Why be a Christian in particular? Permit me to reflect a little, and not attempt to produce a quick answer to such a great question of principle.
Recent events in Israel, India, or one or other of the Islamic countries, have made many people realize afresh that just as for a Jew or a Moslem, so for us Christians, it cannot e entirely unimportant that we were born into a particular tradition of belief and community of values, and that we remain positively or negatively influenced by it, whether we like it or not. The situation is like that of a family, where, in the same way, it cannot be entirely irrelevant whether one has maintained contact or has broken it off, in anger or indifference.
Here, both non-Christian and former Christians can perhaps understand the many Christians who, even though they are no less intelligent and critical and even though they also oppose rigid Christian traditions and institutions which make it difficult to be a Cristian, still do not want to give up living within the great and good Christian tradition, formed through the history of some twenty centuries. For this great and good tradition does still exist.
So, why am I a Christian?
- First of all, simply because - despite all my criticisms and concerns - I can nevertheless feel fundamentally positive about a tradition that is significant to me; a tradition in which I live side by side with so many others, past and present.
- Because I would not dream of confusing the great Christian tradition with the present structures of the church, nor leaving a definition of true Christian values to its present administrators.
- In brief, because - despite my violent objections to what is called Christian - I find in Christianity a basic orientation on the questions of the great Whence and Whither. Why and Wherefore of humanity and the world a basic orientation for my individual and social self. And at me I find in these things a spiritual home on which I do not want to turn my back, any more than I want in politics to turn my back on democracy, which in its own way has been and is, no less misused and abused than Christianity. But admittedly, all this only hints at the decisive factor. I must make myself clearer still.
There are in fact many non-Christians or former Christians who say that they would believe in such a great Whence and Whither, they would believe in an Absolute or Supreme Being, a Deity, or "God"; that atheism leaves them intellectually and emotionally unsatisfied. But they have little idea of what to do about this "God," scarcely know what or who God is, or what he is like. In this sense, if they are not atheists they are at least agnostics.
Here is my take on this, being a political blogger, it's a political take.
Having always seen the intellectual defects of atheism from the period I maintained something like agnosticism, I can't claim that I could come to an understanding of atheism except by looking at the claims and words and deeds of atheists. Maybe that's why I came to be so critical of it so late in life. Apart from reading dear old Bertrand Russell on the topic, of reading whatever was said about atheism in articles by semi-pro atheists like Barbara Ehrenreich or the snark from Brits like Alexander Cockburn and in time wasted by reading Christopher Hitchens' column in The Nation*.
It took reading the unedited thoughts of many hundreds and thousands of self-declared atheists online and reading the new-atheist stuff, the garbage such as comes from the "Skepticism" industry, and the writings of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett and others and with that going back to read earlier atheists that I came to see what a total and complete and completely hypocritical intellectual fraud it almost entirely is. After the 20th century, a century in which atheist rule was given a larger number of trial runs than in the entire previous history of humanity, it turned out that when you didn't believe in an "Absolute" a Law-Giver, you produced tyrants and dictators who were as ruthless and more ruthless as those "Most Christian" monarchs who ignored or set aside the Christian morality they merely pretended to profess.
The important thing in that for egalitarian democrats is to notice that in both cases, the scientific atheist dictators of the 20th centuries and the "Christian" monarchs and princes, etc. who brought us the things like the 30 Years War and other breaches of the teachings of the Jesus they professed, IT WAS THE SETTING ASIDE OF THOSE TEACHINGS, OF THAT MORALITY, THAT PRODUCED THE MURDERS THEY COMMITTED, THE ENSLAVEMENT, THE PILLAGING THEFTS, ETC.
With "Most Christian Monarchs," they have to set aside the morality of Christianity to accomplish their crimes, atheist dictators have a more direct route to their criminality, they have to set aside nothing about atheism to do it.
You might observe that the force of religious morality is weak in the course of human events - you would be noting something that is one of the major historical themes of The Bible - but that force is at least there when it's there, when it's not there isn't even a weak force to hinder the strongest strong-man to make their bloody rise to a position of power where they can have the kind of unlimited evil effect that the modern atheist tyrants have had.
As can be seen in the nuclear practices of Putin and the Kim regime, and others, the science which, the atheists will brag, is largely peopled with atheists (an exaggeration but let's let them have it for the purpose of this argument) is no hindrance to such depravity, scientists, especially nuclear scientists, others involved in weaponeering, have magnified the power that such uninhibited gangster-atheist thugs practice. Science, in its creation and by universal agreement, is an intellectual universe which does not concern itself with God or morality.** I have to say that when I realized that, a lot more of its utilitarian attraction to some of the worst tyrants became clearer to me.
When you reject the reality of absolute moral prohibitions from a human culture, the results will always tend to go to the direction of gangsterism because in that absence, the only force that benefits is unlimited and ruthless power seeking. I think that is how a Christopher Hitchens could write off scores of millions of people as the dross of history. His atheism presented no problem to him on that count. You can contrast his declaration with that of many Christians who, from the start of it, condemned and opposed the European theft of the Americas. Bartolomé de las Casas, is just one example of that. Any atheist who did likewise would have to borrow a morality that opposed murder, theft, etc. from religion in order to even start and I doubt their moral declarations would be that strong from lack of conviction. That's something I remember noticing about dear old Bertrand Russell's very late anti-nuclear activity. I remember thinking he was hedging his bets as he faced the death sentence that old age is.
With the power that science and technology gives those who either start out rejecting the absolute morality that you will not kill, you will not steal and those who may give it mouth service but who find intellectual lies to set them aside as they wish to, we have reached a stage of human history when the very moral absolutes that you will only get with religion, with a belief in the Creator and Law-Giver is the only thing between us and extinction. Science, secular philosophy, etc. will not produce what is necessary for us to not commit suicide for us and the destruction of all life on Earth, perhaps in the universe. I think the Jewish insight that that God can be discerned in the working of human history is one of the most important intellectual achievements of our species, I think this latest truth revealed by the modern history of atheist governments and those secular governments which, in their worst aspects are no better than the old monarchies they allegedly improved of, is just the latest example of that.
* Yeah, I read his articles, he was probably the first of the regulars in The Nation I distrusted in a way that I would, with later fact checking, I would distrust many of the other writers of the secular left. Hitchens didn't much surprise me when he went Republican-fascist in 2000 because I'd seen that tendency in him for at least twenty years. I think the greatest of those eye-openings was when he wrote off the entire native population of the Americas as trash bound to be swept aside by the great tide of history and we shouldn't waste any time regretting the millions murdered or the remnant population whose continued destruction didn't trouble the silver-tongued Oxford boy much. I will say that it was seeing that published in The Nation that led to my eventual disillusion with the magazine.
If Christianity has its sins to answer for, so does atheism, so does agnosticism, for that matter.
** You might notice that I didn't put the quotes around "scientific atheist dictators" where as I did "Most Christian Monarchs". That's because no atheist dictator had to violate science in any of their use of science, the monarchs' use of "Christianity" was almost entirely a violation of the substance of Christianity, the teachings of Jesus, Paul, James, etc. The atheist dictators were true atheists, the "Christian" monarchs violated pretty much everything that being a true Christian would entail. That's also a glaring truth of history that I don't think is taken seriously enough in this discussion.
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