FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Atheism & Immaturity

Rant Number 507        27 September 2012

‘The attack against all religions constitutes our identity...We are anarchists, ecologists, communists, trotzkysts and socialists...we are all atheists.’ Thus in Le Monde Monsieur Charb, editor of Charlie Hebdo, notorious for its anti-Prophet caricatures. You can’t say the guy does not nail his lurid colours to the mast...

In a previous avatar the priest was a Marxist-Leninist and an atheist so he knows the syndrome. Folies des jeunesse, bien sur. The marvellous insipience of youth. Charb looks young enough to be stupid.  His first duty should be, as philosopher Benedetto Croce once advised some youths, to grow older as quickly as possible. To grow out of childish inanities like blasphemy and atheism. But cultures and ideologies too can be immature. They need to grow up. What is to be done if they refuse? The problem is large. As vast as human imbecility.

This is the age of immaturity – well, at least in what passes for Western culture. Occidental man has grown childish. It was not always so but now it is. Involution exists, as much as evolution. John Milton, the great Puritan poet, had no illusion about the future of the human race. Writing 400 years ago, he believed human beings were actually growing physically and mentally smaller, degenerating into gnomes and fairies. Whether he meant it or not, quite an apposite, prescient allegory of our stupid times.

Theology may confirm the regression hypothesis. St Clement of Alexandria argued long ago that Adam was as a child, created to grow up, to be perfected into a virtuous, mature being. But, just as Adam and Eve slipped, like naughty children, so does Western man today. Again, regression is the name of the game. Sinking back into a foolish childishness. Basking into blasphemy, refractoriness and wilful disobedience.

Sounds implausible? With all the wonders of technology, getting more and more astounding by the day, available to all. Touch iPods, mobiles, ultra-fast Apples, the world wide web. A brave new world, surely. If that ain’t progress, what is?

A simple answer. A moron with an iPod is still a moron. Gadgets are tools, no more than that. People in the Tube fiddling with their gadgets are not getting brighter because of them. No, if anything, judging by the cacophonies emanating from their i-Pods, they are degenerating. Getting more childish. More infantile. QED.

French anticlericalism has had long innings. Dates back to the sanculottes and even before. Voltaire, the father of all modern mockers of Christianity, wrote a play, a scurrilous attack on Islam’s Prophet. Cunningly, he dedicated his work to the Pope, in fulsome language. They say Voltaire was actually gunning for Christ, under the guise of Muhammad. Perhaps. The old fox must have known of that other irreverent, anonymous tract, De Tribus Impostoribus. It circulated in the Middle Ages. A foul attack on the three founders of the supreme monotheistic religions. It charged them with cheap magical tricks, lies and deceptions. The author was never discovered. Another prankish, immature atheist, no doubt. But the point is that an attack on a prophet of God is an attack on all of them. Muslims may rub their hands when the Church, Islam’s ancient rival, gets vilified by secularists – they should know that they will be next – they already are. Monsieur Charb is quite clear about that.

Mocking sacred persons and things is not new. It is made easy when they exhibit traits that invite malice. So Lucian of Samosat, a Greek satirist, lampooned the gods of his culture. I guess some pious pagans may have been shocked. But how can you refrain from smiling or laughing at gods who share, reproduce the failures and flaws of human beings? Zeus, the father of the Olympians, kidnaps and rapes males and females, children and adults alike. Hermes protects thieves. Hera is jealous, Hephaestus a cripple, Ares is quarrelsome and Bacchus a drunk. Deities like those are fair game and Lucian’s satires are still hilarious to read.

Admittedly, there will always be disagreement about the character and personality of any great man, especially the founder of a world religion. In Why I am not a Christian Bertrand Russell – he was not stupid, granted – gave grounds why he did not think Jesus’ character admirable. They are not very profound, alas. Wittgenstein was right when he said that Russell in later life had given up thinking hard about philosophy. He wasn’t thinking deeply about religion, either.

Islam’s Prophet too has his detractors. Cyberspace is chock-a-bloc with it. But surely there is a difference between academic and historical criticism and childish obscenities? It is an objective fact that Muhammad, like him or not, was the legislator of a world religion and the founder of a new civilisation. The Washington US Supreme Court in a frieze even includes him amongst many universal lawgivers – though American Muslims, of all people, objected to the representation. To persist on filthily besmirching such a man, a figure surrounded with a halo of great reverence by a fourth of human beings on earth can only be a cheap tantrum, a mark of immaturity.

What is to be done? No bombs but education must be key. Not simply a matter of individuals, like the staff of Charlie Hebdo. As far as the transcendent, religion is concerned, a whole culture, a whole civilisation is in need of education. As in Adam all human beings fell short, so they all share in Adam’s immaturity. Too many seem to have slipped back, into crudeness, rawness and non-culture. The Church, mater et magistra, surely should be proclaiming and promoting the necessary task. God-driven, God-mandated, stern pedagogy is the job ahead.

Education, education, education, yes. But not a’ la Tony Blair. (The Labour Party has indeed been the grave-digger of education.) Don’t give a damn if it is un-PC. A great Englishman, indeed, a great Christian, Dr Samuel Johnson, once spoke the unpalatable truth about the immature, the stupid and the childish: ‘They, being irrational, can only be governed by fear.’ Till they grow up.

The fear of the Lord, however, is the beginning of wisdom.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli