John C. Wright: “Has Religion Been on Balance Good or Bad for Humanity?”

Theist vs. Atheist: What Should You Believe? is a seven-part series of articles by two authors, John C. Wright and Stephen R. C. Hicks, in which they debate seven key issues in religion.

Has Religion Been on Balance Good or Bad for Humanity?

By John C. Wright

The question for this final column of the debate between Catholic and Atheist is this: Has religion been on balance good or bad for humanity?

Alert readers may have noticed in previous columns that nearly every question contains a hidden assumption, or slant, which must be brought to the surface before the question is answered. It will surprise no alert reader to learn that Mr. Hicks proposed the questions, hence they contain his unspoken foundational assumptions. But fair is fair, and I agreed to answer the question that was asked, as it was asked.

It is, however, also my part to address any unspoken assumptions or leaps of logic the answer might provoke, hence also to answer the unspoken falsehoods the question provokes.

The question as phrased is meaningless.

It is like asking whether the sexual drive, the maternal instinct, passion for war, the love of peace, the craving for beauty, the need for comedy, or the appetite for food and drink have been on balance good or bad for humanity? There is no way to answer the question because these drives, instincts, appetites and cravings are so basic to all mankind and so universal that they can be found in all men, all institutions, and in all times and places. These things define what it is to be man.

Religion properly so called means the rites of petition, thanksgiving, worship and adoration offered in their many guises in many lands to divine and supernatural entities, but also includes institutions formal and informal, touching theology, morality, laws and customs, art and poetry related to divine beings, or man’s relation to them.

Good means approach to the divine truth. It means virtue, beauty, and truth.

But to ask a question about goodness as a whole implies a standard of measurement, a goal, and the way to measure whether religion is moving us closer or father from the goal. The subjective atheist so-called standard is manmade and man-centered whereas the objective and rational Catholic standard is divinely ordained and Church-centered. I can imagine no way to answer the question about goodness across so wide a gap of disbelief.

And, more to the point, to ask a question about ‘religion’ without making any distinction between primitive and advanced religions, civilized or uncivilized, and making no distinctions between worshipping good and gentle gods or horrid and beast-faced devils is like asking a question about whether marriage is better than celibacy, without distinguishing between marrying one’s true love, marrying a shrew, marrying one woman, many woman, or marrying the volcano god by being tossed in chains into the lava crater.

The question as it stands does not mean anything because there is nothing outside religion with which to contrast it. The religious impulse is part of human nature, and even atheists and agnostics treat some matters with the awe and reverences theists offer gods. There are still things an atheist treats as sacred — his sense of honor, for example, or his love of reason — even though in his worldview technically nothing is sacred.

The question is the same as asking whether being human, on the whole, has been good or bad for humanity.

Now, the question might be trying to ask something deeper than this. It might be trying to ask whether or not the religious impulse has been the cause of more harmful and unhappy historical events that of events of benevolence, civilization, and progress.

There is no standard. If the number, frequency and severity of wars, there is an insufficient number of purely atheist or pure theist motives for war to make any determination. Likewise, the length a society stands might be a measure, or the fairness and justice of its law, or how well it treats the poorest among them, but then the selfsame objection arises. When a man does evil, how can any mortal know which of his motivations was paramount? For in every war, aside from the World Wars and thereafter, religion was as much part of the culture, both at war and peace, as were all other cravings, appetites, drives and instincts of the human condition.

But, again, since the word ‘religion’ refers both to the blood-smeared and steaming stepped pyramids of Mexico, where thousand died under the obsidian knives of painted priests dressed in flayed human skin, and also to the ministry of Mother Teresa of Calcutta washing the limbs of lepers, it is again like asking whether the sexual impulse has led to more harm than good, without distinguishing between happy marriages and grotesque adulteries.

Mere toting up the happy marriages of CS Lewis and GK Chesterton against the treason of Lancelot, the rape of Lucretia, and the polygamy of Solomon will tell you nothing worth knowing.

