Sherry Chandler

I’ve always had a distaste for Christianity as it is practiced. One reason has to do with the Medieval trappings of it — the business of Lord and servant, of abasement before a master. I know there are those among my readers who will see this as shallow, as a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but there it is. I’ve always thought the conventional notion of humility has much of Uriah Heep in it, and I’ve always identified more with the Shelleyan or perhaps the Camusian hero: one who acts in defiance of the gods and then takes the punishment.

Another reason is that I’ve always found the conventional notion of heaven less than appealing. I figure I’d get bored pretty quickly singing praises, though I love to sing and always thought music the best part of church. The older I get, though, the more I am moved by the Blues and the less by the gospel.

But I think my discomfort with the notion of heaven is more deep-seated than that, so I give you, as a sort of corollary to Atwood on Utopia, this explanation of the problem of heaven in James Wood’s review of Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006):

Actually, the more complete confounder of the Free Will Defense is the concept of heaven (less important to Judaism than to Christianity and Islam). In heaven, it seems, all tears will be wiped away and we will be free of pain and suffering. We will also be free of freedom — necessarily so, because if freedom were to exist in heaven, we would merely replicate our lives on earth and start doing terrible things to each other again. Heaven, as an intellectual category as much as an “actual place,” depends on the idea that the highest form of happiness — to be face to face with our Maker, and so on — is a state without freedom, or with severely curtailed freedom. But if this is the ideal state, the state that our Creator longs to have us in, then why was heaven not instituted on earth?

Since heaven was not created on earth, we must conclude that our lives here are more or less painful experiments, and that the world is a training ground for heaven.

Yet it is a rigged experiment, since the experiment already knows its own answer. Not just because God, being omniscient, must know what will become of each of us (the Catholic church tied itself up in knots over this issue, and eventually had to repudiate its own doctrine of “double predestination”), but also because a real experiment would put the existence of heaven itself in doubt.

A rigged experiment simply puts our going to heaven in doubt.

Yet if heaven must exist, if there is no doubt that heaven exists, then we know that we are being trained here on earth to exercise a free will that will not be needed in heaven, a free will the exercise of which causes immense pain to many people, but a pain that will be miraculously eased in heaven. This is nothing less than a definition of torture.

Sam Harris’s Letter is one of several defenses of atheism that have been published lately, and ultimately, Wood does not find them satisfying. His position is one that I would describe more as agnostic than atheist. He begins his essay this way:

I have not believed in God since I was fifteen, and now, at forty, I suspect that I am too late to change. But the velocity of that flight from belief has not been constant: there have been hesitations, interruptions, acute nostalgias.

I would describe my own experience in much the same way. And I would not call myself an atheist, though I am in sympathy with the atheist position that neither the club of hell nor the carrot of heaven is needed for humans to act morally. And I am, like them, very tired of the bullying from the Christian right.

I find much that is attractive in the Buddhist notion than humans can reach transcendence without God, can in some ways become God. Even Christians, after all, believe that we all partake of the Holy Spirit. The Gnostics also believed that humans could become God, believed that this was the accomplishment of Jesus Christ. And I find that notion somehow more compelling than the notion that Jesus was somehow God-made-flesh, in part because I can’t help feeling a little bit like he was just slumming.

But, in the end, I find some of the Gnostic writings just too strange. And I find Buddhism too cold. I suppose it would be just too cute to say that poetry is my religion, though I can quote Richard Taylor as saying poetry “is as close to scripture” as he can come. But I am, like Molly Peacock, way too engaged in my human life to forsake it for anything less than poetry. I’ll leave you with her words:

Why I Am Not A Buddhist

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billforld—and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption…

— Molly Peacock, from Cornucopia (Norton, 2002)

Writing with Intent contains the text of an unpublished speech in which Margaret Atwood talks about writing The Handmaid’s Tale and also a bit about the form of speculative fiction called utopia/dystopia. Some nuggets:

The Utopia-Dystopia as a form tends to be produced only by cultures based on monotheism—or, like Plato’s system, on a single idea of Good—and that postulate also a single goal-oriented timeline. Cultures based on polytheism and the circularity of time don’t seem to produce them. Why bother to try to improve society, or even to visualize it improved, when you know it’s all going to go around again, like clothes in the wash?

***

It is a characteristic of the extreme Utopia on one end, and the extreme Dystopia at the other, that neither contains any lawyers. Extreme Utopias are communities of spirit, in which there cannot be any real disagreements among members because all are of like and right mind; extreme Dystopias are absolute tyrannies, in which contention is not a possibility. In Utopia, then, no lawyers are needed; in Dystopia, no lawyers are allowed.

***

Utopia is an extreme example of the impulse to order; it’s the word should run rampant. Dystopia, its nightmare mirror image, is the desire to squash dissent taken to inhuman and lunatic lengths. Neither are what you’d call tolerant, but both are necessary to the imagination: if we can’t visualize the good, the ideal, if we can’t formulate what we want, we’ll get what we don’t want, in spades. It’s a sad commentary on our age that we find Dystopias a lot easier to believe in than Utopias; Utopias we can only imagine; Dystopias we’ve already had. But should we try too hard to enforce Utopia, Dystopia rapidly follows; because if enough people disagee with us we’ll have to eliminate or suppress or terrorize or manipulate them, and then we’ve got 1984.

***

…the American Puritans did not come to North America in search of religious toleration, or not what we mean by it. They wanted the freedom to practice their religion, but they were not particularly keen on anyone else practicing his or hers. Among their noteworthy achievements were the banishing of so-called heretics, the hanging of Quakers, and the well-know witchcraft trials. I get to say these bad things about them because they were my ancestors…

***

Puritan New England was a theocracy, not a democracy… the most potent forms of dictatorship have always been those that have imposed tyranny in the name of religion… What is needed for a really good tyranny is an unquestionable idea of authority. Political disagreement is political disagreement; but political disagreement with a theocracy is heresy; and a good deal of gloating self-righteousness can be brought to bear on the extermination of heretics, as history has deomonstrated, through the Crusades, the forcible conversions to Islam, the Spanish Inquisition, the burnings at the stake under the English queen Bloody Mary, and so on through the years. It was in the light of history that the American constitutionalists in the eighteenth century separated church from state.

***

But true dictatorships do not come in in good times. They come in in bad times, when people are ready to give up some of their freedoms to someone—anyone—who can take control and promise them better times.

Obviously I’ve snipped and stitched here to form a patchwork that fits my own design, to highlight what I see as an inside threat to our freedoms as real as the outside threat of terrorists. Democracy is a messy affair and it requires a certain tolerance for chaos. I fear that the Bushies have failed in destroying ours only because they have been so incompetent.

I have left out as much good stuff as I’ve highlighted. I can only recommend that you get your hands on a copy of Writing with Intent and read it all for yourself.