The Serpent and the Tower: My Follow-Up Essay to A Religion For A New Age
by
John J. Dunphy
Author’s note: I’m now going to share a secret with you. I won The Humanist magazine’s North American Essay Contest twice. That’s right. “A Religion For A New Age” won third place in the first contest and my entry “The Serpent and the Tower” won third place in the second contest. The reason you’re familiar with my first essay but not my second is because “A Religion For A New Age” was published in The Humanist in its inflammatory entirety, while only an innocuous excerpt of “The Serpent and the Tower” appeared in that fine magazine.
Find a copy of the March-April 1984 issue and you’ll find me listed as a third-place winner on page 8. Go to page 29 and you can read this excerpt from my winning essay.
How wonderful the world might be if only we gave to each other all the love we claim to give to God. Such a world can be ours, dear friends. Let us work together to achieve it.
Kinda makes one feel all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn’t it? Oh, it’s an excerpt from “The Serpent and the Tower,” all right. More specifically, it’s a condensed version of the essay’s final paragraph. But is it genuinely representative of the essay’s tone and subject matter? Read “The Serpent and the Tower” in its entirety and decide for yourselves.
After contacting Lloyd Morain, who edited The Humanist, to make sure he had no intention of publishing “The Serpent and the Tower” at some later date, I began to search for a market for what I regarded as a literary orphan: a work that had been briefly honored and then consigned to obscurity. Obviously, markets for a work such as this were few and far between
I discovered The American Rationalist while ordering books and pamphlets from The American Rationalist Book Service — often referred to as Book Service — AR — shortened to ARdive, Perhaps I ordered some books from The American Rationalist Book Service, which was located just across the river from me in St. Louis. In any event, I mailed a hard copy manuscript of “The Serpent and the Tower” to Gordon Stein, editor of The American Rationalist, who readily accepted it for publication. The essay appeared in the March-April 1985 issue.
The American Rationalist was a much more modest periodical than The Humanist: just 16 pages, and that’s including the front and read covers. It sold for just $1. Still, it gave a home to my orphaned work and for that I’ll always be grateful. Still, it was undeniably a rough cut periodical. I corrected several typos while keyboarding the essay into this manuscript. The most amusing typo transformed Paul of Tarsus into Paul of Taurus, which is the Latin word for “bull.”
Reviewing the authors I cite in “The Serpent and the Tower” was an interesting experience. I cited Plato remarking I in the dialogue Sisyphus, “He was a wise man who invented God, unaware at the time that scholars acknowledge that Sisyphus is a spurious work. Damn! And I so loved that quotation.
Rereading “Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr,” which is sometimes published in English under the title “Saint Manual Bueno, Martyr,”for the first time in decades made me appreciate this short story all the more. Word-count restrictions prevented me from extensively quoting Unamuno’s story as much as I would have liked. As you’ll recall, the story revolves around the parish priest in a small Spanish village whose loss of faith causes him to see life as meaningless. Yet, he continues to feign belief so that the villagers he serves so diligently can cling to their Catholic faith, which he regards as necessary to insulate them against the meaningless of a life without God or the hope of personal immortality.
In this excerpt, Don Manual is talking with Lázaro, who returned to the village after living in the New World, where he acquired the kind of liberal notions that the priest sees as a danger to the villagers’ simple faith. Lázaro is trying to determine what this priest, so loved and revered by the people he serves, really believes.
“But, Don Manual, the truth, the truth above all, and he, trembling, whispered to me, in spite of the fact that we were alone, in the middle of the fields: ‘The truth? The truth, Lázaro, is something so terrible, so unbearable, so deadly, that perhaps simple people could not live with it.’ ”
When Lázaro asks why Don Manual has admitted his atheism to him “as though in the confessional,” the priest admits, “Because if I didn’t, it would torment me so much, so much that I would finally shout it in the middle of the square, and that never, never, never. I am here to make the souls of my faithful live, to make them happy, to make them dream they are immortal, and not to destroy them.” As you know either from reading the story or my summation of it in “The Serpent and the Tower,” this tormented priest takes his secret atheism with him to the grave.
Upon discovering this masterpiece of short fiction at a very young age, I admired Don Manuel for his compassion for the villagers. He clearly desires nothing for himself and wants only to ensure the continued happiness of his people. Still, I disagreed with his conclusion that losing their faith would plunge the villagers who comprised his congregation into despair. As I put it in my essay, “Rather than producing a feeling of despair, the decision to embrace atheism should result in an exhilirating (sic), almost intoxicating sense of freedom, something akin to the experience of those American slaves who rejoiced upon hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.”
