of petty tyrants and self-appointed henchmen
For some people, their religious beliefs are just something with which they grew up, surrounded by those of the same faith and indoctrinated into it from birth. For others, it’s something they discover when they feel lost, or when a serious case of midlife crisis hits them. And yet for others, religion is a crutch to indulge in the kind of dark and vengeful fantasies and dispensations most of us would find abhorrent if they weren’t first given a very thorough religious cloak. A good illustration of that are short stories currently being hawked by Christian apologist and professional bloviator Anthony Horvath, whose ideas of Heaven and what happens to celebrity deists, faithful, and atheists who end up there seem uncannily vapid and almost pathologically vicious, as PZ went through the hassle of pointing out recently.
Ordinarily, if someone spends years thinking about how a certain person would be punished for his lack of adherence to his favored dogmas and how he would either be corrected or tortured, we would call a therapist. But because Horvath tells us he’s a Good Christian, we’re supposed to just let it slide as he spends his days dreaming of how he and other belligerent believers prone to deciding the eternal fate of all those they meet or hear about, will be vindicated by a supernatural force.
Here’s what concerns me most. When the same people who love to talk about forgiveness and go on and on about their faith’s mission of love, comfort, and light, use the threat of Hell as a bludgeon or a tool to ensure that their flocks are on their most obedient behavior, even someone who doesn’t have their belief in a deity can’t help but feel that they’re being immensely disrespectful to the creature they call their creator. Think about it for a minute. If there’s an omnipotent being who created the entire universe and spent eons shaping entire galactic archipelagoes while administrating the laws of the cosmos, how humble is it of you to ask it to step in and resolve petty human affairs or console you when you’re feeling blue?
How many of you would ask the president of your country to come to your house when you need something and ask for favors? Do you think a president might have more important things to do than listen to your whining, or begging, or promises that it’s the last time you did something ethically questionable and you’ll never do it anymore if he gets you a new job, or helps you pass an important test, or rigs the lottery for you? Why would anyone think that an entity in charge of entire manifolds of space and time is suddenly going to float down to some little planet and settle your little vendettas personally? Wouldn’t it be like you stepping in to mediate a debate between some bacteria? Would you even want to bother, or would you rather let them solve their own problems while you attend to building a spacecraft or something completely out of the bacteria’s comprehension?
But even if we were to grant the Horvaths of the world two immense concessions and momentarily accept the notion of an afterlife and that it’s administrated by a deity, doesn’t it still seem incredibly arrogant to decide for the deity how it will deal with certain people? Doesn’t that seem like petty, vicious, and small-minded mortals overstepping their bounds to enforce their will? It doesn’t matter if you think you were given an instruction from on high explaining how that deity rules because the same supposed manual also states that it’s not your job to make those rulings, but the deity’s. To return to the president analogy for a moment, I’m going to guess that no matter how well you think you can do a president’s job, you’re not going to just walk into his office and start telling his advisers and military generals what to do and how to do it.
Why does anyone who simply can’t help himself but invoke God’s wrath think that it’s acceptable to do the equivalent of that with an authority no lesser than the universe’s architect? Does Horvath really think that he’s going to get brownie points in Heaven for his dimwitted fantasy of erasing Richard Dawkins out of existence while arguing that everything is good, from any light to our very existence and since all good must come from God, then Hell must mean that you’ll just vanish into nothing if you die an atheist? He can’t even resist from dreaming of how Dawkins may finally be silenced when an angel with the intellect of a cinderblock dissolves his mouth. Really, Horvath doesn’t sound like he’s anywhere close to being in his right mind or capable of making a point without arguments by assertion.
Really, while atheists might make light of the deity so many fundamentalists around the world conceive as a petty tyrant for whom they eagerly want to play henchmen, sometimes rhetorically, sometimes with appalling acts of brutality and hatred, they actually seem to respect the idea of a God more than the faithful. They’re not willing to settle on a small-minded dictator obsessed with ensuring the servitude of his creations to himself, using his immense powers to meddle in our daily politics and mundane affairs. They understand that we are not the center of the universe, time and space do not revolve around us, and if we have problems, we need to deal with them ourselves instead of wishing for something to fall from the sky and help us just as we need it, justifying our failures to get what we want as “God’s will.”
When Horvath pens his stories on what happens to the unbelievers and the doubters in Heaven or Hell, he’s not writing a warning to all the atheists or agnostics, but for the fans of that caricature of a deity addicted to self-righteous indignation in their arrogance, and using their faith as a crutch to make themselves feel more important than they are without putting in the work to get out into the real world and make themselves more important. This, of course, is nothing new. The work from which we get our modern conception of Hell, the Inferno tome of the Divine Comedy, was written as Dante’s impotent threat towards those he saw as wicked and corrupt, indulging his fantasies for how he would have them tortured if he was in charge. Horvath is merely upholding this tradition. Just less eloquently.
