If God proved he existed, I still wouldn’t believe in him
8 March 2008
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
That division between the two possible meanings of the word belief is probably a false one anyway. Although we assume that belief in God implies an entirely different magnitude of belief than belief in, say, the policies of the Liberal Democrats, I think essentially they’re the same and have come to have different meanings over the centuries simply because the monopolists running the rival religions told us they did.
No religion has ever had a global monopoly and despite all the attempts to ensure brand loyalty (promise of paradise, forced conversion, death for apostates, torturing and burning heretics and so on), each one has existed in a marketplace. That’s why hell is filled with demons who were once the gods of neighbouring tribes in Bronze Age Judea, placed there by the devotees of Yahweh as he muscled in on their territory to increase his market share.
That’s probably why St Paul was so proscriptive about homosexuality, even though the man who inspired the religion Paul subverted and corrupted never said a single thing on the subject, despite all the opportunities available to his editors at a later date: it was to mark Christianity apart from the sexual tolerance of Hellenic paganism and the widespread acceptance in the ancient world of sodomy as a mark of priestly otherness and mystification.
And that’s why, even if God now came down in fiery splendour and proved beyond question his, her, its or their existence, I still wouldn’t believe in him, her, it or them, because I’m unconvinced by the spiel and I don’t like the way his, her, its or their brand takes a previous contingency from thousands of years ago and concretes it into certainty. I don’t like the threats, the taunts, the patronising assumption to unchanging and unyielding rectitude and infallibility. In short, I don’t buy the ideology.
And that’s something else which divides my kind of atheism from Richard Dawkins’s. He’s on record, as a good empiricist, as saying that if the existence of God was verifiably proved to him to his satisfaction, he would be compelled, because of his respect for science, to believe in him, her, it or them. He hasn’t said whether or not that means he’ll consequently worship God, and Christopher Hitchens has kept schtum on the whole subject. However, it’s just possible that if he ever were confronted with God, Hitchens would eat him, but obviously in an entirely nonsacramental way.
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beeboyblue
March 6th, 2008 3:51pm Report this commentIs it just me or is this mad as a bag of spaniels?
John Bull
March 7th, 2008 1:12pm Report this commentAlmost 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 commentEVEN 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 commentThe 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 commentIt 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 commentThe best piece I have seen on the subject. Martin Rowson, I salute you.
Daniel McCormack
March 8th, 2008 9:29am Report this commentWhich 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 commentDid the editors pass on this after a long, liquid lunch?
Abu Nudnik
March 8th, 2008 7:05pm Report this commentI 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 commentBlah, 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 commentSpeaking 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 commentMore to the point, does God believe in Martin Rowson?
Robert Landbeck
March 14th, 2008 2:11pm Report this commentToo 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 commentI 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 commentRichard 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?
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