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On Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:25:52 +1000, **Rowland Croucher** <rccroucher@contactemailonwebsite
Why I believe again
A N Wilson
Published 02 April 2009
A N Wilson writes on how his conversion to atheism may have been similar
to a road to Damascus experience but his return to faith has been slow
and doubting
Unlike his conversion to Atheism, Wilson's path back to faith has been a
slow one
By nature a doubting Thomas, I should have distrusted the symptoms when
I underwent a “conversion experience” 20 years ago. Something was
happening which was out of character – the inner glow of complete
certainty, the heady sense of being at one with the great tide of fellow
non-believers. For my conversion experience was to atheism. There were
several moments of epiphany, actually, but one of the most dramatic
occurred in the pulpit of a church.
At St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London, there are two pulpits, and for
some decades they have been used for lunchtime dialogues. I had just
published a biography of C S Lewis, and the rector of St Mary-le-Bow,
Victor Stock, asked me to participate in one such exchange of views.
Memory edits, and perhaps distorts, the highlights of the discussion.
Memory says that while Father Stock was asking me about Lewis, I began
to “testify”, denouncing Lewis’s muscular defence of religious belief.
Much more to my taste, I said, had been the approach of the late
Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, whose biography I had just read.
A young priest had been to see him in great distress, saying that he had
lost his faith in God. Ramsey’s reply was a long silence followed by a
repetition of the mantra “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter”. He told
the priest to continue to worship Jesus in the Sacraments and that faith
would return. “But!” exclaimed Father Stock. “That priest was me!”
Like many things said by this amusing man, it brought the house down.
But something had taken a grip of me, and I was thinking (did I say it
out loud?): “It bloody well does matter. Just struggling on like Lord
Tennyson (‘and faintly trust the larger hope’) is no good at all . . .”
I can remember almost yelling that reading C S Lewis’s Mere Christianity
made me a non-believer – not just in Lewis’s version of Christianity,
but in Christianity itself. On that occasion, I realised that after a
lifetime of churchgoing, the whole house of cards had collapsed for me –
the sense of God’s presence in life, and the notion that there was any
kind of God, let alone a merciful God, in this brutal, nasty world. As
for Jesus having been the founder of Christianity, this idea seemed
perfectly preposterous. In so far as we can discern anything about Jesus
from the existing documents, he believed that the world was about to
end, as did all the first Christians. So, how could he possibly have
intended to start a new religion for Gentiles, let alone established a
Church or instituted the Sacraments? It was a nonsense, together with
the idea of a personal God, or a loving God in a suffering universe.
Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.
It was such a relief to discard it all that, for months, I walked on
air. At about this time, the Independent on Sunday sent me to interview
Dr Billy Graham, who was conducting a mission in Syracuse, New York
State, prior to making one of his journeys to England. The pattern of
these meetings was always the same. The old matinee idol spoke. The
gospel choir sang some suitably affecting ditty, and then the converted
made their way down the aisles to commit themselves to the new faith.
Part of the glow was, surely, the knowledge that they were now part of a
great fellowship of believers.
As a hesitant, doubting, religious man I’d never known how they felt.
But, as a born-again atheist, I now knew exactly what satisfactions were
on offer. For the first time in my 38 years I was at one with my own
generation. I had become like one of the Billy Grahamites, only in
reverse. If I bumped into Richard Dawkins (an old colleague from Oxford
days) or had dinner in Washington with Christopher Hitchens (as I did
either on that trip to interview Billy Graham or another), I did not
have to feel out on a limb. Hitchens was excited to greet a new convert
to his non-creed and put me through a catechism before uncorking some
stupendous claret. “So – absolutely no God?” “Nope,” I was able to say
with Moonie-zeal. “No future life, nothing ‘out there’?” “No,” I
obediently replied. At last! I could join in the creed shared by so many
(most?) of my intelligent contemporaries in the western world – that men
and women are purely material beings (whatever that is supposed to
mean), that “this is all there is” (ditto), that God, Jesus and religion
are a load of baloney: and worse than that, the cause of much (no, come
on, let yourself go), most (why stint yourself – go for it, man), all
the trouble in the world, from Jerusalem to Belfast, from Washington to
Islamabad.
My doubting temperament, however, made me a very unconvincing atheist.
And unconvinced. My hilarious Camden Town neighbour Colin Haycraft, the
boss of Duckworth and husband of Alice Thomas Ellis, used to say, “I do
wish Freddie [Ayer] wouldn’t go round calling himself an atheist. It
implies he takes religion seriously.”
This creed that religion can be despatched in a few brisk arguments
(outlined in David Hume’s masterly Dialogues Concerning Natural
Religion) and then laughed off kept me going for some years. When I
found myself wavering, I would return to Hume in order to pull myself
together, rather as a Catholic having doubts might return to the shrine
of a particular saint to sustain them while the springs of faith ran dry.
But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter
of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn,
over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many
of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books,
had been believers. Reading Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and
following it up with Gandhi’s own autobiography, The Story of My
Experiments With Truth, I found it impossible not to realise that all
life, all being, derives from God, as Gandhi gave his life to
demonstrate. Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt
the love of God. But a life like Gandhi’s, which was focused on God so
deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if
you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a
bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although
Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a
musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront
the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel
Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?
Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a
short space of time convinced me that purely materialist “explanations”
for our mysterious human existence simply won’t do – on an intellectual
level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A
materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we
laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as
committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend
asserted: “It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was
no need to distinguish between one another by giving names.”
This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing
in the historicity of Noah’s Ark. More so, really.
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’
beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally?
Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all
agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could
it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing
morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole
grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime
and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one
of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest –
which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of
meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the
religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His
image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true.
As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure
experience, it fits.
For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion
experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness. I do not find it easy
to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who
turns off Thought for the Day when it comes on the radio. I am shy to
admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a
wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief
“don’t matter”, that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith
will return.
When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me
like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud
of religion – prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these
unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to
grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel
it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the
final resolution of a fugue.
I haven’t mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat
on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the
Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent
were Hitler’s neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition,
much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual
victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask
yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that
ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity
before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to
look forward to.
My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to
Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be;
but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with
donnish absurdity, called God “a category mistake”. Yet the real
category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human
beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “Read the
first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at
once . . . ‘The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’.” And then Coleridge
adds: “‘And man became a living soul.’ Materialism will never explain
those last words.”
New Statesman
*****
Can you love god and agree with Darwin?
Published 02 April 2009
AN Wilson on his return to faith after a period of atheism
Has fear of death helped your faith return?
Fear of death.....The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
My growing hunch or intimation that dead friends are still in some
mysterious sense with us was part of the "return". Fear of death has
never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of
me. I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an
inordinate fear of death.
Do people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins simply not get life?
I think on the whole that's right, that clever as the professional
atheists are, they are missing out on some very basic experiences of life.
What's the worst thing about being faithless?
The worst thing about being faithless? When I thought I was an atheist I
would listen to the music of Bach and realize that his perception of
life was deeper, wiser, more rounded than my own. Ditto when I read the
lives of great men and women who were religious.
Reading Northrop Frye and Blake made me realize that their world-view
(above all their ability to see the world in mythological terms) is so
much more INTERESTING than some of the alternative ways of looking at life.
Of the things that drove you atheism, what have you still to resolve?
Childish playground things - religious people aren't cool, religious
people have spots, wear specs, all those feelings; embarrassment at
being in the same gang as people whose views sound, and perhaps are,
absurd ; or worse than absurd. The disconcerting sense that certain
psychological types (often v unappealing) seem to be drawn to religion.
I very much dislike the intolerance and moralism of many Christians, and
feel more sympathy with Honest Doubters than with them.
Can you love god and agree with Darwin?
I think you can love God and agree with the author of The Voyage of the
Beagle, the Earth Worm, and most of the Origin of Species.
The Descent of Man, with its talk of savages, its belief that black
people are more primitive than white people, and much nonsense besides,
is an offence to the intelligence - and is obviously incompatible with
Christianity.
I think the jury is out about whether the theory of Natural selection,
as defined by neo-Darwinians is true, and whether serious scientific
doubts, as expressed in a new book Why Us by James Lefanu, deserve to be
taken seriously. For example, does the discovery of the complex
structure of DNA and the growth in knowledge in genetics require a
rethink of Darwinian "gradualism". But these are scientific rather than
religious questions.
New Statesman
*****
Religion of hatred: Why we should no longer be cowed by the chattering
classes ruling Britain who sneer at Christianity
By A N Wilson
11th April 2009
A week ago, there were Palm Sunday processions all over the world. Near
my house in North London is a parish with two churches. About 70 or 80
of us gathered at one of these buildings to collect our palms.
