Where a religion is inscribed in a book, how could faith be more than a misreading?
The New Testament is true only if 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 appears in the hebrew Testament, it is as one of the strange gods or false prophets which the one Lord warns the children of Israel to beware of.
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. Then believers had to twist what the New Testament meant so that they might keep on their false path which they had mistaken for christianity. And theologians act like callow critics, who treat a character in a book as if he were a real person, and a real man as if he were a god, that is, a character in a book. Since Jesus really did exist, how could he be God? The Lord has ceased to hand down new
scriptures, since he has seen how we keep garbling them. Like all fastidious authors, he found that his books were wasted on those who read them. Religion is a misuse and distortion of literature.
Fundamentalists insist that every word in the Bible must be read literally, and so are forced to ignore nine tenths of it.
When they die, the gods go back to being what they were in the beginning, that is, to mere literature.
A lutheran must first of all be a literary critic. Salvation begins with an act of interpretation. And since all such acts are partial and provisional, our salvation must be exceedingly precarious.
‘Thou read’st black where I read white,’ as Blake warned.
Is the Lord, like a prickly author, vexed that his far superior first book is overpraised at the expense of his much inferior second one? Or is he like all writers past their prime, who are sure that their best work must be their latest?
Mysticism is a rhetorical genre, which, like all rhetoric, begins with the trope of rejecting rhetoric and all mere words. Yet even for the most god-intoxicated mystics the point of their intercourse with the divine is to blather about it to mortals.
Why did the Lord delegate a rich mind like Pascal to act as his apologist, and then fit him out with the fatuous arguments of a ninny?
Myths are sacred fictions which tell deep human truths. 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 small-minded moralists. The hebrew Testament is a grand and savage myth of a great people. The christian one is the parochial fraud of a small sect. And the only good things in the New Testament are the quotes from the Old. It is a transcript of the pathology of a few fanatics and their febrile time. Like all sequels, it lost a lot in freshness and imagination.
The gods are essential fictions, which quicken our imaginations and curtail our boisterous appetites. They are poetically fruitful and politically useful. A faith is to be prized not for the pedantic and delusional catechism which it promulgates, but for the terrific and stark myths which it breeds. The best were made by freedom and vision, the worst by a crabbed fanaticism.
The God of the israelites is the paramount deity of 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.
The gods were begotten by imagination, but are kept alive by the shortage of it.
The gods are the hammers that have forged the souls of their peoples on the anvil of affliction and imagination.
God, like all the great anonymous artists, is operant as a tradition, which is a far more precious thing than a mere living being.
7 Faith
Salvation is by faith, that is, an imaginary reward for an imaginary virtue.
A creed is doomed to die out once its partisans 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.
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.
Faith is the flag of God’s withdrawal. We’ve 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. The Book of Genesis tells the story of his 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.’ How was such a botched and aborted world brought forth by a perfect begetter? How did a loving father sire such a detestable lump? And what gruesome memories of it must turn his paradise almost 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 made it?
The two sources of faith are scripture and tradition, and yet anyone who made a study of either of these would lose all grounds for faith.
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 what demonstrates 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 but 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.
The chief appeal of a creed is the zeal of its believers. And yet when you know what coarse and silly chaff feeds their fervency, you’re apt to be made sick by it.
In epochs of strong faith people were prepared to fight for their beliefs which they were willing to change a year later at the behest of their prince.
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. Who these days could do homage to the deities of Egypt or the aztecs? A dead god can’t be brought back to life, as Julian the apostate found when he tried to resuscitate the divinities of Rome. We taunt a defunct god like a cashiered dictator, who has lost the power to hurt us.
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.
8 Idols
Mortals can’t touch a god without transforming 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. Our mouths gape to praise God, but then gulp down the world.
An idol is an image which lives in stone or wood. A god is a character who lives in words. God made the heavens and the earth by an act of speech, and we made him in the same way. Idols are carved with hands. Gods are conceived in hearts.
Idols are the works of peoples who excel in the plastic arts. Gods are the works of literate ones.
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.
God is what I worship, idols are what everyone else bows down to.