However wrong, religion persists.
I don’t think it unusual for a child to indulge in superstitious thinking. As a child, lying in bed, I thought about the fact that ‘god’ spelled backwards was dog, that “GE” were special letters and so a special company, that I would try to make up nonsense words as signs of inspiration, and would chant phrases until I fell asleep, Don’t most children do something like that? What might be distinct was that a sense of awe was generated in me by outside properties having to do with the metaphysics of language rather than morality or human nature. That would come later. Maybe that is the way religion develops: history following the usual individual development, social phylogeny a recapitulation of individual ontogeny. First spirits and later, with Abraham, morality.
I had an ear for religious auras, just as some people have a green thumb or good pitch but I did not respond well to the Hebrew school I attended, kicked out of it for being rambunctious though I was very attentive at public school, maybe because I thought it really counted. But why didn’t religious instruction really count? Maybe because it really consisted only of learning to read the sounds of Hebrew without learning what they meant and was shameful of my failure to master prayers, never having been taught them. Who wants to excel at what you are not good at? (Me, who never learned much math but tried hard to do so.) At any rate, I treated religious books as to be held gingerly and with awe because included in the volumes were God’s word.
My bar mitzvah did not awaken religious feelings. The ceremony was rushed because there were three or four celebrants that morning and I made mistakes in speaking my portion of the torah and m,ade a speech written by the son of the teacher who instructed me on the prayers I had to learn. I would have preferred to make my own speech since, after all, I had won a prize for having given the best Israel Independence Anniversary speech. (My future wife, then a little girl, battled her own version of Judaism. She objected to the Israeli flag at her synagogue school because she insisted that she was American.)
The big event on that celebratory day was not the religious ceremony. It was the dinner and dancing to a four piece band at the catering hall that evening, one of the band members acting as master of ceremonies to usher myself and my parents into the ballroom to the applause of the guests, those not including any of my friends because that would be too expensive. My mother said that the bride is the female star of a wedding celebration but that the mother of the bar mitzvah boy is the female star of that occasion. Ast the end of the evening, I sat on a chair next to the exit with an open cigar box so people going past could deposit their envelopes with cash gifts, my parents counting the money before going to sleep to see if the total had defrayed the cost of the event. I did not feel embarrassed at collecting the proceeds because I was following the custom, much as was the case in a wedding for Slavic immigrants at the turn into the Twentieth Century in Chicago in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle''. Some of the old world customs had deteriorated and some of the guests did not pay off. For many years I would assign “The Jungle” to introductory sociology classes so as to explain American immigration. Nevertheless, I thought the Bar Mitzvah event I experienced did make me feel that I was being used, an excuse for showing off the family rather than reflecting on me.
Sometimes the religious and the secular got confused. A master of ceremonies solemnly introduced the rabbi who had officiated at the catering hall wedding and said he would offer a few songs, which was not well greeted. Instead, the rabbi had taken off his robes and wearing flounce sleeves and marimbas, had sung some Cuban style songs in the manner of Desi Arnaz. Everyone was silent, this clearly a matter of bad taste. I doubt he repeated this try at entertainment but did allow Bar Mitzvah boys to play the piano badly but I found out when sitting at the kiddie table with the musicians that a boy was not allowed to play the dreams because he might damage the skins. This is all a bit comical, what William Hazlitt thought when social classes are misaligned, but also applicable to immigrant groups, to grasp what their cultures are, second generation people trying ro be American and Bar Mitzvah boys stretching limits, just not me.
