John Rachal's Blog

In New Delhi, at the last residence of Mohandas Gandhi, there are concrete blocks about the size and shape of a human foot literally marking the hundred or so sandaled steps the Mahatma took from his room to the point of his 1948 assassination. With reverence and admiration, along with that characteristic poignancy of history that comes from standing in the very place where it occurred, I walked that same path during a 1989 trip to India. A little over a decade later I among others nominated this great man for Time’s “Person of the Century” (he was beaten out by Einstein). But facts—those “stubborn things” as our second president called them—as well as words have a way of illustrating the dangers of deification and the disappointments of true believers.

Christopher Hitchens, drawn to most forms of iconoclasm as a moth to the flame, reviews Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, and the two of them offer a few object lessons to those prone to the allures of uncritical character apotheosis. No doubt many of Gandhi’s admirers have long qualified that admiration, as I have, with some reservation concerning his undiluted (one is tempted to say “militant”) pacifism, but Lelyveld’s book and Hitchens’ review provide much fodder for consideration of the limits of pacifism and, in the face of an unbridled, genocidal militarism, its dangerously suicidal fatuity. Lelyveld’s book provides a disturbing foundation, in the form of Gandhi’s own words, for the clichéd observation that what worked against British colonialism would have been a mere sandcastle against the tide of German National Socialism. Even allowing for the advantage of historical hindsight, the Mahatma’s disciple may be forgiven if the first crack in his reverence occurs when he reads Gandhi’s 1939 observation that “a single Jew standing up and refusing to bow to Hitler’s decrees” might “melt Hitler’s heart.” Well, yes, that incredibly brave Chinese student did for a few moments stop the tank; but apparently he was soon whisked away into that vast Chinese gulag never to be seen again. Gandhi’s suppositional Jew’s fate could hardly have been any more promising.

The second crack in the sub-continent’s marble man for the true believer might occur when he reads Gandhi’s personal letter to Hitler in that same year—the year of the invasion of Poland—beginning with the simultaneously sycophantic and condescending “My friend,” and asking the Fuhrer if he would “listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” One hopes that he could not possibly have been so naïve or other-worldly as to write the same letter two years later. Ever seeming to be oblivious to genocidal intentions, he advises a Chinese guest to “shame some Japanese” by adopting pacifism and civil disobedience, or satyagraha. (My father has a photo album from his service as a Marine in China in the late 30s, and one of its grim photos shows an execution: a Chinese head in the air as a Japanese soldier’s sword has just passed and done its gruesome work).

But Gandhi falls most precipitously from deity to mortal—and a disturbing mortality at that—when one reads that he encouraged the British to allow the Nazis to “take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman, and child to be slaughtered.” Reading such a chilling formula for ethereal transcendence over worldly materialism and physical survival, one steps back, aghast at seeing evil allowed to triumph so easily and be embraced with such equanimity. Is it reasonable—though reason seems to have nothing to do here with Gandhi’s foray into grim other-worldliness—to think that inviting slaughter and censuring all necessary forms of resistance to it is to preserve one’s own unblemished moral purity, or is it more reasonable to believe that allowing the slaughter is in fact to be culpable in it? Would the victim in such a case, though now satisfyingly sanctified, be wholly innocent in his own victimization? The essential quality of hubris is self-deception, and while there remains so incredibly much to admire in this great man, it seems not so wild a thought to see his hubris as both the cause and the effect of his chosen life of unrelenting renunciation.

A few weeks ago Baptist minister Rob Bell broke ranks with his flock and presumably the great majority of his denomination by writing a book in which he proclaimed that salvation is not a Christian prerogative only. He endured the appropriate vilification for this broad-minded transgression, including a chastising letter in USA Today in which Kathy McFarland observed that Jonathan Edwards, 18th century minister famous in particular for his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon, “had it right.” It just so happened that I had re-read that sermon less than a year ago—but even in high school, God “hold[ing] you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider” over a flame, was memorable.

Edwards’ sermon might be more properly titled “Sinners in the Hands of a Solipsistic, Bloodthirsty, and Contemptible God.” Why, Reverend Edwards, is God so angry? Apparently, like some mewling child, he can’t tolerate not getting his way; he is outraged by anything less than total adoration and obeisance; he is furious that you might not fully appreciate his throwing you into a world in which the sole responsibility of his prized creations is to thank him for the privilege of adoring him. And if you, his wretched, undeserving creation, who never asked to be created, neglect to adequately perform this lifelong requirement of adulation, you are doomed to the literal flames for all time: you “must suffer it to all eternity.” Edwards’ cruel, vain God consigns you to “no end to this exquisite, horrible misery.” Nor are children exempted from the wrath that the Reverend so admires and justifies: “And you, children, who are unconverted, do not you know that you are going down to hell, to bear the dreadful wrath of that God, who is now angry with you every day and every night?” Yet still you have the chance, Edwards simultaneously coos and threatens, to appease this tyrant and avoid an infinity of flames for your few years of unbelief by divesting yourself of your capacity for rationality, by denying yourself and others freedom of thought, by choosing to live on your knees, and by choosing to worship and adore a monster. That is all that is required—no kindness to others, no virtue, no compassion, no forgiveness is necessary. All the monster requires is adoration, sycophancy, and hourly gratitude; and for their absence you will be tortured everlastingly, and out of all proportion to your crime.

