FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Comedy of Atheism

Rant Number 393 14 April 2010

Comedy of Atheism

‘Popping the Pope behind bars.’ The egregious aim of Messrs Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, it transpires. Arresting Benedict XVI for ‘crimes against humanity’ when he visits this sceptred isle later this year. A stunt? No, the two atheists mean it seriously. Actually, they don’t know it but they are the unwitting victims of a joke. One of their own contrivance.

‘History repeats itself twice’, quipped Karl Marx. ‘First as a tragedy and then as a comedy’. A tell-tale dictum. Of course, unlike the Pope when he speaks ex cathedra, Marx was not infallible. But now the history of atheism seems to bear old Karl out, as Christopher Hitchens’ own, peerless comic trajectory goes to show. Watch on YouTube George Galloway MP administering to former fellow Marxist Chris a masterful put-down: ‘He has performed a miracle in reverse: from butterfly he has turned into a slug. And, like a slug, he leaves behind a trail of slime.’ I love Gorgeous George – he knows how to wield the knife!

Bishops of Rome have indeed been seized and imprisoned before. In 1303 King Philip the Fair of France had his mercenaries outrage Pope Boniface VIII in the castle of Anagni. With his mailed glove, an Italian nobleman, Sciarra Colonna, heavily struck the elderly High Priest. In the Purgatory Dante tells how shocked Christendom thus beheld ‘Christ led captive and crucified in the person of his Vicar’. (The poet had mixed feelings about Boniface, though, as he was responsible for Dante’s exile – hence Boniface’s post-mortem abode is not Paradise but Hell.) A popular insurrection quickly freed the Pope but he died shortly afterwards. Truly tragic.

Another villain is Napoleon. Pius VII, a cultured and refined monk, would not bend to the tyrant’s will. For his seizure of Rome, Pius excommunicated the emperor. A vengeful Bonaparte then abducted him and imprisoned him in Savona, after subjecting him to various indignities. Despite a major illness, Napoleon had the Pope later taken in Fontainebleau, at times almost physically assaulting the elderly priest. Remarkably, after Napoleon’s fall, Pius gave asylum to his relatives in Rome and even interceded to lighten the emperor’s sad exile at St Helena. Pretty tragic.

Maybe Dawkins and Hitchens dream of a similar jolly exploits? Manhandling Benedict into Wormwood Scrubs, scoffing at him in his cell and laughing all the way to the pandering, sniggering British media. Or even dealing him a few hard, well-aimed blows, like Sciarra Colonna did with Boniface? Perhaps they’d spit on him, and cover his face and strike him, saying to him, ‘Play the prophet, Pope! Who struck you?’ A jolly slapstick. It would be great fun for our atheists, no doubt. A comedy with many echoes...

Indeed, at bottom this kind of atheism is comical. Quite unlike the malignant, armed and murderous atheism of comrades Lenin and Stalin. That was a mega-tragedy. A violent and most evil one. Communism last century erected atheism into a powerful dictatorship. The Soviet Union and its satellites made sure religion and its representatives became pariahs. Atheism was part of the school curriculum. Churches were closed down. Many priests were imprisoned and often killed. Who remembers Cardinal Mindszenty? The head of the Catholic Church in Hungary was jailed, beaten with rubber truncheons, drugged, tortured and exhibited in a shameful show trial in which he ‘confessed’ to absurd crimes. ‘How many divisions has the Pope?’ Stalin scoffed. Well, Uncle Joe, you are finding that out now, down below.

Pity the edifice of tyranny, blood and lies built by atheistic communism is now in ruins. (In Tallinn, Estonia, the old museum of atheism is now a display of defunct communism instead.) Hitchens and Dawkins must awfully miss all that. A world after their own cherished fantasies, in which children were systematically taught that there is no God. In which that non-existent God was made fun of. A fab reality. Atheists really ruled the rooster then. Why did it have to end all in the gutter? God’s divine irony? Something called Providence? But our atheists don’t believe in that, naturally. I feel sorry for them.

Hitchens of course is a bit of recidivist on religion. Pompously, he has announced that ‘God is not great’. An obvious dig at Islam. But my impression is that he pulls his punches when it comes to the faith of the Crescent. This champion of atheism must not fancy becoming a martyr for the cause – enraging Muslims is a tad more dangerous than tormenting lamb-like Christians. There is a lesson there, though I am not sure for whom.

Don’t misunderstand me. As a former atheist myself, I know the syndrome. Tragedy or comedy, atheism is often an infantile disease. A sign of arrested emotional and intellectual development, like masturbation and perverted love. Actually, Chris Hitchens’ public persona – chain-smoker, unkempt, dissolute-looking – makes me feel a little sentimental. It takes me back to my own, remote roaring teens and twenties. Occasionally, the man even hits it off, as when he lambasted the idiocy of spectator sports. But I draw the line at one thing: way back he derided Mother Teresa of Calcutta. He advised the woman who cared for the desperately sick and the hideously suffering ‘to get laid’. It says a lot about Hitch. Mocking someone who sacrificed herself to help others – that’s not funny. I call that base, vile and inhuman. Full stop.

Comedy, yes. A sad one – for the atheists. Because the truth is that atheism, tragic or comical, is on its way out. The future does not belong to them. Comfortable, pampered atheists like Dawkins and Hitch are expressions of a decadent, effete, suicidal Western pseudo-culture. Outside that and its jabbering, jarring media, they mean precious little.

The argument here is pragmatic. Crude but effective. Demography. The believers’ birth-rate is phenomenal. It grows and grows. They are fruitful and multiply. The atheist’s progeny, on the other hand, shrinks by the day. They are barren, sterile – a self-inflicted tragedy and God’s sentence on them.

Paraphrasing a forgotten Soviet leader, you might whisper to the atheists: ‘Sorry, mates. Your comic act will soon be over. We will bury you.’

Revd Frank Julian Gelli