I did decide, though, that now that I was an adult Jew, having been Bar Mitzvahed, that I should go to synagogue every week even if Orthodox children had attended synagogue since they were three.I went to the synagogue where I was Bar Mitzvahed sitting in the back pews enveloped in the aura of devotion until an elderly regular practitioner asked me to join him near the front and showed me which of the prayer book to read and suggested I wear a suit whenI showed up. My less religious friends thought I was ridiculous, continuing to go to synagogue after having been Bar Mitzvahed. But I never, for some reason, was able to improve my prayer reading very much and I stopped attending after a year or so. It did not occur to intervene with a learned rabbi and ask for help. The reason for that may be that I was always uncomfortable with liturgy, feeling distant from me while I observed myself performing its various offices, from weddings to funerals. I did those things to please other people. What I cared about was the truth of the matter, whether God exists and the purposes of the creation. I wanted to find out what books and my own reasoning told me. Years later, my son engaged his own religion around liturgy, what was called “the bells and whistles” because, as I understand his view, liturgy is human constructed and so non-superstitious even if it refers to metaphysical matters, like the Incarnation and the Mass. Drama is the key matter rather than what motivates me, which is dogma.
When I soon after that started to develop my arguments about religion, I wondered if I was finding excuses to justify my lapses in religious attendance, but the arguments accumulated. I thought of the usual ones, such as whether God was just and if that was the case, then He could not be all powerful. When I told an Orthodox friend my misgivings about God’s justice, he said that while I could still be trusted about schoolwork, he could no longer trust him on moral issues. It did not occur to me to say that I should distrust him because of his irrational beliefs.
My most compelling argument in my youth was that if a person engaged in honest reasoning and concluded that the evidence suggested there was no God, then how could an honest God condemn a person for being a non-believer? Was God deliberately fooling people into thinking there was no God? Wouldn’t God then just be malicious? What this argument was switching sides on responsibility. Rather than make a person problematic about whether my quest for God was engaged in honorably, the question was whether God was honorable in making the world apparently without God. Turn about against God is fair play. By the time I became a college freshman and was exposed to Hume’s “Dialogues on Natural Religion”, most of what he said was to me old hat, however elegantly put. It was only later into college that I came across Dante who puts atheists into the seventh circle of Hell, forever existing in burning coffins because they denied the hereafter, a critic informing me that atheism, for Dante, was a flaw in character rather than, as I had thought, simply a mistake that, moreover, people were tricked into by God.
In later years, I crafted other arguments. First of all, if all the arguments for the existence of God were felt wanting, and I had consulted as many as I could, the elegant St. Anselm and those of St. Thomas, and what might be called the existentialist presentations descending from Kierkegaard, that life was left bereft without the solace of God, however demanding a taskmaster He might be, but still essentially a claim to psychology rather than fact, a plea to what the author wanted as a fact, which was that there was in the nature of things that there was such a thing as authority and it commanded obedience, then I was in a position to say there is no God because no one was likely to come up with a new counter, that God does exist. Lack of proof means proof of absence.
Second of all, there is no experience of religion that could not be experienced by a non-believer except for the experience of sensing it as true. That means that I, as an atheist, can appreciate the sublime suffering of the Crucifixion and the moral obligation of the Atonement, as well as the serenity of nature found in “The Peaceable Kingdom” and the sense of the dazzling firmament of Van Gogh, and also the precise nature of however is a church and a synagogue, even though those experiences are overcome by the grandeur of the humanless expanse of the galaxies which seem to me to dwarf the petty concern of whether a crucified Jewish rabbi two thousand years ago claimed to be the messiah for all humanity and not just for the Jewish people. How parochial a concern!
Third of all, every event in religious history could be explained by natural events, such as when people congregate so as to give one another solace in adversity and that religious people may indeed be more moral because they are affiliated with other people. That includes the imputation of Jesus rising from the dead, which is a rumor and witnessed by a set of followers in the Upper Room in a report written down years later. If someone can rise from the dead, why don’t more of them show up? There is only a single anomaly, and therefore a dubious proposition. In other words, nothing in history would be different if religious claims were not true. Social movements like Christianity and Soviet Marxism would still unfold as they did, nothing extraordinary there unless one claims to it being otherwise, and people like martyrs are people who have refashioned their own natures for understandable reasons, very human in their extraordinary demands on themselves, proving nothing as to the validity of their claims.