No balance can be measured. I would consider my own happy marriage to be of such significance that even if every other expression of the sexual impulse for all of time were tragic and wretched, the balance would, in my judgment, still fall favor of being a sexual rather than an asexual creature. And since human biology does not allow for asexual humans to exist at all, the question is moot no matter whose judgment is called upon for this answer.

Likewise, if an evil genii offered that all the sacrificial victims of the Aztecs would be saved from the religiously-motivated human sacrifices of their devil worshippers, if in return one leper who was comforted by Mother Teresa would be ignored and damned and die in the gutter with no human hand to touch him, I would refuse the offer with contempt. When a rather shallow newsman saw Mother Teresa laving the limbs of the leper in water, he said ‘I would not do that for all the money in the world!’

She replied with a smile that she also would not do it for all the money in the world.

So let us talk no more of judging on balance whether something that is part of human nature is, on the whole, good or bad for human nature.

However, despite all this, the meaningless question can be answered meaningfully, if we look at what is its hidden assumption, explore and answer that.

We are dealing with thing worth more than all the money in the world. That is what the question should be about. If the human soul exists (and rational argument and the testimony of experience firmly affirm that it does) then the question of what is good for man is really a question of what is good for the soul.

Little can be known of that mystery called the soul. But we all know we have one, and we know that we have it on good authority, and buttressed by rational argument, that souls must be indivisible and simple, hence eternal.

This immortality has an immense implication for the question we address. It changes the whole model of the universe.

The least important person you meet tomorrow is more important that every republic, empire, and kingdom, every law and institution, every human work of art or engineering, and every triumph or loss, war or peace, in all human history. The reason is simple and shocking:

The least important person you meet tomorrow is immortal and supernatural. He will be alive forever in the bliss of eternal light or screaming forever in the outer darkness. All these other things are temporary and mortal and will pass away and be forgotten. Between the finite and the infinite there is no ratio. The mortal world and all its works and all its pomp and glamour, all the victories and defeats of history, are not merely lacking in meaning, they are infinitely lacking in meaning. But the soul of the beggar you ignore will outlast the stars and galaxies and the cosmos itself.

So says the true view of the universe. By way of contrast, the atheist view holds that no one you meet tomorrow will outlast the century, and the human race will be replaced by superhumans or subhumans as evolution blindly sponges us away, or catastrophe obliterates us, or entropy and decay rots all human things to nothing. And then all animal life will eventually die, and then the world will eventually die, and then our sun will eventually die, and then our galaxy, the cluster in which our galaxy is found, and the supercluster, and the cosmos.

The hidden assumption of the question, when an atheist asks the question, is that churches and cults last longer than people and therefore human history is to be judged on how peaceful and comfortable religion have made the greatest number of mortal men (all religions, devil-worship as well as divine worship).

But when a Catholic asks the question, he knows that all paganisms, cults, heresies and falsehoods will not outlast Judgment Day, and all men will.

He knows the purpose of pagan religions is to uphold the tyrannous and soul-crushing social order of inhuman, unfree, and cruel civilizations. The Egyptians bowed to the Pharaoh as the son of heaven, as did the Japanese to their Emperor, and the pagan Romans to theirs. Tyrants were divine. The Brahmins are superior to the Untouchables of India based on divine and merciless karma, or fate. Whimsical lawless brutality was god. The cruelties of the world were settled in place by the gods and demigods who founded the cities out of whim, and due to fate, from which there is no escape.

The social order of the pagan worldview is helpless and hopeless, because it is part and parcel of the cosmic order. The demigods who founded Rome, for example, or the Nymph who showed Numa the Twelve Tablets of the law, have no more choice about the inferiority of the slave and commoner than they have about the courses of the stars or the coming twilight of the gods, or the turning of the wheel of the Kali Yuga. All things are fixed; all things are fated; all things are predetermined.

And likewise the self-anointed elite of Soviet Russia or Red China are superior to the proletarians and slaves and unenlightened traitors to the class struggle due to their moral and intellectual superiority.

