Science will continue to be powerful in making knowledge and wisdom accessible to everyone. Sadly, however, the enemies of science – religion and politics – still maintain the virtues of fear and ignorance. Please read the holy bible. It admits: - For in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. For my part, as an individual fascinated with science and the scientific way of thinking, I thought it best to throw the bible out of my holy window. Poch Suzara
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Dear Mr. Suzara:
Below is my letter to Billy who forwarded your thoughts to me. I am quite certain that you are more intelligent than I am. I do not wish to engage in a debate but only to wish you well.
Sincerely,
CRIS VILLAHERMOSA
Dear Billy:
Thanks for this. Mr. Suzara is a very interesting person assuming, of course that the arguments he presents are his or gathered from actual reading of books and not lifted from internet atheist sites. Even if the latter, his devotion to atheism, provided it is fueled by intellect and not merely by passion, is notable. At the risk of being accused of using an ad hominem argument, I must say that most atheists (as distinct from agnostics who are the more interesting people, by the way) I have met are mortally wounded people (spiritually, physically or both). They feel that God has let them down and so they react by denying his existence or depicting Him as evil.
But now on to historical, philosophical and theological arguments. Suzara presents to us a plethora of biblical stories and passages that tell of a vengeful, jealous, unjust and cruel God. This is not new and some Gnostics who were attracted to Christianity and converted to the new Faith rejected the Old Testament altogether precisely for this reason. These were the Christian Gnostics whom Paul encountered and alluded to in his epistles as causing confusion with their different teaching and endless genealogies of the various immortals in Gnostic beliefs. The Christian Gnostics were of course suppressed and, in any case, did not gain much following. But Gnosticism itself which is as ancient or even more so than Judaism (certainly as old as Zoroastrianism with which it shares many beliefs), metamorphosed in various forms through the Early Church of the Fathers (as Manicheanism opposed by St. Augustine) the Middle Ages (as Catharism), during the Enlightenment (as Rosicrucianism) down to the present day among Freemasons (with nly those in the 33rd degrees being aware of it but they would deny it because it is a secret to which they have sworn deadly oaths).
The Catholic explanation for these horror stories about God in the Bible is this: These stories were written by men like us who wrote their assumptions, prejudices (like tribalism and supra-nationalism) and even their hate into their accounts. In any case, most of these stories are not “true” in the historical sense but are there for their didactic value. The Book of Jonah, for instance, is almost certainly fictional but is in the collection of books we know as the Bible because it presents a valid or true moral lesson which is: that we must always be obedient to God. The various accounts in Deuteronomy, Joshua and Numbers where it was alleged that God commanded genocide against the native peoples of Palestine is believed by archaeologists as fictional as the cities alleged to have been destroyed by Joshua (like Jericho) were long gone when the Hebrews first came to the area. I would like to add that in any case, these stories were written during the Exile (to Babylon) by an oppressed and humbled people. Lest they lose their self-respect and their national identity, the authors of these books wrote stories that presented the Hebrews as a martial people with glowing victories. It was as if they were saying: “Don’t mess with us, we are tough too!” Besides, massacres of entire city populations was de rigueur under the common protocols of warfare then. Come to think of it, it never went out of style as nations were still doing it during the Middle Ages (the Franks and the Saracens in the Holy Land) and even practically just yesterday (Lidice, Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima). Let me warn the reader, however, that these are only my humble personal opinions probably not worth a grain of salt. However, socio-anthropologists (Frazer, Campbell, etc.) also point out that those massacres were classic accounts of the clash between settled agricultural civilizations and nomadic peoples which went on all over the world. In most cases, the nomadic peoples won but in so doing, they became settled themselves and adapted the technology (agricultural) and customs of the conquered peoples themselves. A case in point is China where the most warlike state of Chin predominated over the six more cultured ones (the Age of Warring States) but ended up spreading Chinese culture all over the Chinese mainland and farther to Korea, Japan, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and Burma. Almost exactly the same thing happened in pre-Columban Mesoamerica where the Aztecs predominated over the other artistically and technologically advanced tribes.
Lest I be thought of as just another mealy mouthed bible thumping fundamentalist or conservative Christian, let me lay my neck or more properly, my soul, on the chopping block or on the road to hell. I must confess that the Bible was never the basis of my Faith. Ever since I started hearing bible stories from the nuns in Catholic school in my primary grades, I was not impressed . Reading them in the highly sanitized and doctrinally aimed “My Bible History” books during my intermediate grades and high school years left me with even more unanswered questions. I felt that either those stories were completely baseless or false or that there were something in them that did not quite meet the eye - that needed further interpretation for them to be understood in a rational context.
