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If God proved he existed, I still wouldn’t believe in him

05 March 2008

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Martin Rowson just doesn’t buy the ideology that comes with God. Even a personal appearance by the Almighty wouldn’t do the trick, he says

The syphilitic atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose career in philosophy came to a sudden halt when he couldn’t stop himself cuddling a carthorse outside St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, believed the death of God was an enormity from which mankind could only recover by willing itself to stand in God’s place. I don’t quite see it like that.

Despite the best efforts of warring religions to stake a claim to a universalist monopoly, each one of them has always been part of a teeming multitude of rival ideologies, which include the kind of atheism I believe in and the kind Richard Dawkins subscribes to. In the frequently mad marketplace of ideologies, an ecology operates, so religions come and go, mutate, adapt or become extinct.

I’ve come to believe in the rightness of my ideology for all sorts of different reasons. And although I thoroughly endorse my son Fred’s and his friend Rory’s rather brilliant comment, ‘Saying atheism is a religion is like saying that bald is a hair colour’, I square my belief in atheism with any contradictions the use of the word ‘belief’ might suggest by believing religion is merely an ideology too, although one that has a dimension mine doesn’t.

That’s where I part company with the scientific secularists, who seem to base their atheism solely on the weight of verifiable empirical evidence, which can always be countered, and always is, by the argument that they’ve failed to factor in faith, just because they can’t pin it down in the agar dish. That doesn’t bother me because I don’t believe in God, not because I can’t but because I don’t want to.

I believe you should deal with the political dimensions of religion in political ways, whether it’s over faith schools or Creationism or demanding special laws or special treatment denied to other equally sincerely or passionately held opinions, or any of the other aspects of religion’s totalitarian imperative to control us and our lives. By and large, that political struggle is being lost by the religionists, and their current ferocity is, to a large extent, proof of the fragility of both their arguments and their position, and belief, in the strictly spiritual sense, doesn’t come into it.

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beeboyblue

March 6th, 2008 3:51pm Report this comment

Is it just me or is this mad as a bag of spaniels?

John Bull

March 7th, 2008 1:12pm Report this comment

Almost profound in its thinking, but sadly only understandable in a rejectionist life-style. Not to worry, Martin, if I know anything at all, it is that my God will, on your day of judgement, forgive you your silliness - as long as you do no harm to others along the way. Go in Peace.

Marc Silver

March 7th, 2008 3:29pm Report this comment

EVEN GOD HIMSELF COULD NOT BELIEVE IN THE GOD WHICH MARTIN ROWSON REJECTS, BECAUSE GOD IS BY DEFINITION THE HIGHEST GOOD IN MAN'S CONSCIOUSNESS. GOD IS THE PERSONIFICATION OF HUMAN IDEALS, THE FIGURE OF ALL THAT IS WORTHY OF WORSHIP AND EMMULATION. WHY DON'T THESE INTELLECTUALS HAVE THE BRAINS TO SEE THAT THE ISSUE IS NOT WHETHER GOD EXISTS, BUT WHAT KIND OF GOD EXISTS. THINKERS LIKE ROWSON MAKE FOOLS OF THEMSELVES WITH THEIR CLAUSTROPHOBIC REACTIONS TO THE IDEA OF A COSMIC INTELLIGENCE. HEY ROWSON, DO YOU BELIEVE IN LOVE? ST. JOHN SAID GOD IS LOVE, THAT GOD LIVES INSIDE WHOMEVER LOVES THE CREATION, INCLUDING YOU. OR ARE YOU TOO CYNICAL FOR EVEN THIS SIMPLE, INTIMATE DEITY?

