Let’s not get lost in the detail
Sometimes, it may seem, I get so tied up in the detail of opposing and criticising religion that the major goal of my blog may be obscured, and I want to keep that purpose in focus and up front, where it belongs. So this is just a reminder of why I write about religion. Very early on I felt the same concern, and wrote a piece called “Why I Write About Religion“. This serves the same purpose.
I write about religion because religion is cruel. As Hitchens so aptly and trenchantly says: religion poisons everything. Some of the religious answer back with the word ‘everything’ with a question-mark: Everything? And the answer is, yes, everything.
Notice this does not mean that religion does no good at all. That would be manifestly false. It gives people comfort and consolation. Some religious people involve themselves in “good works”, bringing food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, education to the illiterate, medicine to the ill — and we could go on.
But in everything good that religion does it carries with it its own poison. It poisons the wellsprings of life and thought. That it does not understand about the wonder of life is very plain in religion’s understanding of the end of life. Instead of something precious and fragile, something that, while it has its stunning beauties and wonders, can also be horrendous and destructive of all that is good and true as well, religion considers life as sacred, and so it imposes upon its votaries the idea that no matter how horrible life becomes, no one must be allowed to leave it when they choose to do so. The sanctity of life doctrine that stands at the centre of so many religions’ ideas of moral obligation is a poison, and a deadly poison at that. For religion reduces life to the merest of mere biological functions, and the preciousness of life, to living tissue, and in the process empties life of its wondrous and fragile beauty. This is religion’s poison. (On the cognitive side this poison expresses itself in terms of absolute truths, but I want to focus here on the transient and wondrous beauties of life.)
There’s a lovely, simple, perhaps even sentimental poem, that says, to me, anyway, something very important. It’s by Sara Teasdale, and it is entitled
If Death is Kind
Perhaps if death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.
Sara Teasdale, American Lyric Poet, 1884-1933
There is something about life that can be, in itself, of such beauty and wonder that we would, if we could, preserve it for ever. Of course, if we could, it would cease to be beauteous and wondrous. But these are the fragile things that make life worthwhile, that give it value. Not eternal things, but precious, fragile moments of wonder and beauty, moments when, like the dead, we are free.
This is something that I learned from Elizabeth, and if I cannot find many such moments now it is because she is not with me to share them. But that this is what is so special and valuable, wondrous and beautiful about life, is what she taught me. Not just being alive, being living tissue: these things, in themselves, have no value. It is what life provides the opportunity to experience and enjoy that is so precious, even though, and perhaps because, they are so fragile and transient. And when the possibility of knowing and experiencing these wondrous, beautiful things is past beyond recall, and life begins, not just to pall, but to become a terrible and an evil thing, then, if the person to whom life has become such misery chooses to bring life to a peaceful close, before all that was most wonderful and beautiful about it has been replaced by the nothingness of existential despair, pain and affliction, it is simply a cruelty to forbid them to do so.
The doctrine that prescribes such a prohibition is a poison that gnaws ceaselessly at the very sources of life and its goodness. This doctrine is religion, and this is what is wrong with it. Religion can only pretend that life is a gift, because it refuses to accept that the dead are free. It refuses to accept that the wonders and the beauties of life are fragile and transient. It wants there to be permanence and eternity, and this we can only know in moments of joy and wonder, when, like the dead, we are free.
Religion will have none of this, and it will impose its vision on us, whatever we ask or desire. Even when life has become a veritable hell on earth, religion goes on telling us how sacred and valuable it is, and it will even defiantly kill you if you disagree. We forget that last point at our peril. Religions have always been prepared to kill people who dissent from their beliefs, because the very fragility of life challenges those beliefs and threatens the security that those beliefs provide for those who cannot live with transience and fragility. Only eternity will do, and those who believe in eternity, do not really understand about beauty and wonder. Religions promise eternity in one form or another, but wonder and beauty can be known only to those who know that life comes to an end, and that the dead are free.
This false ideology exists even in as harmless a religion as Buddhism.
What I never understand is why religious people a) fear death at all and b) mourn their dead. If you will be going to a better place shouldn’t that be something to look forward to?
I understand, I think, what you are saying, and insofar I agree totally. I have a problem, though, with “The dead are free.” One cannot really attach any condition of existence to a no-longer-existent. Getting our minds and our language around that non-existence is just impossible. Jesse Bering, in his book “The Belief Instinct” (good book, btw) deals with this problem. The most that can be said, I think, is that “There is no longer one I love suffering here with me in my house.” But this little cavil does not contradict what you say about the poison of religious interference. Dogma would still insist that there still be this one I love still suffering here with me in my house until god sees fit to end that suffering. That is intolerable.
Every time I was obliged to look into the eyes of a person who, usually just several minutes ago, was vital, alive, full of human enterprise, but now was blasted by injury or brain hemorrhage, I was reminded of Sara Teasdale’s poem. The sudden passage from life to non-life was always a shock to me, and the younger the victim, the more my eyes would brim up. One of my own poems, ‘Jonathan’, about the companion of the young climber in that old ballad ‘David’, has these lines (among others!): ‘Life is a precious and volatile gas, / Love for another can bring it to pass.’
