Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Back in 2004, Sam Harris published a book entitled, The End of Faith, which was on the New York Times paperback best-seller list for 33 weeks. That was followed in 2006 by The God Delusion of Oxford University scientist Richard Dawkins, which sold more than a million copies hardback. Then in May of this past year, Christopher Hitchens published his God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It too was an enormous publishing success.

Without exception, these were all attacks on God, as well as being attacks on the very notion of humans believing in God, which is not atheism per se, but anti-theism.

The question they all broach for us this morning is, what about them was so significant…so triggering of attention and interest? To find out, let’s look briefly at just two of them – Dawkins and Hitchens.

First, Dr. Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that belief in God qualifies as a delusion. He defines delusion as a “persistently false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.” He quotes Robert Persig’s observation that "when one person suffers from a delusion it’s called ‘insanity.’ When many people suffer from a delusion it’s called ‘religion.’" Interestingly, 9-11 was one of the stimuli for Dr. Dawkins writing his book. He states:

“<Before 9-11> many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11^th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense: It can be lethally dangerous nonsense…dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labeled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!

Would you believe that his book not only led to a 50% growth in the sales of books on religion and spirituality, but also to a 120% increase in the sales of the Bible?

The other book, which I know many of you have read or read about, is Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. (I’m sure you noted also that his title is very intentional in being a response to Islam’s praise statement, Allah Akhbar, which as you know is Arabic for “God is great” – ergo, Hitchens “God is not great.”)

He writes that organized religion is "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children….”

He contends that creationists are “yokels,” C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist, torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”

He goes on to say that the Earth sometimes seems to him to be “a prison colony and lunatic asylum that is employed as a dumping ground by far-off and superior civilizations.”

So what do we say to this…in a nation which has had five Unitarians as president, but now in clear violation of the Constitution, insists on only church-going, Bible-toting, creed-believing candidates. Knowing this, how is it that anti-religious theological broadsides are such phenomenal best-sellers? What is happening?

I’ve told the story many times of the ensign on the destroyer who takes a message from the admiral of the fleet to the captain on an officer-filled bridge. He reports, “Captain, a wire from the Admiral.” The captain responds, “Read the message, Ensign.” “Sir, I think it should first be sent to translation.” “That won’t be necessary, Ensign. Read the message.” The ensign reads the wire from the Admiral, “Captain, in all my years of naval command, I have never seen a dumber maneuver than the one you just performed.” The captain responds, “Ensign, you were right. Take that immediately for translation.”

So how should we translate the thrust of what Dawkins, Hitchens and others are writing? Are they right? Is belief in God so disastrous to our world? Is it in part responsible for 9-11 as Dawkins implies, and which Hitchins affirms? What message do we translate, knowing that from their perspective, any smidgeon of religion is all a slice of the same pie? Further, they charge that anyone who apologizes for any of its forms is helping to sustain the whole. He’s talking about people and groups like us, for certain.

Let’s also remember that attacks on God or the belief in God are not unique to this century. In fact, during the second century, it was Christians who were called “atheists,” because they refused to worship the many gods of Rome. They instead claimed to worship an invisible god for whom there were not even any images available for display in the Pantheon. As a result, they were fed to the lions because of their atheism, which was treason against the state and disruptive of public order.

As I cited in a sermon sometime back, Voltaire’s novella “Candide,” written in the 18^th century, attacks the notion of a world closely watched over by a benevolent God, in which everything happens for the best. Voltaire’s writing was partly inspired by a huge earthquake in Lisbon, which struck while the faithful were at Mass on All Saints’ Day in 1755. The earthquake killed upwards of 30,000 people.

Again, what do we say in response? If I may, let me propose some possible responses which are most certainly open to discussion, interpretation, revision and/or rejection:

To view the awesomeness of this Universe on a dark and cloudless star-filled night…or to experience the birth of a baby with your wife or husband…to know the miracle of love in marriage or union…to see a loved one suffer and die…to observe a human tragedy happening to others...is to realize there is more to life and existence than me and mine, us four and no more.

“God,” as I understand it, is a word – a vocable – that we can use to describe the encompassing mystery of existence, for which we have no other more adequate word in our vocabulary. “God” is the vocable that we are most comfortable in using to address the Mystery before which we all stand. The fact that some who profess to believe in God live and die abhorrent lives, even to killing others in the name of their God, does not tar with the same brush every other person who believes…any more than Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler are exemplars of atheism.

Einstein writes eloquently that the notion of our separateness from each other is one of the giant misconceptions of humankind. Think of a bowl of soup and the different things that can go into it. Using that analogy, we are all ingredients in the Universe’s Cosmic Soup, in which we are uniquely related to the Whole bowl of soup, of which we are one ingredient, a Part.

That’s precisely why I believe atheism is simply one more way alongside many other ways of understanding the world – which I will be speaking more of next week. It and the many religious understandings of the world are the many paths available to us by which to live in this world.