Well, in the first place, relatively few slaves rejoiced on January 1,1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Oh, free blacks living in the North such as the celebrated abolitionist-author Frederick Douglass indeed celebrated because they recognized the proclamation as a first step toward the eventual abolition of slavery. But it was only a first step.
The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves living in states that had rebelled against the Union, however. Slaves in the border states such as Kentucky and Missouri, which had remained in the Union, remained in bondage. Slaves in the Confederate states didn’t rejoice, either. Their Rebel masters didn’t recognize the legitimacy of Lincoln’s proclamation and kept their captives. Any number of slaves in the Confederacy liberated themselves by running away from plantations and sought refuge with the invading Union armies. Slavery wasn’t eradicated in the United States until Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 and it was ratified by the necessary number of states later that year.
Does rejecting belief in a personal god and personal immortality lead to “an exhilirating (sic), almost intoxicating sense of freedom”? For some, yes. For others, not so much. The loss of belief in a deity that loves them and takes a personal, benevolent interest in their lives can be a devastating loss for some people. It wasn’t for me, however. Even as a Catholic child who always attended Mass on Sundays and holy days, I never felt particularly loved by the God in whom I devoutly believed. The deity always left me high and dry in times of distress. And there was plenty of distress in my life, both at home and Catholic school.
Believing in a particular religion doesn’t ensure saintly behavior. I knew that when writing “The Serpent and the Tower” and “A Religion For A New Age.” My negative experiences in Catholicism as well as my study of the history of religion led me to believe that rejecting theism typically led to an improvement in one’s morals and behavior. As I wrote in “The Serpent and the Tower,”
Ignorance, bigotry and persecution — the three most notorious stepchildren of all religion — would gradually vanish in an atheist civilization like noxious weeds plucked from the ground and allowed to wither and die in the noonday sun.
I believed that in 1983. Today, however, I know it takes a great deal more than ridding people of archaic, destructive notions to make them treat other people with kindness and respect. If people who lack religion also lack compassion and empathy, I would advise you to keep them at arm’s length. Becoming an atheist or agnostic doesn’t make one a saint any more than being a theist makes one a monster. I don’t care how many of us eventually reject supernaturalism. There’s no utopia just around the corner. I’ll soon be 65 as I keyboard these words into being and now believe the only thing around the corner is another sidewalk. .
Some people should remain theists. I’ve lost count how many times over the years I’ve heard someone claim that humans need religion to keep them in line. Without God and the threat of hell, they maintain, we would just run amok: murdering, raping and pillaging with gleeful abandon. They don’t realize, of course, that by making such an assertion, they’re revealing a chilling character flaw in themselves. Let me ask you this: if religion keeps such persons in check, are you really doing them or society a favor by destroying their religious faith? Let sleeping dogs lie.
I quote Joe Hill’s song “The Preacher and the Slave, which depicts a Christian minister admonishing hungry, exploited workers:
Work and Pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
Many a Christian minister in Hill’s day — he was executed in 1915 on a trumped-up murder charge — indeed carried this disgusting message to workers. And one can still hear it today from fundamentalist and evangelical ministers and laity. In all fairness, however, we should remember the clergy of Hill’s day who promoted the Social Gospel. Ministers such as Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch worked to alleviate the suffering of the poor and supported the right of workers to form unions. Closer to our own day, Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador championed the poor and fought political oppression by the government. Romero was murdered for his activism.
I worked for years with a Habitat for Humanity, which is a Christian organization. We built houses for the underprivileged rather than advising them to resign themselves to living in shacks and wait for good housing in heaven. It’s unfair to imply that all Christians are like the ones satirized by Hill in his song and me in “The Serpent and the Tower.” One can be a Christian and care deeply about other people. When I wrote “A Religion For A New Age” and “The Serpent and the Power” I didn’t know that. Now, I do.
Here’s the essay.
The Serpent and the Tower
by
John J. Dunphy
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
– Seneca
To hate [hu]man[kind] and worship God seems to be the sum of all creeds.
– Robert G. Ingersoll
I have never understood why so many humanists adamantly refuse to read the Bible. The opus which Billy Graham once called “a book written by God through thirty secretaries” has always been a source of unending fascination for me and its critical study continues to occupy a significant portion of my time.
