A faith 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 votaries 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 ingenious 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.
The gods used to do what the state does now, that is, unite us with those of the same tribe as us and divide us from those of competing ones.
We love God because we know he hates our enemies.
God is there to deal out an indulgent mercy to us and a harsh justice to our foes.
God’s blessedness, like that of a tyrant, would not be complete if he lacked the simpering of the saints and the sight of the writhings of the damned. Heaven is the perfect totalitarian state, in which the saved have no will to resist, and no one cares for the recalcitrants who are racked in the concentration camp below.
We do honour 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 autocrat, not of an equal.
Mercy is in the realm of morality what miracles are in the physical realm. God lays down rigid laws, and then demonstrates his goodness or power by disobeying them.
God is a devil’s notion of a supremely felicitous being, who has the unchecked power to do his will with impunity.
The difference between God and the devil was in origin one of relative power. Satan was a subject, and so his duty was to obey. God is a king, and so his privilege is to rule.
God must be as innocent as a child, who still takes joy in torturing kittens and demolishing ants’
nests.
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 small-minded spitefulness might we not have to fear from them? Since God can’t forgive us, we had better pray that he will forget us. ‘O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, until thy wrath be past.’
If God is all-knowing, then he must be all-pitiful too. But he is clearly not all-pitying.
Even the most devout people dread the condemnation of an unknowing by-stander more than that of an all-observing God.
We don’t blush to do in God’s sight the indecorous acts that we would squirm to have witnessed by the world, and he doesn’t blush to be privy to them.
We are told to hate the sin but love the sinner, yet God whips the sinner through the vast tracts of the next world and leaves the sin to flower in the foul marsh of this one.
Was the Lord corrupted, first by his elation at his own omnipotence and success, and then by his despair at how we broke 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 ineptly.
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 love Jesus because they believe either that he didn’t mean the anathemas that he vomited forth or that they were aimed only at his enemies and theirs.
God seems to have been an absent-minded father, unsuspecting for most of time that he had a son. It may be 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 sons and daughters.
It seems that gods and mortals, though harmless on their own, rile one another like a mismatched couple, and bring out each others’ genocidal tendencies.
The Lord had no choice but to wipe us from the face of the earth, as soon as he found that we share his own incorrigible propensity for violence.
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.
A religion is a set of precepts for morally and intellectually straining at gnats and swallowing camels. It makes its adherents harmless as serpents and wise as doves.
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.
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 in what dire need they stood of his saving grace. 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.
When the most high made mortals in his likeness, how horrorstruck he must have been by what he saw. It was a fit reward for his narcissism. If we are in fact made in the image of God, is that not one more reason not to worship him? Would it not be beneath our dignity to bow down to such a sorry being?
God is a flawless being. To exist is a glaring flaw. Hence God does not exist. He is a necessary entity who in consequence has no place in this contingent world.
A perfect being would have to be boundlessly evil as well as boundlessly good, or else it would be deficient in some respect.
3 Providence
God manifests his compassionate grace when he plucks his favourites from a cataclysm in which he dooms multitudes to die. ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.’ When predestination makes up its mind to set the world to rights, you can be sure that there will be slaughter.
The job of providence is not to make everyone happy, but to make me and mine more happy 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.
Providence is the power that preserves my life, God knows what preserves the lives of others.
God’s failure to ensure that justice is done in this world is taken to be an indisputable proof that he must exist in order to see that it’s done in the next. We assume that he must have made a heaven above, since he has let loose such a mad chaos down here.
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 about this.’
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. In the old principalities religion was a mere tool of statecraft. Now it is an outdated name for the caprices of demography. ‘We are christians by the same title that we are périgordians or germans,’ as Montaigne wrote. Faith cometh by breeding. In matters of religion God proposes but man disposes. Divine grace is no match for the feeblest
circumstance.
We needs must forgive God, since he so conspicuously knows not what he does. If he had a skerrick of foreknowledge of the consequences of creating this world, he would not have done it.
And if he were all-powerful, he would have contrived some means to undo it.
God is a sentimentalist, who weeps for the fall of a sparrow but winks at mass extinctions.
If the cosmos is a contraption designed to rescue castaway souls, why is it so ill-fitted to its purpose? 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?