And fourth of all, the idea of God is incoherent in that it is a bunch of metaphors that cannot be started simply and clearly. People say that God has a will and a voice, but how is that when God is everywhere and nowhere. How can Her make a voice or emote a notion of jealousy, something attributed to God? It is trivial to speak of God and the drama of His Son in the context of the vastness and inhuman nature of the universe. Most of life is petty things even up to the immense event having to do with atonement. Why would the universe care? Or, for that matter, for me to care about the Bible, which is just a book and so subject not just to errancy but to the texture of the times in which it was made, more a concern with obedience, which is very deep in human nature, before the Bible evolves into a book about the expansion of the sense of justice.
When in college I thought that religion would just pass away as people became more educated and wealthy and did not need religion to appease the qualms that came from adversity, religion providing its recruits from Asians and Africans and South Americans until those too would achieve secular situations and therefore secular ways. There were already “bare ruined choirs” throughout Europe and America had an Eisenhowerian religion of nationalism whereby every person “under God” would worship in the church of their choice. Columbia College faculty were not devout but I met people in graduate school who were and I changed my mind coming to think that religion hit a chord with human nature whether because of all of our childhood natural superstition or else an adult sense that life was not feasible without the existence of authority, people rejecting the idea of being free and equal to follow each their own paths for no other reason than being inclined to. People have to obey the voice out of the whirlwind.
I did not, however become someone who professed atheism as a religion, who advocated for it and felt solidarity with other fellow congregants, or even established churches to substitute for atheism, as seemed to me to be the case with Ethical Culture, its late Nineteenth Century association that had leaders and services and weddings and funerals to do what religions do in the name of the invisible mandate to experience and affirm the ethical, even though I went for some time with the Ethical Culture Society on Central Park West as part of a youth group where I met lifelong friends, or experienced the Unitarian Universalist congregation some lapsed Christians joined where the Sunday School taught the children about dinosaurs, not to me a very religious theme, but provided available religious-like activities and organizations. Either it was religion or it was not, and I thought it not, atheism a philosophy rather than a religion, a rational point of view that did not replace other religions with some kind of similarity with it. Instead, with a friend, I humorously created a religion of the month club whereby we would attend one or another of the many religious congregations on Central Park West, the Catholic one, the Presbyterian one, the Christian Science one, to get the flavor of the places and experience the serenity found within its various walls.
But clearly enough I was still struggling against God, trying to find Him out, and so somehow in struggle with Him. I did see briefly a moment of numinous illumination but that quickly passed not to be ever recovered and my final stand is to say that I shouldn’t be blamed for getting old and frail because I was not the person that designed the universe even if there is no one else to blame instead. The universe just happened and it is nobody's fault or glory, though it still creeps into me to look for someone to blame. By and large, my own preference in religion, as I have said, was to the dogmatists who showed how the history of thought unraveled rather than to the liturgists who may be evocative and dramatic but are just cultural artifacts. St Anselm is like that in his and not to be restricted to his proof of God's existence but in where he shows how everything that unfolds in religious history is inevitable and rational, as also can be found in the late Nineteenth Century theologian Adolf Harnack, who sees Christianity as unfolding from its germ cells in all the way through to the social gospel. I even admire Malabranch, the Seventeenth Century Catholic theologian who thought a miracle intervened whenever a person acted out a thought. I thought that a stretch but at least true to the Catholic notion that there was a lively interaction between the natural and the supernatural while Protestantism had decided that consciousness was always the intermediary between the two. All these theologians were, after all, trying to state the truth, which is beyond cultural conventions. After that, religion falls off. Karl Barth regressed in that he was just reiterating rather than defending his beliefs and, worse, William James was reducing religion to experience,and the “death of god” theologians falling into nonsense in that nothingness supplants but supports somethingness. If God is all that obscure, what is He? After all, at the time, “Waiting For Godot” was thought profound rather than just quizzical and humorous.
