Polytheists and Atheists

It rarely gets as good as this. Last night, on a flight from Detroit to Ithaca, I wound up sitting next to an academic who identified himself as a sworn enemy of the Faith, and who wanted to discuss it with me! It was as if Divine Providence had seen my “Wanted: Atheists” post from a month or so ago, and obliged by sending a juicy one right to me.

He opened the conversation when he saw me taking out my copy of St. Thomas’ Disputed Questions on the Virtues and beginning to read it. “Are you a philosopher?” I introduced myself. He was also in philosophy, a Harvard PhD, currently an adjunct at Georgetown and now on his way to interview for a job at Ithaca College. Before takeoff I had already revealed that I was a convert to Catholicism, and he had explained that he was a “militant atheist.” I think it was obvious that we were both up for a debate; we circled for a little, testing each other out with a little discussion of the Catholicity of Georgetown, but then he sent us into deeper water with a comment about a former teaching job he had had at a major public university in Arkansas.

He told the story of one of his early classes there, in which he had realized a short way into the semester that he was not connecting well with the students. He did a brief class survey. Out of forty students, one would admit to believing in the theory of evolution. They all (he claimed) thought that the Bible was inerrant. All believed that marriage was an institution solely intended to unite a man and a woman, which had been instituted by God. This was when he had realized that he was not in Boston anymore. Here he paused for a moment to let me respond.

“Impressive,” I said mildly.

He went on to explain that he had dumped his intended curriculum for the semester (I’m not sure what the course was supposed to be, actually, but I think it was something about world religions) and instead focused on reading the Bible with the students, looking always for opportunities to take shots at it and undermine their religious faith as systematically as possible. “Of course I couldn’t be too overt about it,” he admitted. “But there are plenty of ways to do that. I think just reading the Bible at all is enough to make most people begin to doubt their faith. The craziness sort of speaks for itself.”

I agreed that, as Tertullian observed, all heresies come from Scripture; this is obviously why the Church claims the right to interpret it for us. But I remarked that I always find it a terrible shame when people get all worked up over problems that they themselves have identified in the Bible, without even bothering to check what has been said about these issues by great Christian minds throughout the centuries. The poor souls that he taught in Arkansas were presumably Protestants, so no doubt they were robbed of this heritage, not only by philosophy instructors intending to destroy their faith, but even by pastors and parents trying to build it up. But I went on to brightly reassure my new friend that his mission to de-Christianize the Evangelicals was being continued in his absence. My fiancé teaches at a public university in the South, and he has found that many or most of the faculty there (who of course come from the same liberal, atheist graduate programs that produce the professors in Northeastern liberal arts colleges) see it as their mission to save the beleaguered and benighted South by leaching away their unfortunate Christian prejudices.

I explained these things conversationally, but the accusation of bullying was not all that heavily veiled. He moved in by asking me whether I knew what these great Christian thinkers had said about some key, “difficult” passages, and whether he could run some of his favorite objections by me. I told him to fire ahead.

I won’t describe everything we discussed, because we wandered around a fair amount, and some of his “objections” were really much too silly to be worth repeating. For example, he thought that the Sermon on the Mount was flat and tepid and lacked the “internal coherence” proper to a great spiritual text. What can one say to such absurdity except, “millions of holy souls have seemed to think otherwise. Offhand, would you suppose that the problem is with them, or with you?”

But we did get onto one line of discussion that I thought interesting enough to mention here: the psychology of the ancient Israelites. He brought this up by referencing the “genocidal” passages in Deuteronomy. I was explaining that Christianity does not condone murder or genocide, but that it can sometimes be permissible to kill for a just cause, and that the preservation of the Israelites evidently required that the land be cleansed of infidels who would, as God himself pointed out, erode their faith in the Lord. I pointed out too that it might have been essential to the development of the faith for them to do this job themselves, learning in the process that obedience to God’s will would ensure safety (he was not just A god, but rather THE ONLY true God), and that the faith was something that had to be defended, not just verbally but also sometimes physically.

We shouldn’t forget that there was an exclusive element to the faith at this time. Of course God was the Creator of all, but the Jews were the chosen ones. That’s a confusing concept for us to get our minds around these days, and my interlocutor brought this up and contemptuously dismissed it as “racist.” I, of course, would hasten to add that we really don’t know what the possibilities were for the salvation of the Jebusites or the Amorites or any of the others; what we do know is that they were killed and not converted. Why should God play such favorites? I can’t give a fully adequate response, but it presumably has to do with the absolute singularity of Christ. The Chosen People were chosen, and were prepared from the time of Abraham, precisely because they were the people from whom the Messiah was to come. Once that light had broken onto the world, the doors were opened wide to all who would repent and believe, but before that time, the faith was like a nursery with tender shoots that might get eaten by animals, or like a small flicker of flame that could easily get blown out by the wind. It had to be protected at all costs, and nourished and nurtured in the appropriate ways.