We were told by the priest: 'Where we are standing in Kentish Town does
not look much like a Judaean hillside, and the other church to which we
are walking does not look much like Jerusalem. But as we go, holding our
palms, let us try to imagine the first Palm Sunday.'
Jesus Christ: With sneering doubters becoming ever more vocal in their
dismissive attitudes towards Christianity AN Wilson says we should no
longer be cowed
Jesus Christ: With sneering doubters becoming ever more vocal in their
dismissive attitudes towards Christianity AN Wilson says we should no
longer be cowed
And so we set off, singing All Glory, Laud And Honour! and holding up
our palm crosses, to the faint bemusement of passersby, who looked out
of their windows at us, tooted their horns as we blocked the traffic or
smiled from sunny pavements.
We were walking, as it were, in the footsteps of Jesus as he entered
Jerusalem on a donkey while crowds threw palms before him. Except our
journey was along the pavements strewn with the usual North London
discarded syringes, chewing gum and Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes.
When we had reached our destination, a small choir and two priests sang
the whole of St Mark's account of the last week of Jesus's life - that
part of the Gospel that is called The Passion.
It is said the chant used for this recitation dates back to the music
used in the Jewish Temple in Jesus's day.
We heard of his triumphal, palm-strewn procession into Jerusalem, his
clash with the Temple authorities, his agonised prayer in the garden of
Gethsemane, his arrest by the Roman guards, his torture, his trial
before Pontius Pilate, his Crucifixion and his death.
So there we were, all believers, and a disparate group of people, of
various ages, races and classes, re-enacting once more this
extraordinary story.
A story of a Jewish prophet falling foul of the authorities in an
eastern province of the Roman Empire, and being punished, as were
thousands of Jews during the governorship of Pontius Pilate, by the
gruesome torture of crucifixion.
This Easter weekend we revisit the extraordinary ending of that story -
the discovery by some women friends of Jesus that his tomb was empty.
And we read of the reactions of the disciples - fearful, incredulous,
but eventually believing that, as millions of Christians will proclaim
tomorrow morning: 'The Lord is risen indeed!'
Richard Dawkins
Athiest: Richard Dawkins
But how many in Britain today actually believe the story? Most recent
polls have shown that considerably less than half of us do - yet that
won't, of course, stop us tucking into Easter eggs (symbolising new
life) and simnel cake (decorated with 11 marzipan balls representing the
11 true disciples, with Judas missing).
For much of my life, I, too, have been one of those who did not believe.
It was in my young manhood that I began to wonder how much of the Easter
story I accepted, and in my 30s I lost any religious belief whatsoever.
Like many people who lost faith, I felt anger with myself for having
been 'conned' by such a story. I began to rail against Christianity, and
wrote a book, entitled Jesus, which endeavoured to establish that he had
been no more than a messianic prophet who had well and truly failed, and
died.
Why did I, along with so many others, become so dismissive of Christianity?
Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in
1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and
anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are
not merely non-religious, they are positively anti.
To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in
my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a
child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being
religious was unsexy, like having spots or wearing specs.
This playground attitude accounts for much of the attitude towards
Christianity that you pick up, say, from the alternative comedians, and
the casual light blasphemy of jokes on TV or radio.
It also lends weight to the fervour of the anti-God fanatics, such as
the writer Christopher Hitchens and the geneticist Richard Dawkins, who
think all the evil in the world is actually caused by religion.
The vast majority of media pundits and intelligentsia in Britain are
unbelievers, many of them quite fervent in their hatred of religion itself.
The Guardian's fanatical feminist-in-chief, Polly Toynbee, is one of the
most dismissive of religion and Christianity in particular. She is
president of the British Humanist Association, an associate of the
National Secular Society and openly scornful of the millions of Britons
who will quietly proclaim their faith in Church tomorrow.
JO BRAND
Self-satisfied tv personalities like Jo Brand are openly non-believers
'Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion
of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in
agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?' she asked in a puerile
article decrying the wickedness of C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories, which
have bewitched children for more than 50 years. Or, to take another of
her utterances: 'When absolute God-given righteousness beckons, blood
flows and women are in chains.'
The sneering Ms Toynbee, like Richard Dawkins, believes in rational
explanations for our existence and behaviour. She is deeply committed to
the Rationalist Association, but her approach to religion is too
fanatical to be described as rational.
