Then How Come...?

 Last night, an ad played for fifteen seconds at the start of a YouTube video—and I'm still kicking myself for letting it play to the end. I was effectively suckered in. Goddammit, their tricks worked on me. 

The ad consisted of a series of wholesome images and awe-inspiring scenes, set to the sounds of a child's voice asking some very valid questions: "Why are we here?" "Is someone punishing us?" 

What did we do to deserve this, in short. 

Things any of us would have good reason to ask our maker. (As John Dolan puts it in a book of essays on the civil war, "everybody’s got their own 'If God’s so nice, then how come...' to fill in.")

That second question should have been a tip-off to me, though. It even did slightly tip me off. And yet I did not click away. My curiosity was aroused. 

And then, in the final seconds, the inevitable bathos arrived. "Jesus welcomes doubt," it says. 

The whole thing was a paid ad for religion. And an unspeakably manipulative and deceptive one—like so much Christian propaganda down through the ages. 

There is no evidence, of course, that the actual Jesus in any way "welcomed doubt." 

Anyone who's read the Gospels will know he was a born totalitarian, who likened unbelievers within his ranks to diseased limbs that need to be hacked off. 

And his Church has been a natural home ever since for little fascists and sadists who are equally intolerant of any disagreement–from Augustine of Hippo up to the present. 

No, Christianity as a religion has nothing to do with doubt. It has everything to do with "faith"—as any true believer could tell you. 

So why assert otherwise? Why lie? Obviously—the bid is to reach the suffering secularist. The ad is pitched toward the atheist who finds themselves in a moment of despair and anguish, and wants answers. 

The ad aims to convert such people by giving voice to all of the obvious objections to the Christian religion—all the questions that remain unanswered, because they cannot be answered: 

"If God's so nice, then how come..." as Dolan put it. And fill in the rest with your pick of human miseries. 

And by voicing all these questions itself, the ad proposes to somehow disarm them. It says: it's okay to have these doubts; Jesus is still here for you. 

It's an advertising technique that Roland Barthes analyzed in his essay "Operation Astra," and which has been used to sell everything from bubble gum to military service to the Roman Catholic Church. 

He calls it the "truth vaccine." What you do is you add in a little acknowledgement of the terrible truth about something—"the military, this product, this Church is absurd. It's stupid. It's stultifying. It's awful." 

But then comes the twist—"you should still join anyway. It's okay to join, even knowing all of this." (Barthes cites a play by Graham Greene as a particularly skillful example of this technique for purposes of RC propaganda).  

And so, the small dose of truth has neutralized the big truth. We're ready to sign away our souls. We've been convinced and converted. 

"There we are, rid of a prejudice that used to cost us dear, too dear, that used to cost us too many scruples, too many rebellions, too many battles, and too much solitude." (Howard trans.)

Notice that at no point does this type of brainwashing directly address any of the objections. Because they cannot be addressed. There is no way to make sense of the contradictions of Christianity. 

But by acknowledging all these objections, it projects a false confidence. The unwary will be led to think, "Huh, well—maybe Christianity does actually have answers to all this stuff? If they can admit all the doubts without fear, then maybe..."

I felt particularly manipulated by this cheating technique, because it reached me in my own moment of agony (as it doubtless was designed to do).

But I will not be fooled by an intellectual position to which it is simply impossible to retreat. Not even when—perhaps especially not when—a family member is dying of cancer. 

As B.S. Johnson wrote in The Unfortunates, about his friend's agonizing death from that same disease—upon hearing that a vicar had tried to intrude on his friend in such a moment: 

"I remembered Byron dying in Missolonghi, saying he would have no weakness now, not give in to the blandishments of religion, no Pascal's wager for him, no, he said to Trelawney, something like that, I do not remember the exact words [...]

"And I was not going to allow Tony to back out now, it would be a negation of everything he stood for, I thought, for which I stood, too, I could not allow that, it upset me, this I certainly could not understand, stand."

Upon hearing which the makers of that ad would come to me and B.S. Johnson, no doubt—with outstretched hands and a watery smile—saying "ah, dear child, we understand, Jesus still loves you." 

Christ! I'd prefer it if they didn't hide the ball in this way. The ads on the highway I see on every cross-country roadtrip, warning "Hell is real," land better. 

To such signs as these, Thomas Hardy wrote, one could at least shrug with a certain forbearance—taking them as merely "the last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time."

At least there is no deception there. At least there is no manipulation or "truth vaccine." The appeal is just to straightforward terror of divine punishment. The spiritual terrorism is out in the open, undisguised. 

What's far more insufferable is the attempt to modernize without actually changing the hard core of vindictiveness and evil at the heart of orthodox theology. 

The spiritual terrorism is still there, after all, even with the people with the watery smiles. It's just hidden, like a poignard. 

It's only once you're through the door that they let its blade catch the light. 

Unless they are willing to say: actually, we believe in universal salvation. But they won't. Even their "loving" Jesus will somehow have a hell. They will just tell you that it is somehow a metaphor now. That it has been in some way spiritualized. 

"Hell just means distance from God," they'll tell you. 

If all things are possible to God, why do so many of his own creatures end up so distant from him, then? 

"Free will," they will reply. 

To which I say: why create the conditions in which our exercise of free will led to this result? God made the rules. He rigged the game. He gave us a will to sin, if we have one (Behold, thou hast moulded my desires / Even as thou hast moulded the apple—to quote Stephen Crane.)

To which they say: "Repent now, before it's too late"—the poignard starting to show. 

To which I will say, I will worship no concentration camp warden, however spiritualized you try to make his medieval prison. 

If there is a God, as Byron once put it in a letter (see Rowse's The Byrons and Trevanians), he could not believe "He ever made anything to be tortured in another life, whatever it may be in this." 

Byron knew that this was heresy. "I know," he writes in the Vision of Judgment, "one may be damned / For hoping no one else may e'er be so." 

His point being: So be it then. To hell we will go, as Mill said. 

I refuse to join those who, as Koestler witheringly and immortally put it, "approve of the idea that ninety per cent of their contemporaries are designated for an eternal super-Auschwitz by their loving Father in Heaven."

A religion joined through fear is unworthy of the name. 

As George Santayana once wrote of Pascal's famous wager—which Johnson mentioned above: "There is no heaven to be won in such a spirit, and if there was, a philosopher would despise it."

He went on: 

Or if the argument is rather that these beliefs, whether true or false, make life better in this world, the thing is simply false. To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth; it is not nearly so safe, not nearly so sweet, and not nearly so fruitful. These refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind. Believe, certainly; we cannot help believing; but believe rationally, holding what seems certain for certain, what seems probable for probable, what seems desirable for desirable, and what seems false for false.