lost. And now they have dwindled to be the kitsch of themselves. Religion used to provide the poetry of ordinary people’s lives. Now it makes their doggerel. If Bach’s music was a strong proof that there is a God, then contemporary liturgy is a strong clue that he must be dead.

Living rites freeze sentimentality, but moribund ones reheat it and dish it up as a spongy nostalgia. The superannuated gods are doomed to spend their twilight years not in a glorious Valhalla, but as pantomime extras in a tasteless Disneyland. Paradise is the attic in which we stash our christmas trinkets and the rest of the kitsch of brotherly love and the rewards we hope to get for it.

 

 

See also:       Psychology,        The Purpose of Life