Currently, the bruhaha in London, Ontario over the ‘Baby Joseph’ affair (an infant with a universally fatal brain degeneration) whose parents want the hospital to perform a tracheostomy so they can take the baby home – despite their inability to properly care for the device in a home setting – has attracted the likes of the Terry Schiavo Foundation, your tormenter Schadenberg, several other ghoulish groups that thrive on death, to a gathering this weekend in that city. The hospital has done everything it can to ease the pain for the parents (who had an earlier child with the same horror), but those caring for the infant refuse to perform a surgical procedure that will not alter the outcome or reduce the baby’s distress. The baby cannot any longer maintain its respiration, and all of the professionals involved want to simply remove the endotracheal tube. The local paper keeps publishing a picture of the child before the brain degeneration set in, looking perfectly normal, of course. Anything to create a spectacle and controversy at the end of a tragically brief but utterly doomed life. This has nothing to do with the ‘sanctity of life’, certainly not respect for life; it has to do with death-cult agendas.
Ἐπίκουρος (Epicurus; 341–270 BCE), quoted in Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
Yes it is. That’s why I don’t even try. So I can speak of Elizabeth as free now, as she chose to be. Of course, I know that means that Elizabeth is not at all now, but that’s what it took to set her free, if you see what I mean.
And there are those special moments, almost, of natural grace, when we are free as well, when it is not a question of life or death, there is no sense of struggle, no horizon, so to speak, when one is just purely free. I knew so many moments like this with Elizabeth, when I had never known them before, not once, that they became a vivid part of my life.
It was only after she died, though, that I realised how completely sublime those moments were, and why.
Oh, I’m so pleased that you were so reminded, for it was only after Elizabeth died that I understood what the words were saying.
Yes, and the story about baby Joseph is nothing short agonisingly horrible. This is the Roman Catholic death-cult at work, I’m afraid. It’s like a dreadful glimpse into one of the circles of hell, despite all the protestations about sanctity and dignity. What madness religion visits on us day by day! There never seems to be an respite from it any more. Once these things were very infrequent. Now the religious splash themselves across the front pages of our newspapers — and for what? To prop up a dying institution, that is holding on for dear life by claiming the right to govern birth and death. Essentially, it’s an advertising campaign. Despicable!
There was a similar case in Italy couple of years ago. Prime minister Berlusconi was try to keep a girl in persistent vegetative state “alive”.
As it turns out, the guy (who is in his 70s) has a particularly nasty taste for having sex with underage prostitutes and getting them out of jail when they get arrested.
Pope Benedict has never asked him to step down.
i spent a stint in my youth with Unitarians and Quakers (Friends service committee).
I’d like them to be the only Christians (but are they Christian?) who get a fair shake.
I used to know a Quaker (at least online) and let me tell you just how horrid being a Quaker is, if you’re being raped. This girl claimed to have been raped several times by boyfriends, but she did not resist, because she believed so completely in pacificism and non-violence.
Religion, no matter how harmless it appears on the surface encourages all manner of evils.
Gosh! I never thought of that! What a bizarre ideal, not to oppose evil. I have never been attracted to Quakerism, and John Bunyan always struck me as particularly rebarbative.
I’m glad, Hal, that the “free” phrasing caught your attention too.
I think, having now read the comments, that get what you are saying a bit more Eric, but if I was being a believer for a second, and wanting to catch you out a little, I might say that death bringing freedom is in the same league as “s/he’s in a a better place now.”
I don’t know. Maybe I read it too briefly. I’m back studying now, and I must admit that it’s a full time job keeping up with the blogs and reading that I usually do on top of uni work (since one of the subjects is on moral philosophy, I can claim that this is “uni work” and you be pleased to know I’ve exposed a few people to your site who have been impressed.)
Well, David, she’s in no place now — which, for her, was a better place than she was. Death is not always a harm, and being nothing is sometimes better than being a suffering something. Which reminds me of the last two stanzas of Swinburne’s poem, The Garden of Proserpine:
There are worse things than being dead, and from that the dead are free.
It’s hard to argue.
I must admit that maybe it’s an unexamined fragment of some habits of thinking that I may have picked up from my mother, and, as “moderate” (on some subjects) as it was, and as inattentive as I was, growing up around the Anglican church. There’s been more than one occasion where I’ve discovered I have an assumption on a subject which is actually heavily steeped in religious doctrine, however subtle.
The obvious example being abortion. I still balk a little when reading PZ or listening to Peter Singer on the subject, and they’re almost flippant about zygotes. (Flippant in comparison to pro-life overzealous craziness, mind.) I, intellectually, understand their point, and can see it’s absolute vital importance, but I have to drag my thinking along, kicking and screaming. (The distinction between human dignity as a big amorphous phrase and as an individual’s subjective experience, which you highlighted with Pinker, is another assumption that I’d probably missed.)
Woah, tangents. Sorry.
Not sure about this false ideology in Buddhism, at least what I practice. I embrace change and the current moment which is like no other. I think these problems come down respect: It’s not my place to make your decisions for you. I can see myself aiding in a close friend’s death if that became necessary.
As to fearing death, isn’t that built in to most animals? It’d seem to be a survival trait. As to mourning death, why wouldn’t I be sorry to never be able to talk to a friend again? And, as a Buddhist, after I die I’m not going to a better place anyway. If the law of karma is correct, I’ll be arriving with the same baggage I left with. And, if it isn’t, I really don’t need to worry about it. Either way, it’s not that big a deal.
I really appreciate these notes, and certainly wish I could write as well.