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Submission and Favor
[Religious faith] manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism.
—Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great1
In chapter 1, we discovered that many atheists appeal to the problem of moral evil to disprove God’s existence. In chapter 2, we discovered that though the atheist decries the moral evil made possible by human autonomy, the atheist remains committed to valuing human autonomy. Thus we will see in the next five chapters how the atheist responds when divine interventions into the problem of moral evil are actually proposed. Each of these five chapters is dedicated to a pair of interventions within God’s plan proposed to fix the problem of moral evil. What will the atheist say when, in the cause of virtue, he is asked to voluntarily surrender a measure of his autonomy? The first pair of interventions we explore is submission and favor. Both are paired nicely by Ludwig Feuerbach:
Man—this is the mystery of religion—projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject. . . . Thus the religious man virtually retracts the nothingness of human activity, by making his dispositions and actions an object to God, by making man the end of God—for that which is an object to the mind is an end in action; by making the divine activity a means of human salvation. God acts, that man may be good and happy. Thus man, while he is apparently humiliated to the lowest degree, is in truth exalted to the highest.2
What Submission Says about God
To the atheist, any god who asks for submission is a tyrant. According to Dan Barker, the first three problems with using the Bible as a guide for morality are the following:
- The Bible argues from authority, not from reason, claiming that “might makes right.”
- The Bible nowhere states that every human being possesses an inherent right to be treated with respect and fairness—humans don’t matter as much as God does.
- The biblical role models, especially Yahweh, Elohim, and Jesus, are very poor moral examples, often ignoring their own good teachings (what few there are) and ruthlessly pursuing their own tyrannical teachings.3
In other words, God is all about God. All of life trembles in the shadow of his agenda, his power, his will, his teachings. Such a God is selfish, says Feuerbach:
In brief, man in relation to God denies his own knowledge, his own thoughts, that he may place them in God. Man gives up his personality; but in return, God, the Almighty, infinite, unlimited being is a person; he denies human dignity, the human ego; but in return God is to him a selfish, egoistical being, who in all things seeks only himself, his own honour, his own ends; he represents God as simply seeking the satisfaction of his own selfishness, while yet he frowns on that of every other being; his God is the very luxury of egoism.4
The widely traveled journalist Christopher Hitchens cannot resist drawing a comparison:
In the early months of this century, I made a visit to North Korea. Here, contained within a hermetic quadrilateral of territory enclosed either by sea or by near-impenetrable frontiers, is a land entirely given over to adulation. Every waking moment of the citizen—the subject—is consecrated to praise of the Supreme Being and his Father. Every schoolroom resounds with it, every film and opera and play is devoted to it, every radio and television transmission is given up to it. So are all books and magazines and newspaper articles, all sporting events and all workplaces. I used to wonder what it would be like to have to sing everlasting praises, and now I know.5
Bertrand Russell agrees with the parallel: “In the orthodox Christian conception, the good life is the virtuous life, and virtue consists in obedience to the will of God, and the will of God is revealed to each individual through the voice of conscience. This whole conception is that of men subject to an alien despotism.”6 “Barbarity, caprice,” David Hume calls it. “These qualities, however nominally disguised, we may universally observe, form the ruling character of the deity in the popular religions. . . . The more tremendous the divinity is represented, the more tame and submissive do men become his ministers.”7 What makes such despotism so barbaric, however, is the scope of its demand. Hitchens labels this call to complete submission totalitarianism because it “separates ‘ordinary’ forms of despotism—those which merely exact obedience from their subjects—from the absolutist systems which demand that citizens become wholly subjects and surrender their private lives and personalities entirely to the state, or to the supreme leader.”8 To willfully place oneself under such a regime is “to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.”9
It might be asked, however, What if such a God is actually worthy of entire submission? What if, once you got to know him, you actually wanted such a relationship? The atheist responds that he already knows enough about God to convince him that this will never happen. Sam Harris seems confident enough: “We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.”10 According to Russell, “The nonhuman world is unworthy of our worship.”11 Nietzsche clarified,
The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature—but that we regard what has been honored as God, not as “divine,” but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a crime against life. . . . We deny that God is God. . . . If any one were to show us this Christian God, we’d be still less inclined to believe in him.12
Note that the atheist is not suggesting that because God does not exist, it is irrational to submit to him. The contention is that the God presented in Christianity, whether or not he exists, is positively immoral to demand such submission. Just who does he think he is? And, for that matter, who does he think we are?