So what kept me Catholic? My guess is attending mass, saying my prayers, meditation and communicating (or attempting to) with God through meditation. No, he never answered me, called me on the phone or anything like that. I just felt the inner locutions that mystics talk about. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, he learnt more kneeling in prayer before the cross than in hours of reading. But of course, I may have just been imagining things.
But let me put in a good word for the Bible (The Old Testament) edgewise. I find it remarkable that unlike the epics of other peoples (Mahabaratha, Ramayana, Iliad, Aenid, etc.), the Old Testament books do not glamorize their heroes: Abraham was a compulsive liar as he kept denying that Sarah was his wife; Elijah was “pikon” (Filipino for “poor sport”) and merciless as he cut the throats of the priests of Baal whom he already bested in a test of who had the better God. David, who was allegedly “a man after His (God’s) own heart” was an adulterer and the murderer of a virtuous convert to Judaism (Uriah) whose wife he lusted after. Oh, I know Poch can give more examples of this sort of ill behavior. Why is this? I believe that despite their human failings especially in their projection and injection of their cultural biases in their accounts, the hagiographers (or Sacred Authors, as conservative theologians like to call them) of the books of the Old Testament were nevertheless, divinely inspired to tell more of the truth than they would otherwise not have revealed.
But seriously, Poch (if I may be allowed to be familiar) should read Ludwig Feuerbach, a dedicated atheist if ever there was one, but who declared himself a theologian rather than a philosopher (cf. The Essence of Christianity as translated by George Eliot). According to him, man was not made in the image of God but rather, it was God who was made in the image of man. It was man himself who conceived of a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient God - anthropomorphism in reverse: Man is weak, God is strong, etc. Why did man do this? Freud and Marx who were highly influenced by Feuerbach said it was because man wanted to feel secure in this very insecure cosmos. He wanted to protect himself against the vagaries of nature and this all too vulnerable and miserable human existence. I don’t know if they realized that they were just echoing Voltaire who much earlier said that if God didn’t exist then it would be necessary to invent Him.
Although an atheist, Feuerbach saw value in belief in God in that the now famous “I and Thou” relationship between Man and his created God motivates him to altruism, a fundamental human virtue without which civilization would be impossible. But Feuerbach’s teachings influenced Marx and Engels who formulated the philosophy of atheistic and “scientific” communism. So where does God figure in their philosophy? I believe that whether consciously or unconsciously (more likely the latter), the true dedicated communist sees the “Thou” in the New Man to be produced in the final stage of communism when men would no longer need state and government which would have “withered away” because by then people would have become fully responsible, self-sacrificing and perfectly altruistic. Just as we Christians see Christ as the New Adam (St. Augustine), communists see the New Man as the ultimate savior of mankind. In effect, Marx, Engels and Lenin who were accused by their critics as sharing a “messianic complex” either saw themselves unconsciously as messiahs or at least as the ones “who prepareth the way” like St. John the Baptist.
Scientists who claim to be atheists are the same way. They place their faith in science which they believe is the key to the “salvation” of mankind. Science would make life far better. It would bring about material prosperity, cure most medical ills, solve the most egregious social injustices, etc. Since they are the practitioners of science, they are in effect both the “I and Thou.” This is their myth. They are the saviors of Mankind - The Messiah.
As Joseph Campbell said: "Try living without myth," implying that it is impossible. One has to believe in something. I am sure Poch at least believes in love and that it makes life better for him and for the ones he loves. Would he die for his favorite son or daughter if necessary? I am sure he would. HE WILL! He, therefore, is the "Thou," the messiah at least to himself and to his son/daughter.
Finally, I worry about people who absolutely cease believing in God. If they no longer believe in an ideal “Thou,” what do they believe in? What keeps them hoping for a better tomorrow, a better world? What gives them the will to keep on living and survive? As the despairing Macbeth soliloquized about life and I quote (if memory serves):
"Out out brief candle. Life is but a passing shadow.
A poor player that struts and frets about the stage
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot.
Full of sound and fury - signifying nothing."
Dominus vobiscum,
CRIS
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