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https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/

Why I am now a Christian

Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war

In 2002, I discovered a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell entitled “Why I am Not a Christian”. It did not cross my mind, as I read it, that one day, nearly a century after he delivered it to the South London branch of the National Secular Society, I would be compelled to write an essay with precisely the opposite title.

For the record, here is Russell’s actual lecture:

https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

Why I Am Not a Christian  (1927)

By Bertrand Russell

As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is ‘Why I am not a Christian’. Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word ‘Christian’. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians—all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans [sic] , and so on—are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.

So immediately Russell does what any person wanting to be fair and accurate would do: give a proper definition of being a Christian believer. He did this to debunk the all too common idea that Christianity = goodness. Christians themselves should appreciate that; I’m sure most of them would object to someone like Carl Sagan being called Christian (he was brought up Jewish, actually) just for being good.

From now on I will put Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s words in purple and Bertrand Russell’s words in red so you can compare them directly. And I will make responses to both as I go. Continuing…..

The year before, I had publicly condemned the terrorist attacks of the 19 men who had hijacked passenger jets and crashed them into the twin towers in New York. They had done it in the name of my religion, Islam. I was a Muslim then, although not a practising one. If I truly condemned their actions, then where did that leave me? The underlying principle that justified the attacks was religious, after all: the idea of Jihad or Holy War against the infidels. Was it possible for me, as for many members of the Muslim community, simply to distance myself from the action and its horrific results?

Of course it is possible! Does the Quran explicitly command the destruction of civilian targets like the World Trade Center? Indeed, why was that targeted at all? The targeting of the Pentagon that same day may have made sense from a military standpoint, but hitting a non-military building is never cool. Her faith in Islam need not have been shaken by such nonsense, really.

At the time, there were many eminent leaders in the West — politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts — who insisted that the terrorists were motivated by reasons other than the ones they and their leader Osama Bin Laden had articulated so clearly. So Islam had an alibi.

This excuse-making was not only condescending towards Muslims. It also gave many Westerners a chance to retreat into denial. Blaming the errors of US foreign policy was easier than contemplating the possibility that we were confronted with a religious war. We have seen a similar tendency in the past five weeks, as millions of people sympathetic to the plight of Gazans seek to rationalise the October 7 terrorist attacks as a justified response to the policies of the Israeli government.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is actually starting to drop the ball here. I know enough about Islam to recognize that its concept of Jihad (holy war) is always meant to be defensive in nature, never offensive.

Surah 2: The Cow

190 Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.

191 And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable Place of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.

192 But if they desist, then lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.

193 And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers.

So the attack against the World Trade Center actually violated what the Quran taught.  In addition to the building complex being peaceful in nature, Muslims could have been working there that day and could have died there.

Plus both Israel and America have committed wrongful acts towards Arabs and Muslims on many occasions.

Israel is a nation of BIGOTRY!

Israel Commits Another War Crime

Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the USA

The Absurdity of the Iraq War

The fact that not all Muslims are anti-American terrorists and that history is full of examples of Israeli and American acts of aggression justifies the even-handed approach of western journalists and scholars. We shouldn’t be like FOX News, after all.

When I read Russell’s lecture, I found my cognitive dissonance easing. It was a relief to adopt an attitude of scepticism towards religious doctrine, discard my faith in God and declare that no such entity existed. Best of all, I could reject the existence of hell and the danger of everlasting punishment.

Russell’s assertion that religion is based primarily on fear resonated with me. I had lived for too long in terror of all the gruesome punishments that awaited me. While I had abandoned all the rational reasons for believing in God, that irrational fear of hellfire still lingered. Russell’s conclusion thus came as something of a relief: “When I die, I shall rot.”

Let’s see what Russell actually said.

THE ARGUMENT FOR THE REMEDYING OF INJUSTICE

Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say: ‘After all, I know only this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also.’ Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue: ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.’ You would say: ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say: ‘Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favour of one.’ Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.

Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people’s desire for a belief in God.

Continuing…..

To understand why I became an atheist 20 years ago, you first need to understand the kind of Muslim I had been. I was a teenager when the Muslim Brotherhood penetrated my community in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1985. I don’t think I had even understood religious practice before the coming of the Brotherhood. I had endured the rituals of ablutions, prayers and fasting as tedious and pointless.

The preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood changed this. They articulated a direction: the straight path. A purpose: to work towards admission into Allah’s paradise after death. A method: the Prophet’s instruction manual of do’s and don’ts — the halal and the haram. As a detailed supplement to the Qur’an, the hadeeth spelled out how to put into practice the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, God and the devil.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali then proceeds to detail some of the intolerance that was indoctrinated into her and other Muslims in Africa, including anti-Semitism.

But then we see a wrong turn:

So, what changed? Why do I call myself a Christian now?

Part of the answer is global. Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

The first two are certainly valid concerns. But “woke ideology”? That’s the imaginary target of right-wing bigots, not a threat to people in general, Progressive, liberal, and leftist people do not speak of themselves as having “woke ideology”. That’s almost like calling a person of African descent a “nigger”. Seeing an actual person from Africa use such a bigoted slur is shocking.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.

Is she seriously claiming that non-Christians cannot share in those secular concepts? Or that debunking Christianity automatically debunks those concepts too? That’s quite a stretch!

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

History has shown that Christians in Europe spent over 1000 years ignoring or rejecting concepts of personal freedom, with kings and emperors ruling over the people and that only the constant threat of violence resulting from the Protestant Reformation and the reactions of the Roman Catholic Church to that finally made European leaders realize that the absolute power of religion needed to be restrained, if not broken completely. Also, her claim that “Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage” is laughably FALSE! There are plenty of authoritarian cults within Christianity and its many subdivisions. I grew up in one of them. And the aforementioned Catholic Church is highly dogmatic too. 

Yet I would not be truthful if I attributed my embrace of Christianity solely to the realisation that atheism is too weak and divisive a doctrine to fortify us against our menacing foes. I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

If she turned to Christianity because it fit her Spiritual Orientation, so be it. But that doesn’t give her the right to talk down to those that are still atheist and have a different orientation. 

Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

This simply makes no sense to me at all. After I stopped believing in God, I did not accept things like astrology or homeopathy. I insisted on evidence before accepting anything as true. Ironically, it was when I stopped demanding clear evidence for something and allowed myself to be manipulated emotionally that I converted to the Baha’i Faith, which I would eventually leave. Because of that experience, I think I know what really happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That essay she wrote is a product of her being brainwashed.

We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. 

Respect for our common humanity is not enough? It is for me!

We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy.

That is (to me, at least) insane. Progressive ideologies seek to improve civilization, not destroy anything. She is afraid of something that is actually harmless.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

Actually, that is a delusion, just as bad as that of Muslim bigots. There is no evidence that Christianity is true and indeed Ayaan Hirsi Ali hasn’t provided any. And that’s what should matter, not your misplaced feelings.

So I dismiss her claims for the rubbish it looks like to me.