My Penny's Worth

For some reason I ended up explaining the meaning of baptism to my teacher today. (I had actually bothered to go to class- a rare occurence. I find it distracts me from my current work of cultivating flu viruses and manufacturing mucus).

Anyway, I only half know what baptisim means so I mumbled about it washing away sins so you could be a member of the Church. A surprisingly large proportion of the Koreans are Christian so could almost certainly have given better answers than me but they have a phobia of speaking Chinese in front of other people. The teacher thanked me and mentioned that as she was not a Christian, she did not know these things. I didn't point out that I wasn't much of a Christian either. Not believing in God generally bars me from religion.

But it did remind me to post some musings on the topic. Namely that Atheists and Religionists don't seem to be able to communicate on even the most basic level. The problem is that Atheists think it all boils down to whether or not there is a god and concentrate on that. But for a Religionist, let's pick a Christian, this is not really the point.

You belong to a religion claiming over a billion followers. 2000 years of history have produced reams and reams of theological debates and theories over whether we're all born in sin, is the wine really his blood, can women represent Jesus, which is the best translation of the Bible, or indeed the best language, what is the precise meaning of Revelations etc. (The wikipedia trail on Christian debates is terrifying.) Not to mention the pages and pages of commentaries on the Bible, feckit even the Bible itself is pretty lengthy. And the years and years spent building hundreds of fantastically magnificent buildings to honour God. And the gallons of blood spilt in his defence. The thousands of miles walked by pilgrims. The calendar is stuffed with saints' days. The hours and hours of soul-lifting music written to celebrate God. There are enough rites and rituals to commemorate every second of the day. For some people, it fills their whole life. Christianity is stuffed with the detritus produced by 2000 years of men needing to do something to fill the time.

And that's just Christianity- there's Islam and Judaism and the list goes on. They all think there's a god.

No wonder they do not thank Atheists for pointing out it might all be for nothing, only half hiding their amusement at all the energy spent by the silly people doing silly things.  How can all that be for nothing?

The wizened men at the top of the Christian pile have moved on from the infantile debate on whether there is a god- they are busy debating the wingspan of angels. They ignore the childish bleating of Dawkins and Hitchens and dismiss them as ignorant and crude. It must sound crude, while you're sat in your marble hall reading a beautifully written psalm, to hear Hitchens bluntly comparing god to North Korea.

So as Atheists, what we say might hold sway with Agnostics and hazy Religionists, but our arrows fall short when we aim at religion's lofty towers. So what should we do?

Nothing.

Think of Shelley's poem "Ozymandias".

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Swap Jesus for Ozymandias (I know it doesn't scan well) and you take my point. You can already see the cracks in the stone. Science is doing the job for us, shining the spotlight on previously dark, unexplained corners of the universe. God has fewer and fewer places to hide...