by John Griffin - December 4, 2007
I’ve been reading Mr. Dawkins again. I only think this, mind you, for if I articulate my present point of view, I’m fairly certain it is destined to coincide with something that sublime rationalist has already said touching the great mysteries of revealed religion. Merely think it, and you can bet Herr Dawkins has already said it better. Which is all a roundabout way of telling you that the approaching festive season finds me once more in a particularly recalcitrant and atheistic mood. I don’t know what it is about the Blessed Yuletide that brings out the infidel in me, but damned if I don’t start applying the discursive blade to this or that dogma as soon as the Star of Bethlehem is on the ascendancy. Does this mean I begrudge people their share of joy? Does the season find me trudging through snow drifts looking for lost Magi, so as to give them the loan of my GPS thingie? Do you suppose I spend my idle hours trying to vet miracles and that sort of thaumaturgical business? Not at all. Let them off with their fairytales and spirits and sainted this and holy that and infernal the supernatural other. Doesn’t bother me in the slightest that poor humanity must cling to its fables in order to do what it will do regardless but with a clearer, lighter conscience: If it helps you to summon the testimony of dead poets to feel at one with yourself, then by all means have at it. Just don’t insist that I perform the ritualistic verbal and devotional gymnastics along with you – kneel, sit, stand, bark, groan, bow head, up again, sit again, kneel again and so on and so forth.
So, yes, I believe this whole Santa Claus fairy tale is as malignant to the innocent consciousness of children as is the notion of God itself. I subscribe to neither. I used to entertain those vestigial beliefs I inherited from my parents, but I’ve long since sloughed them as seals moult baby fur. For me my disbelief in belief grew out of my insatiable thirst for rational answers to irrational assertions. I never got any satisfactory or credible answers, so I concluded that the black hole which is faith was not a place where I longed to live. I observed the faithful too, closely watched and monitored their actions, paid heed to the dogmas they claimed to espouse, sought to extenuate their follow-throughs, but always came up short, and it occurred to me that the most vociferous and flamboyant champions of faith were all too often the very last ones I could trust under any circumstances. Actually, I decided an inverse ratio obtained between malevolence and hypocrisy and an intensity of devotion: the most sainted church-goer is frequently the most nefarious scoundrel, not always of course, because such generalizations are invalid and untrue, but in the majority of cases in my personal experience. But Pharisees alone were not the cause of my atheism, nor indeed are all the vicious crimes committed throughout history in the name of sanctified, beatified religion, and that are still being committed to this day. It galls me that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake, and I’ve always rued that Sir. Isaac Newton felt compelled to second his genius to dogmatic theology. The same can be said for my qualified respect for Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. If only, I say to myself. Yes, and if only Gerard Manley Hopkins hadn’t quit writing poetry for his God. But there I go, y’see, simply repeating what Richard Dawkins has said much better than I.
Dawkins exposes the irrational and unconvincing proofs for miracles and apparitions and Divine Interventions and comes up with a fairly convincing catalogue of refutations of authoritative religions that premise their provenance on such proofs. The Catholic faith [the one I was raised in] makes many such claims on my reason; it asks me, no, it bids me to put aside my empirical expectations and be satisfied that its anomalies may be satisfactorily explained by that catch-all cosmic net, Faith. If you believe, Brother G, then you shall be saved; if you ignore those insistent voices in your head, then the Lord will honour you with a place among the angels. So I find myself stupefied by much of the Marian doctrines of my denomination: the Immaculate Conception, for one, the dogma that the Virgin Mary was born without Original Sin. Can’t get my head around that one at all, or even the dogma that’s so often confused with it, the Virgin Conception. I must confess I’ve always felt an especial compassion for poor St. Joseph – seems to me his spectator role in his own life always requires a bit of a stretch, not to mention his patience: I can’t say I’d have trudged through the coldest desert night in search of a stable if the missus was with child that wasn’t my child. Would I have believed the ‘but God put it there, Joe’ line? Probably not. Chivalry only goes so far…but Faith goes much further. This dogma leads me into the inscrutable mysteries of Incarnation and Hypostatic Union, two things I just cannot get my head around. I suppose as a practicing scribbler of poems I could get used to the idea of my ‘words made flesh’, but I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon..
The real doozie for me however is the Assumption, the notion that "having completed the course of her earthly life, Holy Mary was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory." It means that Mary was assumed, or transported, body and soul straight up into Heaven. It’s the hope of all devout Catholics too, that at the end of days their bodies and souls will be reunited before God. I won’t even go where Mr. Dawkins has already gone in his essay, ‘When Religion Steps on Science’s Turf: The Alleged Separation Between the Two is not so Tidy’:
Either Mary's body decayed when she died, or it was physically removed from this planet to Heaven. The official Roman Catholic doctrine of Assumption, promulgated as recently as 1950, implies that Heaven has a physical location and exists in the domain of physical reality - how else could the physical body of a woman go there? I am not, here, saying that the doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin is necessarily false (although of course I think it is). I am simply rebutting the claim that it is outside the domain of science. On the contrary, the Assumption of the Virgin is transparently a scientific theory. So is the theory that our souls survive bodily death, and so are all stories of angelic visitations, Marian manifestations, and miracles of all types.