And this most recent manifestation of the ancient cruelty and hopelessness of paganism, of course, erected the same system of coercion, slavery, and public ritual as their ancient counterparts, except without the myths of gods to give them any glamour or lightness.

Communism is all the sacrifices in the endlessly burning human-eating furnaces of Moloch, without the poetry of Virgil or Homer.

In both the modern and the ancient melancholy and darkness of paganism, the single repeated note is one of hopelessness, and the sacrifice of the individual to the bloodthirsty gods who maintain order.

Every evil done, every lie told, every turn of the screws of the torturer, is done for the same reason: the ends justify the means. Julian the Apostate, last pagan Imperator of Rome, sacrificed a slavegirl to have priests read her entrails to tell if his campaigns in Persia would be successful. Her name is not recorded in history. At Odessa the Cheka (Bolshevik secret police) tied enemies of the state to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces. The true numbers of all those killed by the Cheka is not recorded in history. In both cases, the remorseless gods of Olympus or the remorseless material dialectic of class struggle required sacrifices. Pity and compassion and those other weak Christian virtues unknown to pagans old and new never are mentioned.

The purpose of Christianity is to overthrow that social order erected in the mundane and mortal world by means of the power of the kingdom not of this world, which does not play by the rules of his merciless world, and does not accept that the ends justify the means.

We Christians overthrew the iron brutality of Rome with the one weapon no atheist, no pagan, and no worldly man can never understand: the exorbitant excess of love called martyrdom.

Imagine the scene where Jesus Christ, a rebel and the child of a despised and conquered race, beaten and humiliated, tortured and forced to wear a clowning mockery of a regal coronet, is taken before the cynical, educated, powerful and superior Pontius Pilate.

It is nearly impossible even for the most intelligent of modern agnostics to look at the scene with pagan eyes, because modern agnostics have so entirely adopted the Christian worldview that you are unaware of it even during your rebellion against it.

Was the pagan sees is this: Christ is one the Three Stooges. He is not Sancho Panza, the low peasant more cunning and goodhearted than his crazy master. The low class figures in Greek Dramas were not there to inculcate the subversive and Christian message that all men are equally the sons of God and judge on their faith and works. The low class figures in ancient drama were there to show the superiority of the superiors.

Look, for example, at the treatment of Thersites in Homer. When Odysseus beats him with the gold studded rod that served the gathered kings and chiefs as a chairman’s gavel during the public debate over the issue of returning Agamemnon’s slavegirl to her father to remove a curse, the poet does not expect anyone his pagan audience to have any sympathy with the turnip-headed and loose-tongued Thersites. He is the only figure given a visual description in all of Homer’s epic, and it is an absurd one. He is comically ugly. Odysseus was the hero, and the job of pagan heroes is to beat underlings into line, to protect the city, and to burn with the brilliance of battle that awes even the gods, and to die young.

Rescuing damsels in distress is the profession of the chivalrous Christian knight, and he does not take slavegirls as loot for his growing harem of concubines. Then he seeks the Holy Grail, to return light to the darkness of the world, and hope to the helpless.

Let the scoffer say what he will about how well or ill the stoic Myrmidon or the devout Paladin lived up to his ideals or betrayed them, but no scoffing can hide the fact that the ideals are very different, and that the Christian ideals are brighter, cleaner, and finer.

Christ, bruised and torn by the whip, was Thersites, and Pilate was Odysseus. For the Christians to see the scene as once where Christ is king and Pilate a bewildered and pathetic figure, as bruised and battered by the contrary demands of Roman tyranny and Jerusalem mobs as Peter the poor fisherman, is remarkably and unthinkably subversive. Or perhaps a better word is superversive. The Christian view uplifts even the humblest above the greatest.

The pagan view of life is one where the cross is an instrument of torture so disgusting and so humiliating that no contemporary account whatsoever exists detailing how it was used, or what it looked like – the Romans were too ashamed to write it down.

The Christian view flips the universe on its startled head, and the crucifix is turned into a sign of glory at which the demons of hell scream and tremble and the brutal and capricious gods of Olympus, with all their fornications and father-murders, are reduced to babyish images on posts card on Saint Valentine’s Day.

The modern atheist cannot argue about the harm and the good done by religion, because he does not know what religion is.

There is no atheistic explanation of religion, or, rather all such attempts at explanation of merely sneers and emotional tirades, lacking the precision of science and the cold clarity of philosophy.

For what possible atheist explanation of religion could there be? Animals have no such thing, and there is no god to breathe a spirit into an animal to make him man, to religion must have evolved in all men equally. But it is not something that could evolve naturally, for it serves no natural purpose, it gathers no food, fends off no predators, discourages the fecundity of animals who mate without marriage rites.

The argument that religion evolved as a social mechanism contradicts itself, since social mores and customs are deliberate, not instinctive, and in any case the clear evidence is that social mores are a response to a religious impulse, not the other way around. In order for this argument to work, we would have to see evidence of a religious and a nonreligious social order, and see the nonreligious one fail due to some innate drawback with atheism and social unity, and confirm that the religious one spread and over-swept the world. What anthropology shows us instead is that the earliest and most primitive of men, centuries and millennia before some Stone Age Moses wrote their first law or Caveman Jefferson their first Constitution, had burial rites and rituals. Religion is old than society, and so cannot be a byproduct of it. It does not show a single culture controlling all Neolithic men from pole to pole with a single unified religious order.

Atheists from time to time offer other windy theories as to how religion arose and what religion means, but crippled by the foolishness of their starting point, they cannot explain why men of old worshipped demons, because the atheist does not believe the demons exist. It would be like asking an insane marriage counselor who thought your wife was imaginary to explain your love for her, or asking a delusional cop who thought all crimes were imaginary why the frightened store owner paid a protection racket. All they can conclude is that religions are irrational, and this for the same reason why the insane marriage counselor and the delusional cop cannot render any sound advice about crime or marriage: they do not think the subject matter of the discussion exists.

Moreover, thanks in part to modern education, and in part to willful ignorance, the ability to judge the good and bad of history is crippled and perverted. He cannot tell what he is looking at.

When one looks are Christendom, and sees the things that only Christians have ever made or inspired imitative pagans following in Christian footsteps to make, the testament of history is overwhelming.

What we call civilization, everything from the rule of law to the equality of women to the exploration of the globe, the scaling of Mount Everest, industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the signing of the Magna Charter, the American Revolution, and planting a flag on the Moon, was all done by Christians, for Christians, and in the context of Christianity.

No one ever wrote a science fiction novel outside Christendom, or before he first met Christian civilization.

The contributions of the Jews from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand to Maimonides to Spinoza were made possible only by the surrounding Christian society, and were possible only within the surrounding Christian metaphysical, moral and philosophical outlook. The utter lack of any record of Jews living under Muslim rule, or farther afield, making such startling and innovative breakthroughs is sufficient to arouse the suspicion that their culture without ours is insufficient to achieve a growing, modern, industrial, and democratic civilization.

The case for the contributions of medieval Spanish Muslim mathematicians and doctors is even more lopsided and obvious. The Near East fell behind the Christian West in science, in art, in the law and liberty, in wealth and power, because and only because their heretical copy of the Christian religion did not keep the essentially Christian elements of the worldview which make such progress necessary.

While the faithful Mohammedan retains some elements of the Christian unity and equality of man — for example, all the faithful of all ranks in a mosque pray in the same way and at the same time, and, for another example, charity to the poor is one of the Five Pillars of Islam — on the whole, as all heresies eventually do, it became part of the worldly system of power, part of the social order Christ opposes, and turned into a mechanism to retain the Sultans and Shahs on their thrones, or elevate the Imams to their divans of power.

As far the Far East, the social order of India and China before the coming of the West speaks for itself, and the Mesoamerican Indians and their mass human sacrifices is very nearly the closest thing we have ever had to hell on Earth, up until socialists in Germany, Russia and China excluded or subverted religion to their programs of mass extinctions, mass expropriations, mass exterminations, mass murders, mass slavery.