For a while, I tried a new gambit. It is presumptuous, I thought, to question God should He demand His allegiance and belief. Sort of a watered down version of “Job”. You should follow whoever yelled loudest. That would be the Catholics, at least until Vatican II, when they allowed that there were many ways to God and not just through Jesus, which seemed to me to be giving up a lot--its exclusivity--however more humane the new doctrine was. But I lost heart. It was too absolutist to abandon reason and go over to Rome where Rome was clear, as Pope Benedict later said, that reason was essential to Christianity, not a cultural phenomenon to be dispensed with when the times moved on, as happens to the pagan like rituals that might cling to Christianity for a few generations after conversion, such as happened in Eastern Europe and Africa, however embarrassing those practices might be.
When a friend of ours died, my wife and I were sitting with a rabbi who had seen her through that illness. We were chatting and I teased her a bit by asked her how she interpreted the meaning where God passes from Saul as his favored King because Saul will not commit genocide against the Amalakites. Some excuses are that there were other reasons to shift political leadership, such as Saul being deeply depressed, or that the Amalakites were really bad people, but this rabbi and many other rabbis of a variety of allegiances said that no one can explain it. The rabbi felt inclined to ask, as she might, given my interest in the Bible, what was the version of Judaism to which I was affiliated? I would have said “nothing” but my wife, increasingly agitated as the amiable discussion had progressed, said “He is a Jew and a Holocaust survivor and that is all to be said.” Not quite true in any of the particulars, but my wife found discussing religion disquieting because it would lead to unnecessary contentiousness while I felt comfortable with people religiously inclined. Rabbis and priests had heard worse to deal with than my textual issues. After all, they deal with the aggrieved and the dying. A priest once said to me that the saints were strong enough to bear the anguish of those who cursed them because the parishioners were in such pain. I did not ask him, though, whether that included cursing God or Jesus. That might have been a bridge too far.
Some years earlier, when my son Harold was in his mid-twenties, he came down with aplastic anemia, an often fatal disease. My wife and I lie in bed in the dark, our eyes open and staring up to the ceiling, wondering whether he would die, but he did survive and Jane thought his having been so close to death made him turn to religion. I thought otherwise, he having had a long term attraction to religion even though I gave him no religious instruction but had looked fitfully for a Jewish school that was long on history and short on prayers. He went to a close friend of mine’s Seder when he was a teenager and remarked to him with great pleasure that this was like an anthropological ritual, to which my friend replied with amusement “This was not like an anthropological ritual; it was an anthropological ritual”. My son complained that I had not made religious instruction part of his life, a different friend remarking that I could not give him what I didn’t have, but that partly missed the mark in that I did offer him what I had, which was a secular point of view.
I did not oppose his becoming Episcopalian after he became an adult. I offered a present of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the New Testament as a present for his baptism, though his mother felt perturbed by the superstition inevitable to religion and her silent presence at that service a sign of her love for him. My own view was that on the face of it religion was ridiculous and untrue but if you dug deeper it was very profound, responding to the deepest feelings and ideas about human nature, such as the nature of sin and the purpose of existence, but even further down, despite the well meaning of clergy and laity, religion was ridiculous, for reasons already explained, or worse, for the reasons Christopher Hutchins offered, as immersing people in self hatred and cruelty. I had had a few gingerly discussions with Harold about Dante, who Harold much admired, thinking that a lifetime was long enough to define a person’s nature and thereby to be judged wanting either for forever or just a very long time and I, on the other hand, thought noone, not even Hitler, should roast in Hell, just killed so as to be rid of the pest. Harold saw the two of us as the two people in “The Magic Mountain'', one the humanist Settembrini and the other one the Jesuit Naphtha and that is the way it still stands, mutually respectful but the other one regarded as deluded.