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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

Without question many people will pick holes in what I’ve said. They’ll argue religion’s political success and domination of a lot of the history of humanity we can ever know about proves, or at least suggests, God’s sponsorship, and the crimes committed in his, her, its or their name are yet further evidence of humanity’s massive shortcomings in comparison to God.

They’ll also say the shallowness and apparent emptiness of the lives of people living in post-religious societies proves we need something like God to make sense of our lives, even though a main part of my argument is that that’s why we invented God in the first place and, anyway, that vacuity is less to do with the absence of God and more to do with the presence of the crass kind of consumerism with which governments have bribed us to buy our obedience and good behaviour.

And other people will say I’ve failed to take account of the levels of doubt many serious and thoughtful religionists wrestle with throughout their earthly lives, though I still don’t get why the existence of God should be the focus of their doubts, rather than his, her, its or their non-existence. And yet other people will say, with all sincerity, and equally sincere concern for my ultimate well-being, that my arrogance and my ‘fundamentalism’ are not only as bad as the religionists’, but will also cut me off from the possibility of life after death and everlasting bliss.

Well, I don’t really care. I may be certain in my rejection of God, or rather in my refusal to accept the notion of him, her, it or them, along with all the concomitant baggage. But I’m not prepared to pay the price of forcing agreement on other people, beyond simply adding my voice to the beautiful Babel of human disagreement, which, like religion or keeping pets, helps define us as human. As to heaven, I’m with the great English irrationalist and absenteeist musician Syd Barrett, who, days before he died in the summer of 2006, was asked by his sister what he thought about God and the afterlife. ‘Do you know,’ he’s reported to have replied, ‘it never occurred to me.’

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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?

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