The context of eternity

In this Face to faith piece (accessed 02.11.11), Steven Hepburn describes how he prayed for the soul of his recently deceased father, and he has a poke at atheists:

My dear father was not a Catholic. The customary alliance of hardline fundamentalists and militant atheists will no doubt unite to suggest that the logical consequence of my belief system would thrust him into that third and much less popular destination of hell...

It’s difficult to convey just how inappropriate the words “customary” and “militant” are in this context. The inference Hepburn intends his readers to draw is that atheists are militant while Catholics are not. An important sense of the word is “warring; engaged in warfare” and while I am not aware of any Wars of Atheism occurring at any point in the history of humanity, we do have the European Wars of Religion between 1520 and 1648. As Steven Pinker (2011, p. 142) puts it:

With the people who brought us the Crusades and Inquisition on one side, and the people who wanted to kill rabbis, Anabaptists, and Unitarians on the other, it’s not surprising that [these wars] were nasty, brutish, and long. ... During the Thirty Years’ War soldiers laid waste to much of present-day Germany, reducing its population by around a third.

When peace finally came, no doubt the meek and mild religious folk were the first to celebrate, and those nasty “militant atheists” the last to put down their blood-soaked weapons? Pinker (ibid., p. 143) continues:

It wasn’t until the second half of the 17th century that Europeans finally began to lose their zeal for killing people with the wrong supernatural beliefs. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, confirmed the principle that each local prince could decide whether his state would be Protestant or Catholic and that the minority denomination in each one could more or less live in peace. (Pope Innocent X was not a good sport about this: he declared the Peace “null, void, invalid, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all time.”)

Oh dear. That papal parenthesis would be quite hard for even Alistair Campbell to spin. It seems that the phrase “militant Catholics” is far more warranted by the historical evidence than “militant atheists”.

At the other end of the scale to militancy against whole populations is intimidation of the individual. It was Catholics who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and, a few years later, threatened Galileo with torture, and these were of course far from isolated lapses of an otherwise peaceful institution. So what for history? Why would a man of faith care about reason and evidence? Faith permits you to believe anything you fancy, and to engage in an Orwellian rewriting of history if that serves the faith.

As for this “customary alliance” between fundamentalists and atheists, how is such a thing possible when religious believers of all kinds and for centuries tortured and burned atheists for their unbelief, and excluded those not charred to a crisp from full citizenship?

Is it caring to pray to an imaginary god so that an imaginary entity (a soul) can move on from one imaginary place (purgatory) to another imaginary place (heaven)? There are many adjectives that spring to mind, and caring is not one of them. For a humanist, caring for someone means acting in that person’s interests during their lifetime, and cherishing their memory after they have died. Fretting over the whereabouts of a non-existent metaphysical construct seems like a distraction.

Hepburn expresses a revealing thought in the following sentence:

Death is placed in a context not only of eternity but of community.

The part about community is unproblematic, but the context of eternity – is that a good thing? Or might stretching out the timeline in fact erode our ability to care because it – almost literally – leaves no time in which we can care? Pinker (ibid., p. 143) argues that people started to place a higher value on human life during the Age of Reason:

Part of this newfound appreciation was an emotional change: a habit of identifying with the pain and pleasures of others. And another part was an intellectual and moral change: a shift from valuing souls to valuing lives. The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infinitesimal fraction of their existence. Death is a mere rite of passage... The 17th century is called the Age of Reason, an age when writers began to insist that beliefs be justified by experience and logic. That undermines dogmas about souls and salvation...

The Age of Reason began four centuries ago. Should someone tell the pope?