Holy Terror

Let’s begin with a proposition so benign it could be chiselled into a gluten-free communion wafer: religion, properly construed, is an attempt to answer the Big Questions™ — questions so ineffable and poorly defined that they can’t be tweeted or reduced to a TED Talk without some fairly egregious ontological laundering.¹

And yet: religion, as lived and embodied and shouted from the rooftops or strapped to a vest and detonated in a bus station, is often less about the divine and more about the divinely sanctioned punching of faces. Which is odd.

Because when you read, say, the actual purported words of these foundational desert prophets and sandal-wearing enlightenment brokers — Jesus of Nazareth, the Buddha, Muhammad, Laozi, Moses, Baháʼuʼllá, etc. — what you mostly get is a kind of metaphysical chill-pill: humility, compassion, don’t-be-a-dick-ness.²

So how is it that the doctrines of Love Thy Neighbour metastasize so reliably into Just Bomb the Village, It’s Probably Full of Heretics Anyway? Do Unto Them as They Did Unto Us (or would if given half a chance). THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE WHICHEVER ONE I HAPPEN TO BELIEVE IN BECAUSE ALL THE OTHERS ARE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS.

Here’s the thing about religion: at its best, it’s a poetic operating system for the messy data of existence.³ It teaches that suffering is universal, love is redemptive and that somewhere, somehow, all this incomprehensible nonsense — wonky knees, dying dogs, existential dread during dental appointments — means something.

To the earnest believer (who is not the target of this essay, please note, earnest believers), this is a lifeline: not a delusion, but a deep structure, an organizing metaphor, like narrative itself. We are meaning-making machines, and religion is the Costco-sized bucket of meaning mix.

And yet. YET. (This is where the instrumental part of “Abide With Me” kicks in, so please wait to be seated.)

Show me a scripture, any scripture, and I’ll show you a man with a beard and a microphone (or an immaculately shaved man with a detective sergeant haircut from 1955 and a microphone) screaming that the scripture definitely says what he thinks it says, and if you don’t agree, well, there’s a flaming pit and/or a Kalashnikov in your future. (Clap hands here if you believe in fairies.)

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the sheer aesthetic audacity of it. We have:

• A God of infinite compassion

  
  

• Who has a disturbingly specific interest in what we do with our genitals

  
  

• And who, despite being omniscient and omnipotent, seems to require a great deal of defending by people who can’t even successfully operate a group chat.

  
  

Fanatical religion is the metaphysical equivalent of screaming at someone in traffic that they’re going to hell because they merged without signalling. The fanatics have taken what was meant to be a lens — a way of seeing the sacred in the profane — and forged it into a very sharp stick with which to poke out the eyes of the infidels (read: everyone else). Especially those who take a different tack on some obscure doctrinal point that the God they both claim to revere couldn’t possibly care about unless the self-same Supreme Being is as petty and narrow-minded and stupid as they are.

The paradox is this: the more certain a person is of their eternal reward, the more likely they are to commit acts that are, shall we say, unrewardable on Earth. Genocide, honour killings, female genital mutilation, state-sponsored stonings, comically titled Truth Social outbursts by the Leader of the Free World referring to political foes as “the party of hate, evil, and Satan” — the body count piles up.

But what’s perhaps most perversely hilarious (in the bleak, Kafka-goes-to-Vegas sense) is how utterly boring the fanatics make the whole thing. The ineffable turned into the doctrinaire. The cosmic collapsed into bureaucracy. Imagine taking the thunderous mystery of creation and reducing it to a PowerPoint on appropriate hemlines.⁴

There’s a bit in David Foster Wallace’s writing (and yes, this is me quoting Wallace in a Wallace-style pastiche — how meta, how gauche, how inevitable) where he talks about worship. “Everybody worships,” he says, “the only choice we get is what to worship.”⁵

Maybe the object of that veneration is God. Maybe it’s Nature, with a capital N à la Spinoza. Maybe it’s wealth, à la Fox News. (Time to unleash my favourite Mark Twain quote from Innocents Abroad: “Virtue has never been as respectable as money.”)

The irony, the big guffaw from the universe here, is that zealous religionists — the swaggering, blustering, overbearing fanatics —  always think they’ve chosen God, but what they’ve really chosen is certainty. They’re junkies for epistemic closure. Which is not the same as faith. Faith, real faith, requires doubt like a fire requires oxygen. Certainty kills it. That’s the whole frigging point. FAITH IS NOT KNOWLEDGE.

In short: the worst people in every religion — the ones who really don’t get it but are full of passionate intensity while the best lack all conviction — are the ones most convinced they’re the champions of every religion. Crusaders. Defenders of the faith.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, the divine — whatever you want to call it: God, Source, Love, Pattern, Whateverness — waits patiently while humans screw it up. It must be like watching toddlers use Caravaggio’s painting “The Incredulity of Saint Thomas” to mop up applesauce.

And still, people will tell you, eyes glowing with the special light of the recently radicalized, that God wants them to do this — this meaning ban the book, or blow up the temple, or strap up the suicide vest, or defund the arts curriculum.

We are a species that builds mosques and synagogues and cathedrals and temples to remind ourselves we’re not the centre of the universe — and then immediately declares holy war on anyone who doesn’t agree with the way we positioned the pews.

So yes: religion is beautiful. It is poetry and longing and ritual and soup kitchens. It is candlelight and awe and tears in the right kind of silence. It is mothers in veils and monks in mountains and people who pray quietly for their enemies and then go feed stray cats.

But it is also, far too often, a Molotov cocktail with a scripture verse duct-taped to the bottle. The people who dislike music, jokes and pleasure — the curse of every faith community — properly belong in Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Snow Queen,” with its splinters of magic mirror that enter people’s bloodstreams and turn their hearts to ice and their brains to Fudgicles.

And the worst part (as we endeavour to go placidly among the noise and the haste)? God — whatever you conceive Him, Her or It to be (or not) — has to be just as confused as the rest of us. Omniscience and omnipotence will take One only so far.

FOOTNOTES:

1. The Big Questions™ include: What happens when we die? Why is there suffering? Is there a plan? Can anyone remember who shot J.R.? Was it Lyle Waggoner? Etc.

   
   

2. With the notable exception of some Old Testament and Qur’an passages that read like Quentin Tarantino tried his hand at ancient legislation. (Please don’t kill me for observing this ... although, if you do, it would add some heft to my argument. Also, Tarantino has asked that you tip him off in advance in case he’s interested in filming it.)

   
   

3. Like Linux, but with more incense.

   
   

4. “Thou shalt not mix polyester with wool” is a real biblical commandment. Somewhere in the universe, a divinity who allegedly created quasars and photosynthesis is apparently deeply concerned about your wardrobe choices (as well as turning those who look back out of compassion for others into pillars of salt.)

   
   

5. This Is Water, 2005. Still makes post-structuralists cry into their oat milk.