That seems reasonable enough it itself, but the particular measures used by God to do this can sometimes seem strange to us. Why was it necessary for them to wander around forty years in the desert? To mercilessly kill women and children and all manner of people whom we’re inclined to classify as innocents? There’s no pat answer to all of this, but I think we can make a start. It’s easy to say, but hard for us to internalize, this basic fact: for the ancient Israelites, temptations against the faith came not in the form of atheism or materialism, but in the form of polytheism. The medicines needed to combat their spiritual sicknesses were thus rather different, and least in some respects, from the ones needed in our time and our country. The Israelites needed to learn (and it was very difficult for them to understand it) that their God was not just their God, but the Lord and Creator of all.

My philosopher friend pointed out to me that the psychology of the ancient Israelites was laughably unrealistic. God takes them away from the Egyptians, parts the Red Sea to let them through, brings them victory in battle, rains manna on them from Heaven, cures their sick with the lifted serpent, and all manner of other miracles. You’d think they’d be pretty darn committed after all that. But the second they run into some sort of hardship, they’re off building a golden calf or adopting the gods of the local peoples. How plausible is that?

On face it does look pretty ridiculous, but remember again the principle: the main temptation for them was polytheism. My atheist friend is sure to misunderstand the psychology of people who are in some respects quite his opposite. He would probably be quite impressed to see food appearing on the ground in the morning when he was hungry – maybe sufficiently impressed even to become a Christian. But he’s spent his whole life denying that there are supernatural forces, so the event would be much more momentous for him. The Israelites had exactly the opposite problem. They were never in much doubt that there were some kinds of supernatural powers; quite the contrary, they took them for granted. Having seen ample evidence that it’s good to have a God in your corner, is it really so strange that, in times of hardship, they would want to go on the market for a better God?

It’s an unfortunate thing that we Westerners are often inclined to shy away from the Old Testament; it seems to us rather strange and forbidding. That’s a terrible shame because, as this conversation with an atheist reminded me, the lessons taught by these Old Testament stories are very poignant. Once we let ourselves get inside the polytheistic mindset that seemed so natural to them, we find that the spiritual struggles of the Israelites are more familiar than we might have expected. Most of us have never been tempted to employ golden calf to sort out our problems… but how many are tempted to find a better church or a more lenient confessor? Or, more subtly, how often do we try to distract ourselves from guilty feelings by filling our lives up with other things (ambitions, social activities, television, or whatever)? There are certainly parallels to our own failings.

Another example of this kind of application might be seen in the story of the serpent that Moses lifted up to cure the suffering Israelites of their disease. They only needed to look at it and they would be cured; nevertheless, many refused to look, and died instead.

At first glance, it seems utterly crazy. If you’re already dying, why not try whatever solution presents itself? What have you got to lose? But this thought betrays a misunderstanding of the struggle that they were enduring. We might be inclined to be skeptical that a disease could ever be cured by something so simple as looking at a staff. We’re inclined to project that same skepticism on the reluctant Israelites, but this probably isn’t accurate. The Israelites probably had no difficulty believing in the possibility of miraculous cures. But they were being punished. On one level they no doubt knew that they were themselves responsible for their suffering. To accept mercy from the one who has inflicted pain on you, particularly when the pain was administered as a rebuke, is deeply humiliating. The Israelites who refused to look at the serpent are not very different from people who refuse to go to Confession, even on their deathbed, because they harbor bitter feelings against the Church. Perhaps they believe that God will not forgive them, or perhaps they just aren’t sure they want to be forgiven, with the humiliation that such forgiveness always entails. In any case, this is a spiritual condition that we can readily recognize. And of course, it’s no accident that, as the Gospels tell us, this incident with Moses and the Israelites prefigured the much greater saving power of Christ, lifted up for us on the cross at Calvary.

I love the New Testament, but so many of the figures that we find there are heroes, worthy of imitation but sometimes unlikely figures for identification. The beauty of the Old Testament is that it gives us lots of non-heroes. We see the struggles of more ordinary people, which can at times be inspiring, and at times gut-wrenchingly tragic. I’m quite grateful to my new acquaintance from the plane last night for giving me a chance to pontificate a bit on a topic that I find so interesting. I hope he was at least a bit nonplussed at meeting a fellow philosopher who could gladly discuss his “tough questions” without losing composure or suffering a crisis of faith. It may have been good for him, for a change, to pick on someone his own size instead of bullying Evangelical undergraduates.

And here’s the funniest or perhaps saddest part: he was interviewing for a job in the philosophy of religion!

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