The question of the impact of Christianity on history is too obvious to bear debating. Western civilization is Christianity. Christianity is Western civilization.

All the desperate attempts to claim that the achievements of, say, the Wright Brothers or the Apollo astronauts were of no greater value than the men of Easter Island denuding their island of trees to build their great tiki idols, thus trapping themselves for generations with no ability to cross the sea, is so foolish that words fail.

Civilization is not without its drawbacks, and surely there are many fine things in primitive life that civilized man has lost, and many vices civilization not only permits, but invents: but modern thinking merely equates civilization with its absence. In effect, modern thinking says zero equals one on the grounds that 0 and 1 are both digits.

Without this modern unwillingness to note the astonishing accomplishments of the West, the question of whether Western civilization has been good for civilization would be a question too obvious to ask.

The accomplishments of the Far East are roughly equal to those f the classical world, and were outstripped handily during the so-called Dark Ages, which was one of the most rapid periods of scientific and cultural progress history has ever seen until the 1950s. It would weary me just to list the inventions and breakthroughs, from the stirrup to the fuller’s mill to the abolition of slavery to the scientific method, the subjection of kings to baronial and parliamentary power, and, at the tail end of this so called dark period, the invention of the printing press.

The accomplishments, such as they are, of Near Eastern scholars are all taken from the Christian Roman Empire which they conquered and destroyed, while falling out among themselves into endless deadly squabbles and wars. The only truly native accomplishment is the creation of the harem and the belly dance, the minaret and the wailing prayer-call, and the poetry of Omar Khayyam, in all its hedonistic bitterness, cynicism, and blank despair.

Despair is what is found outside Christendom.

From the melancholy of Omar Khayyam to the cynical pragmatism of Confucius to the mind-obliterating mysticism of Lao Tzu and the Buddha there is not one ray of hope, and no surety of human happiness. The zealous Muslims of the modern jihad are strapping bombs to their own children in hopes of blowing up Jewish schoolgirls at play. These are acts of stark and terrifying despair.

And the atheist has even less than these heretics, pagans, and bloody-minded cultists. He does not even have a devil to worship. He thinks himself a cunning animal who by accident learned to speak and think, or a machine made of meat.

From all this we can see the answer to the question, both the one that was asked, and the one that was implied.

Whether religion as a whole has been good for humanity is a meaningless question, because religion is the major part of what it means to be human, ergo it is like asking whether being human is good for humanity.

The real question is whether the Christian religion has been good for civilization. The answer is so obvious that it cannot be answered by anyone with even the smallest scintilla of honest learning about all the miseries and hopelessness of history.

All other civilizations outside Christendom are stagnant by design. Ancient China, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India were meant never to change. Even the Republic of Rome changed only by growth through conquest, and that came to a halt after the government devolved into an Imperium. After emperors arise and become divine, the legions were used merely to stop civil wars and tumults. The laws of Rome forbad that sons should enter other trades from their fathers’, and in this followed the stagnant path of India with its caste system, Egypt with its ossified theocracy, and China with its Mandarin bureaucracy.

The idea of progress and change for the better, the idea of evolution to higher and finer things, is an idea not found outside the Christian worldview.

History outside Christendom is merely one damned thing after another, a flux of meaningless events, one tragedy after and the next. History within Christendom is a story, and a march of progress from pagan darkness to law and equality, happiness, technical advancement.

However, a far better answer to the question of whether, on the whole, Christianity is good for man exists than mine, and it is meet that I end this column, and this whole debate, on this note:

The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) records the story of King Edwin of Northumberland at the hands of the missionary bishop Paulinus. Edwin called together a meeting of his council of elders, which included his pagan high priest, Coifi, to debate the wisdom of converting to this new faith.

Bishop Paulinus presented the gospel to him, and one of the chief advisors replied with this observation:

“Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counselors.

“In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a moment of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came.

“Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.”

* * *

 

Theist vs. Atheist: What Should You Believe? is a seven-part series of articles by two authors, John C. Wright and Stephen R. C. Hicks, in which they debate seven key issues in religion.