Abu Nudnik

March 7th, 2008 4:47pm Report this comment

The first thing that strikes me about the "thoughts" of this author is how extraordinarily shallow he is. The second is that he has made sweeping assumptions about what others think. What ideologies “come with” God is entirely a figment of the author’s imagination. Apparently a god that is omniscient is impossible but the author's omniscience is unquestionable. I guess he doesn't like the competition to his vanity. His insistence on religion as politics is really a bad analogy and shows the limitations of his mind, a mind made up long before it was open. His knowledge of even the basic facts of history is poor. For example, Judea didn't exist till Roman times. Even the Kingdom of Judah came into being at the cusp of the Bronze and Iron Ages (which is the meaning of the Goliath metaphor since the Philistines had a monopoly on iron). But what is most glaring is the seemingly unnecessary comment regarding the carthorse and Nietzsche near the beginning of the essay. It’s correlative comes later, in the passionately angry paragraph defending sodomy, once considered sacred. Here, strangely, the author has appealed approvingly to the holy for the first time. Seems a bit queer to me to reject the whole notion til it comes to sodomy. Which brings us to the point: The town of Sodom was destroyed because of an attempted gang rape, not homosexuality per se: because the men of Sodom thus stated that their will was the law that all others must obey. Sounds like all the ideologies since the death of God that have licked their hair and stumbled and staggered onto the world stage where their ideologies murdered more people in one century than all the religions could have in eternity.

Al Frick

March 7th, 2008 5:11pm Report this comment

It is not your place to deny the existence of the Almighty. Your main problem is the inability to acknowledge anything greater than yourself; you hate the possibility of you being a creation of another and being indebted to God. Well get over it cause your waste of a combination of atoms and molecules is a creation of 1) a biological father and mother and more importantly 2) God.

ozynol

March 8th, 2008 4:22am Report this comment

The best piece I have seen on the subject. Martin Rowson, I salute you.

Daniel McCormack

March 8th, 2008 9:29am Report this comment

Which rational person bases his beliefs (ie. what he regards as being true) on what he wants to believe (ie. what he wants to be true)? I could believe the world is flat but unfortunately it would remain round.

Allen Khodabash

March 8th, 2008 12:32pm Report this comment

Did the editors pass on this after a long, liquid lunch?

Abu Nudnik

March 8th, 2008 7:05pm Report this comment

I was wrong to say "The first thing that strikes me about the "thoughts" of this author is how extraordinarily shallow he is." I should have said "The first thing that strikes me about the "thoughts" of this author is how extraordinarily shallow they are."

Liz Babcock

March 9th, 2008 11:36pm Report this comment

Blah, blah, blah, blah. Which of the multitudinous definitions of divinity are we talking about here? Couldn't the author has taken a minute to define this "God" word?

Martin Kalinin

March 11th, 2008 5:04am Report this comment

Speaking of Gods, mankind is blessed with 3 major Gods at present, each claiming superiority and exclusivity over the others. Before these Gods came into being, which happened relatively recently, we had a plethora of other Gods, whole legions of them. And Godesses. So what makes one God superior to another... what is the difference between, say, Huitzilopochtli or Odin or Ra or Zeus or Yahweh...who is to say which is more worthy of worship than the other. Rather confusing, the whole thing...

Jonathan Wilton

March 13th, 2008 2:33am Report this comment

More to the point, does God believe in Martin Rowson?

Robert Landbeck

March 14th, 2008 2:11pm Report this comment

Too bad for Martin, for a proof of God's existence is now circulating on the web, pure ethics 'without baggage'. Anybody want to test it?

http://www.energon.org.uk

God's child

March 21st, 2008 7:31pm Report this comment

"God mocks proud mokers, but gives grace to the humble." --Proverbs 3:34

Richard Dale

July 30th, 2008 7:18am Report this comment

I believe Nietzshe tried to prevent cruelty to the aforementioned horse in Turin, in the Piazza Carlo Alberto, not Venice.

Tanaduke Wylie

December 13th, 2008 10:00pm Report this comment

Richard Dale is right. The incident took place on January 3, 1889 in Turin. If Rowson can be so cocksure (and wrong) about Nietzsche, why should we pay any attention to what he says about God?