What Submission Says about Us
While the demand for submission enlarges God into a tyrant, it dwarfs man into a stuttering servant. Under God’s thumb, we are squashed into perpetual infancy. Hitchens paints the unflattering portrait:
The three great monotheisms teach people to think abjectly of themselves, as miserable and guilty sinners prostrate before an angry and jealous god who, according to discrepant accounts, fashioned them either out of dust and clay or a clot of blood. The positions for prayer are usually emulations of the supplicant serf before an ill-tempered monarch. The message is one of continual submission, gratitude, and fear.13
According to Barker, enough time in such a posture cripples us:
One of the most damaging ideas in the Bible is the concept of Lord and Master. The loftiest biblical principles are obedience, submission and faith, rather than reason, intelligence and human values. Worshippers become humble servants of a dictator, expected to kneel before this king, lord, master, god—giving adoring praise and taking orders.14
In fact, because all religious faith demands submission, then naturally all religion by definition stunts humanity. Feuerbach explains the process by which religion arises: “To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.”15 Nietzsche writes, “The man of faith, the ‘believer’ of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man—such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The ‘believer’ does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end.”16 As Russell puts it, “The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.”17
How then might a self-respecting human respond to such a God? Perhaps the most courteous response is a firm “No, thanks.” Mature man has no need of that hypothesis. According to the Humanist Manifesto II, “Too often traditional faiths encourage dependence rather than independence, obedience rather than affirmation, fear rather than courage.”18 The Humanist Manifesto I prescribes, “In place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.”19 The old-fashioned supplicant remains in the clutches of fear. In an ironic twist, Russell quips, “Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”20 Fear of the Lord is too babyish. Besides, a good parent would not nurture belief in closet ghosts so that he or she could be called upon each night. Barker explains, “A true father expects the child to become a peer, with its own purpose, even if it disagrees with the parent. If I raise a child who is eternally dependent on me for meaning, then I am an inept parent.”21 Thus we graduate from the comfort of the parent’s lap to the productivity of the laboratory. Says Russell, “Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”22 After all, if we do not grow up, we will remain one species under God instead of rising to become the supreme species ourselves. It is either he or we, as philosopher Walter Kaufmann explains:
The basic choice is this: either man hypostatizes the object of his profoundest aspirations, projects his boldest hopes, and in the most extreme case strips himself of all that distinguishes him from the apes, and then the ape that remains grovels on his belly; or man seeks to leave the ape behind on the ground and tries to raise himself to a higher level of being. Whether he worships idols or strives to perfect himself, man is the God-intoxicated ape.23
But what of the believer’s customary reply: Unless you submit to God, will you not succumb to reprobation? Richard Dawkins thinks not: “Do we really need policing—whether by God or by each other—in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner? I dearly want to believe that I do not need such surveillance—and nor, dear reader, do you.”24 Hitchens agrees: “Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement.”25 Thus, “There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine.”26
Hence, if a good humanity does not need to bow and a truly good God would not need us to either, we will not bow. Such refusal is atheism, according to Emma Goldman: “Atheism . . . in its philosophic aspect refuses allegiance not merely to a definite concept of God, but it refuses all servitude to the God idea.”27 For Barker, it is either God or the individual: “Jesus said, ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ But what about the individual? What about democracy? . . . It is not moral to be told to submit to a Caesar or to a god.”28 Even gratitude is demeaning, as Daniel Dennett argues in his article “Thank Goodness.” After making it through a nine-hour heart surgery, he chose to thank “goodness.” Of course, “You can thank God—but the very idea of repaying God is ludicrous.”29 Similarly, after Barker’s wife pulled through a near-fatal infant delivery, Barker boasted, much like a new mother in not having requested an epidural, “During this entire traumatic experience we never once thought of invoking a god for help. We never prayed, never even considered it.”30 Thus, to Hitchens, the response is obvious: get up off the floor.