This seems to me to put it best, and there I shall leave Mary, leave her to her Apparitioning, as is her wont. Theophany is a very successful business – just look at Fatima and Lourdes and Međugorje, where the faithful were flocking even at the height of the Bosnian debacle. And of course, in Ireland, we had our own Knock [can’t tell you how many ‘knock-knock’ jokes grew out of that particular Marian visitation], but the best part was the unfettered entrepreneurism of one Monsignor Horan, whose legendary business acumen became the envy of our burgeoning capitalist nation. Horan built a mini-empire up at Knock, replete with International Airport – not bad for a day’s work. But the Monsignor has much to answer for, not the least of which was the ensuing cashing in by complete impostors on the whole apparition gig. I refer of course to none other than The Moving Statues Movement.
Some years ago now, but not so long ago that your average quartogenarian wouldn't remember it, religious icons on my native island took it upon themselves to move and weep and bleed and wink and sigh and jabber and hover and light up and get up to all sorts of devilish shenanigans. It was awful. In fact, it became so widespread that these intrepid statues decided to knuckle down and form themselves into a legitimate trade union, the Moving Statues Movement of Ireland, or MSMI, they called themselves. That way any idol hurt or blasphemed or stroked or robbed in the line of duty could seek redress and receive commensurate compensation, a new paint job, or a new glass case, or a pedestal or plinth, or extra strobe lighting for the more subtle lacrimal displays, or just a deft wash-up, for it is widely known that the especially devout Irish pilgrims have an incurable tactile tendency [and need] to manhandle (or womanhandle) anything considered Verboten by the Mother Church. For centuries, it was their own genitalia, and then for centuries after that it was other people's genitalia...
So these unsteady-on-their-feet merchants formed a rock-solid (and in some cases, a brass-balled) trade union, and they were very happy with their shop stewards, their local chapter men and women, their insipid representatives, the St. Vincent de Paul bunch in charge of the treasury, for example, or the more mollifying crew, the Virgin Marys, overseeing disciplinary issues, like calling meetings to order, or bouncing soused saints like St. Augustine out of there. They were very pleased with their organization and even wrote their own very moving anthem, "The Moving Statues Movement", which goes something like this:
We're the moving statues movement
And to move is what we choose ...
It's a Friday night in Glenamaddy
When the statues move!
A very delectable and most fitting air!
But, as usually happens with unmoved movers who finally decide to get off their arses, the statues started to give themselves airs. They got smarmy, went on strike here, refused to levitate there, stifled tears, wouldn't bleed up in Knock and, worst of all, the winking St. Anthony down in the blessed County of Mayo got churly and refused to not stare ahead, scared the bejaysus out of the poor kids up for wholly Communion and Confirmation. It was terrible the smugness that came over them across the land. Even those Moorish alabaster lads and midlands marble ladies, who were always so obliging with their genuflecting and dreamy sheens of beatific cunning, decided to pack it in and not perform any more. The cheap soap-stone baby Jesuses from Warsaw turned over in their mangers and showed pinkish rumps to the world. A secret Nuncio was dispatched from the Holy See for to see if he could, y'know, prevail on them. But, not a budge out of them could he get. He returned to Rome admitting, and ruing, his failure, which was an unusual eventuality for a corporation whose motto is, "You Believe; We Deceive."
As a consequence, very few figurines now bother to budge on this sainted isle. All of a sudden a complete freeze has come upon their supernatural kinesis. And good thing too, except where one icon refuses to budge another can be readily found to dispense its miraculous healing powers. For years it was the scapulars, then splinters from the cross, then relics from St. Peter, and more recently gauze from the blood-stained hands of St. Padre Pio. Irish homes, once so loyal to JFK and the Pope, are now sporting portraits of the Padre instead and many of the faithful are praying to him. He not only had the stigmata, for which was famous, he was also gifted with the ability to speak in tongues, bilocation, levitation, prophecy and miracles. It is quite the list, and one ought to be impressed. But recently it has emerged that this sainted priest administered carbolic acid to his hands to cause the bleeding. A tell-all book by the historian, Sergio Luzzatto, has made this blasphemous claim, and the Catholic Anti-Defamation League has responded by accusing him of libel. I cannot fathom what kind of mind would afflict its body thus for, though the story never squared with my innate reason, it did however fit with the traditional antipathy the church holds for the body.
Still, it’s not that I require irrefutable proof to satiate my infidelity; rather, it’s simply that I cannot reconcile the supernatural with my common sense, and I’m not going to make any Pascalian wagers on that score. There are many things for which I don’t require proofs, like using the telephone, or my computer, or even my car: I couldn’t tell you precisely how these things work, but I’m fairly confident somebody can, and that I could consult or learn the proofs should I ever require them. I know they’re to hand, just in case. Not so the doctrines of religion that defy reason and are inimical to demonstration. They continue to elude science and one is treated to the most outrageous and ludicrous pretexts and excuses when one asks that simple question, how? So I don’t ask anymore, and I don’t bother bothering the faithful…well, I’m willing to make this one exception – get rid of the damaging notion of Santa Claus, purge yourselves [and your children’s imaginations] of flying venison, aeronautical feats that defy all known laws of physics, and please, please don’t be leaving mouse fodder out for a rotund and jovial chimera who you tell your bemused kids fits down the sooty canal you do not have. Stop lying for goodness sake and try teaching the brats not to be brats. The world will be the better place for it, and you’ll be relieved of all the idiotic charades you get up to this time of year. Bah, Humbug! Damn Straight!
John Griffin is a writer living in Ireland.