Nor does Edwards’ God see himself as being under any obligation to keep his side of the bargain. As a Calvinist, Edwards subscribes to the view that the “elect” are saved from infinite torture through predestination, a decision his dice-throwing God made long before these few, fortunate souls were born—a doctrine, he claims elsewhere, which “appears exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet.” So the bargain God offers—I will not torture you endlessly provided that you surrender everything in order to meekly adore me—he can capriciously ignore after your lifetime of abject submission. You are not free to violate your agreement, but he is totally free to violate his and for no reason. He is entitled to be wholly arbitrary, throwing you into “hell’s wide gaping mouth” on a whim, no matter your lifetime of devoted servitude. Conveniently Edwards does not mention this in his sermon, cowing all his congregants into a false and corrupt bargain. As with the kidnaper who kills his victim after receiving the ransom, only one side is required to honor the agreement. Melville must have read this sermon. This was Ahab’s private war.

What honorable human could say such things to anyone, but especially children? Here lies evil; and if there were a hell, Edwards and all the legions of godly hate-mongers and fear-mongers of all faiths would be the first to feel the flames. No, Ms. McFarland, Edwards most certainly did not have it right.

Voltaire, like Jefferson, was a man of mixed parts, hardly less interested in science than literature, history, and the social and political events of his day. Also like Jefferson, he was deist, one who could be disturbingly deferential to nobility and authority, but who courageously campaigned against the horrid injustice done by the Church-State coalition to the Calas family, and who led the philosophes’ war with the Church. Still, in the way of old men softening with age (perhaps fearing to rage against the darkness any longer), he sought Communion at the end of a long life and died in the Church. In the course of his conversion, he drew a cartoon of Jean Meslier which was mendacious and contemptible.

The cartoon was all the more reprehensible because it was not a mere critique of Meslier (1664-1729), but rather an abduction of his very identity. He took Meslier’s posthumously published Testament, and printed a twisted, corrupted, hideously redacted version of the atheist priest’s explosive manuscript, dressing him up, as a modern Meslier defender states, “in a cassock and a clown suit,” and turning him into a deist.

Meslier was a practicing priest, deeply compassionate toward his believing and oppressed flock, hardly able to contain in secrecy his vitriol and literally unspeakable apostasy in the practice of his vocation. It is his hidden life, his hidden thoughts that fascinate me as much as the virulence of his diatribes. His conflict between public role and private thought must have been excruciating. He acknowledges that to expose himself would destroy his parents, but also that the Church could not find “tortures cruel enough” to punish him for his radical non-belief and his amazing indictment of religion itself. Thus Meslier leaves his Testament as his posthumous, single-handed declaration of war on the suffocating oppression of religion, the exploitation of the credulous poor by the pampered priest-class, and the sheer absurdity of theism in all its guises.

In multi-layered but often tedious and repetitious prose, he builds a double-barreled argument that no God, whether in the form of an anthropomorphic being or an abstract creator, exists; and second that religion colludes with the state to exploit the credulity of the peasants in order to oppress them, extort them, and tyrannize them. As Meslier says, “all religions are nothing but errors, illusion, and imposture.” In particular, his outrage emanates from his compassion for the people who are exploited by religious authority in a devil’s pact with the state—a pact in which all of the articles conspire for the benefit and protection of the signatories’ power, wealth, ease, and aggrandizement. He rages against this cruel exploitation, all the more cruel because the Church makes its parishioners complicit in their own oppression by fostering and then using their belief for its own ends. It is in this sense that religion is an “imposture,” and its leadership charlatans, con men—and no less so simply because some of them are taken in by their own con. It is, for Meslier, a cruel, life-ebbing criminality cloaked in the fine garments of soaring rhetoric and Godly compassion. Believe and accept (so the priest-nobility alliance says) this unfair imbalance of wealth and poverty in this life—and equally important, propagate it—and you will be rewarded in a deferred life that we have painted as a paradise. But protest this odious imbalance, this exploitation, and condemn it, and further proclaim to others their exploitation, and not only will we damn you to an eternity of torture, we will not even wait for that eternity to begin. Rather we will torture and painfully execute you here, in this life, partly from our own sadism, but mostly to protect our own hegemony from the dangerous sparks of disillusionment and the right to think.

Thus speaks, if not in these words, a righteous man. After thousands of handwritten pages scribbled in secrecy, Meslier concludes his Testament with: “It is the force of truth that makes me say this, and it is the hatred of injustice, lies, deception, tyranny and all the other iniquities that make me speak in this way because I really hate and detest all injustice and iniquity. . . . I am hardly more than nothing and soon I will be nothing.” The outrage is palpable; and the human compassion which is its source is profound and incorruptible. And one should not ignore the existential bravery required: not only does he reject an inherited belief structure that suffuses his world and all his training and upbringing, he rejects the illusory comfort of an eternal life and accepts his coming extinction. Like Hume, when the void nears, he does not retreat into the illusion.

For his time, Meslier, I believe, is correct in his indictment of the extortionate Church he knew regarding its exploitation of the people. And yet we do not have a full picture unless we also acknowledge the undeniable comfort provided those whose lives are an almost endless trial. The belief is probably illusory, but the comfort is not. The European Church of Meslier’s day earned its repellent reputation. Today, except where fundamentalism rules, religion often has a more benign face, and its anodyne value may exceed its vices. Thus the dilemma for non-believers: Can one embrace what he perceives to be an illusion because he also sees the comfort and consolation the illusion provides? At least the best of religion despises the fear, the superstition, the doctrinal exclusivity, and the obscurantism of most religion and stresses above all else kindness, compassion, and love. When the Dalai Lama says “my religion is simple: my religion is kindness,” he removes God and all the resulting dogma that so encumber faith and places humanity and humaneness for all sentient things at its center. But even in religions where God remains the center, the illusion can provide genuine comfort. If the illusion can inculcate an active kindness—as communities of faith often do during crisis, and as I have seen—then it is not without value. Where the message eschews dogma, and instead promotes the universal value of active humaneness, that is where religion’s potential for goodness resides.