Some of you went to the meeting this morning with Ingrid and Craig to learn more about their humanitarian trip next March (which I hope to make as well, depending upon available flights). For many billions of people on this planet, life is a constant struggle enabled by as little or less than $1 a day or for another billion or more $2 a day. Each of those days is a battle for survival, clean water, or food of any kind. These billions of our fellow residents of this Planet may have to battle others down the road who claim their tribe is superior. They may have to battle neighboring nations who claim the superiority of their state.

Their babies are born on dirt floors and most times succumb to infections at birth or shortly thereafter. Diseases pass from generation to generation, from husband to wife, from mother to child. They are the victims of brutal dictators, foreign invaders, and global policies over which they have absolutely no control.

When the day is done, some of them have no home to go to, no table at which to have a family meal, no radio, television or newspaper with which to relax. Their bed is the hard ground. Their supper is the gnawing hunger they must overcome so as to sleep. If they are women, they must constantly be on the lookout for thugs, bandits and criminals who will rape them, or worse, sell them into prostitution.

And at night, the only one to whom they can turn is not the state, not the police, nor even family. Rather, the only source of hope they have is the songs of faith, the words of hope, the promise of a distant tomorrow that their religion or faith may offer. And when they leave their children behind to go to work in some sweat shop for products which wealthy Americans or Europeans may buy on a whim, they nonetheless are grateful to have any resource whatsoever to fight the crouching lion behind their front door who constantly threatens to shred their meager lives with death, disability, or disease.

But one thing they hold on to, when everything else is lost, is the inner confidence they have within that there is One who sees, who knows, who cares and understands. And as death nears, they may ask for a priest in the hope that something said or done will add a comma instead of a period to their all too brief lives.

In so doing, they grasp at faith’s proclamation that this is not a Universe of chance or chaos. It’s not a world in which it doesn’t matter how one lives or believes. Rather, they strive to believe that this is a world in which there is a God who watches over them.

It may be that in the laboratory, the conclusions of science preclude accepting this or that belief. It may be that in the halls of academia, there are few grounds for sustaining the ancient creeds of the past. But for far too many people on this planet, belief in another world may be the only sustaining force to enable them to live in this world.

It’s okay to know without any question whatsoever that the supernatural god we were taught to believe in at childhood is without reason, logic or experience to support it. But it is not okay to ridicule, dismiss, or seek to eliminate those beliefs that provide the only hand hold that millions on this planet can grasp.

Dawkins and Hitchens write eloquently about how terrible 9-11 and Islamofacism are:

n But one could easily claim that the real cause of terrorism in the world is not Islam, but the policies of superpowers who used and are using Islamic nations as battle grounds for their views of government

n who sidled up to and supported any Middle East dictator or monarch who could afford the price of a pair of sunglasses as long as he kept shipping oil for the West’s gas guzzling, planet warming, environment degrading automobiles.

n Some would say that the real cause of terrorism is not the fanatic Muslims who will even commit suicide so as to strike back at America; rather, the problem is neo-conservative American ideologues who have elevated misguided national policies of selfish self-interests above the life or death issues of the millions of Muslims in the Middle East, many of whom are illiterate, oppressed, and poverty stricken.

n Some would say the true threat of terrorism in the world is the president of this nation, whom we Americans elected out of ignorance in 2000, but in the plain light of day in 2004. He is the one who so horrendously abused his powers as Commander-in-Chief, so as to claim that God – his “heavenly father,” to use his phrase – backed his plan to use a horrible “shock and awe” invasion to “bring peace” to Iraq and democracy to the Middle East.

Let’s be very clear: President Bush’s God may support the troops…his heavenly father may kill Al-Qaeda…he may approve of “collateral damage” while bombing villages and towns to kingdom come, and at the same time killing Iraqis in the hundreds of thousands, and killing thousands of young Americans and maiming tens of thousands for life.

But let me tell you one thing for certain: That is not the God of the poor in Peru, the starving in Somalia, the victims of violence in Kenya, or the homeless and drug-addicted in America.

n Their God is our members Joan and Segundo Valesquez, who are at this moment trying to bring hope to the downtrodden in Bolivia…

n Their God is Ingrid and Craig who are devoting their time, money and effort to helping poverty-stricken children only miles off our shores in the Dominican Republic…

n Their God is Dick and Flo Nogaj, who spent an enormous portion of their personal wealth to help scores of families in Immokalee have their own homes for the first time in their lives at Jubilation Village...

n Their God is you and I who refuse to accept the status quo and are working to change this wealth-obsessed and power-driven government…

n They are you who support the children of Hope House…who help the mothers and children who are the victims of AIDS at McGregor Clinic…who give time, money and energy to people in need all over the world.

God is not up there, down there, out there, or in there. God is a verb…a process…which is activated when you and I do what God does…which is help the helpless…oppose oppression…and work to bring about a better day, not only in America, but all over the world.

[1] A sermon presented on January 13, 2008, second in a series of sermons at the Conversation Café of All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1904 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.