We saw in the last letter an argument that atheism is not really a viable option for us. But you ask what is a real alternative for us? Look at the Church and all the crimes committed in its name. Look at the behavior of priests and bishops and, you, and many others, have wondered how they can have come to these lofty positions.

And again, there is the violence and death that are ubiquitous throughout creation. The world around us is filled with terrible and frightening events, some of which are due to human malevolence whereas others are due to the unpredictable behavior of nature. How do we deal with that you ask?

The point that I was trying to make in the previous letter is to soberly see where the idea that materialism is all that there is, leads us. We refuse to do that because it leads straight to unending despair with no way out. Even our cherished sacred cows such as science cannot save us from this predicament because, as one once said, physics cannot explain physics. The basis for rationality and morality and meaning lies in transcendence and not in mechanistic attempts at ‘explanations’.

Scientism paraphrases the sublime first chapter of John’s Gospel into the following: In the beginning was the number and the number was with god and the number was god. We live in the so-called digital age and feel as if this has been a wonderful achievement made by humanity. We feel that this will answer all of the important questions that we have ever faced. And it is true that much has changed in our world, and some of it has been for the better, but we must not make an idol of this technology as if it is the answer to the deepest questions that haunt humanity. It most assuredly is not going to address and answer mankind’s deepest longings.

The only answer that there is to the deep longings of humanity lies in a connection with transcendence. And you claim, as many others have, not unjustifiably, that there are serious faults in the Church and how can we simply ignore them and not take them under consideration.

The example that is brought forward is that of the Inquisition and the fact that the Church condoned putting to death those who dared to disagree with the teachings of the Church. From my readings on this matter, somewhere around 3,500 people are said to have been killed, sometimes with accompanying torture. This is a horrendous fact but it pales into insignificance when we consider how many people were killed through the actions of atheistic communism and Nazism – the number here is easily in many millions. And yet, this point is just elided over and not mentioned with a connection to atheism and materialism. But my point isn’t to get into some kind of statistical argument – even one human death is horrendous.

There is something else that I want to draw your attention to. Yes, there are terrible crimes committed by the Church within history but these crimes fall under the judgement of the teachings of the Church. In other words, the Church has an inbuilt correction, a measure against which all actions can be evaluated. It is the Church that eventually judges these acts against humanity and condemns them whereas political systems do not have this corrective available to them unless it is parasitically accepted from faith. This is what makes a huge difference in evaluating the wrongs the Church has committed as opposed to those of atheistic regimes.

We come back to the point that we have made before and which is something that is often just forgotten. Society on its own has no basis for determining what is right and what is wrong other than the spirit of the age. And we are now living at the beginning of a civilization that is rapidly losing its moral compass, something that Nietzsche presciently predicted in the nineteenth century.

I will again raise the point that I have made in the past. Christians, properly speaking are not believers in religion per se. They were often accused by Roman authorities of being atheists. Rather, they believed in Jesus Christ who was condemned to death by Pilate, and this Christ was executed and rose again to an unending life. This, in a nutshell, is what Christians believe. And they give their total allegiance to this Jesus Christ who is seen as the ruler of all of creation. Christians do not deny that religions can bring with them violence, superstitious beliefs, falsehoods and chains of enslavement for humanity. Religions are merely a natural expression for fallen man’s longing for the transcendent. For Christians, the central and crucial question is – does Jesus Christ warrant allegiance and loyalty from his followers, and the answer they have given over many centuries is a resounding yes.

Christianity is the only major faith built entirely around a single historical claim. It is the report of men and women who have suffered a devastating loss of their beloved master but who, in a very short time – three days – were testifying to his living presence and interaction with them to which they responded with willingness to suffer privation, persecution, imprisonment, and, in many cases, death. And through this, these witnesses testified to the fact that the human will could be transformed from an engine of cruelty and selfishness and thirst for power, into something that held as its highest value charity for others and for the created order.

With Christianity came something new into the world – a vision of the good that had no precedence in history, a creed that described charity as a religious obligation, a story of the unfathomable love of the master of the universe who loves the lowliest in creation as if they were of unparalleled value. Now all of this sounds hard to accept and believe and this is understandable because there was no magical, instantaneous, complete and irreversible transformation of people and society. But there were those who lived and practised these ideals and they still do so today. Even a critic of Christianity, Emperor Julian, commented: It is a disgrace that these impious Galilaeans care not only for their own poor but ours as well.

There are so many anti-Christian myths that have arisen that it is sometimes hard to grasp what was the real state of affairs in the past. Let me just go through a few very quickly and maybe some time in the future we can consider them more extensively.

The point is often raised that Galileo was persecuted by the Church in an effort to keep his ideas from spreading. The truth of the matter is that there were sound scientific reasons for challenging Galileo’s position. Just one example will show that he was criticized more for his scientific failings than for his opposition to the teachings of the Church. Galileo attempted to explain the existence of tides in the ocean as resulting from the rotation of the earth. This was entirely inconsistent with observable tidal sequences, but Galileo elected to propound a theory whose truth he had not demonstrated while, at the same time, he needlessly mocked a powerful man who had treated Galileo with respect – pope Urban VIII. Galileo’s science, and ego, stood in judgement on him and not his supposed argument with the Catholic Church.

There are other bềte-noires that are often brought up in criticizing the Catholic Church. I will limit myself to only a few comments, although much more could be written. It is often said that people living in the Dark Ages were credulous and would accept unquestionably any tale told them. It is claimed that people believed that witches existed and had unusual magical powers. This may have been true for some but we have evidence that the situation was not quite as simple and clear as we sometimes assume. Thus, we have the Synod of St. Patrick in the fifth century anathematizing anyone who believed in the existence of witches with real magical powers.

The Spanish Inquisition was brought in under the pressure of Spanish secular power so as to consolidate the state – it was not something that the Church demanded. It was ironic that, as historian Rodney Stark writes, the first significant objections to the reality of satanic witchcraft came from Spanish inquisitors, and not from scientists of the day. History shows that as the power of the secular state increases, so does the violence that the state exercises, reaching it epitome in the twentieth century. And the Church is implicated in violence to the extent that it comes under the aegis of the secular state.

It is often said that the theological arguments in the early history of the Church have little to benefit us but, as we will see in the next letter, this is not the case. There was indeed a heated argument about theological points such as Christ’s divinity and the Trinity but these were not just some academic debates. They had a very profound impact on what Christianity is and what it teaches us about God and humanity.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas