Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion (17 page)

6.
A pessimistic worldview does not have to entail a life stripped of joy. Pessimists can have a far greater capacity for appreciation than their opposite numbers, for they never expect things to turn out well and so may be amazed by the modest successes which occasionally break across their darkened horizons. Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, generally fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise.

Accepting that existence is inherently frustrating, that we are forever hemmed in by atrocious realities, can give us the impetus to say ‘Thank you' a little more often. It is telling that the secular world is not well versed in the art of gratitude: we no longer offer up thanks for harvests, meals, bees or clement weather. On a superficial level, we might suppose that this is because there is no one to say ‘Thank you'
to
. But at base it seems more a matter of ambition and expectation. Many of those blessings for which our pious and pessimistic ancestors offered thanks, we now pride ourselves on having worked hard enough to take for granted. Is there really any need, we wonder, to carve out a moment of gratitude in honour of a sunset or an apricot? Are there not loftier goals towards which we might be aiming?

Seeking to induct us in a contrary attitude of humility, the Jewish
Prayer Book of the United Congregation commends a specific prayer to be said on the occasion of ‘eating a seasonal fruit for the first time in the year', and another to mark the acquisition of ‘a new garment of significant value'. It even includes a prayer intended to prompt admiration for the complexity of the human digestive system:

7.
Religions have wisely insisted that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always slowly dying.

They have also, of course, in many cases believed in the possibility that a deity might be able to help us. We see this combination of despair and hope with particular clarity at Jerusalem's Western or
Wailing Wall, where since the second half of the sixteenth century, Jews have gathered to air their griefs and to beg their creator for help. At the base of the wall, they have written down their sorrows on small pieces of paper, inserted these into gaps among the stones and hoped that God would be moved to mercy by their pain.

Remove God from this equation and what do we have left? Bellowing humans calling out in vain to an empty sky. This is tragic and yet, if we are to rescue a shred of comfort from the bleakness, at least the dejected are to be found weeping
together
. Only too often, in bed late at night, we panic at sorrows which seem devilishly unique to us. No such illusions are possible at the Wailing Wall. It is clear that the whole race is forlorn. The Wall marks out a locus where the anguish we otherwise bear silently within us can be revealed for what it truly is: merely a thimbleful of sorrow in an ocean of suffering. It serves to reassure us of the ubiquity of disaster and definitively corrects the smiling assumptions unwittingly made by contemporary culture.

Among the advertisements for jeans and computers high above the streets of our cities, we should place electronic versions of Wailing Walls that would anonymously broadcast our inner woes, and thereby give us all a clearer sense of what is involved in being alive. Such walls would be particularly consoling were they able to afford us a glimpse of what in Jerusalem is reserved only for the eyes of God: the particulars of the misfortunes of others, the details of the broken hearts, dashed ambitions, sexual fiascos, jealous stalemates and ruinous bankruptcies that normally remain hidden behind our impassive fronts. Such walls would lend us reassuring proofs that others too were worrying about their absurdity, counting how few summers they had left, crying over someone who abandoned
them a decade ago and dynamiting their chances of success through idiocy and impatience. There would be no resolutions on offer in these venues, no end to suffering, only a basic – and yet infinitely comforting – public acknowledgement that we are none of us alone in the extent of our troubles and our lamentations.

1.
For atheists, one of the most consoling texts of the Old Testament should be the
Book of Job, which concerns itself with the theme of why bad things happen to good people – a question to which, intriguingly, it refuses to offer up simple, faith-based answers. Instead it suggests that it is not for us to know why events occur in the way they do, that we should not always interpret pain as punishment and that we should recall that we live in a universe riddled with mysteries, of which the vagaries in our fortunes are certainly not the largest or even, as we will become aware if only we can look at matters from a sufficient remove, among the most important.

The Book of Job begins by introducing us to its eponymous hero, a man from Uz, on whom God appears to have bestowed every imaginable favour. When we first meet him, Job is living in a large house, he is virtuous and content, he has seven sons and three daughters, 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen and 500 donkeys. Then, in a single day, a catastrophic series of disasters befalls him, his family and his livestock. First a band of violent Sabaeans make off with the oxen and donkeys. Then a great storm breaks out and lightning kills every last one of the sheep. Members of a neighbouring tribe, the Chaldeans, steal the camels. Worst of all, a hurricane blows in from the desert and destroys the house of Job's eldest son, killing the youth and all of his nine siblings, who have gathered inside for a feast.

