Against Atheism

Originally published January 27, 2023

In this essay, I am responding to an aspect of the video “The Link Between Christianity & Abuse Culture” by EssenceOfThought on YouTube. What I want to respond to is the idea that faith is intrinsically bound to scripture, and I make this distinction because those without faith frequently see faith as shallow and self-deluded. This comes from an incorrect understanding of faith.

I focus on this video because I was already watching the channel, it brought the point to mind, and I didn’t want to hunt for a video that I actually disagreed entirely with. While I disagree with this particular point, I do think the link between religion and abuse which it is sometimes used to justify is worth exploring. For the purpose of this piece at least, I’m going to classify what she talks about as “Christian theology” instead as “Christian ethics” so that I can talk about what I consider to be theology proper: discussion about the nature of God and of people’s relationship to God. Using the terms of the video, I agree that the Christian religion may be abusive (I hedge for the tender-hearted, but I will explain), but I take issue with the idea that the God of the Christian faithful is an abuser. This distinction is important because saying that the God of the faithful (GOF? GCF?) is an abuser implies that the relationship that the faithful have with God is based on abuse. Without having data I won’t assert that most view it differently but I can say that it is not necessary to view GCF as an abuser. I have always seen, and heard it explained, that the attraction of the Christian faith is in the answers it provides to many mysteries of life; this is the same for many other faiths as well. This is not to say that these answers are finally true but only that they are moving & convincing answers.

Let me start by elaborating on what I meant about the Christian religion. There are two facets of my agreement about Christianity’s abusive nature. The first aspect is the pure documented fact of abuse, criminality, and atrocity which has been ascribed to various branches and flavors of Christianity over the centuries. Christianity is not alone in these things, that is true. Admitting that, it should not be controversial to admit that Christianity has been invoked — by Christian priests themselves — to justify and cover up ungodly depravities. The second aspect is the fact of authority: specifically, patriarchal authority. The Church has been an ally of authority for most of its history; the most common persecutors of Christians have been other Christians, after all. As such an instrument, it follows that the Church would replicate, reinforce, and multiply the abuses inherent to such a system. Christianity, defined as Christian religion, has certainly been abusive. Christianity described as faith in the GCF, on the other hand, is not based in an abusive dynamic.

I think that the crucial perspective shift is found in this question: what would make you believe in the divine? The question is not “what sort of proof would a god need to show to convince you that they are real”. What would make you believe? I cannot answer this question for you, nor do you need an answer; just consider the question. Consider also why the idea that gods were invented to explain phenomena like storms or crop growth or mortality is so attractive. These are (or were) mysteries, as I’ve alluded to earlier. “Bigger” mysteries like free will or the purpose of a life bounded by nonexistence remain. These mysteries precede God in a sense; we do not ask them because of God, we ask the question which naturally arises and then answer it using God. This is to say that even if GCF could be classified as an abusive figure (which I do not concede), the attraction felt by the faithful is not necessarily a response to abuse. Again, I qualify due to my lack of data. Regardless, it is important to understand this kind of faith in order to understand what motivates long-term devotion such as that displayed by monastics or many martyrs.

In an anthropological sense, both a meaningful afterlife (thus excluding disaffected constructions such as the classical Greek Hades and early Jewish Sheol) and reincarnation can be understood as technologies which were developed to promote adherence to a certain cosmology, thereby implying specific morals and ethics derived from that cosmology. This is not necessarily a cynical development (though I grant that this is a possibility). Rather, the evolution of concepts of salvation (including both the concept of a paradisal afterlife and the concept of progressive reincarnation) seems to come out of a tension that would have been felt in many societies, if not all: why should people be good? The fact that philosophy has never arrived at a final answer means that it is not surprising that many people leave the question in the court of the divine. This evolution also relies on a fundamental solipsism or arrogance which comes from the human perspective. By these it becomes plausible that human ethics are in relation to the encompassing cosmos. The reason that salvation developed in the Hellenistic world is, I believe, tied to the limits of the previous kind of theology in those regions. (I won’t deal with dharmic or other types of salvation as I am not as familiar with their development.) I will soon move on to discuss these types of theology. Before that, I want to conclude my comments about the nature of the God of the Christian faithful.