My old schoolfriend Michael Prest was the first person to make it plain to me that while the authorities could compel us to attend prayers, they could not force us to pray. I shall always remember his upright posture while others hypocritically knelt or inclined themselves, and also the day that I decided to join him. All postures of submission and surrender should be part of our prehistory.31
Favor: Vanity of the Species
Since the atheist is so violently opposed to being treated as a slave, it seems he would appreciate adoption into a more esteemed position. What would the atheist say if God were to exalt what he humbled, to stoop to our level in order to elevate us closer to his? Yet just as the atheist translates submission as tyranny, divine favor is rejected as bribery, and the atheist will have none of it. For one thing, such tactics only go to satiate mankind’s conceit. According to Russell, “Religion has, however, other appeals besides that of terror; it appeals especially to our human self-esteem. If Christianity is true, mankind are not such pitiful worms as they seem to be; they are of interest to the Creator of the universe.”32 Such flattery is unwelcome because it is untrue, as Harris explains: “The anthropocentrism that is intrinsic to every faith cannot help appearing impossibly quaint—and therefore impossible—given what we now know about the natural world.”33 Says Hitchens, the atheist needs no such patronizing nonsense as feeds the religious ego:
Religion teaches people to be extremely self-centered and conceited. It assures them that god cares for them individually, and it claims that the cosmos was created with them specifically in mind. This explains the supercilious expression on the faces of those who practice religion ostentatiously: pray excuse my modesty and humility but I happen to be busy on an errand from God.34
The issue Nietzsche takes with God’s favor toward the human species is, as usual, a step toward the radical. His complaint is not that Christianity elevates unworthy humanity, but that it elevates unworthy humans:
That every man, because he has an “immortal soul,” is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the “salvation” of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. . . . [O]ut of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization. . . . To allow “immortality” to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.35
Thus, whether because of the unworthiness of particular humans or humanity as a whole, this honorary elevation is received with all the disgust of an elitist toward an unaccredited honorary degree from a diploma mill.
Favor: Vanity of the Saved
What starts badly enough, as favor toward the humans of earth, poisons into favoritism toward the people of God. For example, think of how unmeritorious the Jews must have seemed to the Canaanites, their only boast as having been born in the right place at the right time. Such arrogance surely excuses the annoyance voiced by the atheist. As Harris puts it, “There is, in fact, no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: the creator of the universe takes an interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death.”36 Atheist magician Penn Jillette says simply, “Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic [entirely absorbed with one’s self].”37 According to Hitchens, their salvation claim is solipsistic: “How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan?”38 Says Harris, their gratitude is solipsistic: “It is time we recognized the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. It is time we acknowledged how disgraceful it is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God.”39 Even the notion of sin, according to Russell, is solipsistic: “Self-importance, individual or generic, is the source of most of our religious beliefs. Even sin is a conception derived from self-importance.”40 Why even humility is solipsistic! Hitchens explains, “‘There but for the grace of God,’ said John Bradford in the sixteenth century, on seeing wretches led to execution, ‘go I.’ What this apparently compassionate observation really means—not that it really ‘means’ anything—is, ‘There by the grace of God goes someone else.’”41
On the Other Hand
It is our aim now to demonstrate, respectfully and without overstatement, that the atheist basically overturns the tables he has just set up. We just observed that the atheist repudiates the concepts of submission to and special favor from a divinity. Yet consider the following passage by Russell, out of his celebrated “A Free Man’s Worship”: “In this lies man’s true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments.”42 To thus call Russell a “worshiper” is probably a misinterpretation, yet no nonbeliever could deny that this patristic atheist was advocating some form of submission—submission not to God but to that which is created by our loftiest humanistic ideals. Similarly, the Humanist Manifesto 2000 claims, “As humanists we urge today, as in the past, that humans not look beyond themselves for salvation. We alone are responsible for our own destiny, and the best we can do is to muster our intelligence, courage, and compassion to realize our highest aspirations.”43 Although at first this declaration appears to denounce all forms of submission, look closely, for it is truly a call to submission—to submit “our intelligence, courage, and compassion” to “our highest aspirations.” The aim is a uniting under our highest aspirations. We submit not as the loftiest creation of God’s hands but to the loftiest creation of ours. In other words, our freedom lies not in choosing not to submit so much as in choosing what to submit to. Submission is not the problem; rather it is to whom or to what one will submit. It is as atheist Albert Camus had his main character say in The Fall: “For anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.”44 Submission to at least something seems essential to human nature, atheists included. It is when God enters the equation that the atheist suspects a miscalculation and fumbles for the eraser.