As if these tribulations were not enough, mysterious sores begin to spread over Job's body, rendering his every least
movement excruciating. Sitting in a pile of ashes, a broken man, Job scrapes at his skin with a shard of pottery and, in terror and sorrow, asks God why all of these things have happened to him.

Job's friends think they know the answer: he must have sinned.
Bildad the Shuhite is certain that God would not have killed Job's children had they – and Job himself – not done something very wrong. ‘God will not reject a righteous man,' Bildad confides.
Zophar the Naamathite goes so far as to hint that Job's crimes must have been terrible indeed, and God generous in his treatment of him, because the Lord always forgives more than he punishes.

Job dismisses these explanations, though, as nothing more than ‘proverbs of ashes' and ‘defences of clay'. He knows that he has not sinned. Why, then, has he been beset by these troubles? Why has God forsaken him? Does God even exist?

At last, after a good deal of further debate among the men, Yahweh himself is prompted to answer Job. From a whirlwind in the desert, furious, God thunders:

Job's direct challenge regarding God's existence and ethical intentions is thus met with an indirect response, wherein the deity goes on at length about how little humans know of anything. Fragile, limited creatures that they are, how can they possibly understand the ways of God? he demands. And given their ignorance, what right do they have to use such words as
undeserved
and
unmerited
? There are untold things about the galaxy that mankind cannot properly interpret and upon which, therefore, it ought not presume to impose its flawed logic. Human beings did not bring the cosmos into being and, despite their occasional feelings to the contrary, they do not control or own it. God tries to shake Job out of his preoccupation with the events in his own life by drawing his attention to the immensity and variety of nature. He evokes a sweeping vision of the totality of existence, from the foundation of the earth to the tracks of the constellations, from the heights attained by a hawk in flight to the labour pains of a mountain goat, in the hope of instilling in the man from Uz a redeeming sense of awe.

The strategy works: Job is reminded of the scale of all that surpasses him and of the age, size and mystery of space. God's whirlwind, and the sonorous, sublime words he speaks, excite a pleasing terror in his audience, a sense of how petty are man's
disasters in comparison with the ways of eternity, leaving Job – and the rest of us, perhaps – a little readier to bow to the incomprehensible and morally obscure tragedies that every life entails.

2.
Some millennia after Job received his lesson from God, another Jew,
Benedictus de Spinoza, undertook to reframe the same argument in a more secular idiom.

Spinoza had no patience with the notion of an anthropomorphic Supreme Being who could speak to his followers from a mountaintop and dwelt in the clouds. For him, ‘God' was merely a scientific term for the force that had created the universe, the first cause or, in the philosopher's preferred phrase, the ‘cause of itself',
causa sui
.

As a philosophical construct, this God offered Spinoza considerable consolation. During moments of frustration and disaster, the philosopher recommended the adoption of a cosmic perspective, or a re-envisioning of the situation, in his famous and lyrical coinage, ‘under the aspect of eternity',
sub specie aeternitatis
. Fascinated by the new technology of his age – and most of all by
telescopes and the knowledge they yielded of other planets – Spinoza proposed that we use our imaginations to step outside ourselves and practise submitting our will to the laws of the universe, however contrary these might seem to our intentions.

We are not so very far, here, from God's advice to Job: rather than try to redress our humiliations by insisting on our wronged importance, we should instead endeavour to apprehend and
appreciate our essential nothingness. The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage. They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death and shy away from valuing and honouring all that slips through their grasp, until at last they must collide catastrophically with the sharp edges of reality.

Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place. It surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history, and the achievements of our fellow humans as the measure of all things – a grandiosity that plunges us into continuous swirls of anxiety and envy.

3.
Religion is above all a symbol of what exceeds us and an education in the advantages of recognizing our paltriness. It has natural sympathies with all those aspects of existence which decentre us: glaciers, oceans, microscopic life forms, newborn babies or the resonant language of Milton's
Paradise Lost
(‘Floods and Whirlwinds of tempestuous fire …'). Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.