Undoubtedly, two of the most intriguing passages of the entire Bible are the account of the serpent persuading Eve to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3) and the fabled Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). The serpent, widely employed as a symbol of wisdom and power in the mythologies of many cultures, is cast here in an almost Promethean role as it counsels the first woman to disregard her Creator’s command and eat the forbidden fruit. Through this crucial act of disobedience, it admonishes her, she and her mate will attain a distinct measure of equality with their Lord, since the acquisition of such knowledge will make them “as gods” (Genesis 3:5).
The construction of a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven” (Genesis 11:4) represents yet another attempt by humankind to become “as gods” with similarly disastrous results. A truly global myth found in civilizations as distant and divergent as Africa and Mexico, God is portrayed as feeling threatened by humankind’s efforts to achieve a sort of parity with its Creator. The undertaking is eventually thwarted by having its previously-unilingual builders begin speaking in strange languages (“babble”) and unable to communicate with each other. Apparently thinking aloud, the Deity is convinced of the necessity of halting the tower’s construction as he muses that, with one language, “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Genesis 11:16).
Both tales serve to illustrate one of the most crucial facets of Judeo-Christian thought, a theme which recurs repeatedly throughout the Bible, the writings of the early Church Fathers and the speculation of a considerable number of contemporary Christian theologians. Any attempt by humankind to liberate itself from the benevolent despotism of God and establish itself in some exalted, hitherto-thought unattainable position (to make itself “as gods”) is inherently doomed to failure. Humankind, according to this perspective, is by its very nature a weak, vacillating species which must remain bound to God in slavish subjugation, deriving the sheer meaning of its existence from its Creator in much the same manner that a small parasite draws its sustenance from a host organism. Any attempt to shatter the fetters which shackle it to the Deity can only result in disaster, as in expulsion from Eden or the confusion of tongues while building the Tower.
“He as a wise man who originated the idea of God,” Euripedes wrote, a beleif later even more candidly in Plato’s Sisyphus as “He was a wise man who invented God.” The supposed existence of a Supreme Being who takes a vital interest and active role in the affairs of mortals, it is thought, is absolutely necessary to provide meaning in the lives of humankind. Conversely, the knowledge that the universe is nothing more than matter in motion in which humankind has neither “a friend behind phenomena” nor the promise of personal immorality beyond the grave is thought to be so utterly horrible that its realization would crush us like ants beneath the heel of a boot.
Although something of a skeptic in matters of religious orthodoxy, Francis Bacon certainly subscribed to this theory. “I had rather believe,” he wrote, “all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.” Bacon was clearly willing to subordinate his personal misgivings about the validity of Christianity in light of the alleged disastrous consequences for humankind in total disbelief. “They that destroy God destroy man’s nobility,” he thought, echoing the prevalent notion that the dignity of humankind must remain inexorably linked with the continued recognition of the existence of some kind of Supreme Being, a theory by no means abandoned even today.
Immanuel Kant, after having demolished the traditional proofs of God’s existence in his Critique of Pure Reason, devoted the Critique of Practical Reason to arguing for a religion based on the heart instead of the head, in which God and immortality were proved by one’s feelings rather than any scientific or philosophical demonstration. Kant, like Bacon, apparently believed that the overwhelming majority of humankind would be unable to cope with the excruciating agony of discovering themselves to be alone in the universe, requiring the solace of believing in God to anesthetize themselves against the pain of living.
In his masterpiece Reason in Religion, George Santayana stressed that it was precisely the irrational element within the Christian religion which lent meaning and beauty to our lives, enabling us to face the emptiness and sheer drudgery of our everyday existence. The modern skeptic, he concluded, while regarding Christianity with a jaundiced eye and entertaining no hope of personal immortality, should not attempt to destroy the lovely myths of the Christian religion which render such comfort to the masses. Indeed, he thought, one might even envy their simple credulity. Santayana warmly praised the Catholic Church in which he had been raised for its preservation of saints’ legends and the cult of the Virgin Mary, a rich and varied poetic legacy which he regarded as infinitely preferable to the cold, barren theological austerity of Protestantism.
Perhaps the notion that belief in God provides the healing balm which enables humankind better to endure the outrages of this world has never been more succinctly not movingly depicted than in Miguel de Unamuno’s superb short story Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr. The protagonist, the parish priest in a small Spanish village, has long since lost his faith in God or any sort of personal immortality, yet he continues to feign belief for the sake of his simple parishioners. His atheism must remain locked away in his heart, he feels, for such terrible knowledge would destroy their childlike happiness and bucolic naivete. Accordingly, he even persuades a fellow atheist to join him in this devout charade for the benefit of his tiny flock.