That the atheist advocates submission to ideals is telling enough. Yet we find an even more concrete submission being endorsed. Dawkins suggests a hypothetical:
Whether by detecting prime numbers or by some other means, imagine that SETI does come up with unequivocal evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, followed, perhaps, by a massive transmission of knowledge and wisdom. . . . How should we respond? A pardonable reaction would be something akin to worship, for any civilization capable of broadcasting a signal over such an immense distance is likely to be greatly superior to ours. Even if that civilization is not more advanced than ours at the time of transmission, the enormous distance between us entitles us to calculate that they must be millennia ahead of us by the time the message reaches us.45
Why is submission pardonable, necessary, perhaps even virtuous toward them but not to God? According to Dawkins, it’s a matter of whether or not the object of submission exists:
In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? . . . The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn’t start that way.46
But is it merely a matter of whether or not the object of submission exists? Dawkins is obviously right that a nonexistent God is unworthy of our submission. Yet do not forget the attitude displayed earlier in the chapter, that even if God were to exist, it would be positively immoral of him to demand such submission. Even submission accompanied by a certain worshipfulness is unproblematic in itself. It is even pardonable to submit to what has become godlike, only not to God. Submission is not the problem; God as object is.
So their repudiation of submission is half-repudiated. What about their rebuke of religious anthropocentrism? With all the sensibility and sensitivity of the big sister who reveals the nonexistence of Santa, they raise their eyebrows and say, “You knew there’s nothing special about humanity, didn’t you?” You are not the starlet your parents called you. Anyone who flatters you is selling something. What, then, was Russell selling in saying, “For in all things it is well to exalt the dignity of man”?47 To witness this second reversal, one needs only refer back to all the talk of how bad submission is. Why is it so bad? It “denies human dignity, the human ego.”48 It is “quite unworthy of free men,”49 for it denies that “every human being possesses an inherent right to be treated with respect and fairness.”50 It is “not worthy of self-respecting human beings.”51 According to Steven Weinberg, “Religion is an insult to human dignity.”52 Russell’s daughter saw this inconsistency in how her father ridiculed Christians “for imagining that man is important in the vast scheme of the universe . . . yet [he] thought man and his preservation the most important thing in the world.”53
We are not necessarily crying “Contradiction!” Just as a believer can wonder at how man is, in the words of Blaise Pascal, the “pride and refuse of the universe,”54 the atheist can affirm man as on equal footing with his evolutionary brethren and yet worthy of special dignity. Both can be true in their own sense. The inconsistency lies in the hypocrisy of the rebuke: “How dare you call me dignified; it insults my dignity.” Even the election of Christians as the special people with a special mission has its atheistic counterpart. One could argue that their name choice beats any religious self-designation in terms of grandiosity: “We [brights] are, in fact, the moral backbone of the nation: brights take their civic duties seriously precisely because they don’t trust God to save humanity from its follies.”55 We are not calling atheism religious. We are merely pointing out that special favor is not the problem. Apparently we humans can recognize dignity and even bestow dignity on ourselves, but God can do neither. Again, the problem is not favor toward humanity; the problem is God as source. To sum up, atheists want neither submission to nor favor from God, even though both seem to exhaust the possibilities in dealing with a God. Moreover, since neither submission nor favor seems to be the problem, the problem must be God.