Perhaps it goes back to her relationship with her nice old dad, Philip
Toynbee, a Thirties public school Marxist who, before he died, made the
hesitant journey from unbelief to a questing Christianity.
The Polly Toynbees of this world ignore all the benign aspects of
religion and see it purely as a sinister agent of control, especially
over women.
One suspects this is how it is viewed in most liberal circles, in
university common rooms, at the BBC and, perhaps above all, sadly, by
the bishops of the Church of England, who despite their episcopal
regalia, nourish few discernible beliefs that could be distinguished
from the liberalism of the age.
Jonathan Ross
Smug: Jonathan Ross
For ten or 15 of my middle years, I, too, was one of the mockers. But,
as time passed, I found myself going back to church, although at first
only as a fellow traveller with the believers, not as one who shared the
faith that Jesus had truly risen from the grave. Some time over the past
five or six years - I could not tell you exactly when - I found that I
had changed.
When I took part in the procession last Sunday and heard the Gospel
being chanted, I assented to it with complete simplicity.
My own return to faith has surprised no one more than myself. Why did I
return to it? Partially, perhaps it is no more than the confidence I
have gained with age.
Rather than being cowed by them, I relish the notion that, by asserting
a belief in the risen Christ, I am defying all the liberal clever-clogs
on the block: cutting-edge novelists such as Martin Amis; foul-mouthed,
self-satisfied TV presenters such as Jonathan Ross and Jo Brand; and the
smug, tieless architects of so much television output.
But there is more to it than that. My belief has come about in large
measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not
the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and
faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet
acceptance that they have a future after they die.
The Easter story answers their questions about the spiritual aspects of
humanity. It changes people's lives because it helps us understand that
we, like Jesus, are born as spiritual beings.
Every inner prompting of conscience, every glimmering sense of beauty,
every response we make to music, every experience we have of love -
whether of physical love, sexual love, family love or the love of
friends - and every experience of bereavement, reminds us of this fact
about ourselves.
Ah, say the rationalists. But no one can possibly rise again after
death, for that is beyond the realm of scientific possibility.
And it is true to say that no one can ever prove - nor, indeed, disprove
- the existence of an after-life or God, or answer the conundrums of
honest doubters (how does a loving God allow an earthquake in Italy?)
Easter does not answer such questions by clever-clever logic. Nor is it
irrational. On the contrary, it meets our reason and our hearts
together, for it addresses the whole person.
In the past, I have questioned its veracity and suggested that it should
not be taken literally. But the more I read the Easter story, the better
it seems to fit and apply to the human condition. That, too, is why I
now believe in it.
Easter confronts us with a historical event set in time. We are faced
with a story of an empty tomb, of a small group of men and women who
were at one stage hiding for their lives and at the next were brave
enough to face the full judicial persecution of the Roman Empire and
proclaim their belief in a risen Christ.
Historians of Roman and Jewish law have argued at length about the
details of Jesus's trial - and just how historical the Gospel accounts are.
Anyone who believes in the truth must heed the fine points that such
scholars unearth. But at this distance of time, there is never going to
be historical evidence one way or the other that could dissolve or
sustain faith.
Of course, only hard evidence will satisfy the secularists, but over
time and after repeated readings of the story, I've been convinced
without it.
And in contrast to those ephemeral pundits of today, I have as my
companions in belief such Christians as Dostoevsky, T. S. Eliot, Samuel
Johnson and all the saints, known and unknown, throughout the ages.
When that great saint Thomas More, Chancellor of England, was on trial
for his life for daring to defy Henry VIII, one of his prosecutors asked
him if it did not worry him that he was standing out against all the
bishops of England.
He replied: 'My lord, for one bishop of your opinion, I have a hundred
saints of mine.'
Now, I think of that exchange and of his bravery in proclaiming his
faith. Our bishops and theologians, frightened as they have been by the
pounding of secularist guns, need that kind of bravery more than ever.
Sadly, they have all but accepted that only stupid people actually
believe in Christianity, and that the few intelligent people left in the
churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic
or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief after all.
As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that
materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.
Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has
no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love
or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.
The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are
mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts
us with an extraordinarily haunting story.
J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest
writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.
But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms
individual lives - the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle
on a daily basis, the man, woman or child next to you in church tomorrow
morning.
MailOnline
Shalom/Salaam/Pax! Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/
Justice for Dawn Rowan - http://dawnrowansaga.blogspot.com/
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