by rabbi stephen pearce
Fundamentalism and the extreme ideology of political jihadism are advancing the cause of today’s atheists, providing a scapegoat for a crumbling moral landscape. These exceedingly popular writers argue that religion turns people into hateful lemmings.
But what distinguishes today’s best-selling amateur theologians from those of the past is their combative brand of atheism. They are humorless, aggressive, mean-spirited and cruel, and their line of reasoning is stale, unoriginal and coarse.
For them, religion is irrational, a “virus of the mind,” a pious fraud, unalloyed nonsense, overwhelmingly pernicious, a vestigal artifact. Nevertheless, their excessively bold assertions and rhetorical flourishes are attractive to their readers.
Representative of the today’s class of atheists, Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion,” concludes that “the God of the Old Testament is … a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, an infanticidal, genocidal … megalomanical, sadomasochistic, capricously malovolent bully.” Dawkins enumerates the crimes committed in God’s name: war, persecution of minorities, terrorism, closing of children’s minds, oppression of those with alternative sexual lives.
The subtitle of Christopher Hitchens’ book “God is Not Great” says it all: “How Religion Poisons Everything.” Hitchens holds that those who continue to believe in the unbelievable are morons, lunatics or liars. He and the other mean-spirited, combative atheists lump together all believers — obscuring differences, for example, between militant Muslims and pacifist Amish who, Dawkins claims, trap their children in a 17th-century time warp. Following this distorted logic, a world without faith would result in no Arab-Israel conflict, because religious belief not only aggravates such conflict but is “the explicit cause” of it.
Unlike these authors, Judaism has long read the Bible metaphorically, taking it seriously but not literally. In his essay “Law and Love,” Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik suggested that both literalists and skeptics are wrong because they only read the text literally and not as a metaphor with a deeper and richer meaning.
Furthermore, strident atheists do not address today’s rising tide of spirituality among most religious groups, proof that people continue to seek deeper religious meaning especially because atheism does not replace lack of belief with a viable rational alternative, leading to what Michael Novak calls “a leap in the dark.”
The newly released book “Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta” provides stunning revelations that Mother Teresa doubted God’s existence for her entire career. In spite of her decadeslong darkness, melancholy, lack of faith and theological misgivings, she continued to minister to the poor and lost. She believed that her sullen, brooding soul and her sense of personal abandonment by God allowed her to enter the dark lives of the truly abandoned, identifying with and scrupulously serving them.
For Mother Teresa, the real issue was not one of God’s existence or lack thereof, but rather whether it is possible to utilize disbelief for the greater good of humanity, a notion that finds resonance in Judaism.
Rabbi Moshe Leib taught that every impulse, good or bad, even disbelief must have some purpose: “If someone comes to you and asks you for your help, you must not say, ‘Have faith; God will help you.’ You must act as if there were no God, as if help could come only from you, and then you must take the place of God, as it were, and act with loving kindness.”
This approach to spirituality and service is summarized by a terse statement in the Gates of Prayer: “Pray as if everything depends on God; act as if everything depends on you.”
From the Jewish perspective, doing is as important as believing. What Rabbi Lieb and Mother Teresa teach that the today’s atheists miss is that it is possible to doubt and still serve.
Rabbi Stephen Pearce is the senior rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California