I think it is important for serious people, atheists especially, to try to understand the profundity of religious faith. Regardless of one’s own beliefs, to act as though religion is a kind of prank is to refuse a real interest in introspection and in history. From a moral-ethical standpoint, the palatability of religious institutions is possibly nil, but in so saying we must acknowledge a distinction between believers, scriptures, and the divine. Faith is not in relation to the first two: it only concerns the divine. This personal, core faith is always aimed at goodness and wholeness. It is a search for answers to questions beyond experiment and a hope for a desirable outcome. God, or the divine, represents here not the lawgiver but the source of infinite providence. All faith must begin here. To be brief: the faithful do not love God because they love God’s law, they follow God’s law because they love God.

This is why I feel it is a mistake to characterize GCF (or any God of the faithful) as an abuser. The reason I argue strongly for the dignity of faith is that I feel one reason such sloppiness has arisen between faith in GCF on one hand and Christian institutions on the other is that there is a basic lack of respect for the idea of having religious faith from those who do not have it. I have tried to show that belief in divinity is not rooted in or developed under irrationality but is in fact an attempt to understand fundamental aspects of the cosmos which do not respond to scientific observations. I now want to move forward and discuss the nature of theology, and in this I hope to answer some questions about divine wrath and fearing God.

So far, what I’ve discussed is the salvific justification for divine legitimacy, or in brief, salvific theology. The promise of an ultimate salvation or redemption which is enacted by or through the divine is the reason to believe or, at least, to adhere to the religion. The other category of theological systems is victory theology. As I said earlier, one of the reasons to believe is the way a theological system answers certain questions. Salvation theology answers questions of consciousness and death. Victory theology answers questions of practical struggle, especially the question of victory in battle. Even now, engagements are still considered settings of confusion and randomness where combatants try to stack odds in their favor without being able to fully predict an outcome.

There are two sides of victory theology and these sides are complimentary. This side is the promise of victory while that side is the invictus principle. The promise is what draws people in to venerate divinity. The invictus principle is this simple idea: truly legitimate victory religion must be unconquered. This doesn’t hold for every deity in a pantheon (Hephaestus, for example, was regularly humiliated but was still honored by practitioners of ritual), but the major god must be unconquered. Destroying the second part takes away the evidence which makes the first part compelling. Removing the first part makes the divine so remote from human experience that no one would need to interact with divinity.

By stating that a religion is a victory religion, I do not mean to imply that the religion’s primary expressions revolve around victory. Rather, if we assume a cosmology where all deities (domestic and foreign) are considered valid, it only makes sense that people would prefer to worship the most powerful known deity. Again, I have to pull back and clarify that I am not claiming that people were or are wishy-washy concerning their beliefs. Victory is simply the necessary justification, one that must be clearly elaborated.

The most direct explication of a deity’s victory justification is to conquer without being conquered. If a deity has only ever been victorious, they are clearly a god who can deliver victory. Such an undefeated history is not the case for many, if any, communities of any size. How a religion explains reversals is key to upholding the justification which preserves the religion’s legitimacy. A common method is the assumption of divine displeasure. In this scheme, the divine is as capable of delivering victory as it ever was; the reversal happened because the divine withdrew this ability. In this situation, the religion will usually prescribe some ritual of atonement or correction. Days of mourning and fasting are possible remedies, methods to seek the forgiveness of the divine. Great violence is also a common part of atoning rituals; ritualized human sacrifice, the sacrifice of great numbers of animals, pogroms, etc. When a great catastrophe has befallen a society with seemingly no earthly cause, drastic measures to commune with the divine become plausible to many. This is a reaction of desperation; a man dying of thirst may swallow a cruel man’s shit just to stay alive.

An interesting development in this vein is the development of syncretic deities in Roman Gaul. First, I want to make clear that as far as interpretatio graeca and romana are concerned, I think many go too far when they imply that Greeks & Romans believed that foreign gods were the same as their own gods, a sentiment living in statements like “ah Astarte, we just call her Venus”. These interpretations should be understood as a shorthand reference rather than explicit identification. That said, it is true that such identification did take place at times, such as the dual-named Olympians worshipped by the Greeks and Romans. In Gaul, the Gallic ancestral deities similarly became directly identified with Greco-Roman deities but in a way different than the “original” sharing between the Greeks and the Romans. Romans identified their deities with Greek deities and I feel that the manner of their co-identification was in a way respectful, the Romans like children excited to see how their play matched their mother’s work. In Gaul, Roman gods showed dominance over Gallic ones. Rather than writing Mars into Lenus myths which Rome then preserved, the figure of Lenus became the costume that Mars wore in Gaul. Gallic deities were married to Roman ones, especially Gallic goddesses to Roman gods (a subservient situation for the Gallic divine). Though Rome appears fairly explicit about its superiority, I think the manner of the identification also allowed Gallic peoples to continue belief in their own divines as victory-justified objects of worship.