“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?,” he cries heartrendingly during the annual Good Friday service. His God has indeed forsaken him, a secret he successfully takes with him to the grave. A short time after his death, this gentle, melancholy priest, who repressed his atheism out of love for humanity, suffers the ultimate indignity of being nominated for beautification as a paradigm of Christian faith!
But what of the questions raised by these philosophers and writers? Is belief in God intrinsically necessary to provide some semblance of meaning to the all-too-brief drama in which we have been cast? Must we have the promise of personal immorality so that we might bear our trials and tribulations without crumbling beneath their weight? Would life with out God be, as Dostoevski has Kirillov suggest in The Possessed, a “vaudeville of devils”?
I steadfastly maintain that only with the complete and irrevocable rejection of God and the supernatural will humankind truly begin to live. Rather than producing a feeling of despair, the decision to embrace atheism should result in an exhilarating, almost intoxicating sense of freedom, something akin to the experience of the American slaves who rejoiced upon hearing news of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Only the atheist is truly free.
“How many evils have flowed from religion?” Lucretius asked in De Rerum Natura. Even the most cursory examination of history as well as today’s headlines demand that we answer with an emphatic “Far too many!” Moorhead Kennedy, one of the American hostages held in Iran by Khomeini’s brand of Islamic fanaticism and now executive director of New York’s Council for International Understanding, has frankly identified religion as an underlying element behind much of the world’s bloodshed. Anyone naive enough to believe that religious wars are a thing of the past should consider the conflict between Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia, the southern Philippines and — of course — Lebanon. Muslims slaughter Muslims in the Iran-Iraq War, while Protestants and Catholics in Ulster have virtually enshrined violence over the centuries until it is now something of a cherished tradition. The Buddhist majority and Hindu minority in Sri Lanka regularly battle in what has been described as “communal warfare,” while Hindu and Muslim groups clash in neighboring India. It is hardly worth the effort to note the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has resulted in five major wars, tens of thousands of casualties and strained international relations between the superpowers.
The history of religion, then, can only be described as having been written in blood. Indeed, it is still being written in blood at at least a dozen spots around the world. And hypocritical religionists have the incredible audacity to accuse freethinkers of trying to plunge the world into a holocaust born of godless despair because they question the value of religion! Ignorance, bigotry and persecution — the three most notorious stepchildren of all religion — would gradually vanish in an atheist civilization like noxious weeds plucked from the ground and allowed to wither and die in the noonday sun. Such a prospect hardly comprises the dreadful, terrifying specter of a “godless world” so often employed as an apocalyptic boogeyman by Christian theologians.
The concept of a Supreme Being who childishly demands to be constantly placated by prayers and sacrifice and dispenses justice like some corrupt petty judge whose decisions may be swayed by a bit of well-timed flattery should be relegated to the trash bin of history, along with the belief in a flat earth and the notion that diseases are caused by demonic possession. Ironically, the case for the involuntary retirement of God may have been stated best by one Saul or Paul of Tarsus, a first-century tentmaker and Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, who wrote: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (I Corinthians 13:11). Those words are no less relevant today that they were some two thousand years ago.
Joe Hill, the famous Wobbly martyr, wrote a parody of the hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” in which he had ministers, who were apologists for the status quo, assure hungry, exploited workers:
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.
This bit of satire neatly summarizes the traditional Christian attitude toward the ills of this world. But we uncompromisingly demand justice here and now, not in some imaginary never-never land beyond the grave. Let our immortality be the work we have done toward building a humane, compassionate world in which war, poverty, sexism, racism and the myriad other problems that have troubled humankind since the dawn of history have been eradicated. If we desire an immortality which is a bit more “personal,” we may will our eyes, heart, kidneys and whatever bodily organs that can be salvaged to others and so share in further triumphs of humanity in such a literal sense as even the most ardent Christian might envy.
How wonderful the world might be if only we gave to each other all the love we claim to give to God, a thought which has been expressed time and time again. Yet, it still manages to resound with a poignance that is almost painful. Such a world can be ours, sisters and brothers. Let us work together to achieve it.
_____________________________
Someday I intend to publish a book that features all my articles and columns that deal with religion and humanism. I’ll turn 67 on 12/8, so I’d better start working on it soon.