The Gallic response to their defeat was stage-managed by their conquerors, of course, and obviously does not tell the entire story. It should be noted, for instance, that Gaul is said to have been fertile ground for initiatory mystery cults. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem as though any mystery cults devoted to Gallic deities were going, which could suggest the completed folding of Gallic religion into Roman religion. On the other hand, the character of mystery religions may mean that people were now needing a different kind of religion: salvific religion.

Before approaching salvation, we must keep one thing in mind: the divine never truly dies. When a Gallic god is subsumed under a Roman one, this should not be understood as the Gallic god’s death. Even gods like Milcom whose worship and notoriety are now almost nonexistent cannot be considered dead. Truly dead gods, ones which are dead to their believers, are rare, which I attribute in large part to the disconnect that this presents. The divine cannot die, so how can a god be dead? Usually, defeated deities are imprisoned: the Titans, for example. Gods who are acknowledged as dead include Osiris and Baldr, and these two are still of extreme importance despite their deaths. They are still, in a sense, alive. Gods cannot be killed the way humans can; their defeat is never final.

I stress that point because it is important to understand that victory and defeat are relative states, not synonyms for existence & nonexistence. It would be too simplistic to say that if A conquers B, the people of B will immediately worship only A’s gods. Instead, A’s religion will encroach upon B’s religion. A will erect statues to A deities in B temples. Priests of all kinds will be compelled to get license to perform rituals from A’s officials. Sacred objects of B’s religion will be taken to A’s great city. In ways like these does a victorious society impose its religious perspective until B’s people are forced to agree that B’s gods are the subjects of A’s gods. The defeated deities continue to exist but, because the gods have in a sense agreed to honor the concept of victory-equals-authority, they cannot object to humiliation once they are defeated. Deities superseded in this way may still remain potent but only as vassals to the sovereign divinities.

The great invention of salvific religion is its focus on the mystery of death rather than the mysteries of life. Despite the strategies that societies might use to exculpate their defeats, the promise of victory is falsifiable. The long persistence of foreign overlordship is a kind of final proof of the local god’s broken promise. By refusing the logic of victory, the salvific divine remains perfectly legitimate no matter how many reversals its society suffers. Whether or not a religion’s salvific claims are true, it must be admitted that such claims are empirically unfalsifiable. This means that there is no defeat heavy enough to make a salvific religion fundamentally illegitimate, there is no invictus principle to break.

The Torah has, as a major part of its content, a description of how the God of the Hebrews led his people to a promised land and helped them to conquer it. It would be easy to understand this deity in the context of victory religion. Victory is not the ultimate principle for this god, however; salvation is. It may be true that early Judaism had no concept of a meaningful human afterlife. Regardless, the covenant between the Hebrews and their God enjoined God to rescue them. In stories such as the exile in Egypt and experiences such as the Babylonian captivity, God demonstrated that he could not be finally defeated, that he would always exist to be called upon. The God of the Hebrews could not be forced to syncretize. Destroying the Temple and preventing its reconstruction did not destroy the faith. Had the Hebrew God been different, it’s possible that he may have dissolved into the religious punch of the Roman Empire. In my opinion, the fact of the special covenant and Hebrew monotheism allowed Jewish religion to move from one which defined itself by victory to one that defined itself by salvation. The salvific elements had long existed, of course, just as Christians, Muslims, and Jews today still buttress their faiths by stories of deeds done in the name of their religion. This said, it is the privileged position of the covenant which facilitated the transition.

The kind of salvation which the Hebrews originally sought was national salvation, which seems to follow from God’s evolution out of public civic religion. That is to say, early Hebrews were not concerned about their personal fates (in religious terms), only that “the Hebrews” were preserved. Only later did the concepts of a personal soul and of final judgments become important to the Hebrew relationship to the divine. It should also be noted that the Hebrews were not unique in this way of thinking in the slightest. Rome’s connection to their divines were primarily about the continued prosperity of the city and many Greek city-states had a similar outlook.

God’s law is important in its way but the real relationship of the faithful to God must be understood properly. God’s law is not the same thing as God. The key to this distinction lies in the nature of evil. Theodicy and related inquiries are eminently worthwhile; however, from the perspective of studying society, this subject is fairly straightforward. Evil is, in the most mundane construction, a collection of thoughts, acts, events, etc. that the society has deemed inimical. “Society” here stands in for any sort of group. What is clear, therefore, is that the issues which God’s law concerns are the issues of the society God is addressing, and this is not necessarily the same thing as the totality of issues God is interested in. Further, without having access to the scope of things God would be thinking about, it is unclear that we should take any particular aspect of what we presume is God’s law to be a truly general prescription. To make my point here plain: the punishment of evil & sin is ascribed to God because God is worshipped, God is not worshipped because God punishes.

A necessary distinction must be made between the followers of a religion and the faithful. These divisions do match up neatly to any priesthood/laity or elect/hearers split. It may be true that there are proportionally more true faithful now than there were when polytheism was more prevalent, but we are also not certain of the scope of personal beliefs of the people at that time. Religious followers are true believers, yes, but their desire to express more or to know more is limited. They follow because they believe the religion is right. The true faithful loves the object of worship — deity, phenomenon, spirit, etc. — and this love comes before any law. Followers read scripture to gain rules and tools for life. The faithful read scripture to find out how to know God. Although followers are usually the great majority of a religion’s adherents, they need the faithful. Without those who seek that knowledge and encounter, the faith that the followers have would falter. This is an unconscious offloading of emotional energy which followers do so they can focus on the aspects of their lives which they find more fulfilling. In short, someone has to believe if anyone else is going to believe.

The reason I present this distinction is to help clarify what I mean when I say that only salvation drives a true love of the divine. Many followers follow largely because they believe in their god’s ability to bring victory and prosperity, even today. These are not who I am talking about. For the faithful, what can the divine provide that cannot be provided by mortals? Salvation and only that. It is my opinion that mystery cults were an expression of this sort of faith in Hellenistic & Roman times (even though there was likely a follower element of the mysteries as well). This “core” God is who I am speaking about when I invoke the God of the Christian faithful, the God of the Jewish faithful, the God of the Muslim faithful, and so on. This conception is always before considerations of theordinant law and that law is ultimately a relative means of achieving closeness of God (or at least lessening distance from God).

One way that we can see that theordinant law is relative to humans (if not a human invention) is that both victory theologies and salvific theologies have the same method for interacting with the divine: following law which has been attributed to the divine. This implies that the focus of the law is on society and not on the divine. Sin and the punishment of hell should therefore be considered tied to, and indeed arising from, the concerns of the society which developed them. They have a separate conceptual origin than that which creates loving faith in God, even if the purpose of the law is to mediate the distance between the society and God.

I hope I have clearly laid out the motivations underpinning salvific religion. This leaves aside the underpinnings of victory religion. Is there a similar “victory faithful”? I would say no and yes. I believe that more believers in victory religion are followers than even in salvific religion (where they are also the majority, as said) and even those I might call “victory faithful” are not essentially averse to worshipping different gods. That is the no. The yes is that I feel that most of the “true” and “salvation-like” aspects in victory religion are actually located in the concept of tradition. While we do not read much personal devotion for the gods among the Greeks and Romans, we do hear a great deal of respect for and even adoration of their traditions. Much like the God of the Hebrews was valued at first for national salvation, we should understand the love for tradition as devotion to practices and principles that made a people thrive and prosper in the past. Much like salvific religion, there are those who are passionately devoted to their traditions and then there is the majority which receives tradition with less fervor, relatively passively.

Modern American Christianity has many things in common with victory religion. The Founding Fathers and a few other statesmen are more important to ModAm Christians than the vast majority of saints (as an aside, as I have recently learned that some MACs do not know this, saints are people who are venerated for things they did to advance the faith, they are not an order of demon or horror movie monster). Perhaps there is a salvific core but the core could also be their idea of tradition; if their core is active salvation, they still value tradition extremely highly. It should be considered that many of the critiques MACs make against Christianity are echoes of comments made by many fascists of the first wave. Fascism may even be understood as an ultimate expression of victory theology, or perhaps some perverse marriage of the concepts of victory and salvation. It bears thinking about.