The End of Faith (12 page)

theological state of nature. Christianity and Islam both acknowledge the sanctity of the
Old Testament and offer easy conversion to their faiths. Islam honors Abraham, Moses, and
Jesus as forerunners of Muhammad. Hinduism embraces almost anything in sight with its
manifold arms (many Hindus, for instance, consider Jesus an avatar of Vishnu). Judaism
alone finds itself surrounded by unmitigated errors. It seems little wonder, therefore,
that it has drawn so much sectarian fire. Jews, insofar as they are religious, believe
that they are bearers of a unique covenant with God. As a consequence, they have spent the
last two thousand years collaborating with those who see them as different by seeing
themselves as irretrievably so. Judaism is as intrinsically divisive, as ridiculous in its
literalism, and as at odds with the civilizing insights of modernity as any other
religion. Jewish settlers, by exercising their “freedom of belief” on contested land, are
now one of the principal obstacles to peace in the Middle East. They will be a direct
cause of war between Islam and the West should one ever erupt over the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.30

THE problem for first-century Christians was simple: they belonged to a sect of Jews that
had recognized Jesus as the messiah (Greek christos), while the majority of their coreligionists had not. Jesus was a Jew, of course, and his
mother a Jewess. His apostles, to the last man, were also Jews. There is no evidence
whatsoever, apart from the tendentious writings of the later church, that Jesus ever
conceived of himself as anything other than a Jew among Jews, seeking the ful- fillment of
Judaismand, likely, the return of Jewish sovereignty in a Roman world. As many authors
have observed, the numerous strands of Hebrew prophecy that were made to coincide with
Jesus' ministry betray the apologetics, and often poor scholarship, of the gospel writers.

The writers of Luke and Matthew, for instance, in seeking to make the life of Jesus
conform to Old Testament prophecy, insist that Mary conceived as a virgin (Greek parthenos), harking to the

Greek rendering of Isaiah 7:14. Unfortunately for fanciers of Mary's virginity, the Hebrew
word alma (for which parthenos is an erroneous translation) simply means “young woman,” without any implication of
virginity. It seems all but certain that the Christian dogma of the virgin birth, and much
of the church's resulting anxiety about sex, was the result of a mistranslation from the
Hebrew.31

Another strike against the doctrine of the virgin birth is that the other evangelists,
Mark and John, seem to know nothing about it though both appear troubled by accusations of
Jesus' illegitimacy.32 Paul apparently thinks that Jesus is the son of Joseph and Mary. He refers to Jesus as
being “born of the seed of David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3meaning Joseph was his
father), and “born of woman” (Galatians 4:4meaning that Jesus was really human), with no
reference to Mary's virginity.33

Mary's virginity has always been suggestive of God's attitude toward sex: it is
intrinsically sinful, being the mechanism through which original sin was bequeathed to the
generations after Adam. It would appear that Western civilization has endured two
millennia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because the authors of Matthew and Luke
could not read Hebrew. For the Jews, the true descendants of Jesus and the apostles, the
dogma of the virgin birth has served as a perennial justification for their persecution,
because it has been one of the principal pieces of “evidence” demonstrating the divinity
of Jesus.

We should note that the emphasis on miracles in the New Testa- ment, along with the
attempts to make the life of Jesus conform to Old Testament prophecy, reveal the first
Christians' commitment, however faltering, to making their faith seem rational. Given the obvious significance of any miracle, and the widespread acceptance of prophecy,
it would have been only reasonable to have considered these purported events to be
evidence for Christ's divinity. Augus- tine, for his part, came right out and said it: “I
should not be a Christian but for the miracles.” A millennium later, Blaise Pascal

mathematical prodigy, philosopher, and physicistwas so impressed by Christ's confirmation
of prophecy that he devoted the last years of his short life to defending Christian
doctrine in writing:

Through Jesus we know God. All those who have claimed to know God and prove his existence
without Jesus Christ have only had futile proofs to offer. But to prove Christ we have the
prophecies which are solid and palpable proofs. By being fulfilled and proved true by the
event, these prophecies show that these truths are certain and thus prove that Jesus is
divine.34

“Solid and palpable”? That so nimble a mind could be led to labor under such dogma was
surely one of the great wonders of the age.35 Even today, the apparent confirmation of prophecy detailed in the New Testament is offered
as the chief reason to accept Jesus as the messiah. The “leap of faith” is really a
fiction. No Christians, not even those of the first century, have ever been content to
rely upon it.

W H I L E God had made his covenant with Israel, and delivered his Son in the guise of a Jew, the
earliest Christians were increasingly gentile, and as the doctrine spread, the newly
baptized began to see the Jews' denial of Jesus' divinity as the consummate evil. This
sec- tarian ethos is already well established by the time of Paul:

For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ
Jesus: for ye also like things of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: Who
both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they
please not God, and are contrary to all men: Forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that
they might be saved, to fill up their sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the
uttermost. (Thes- salonians 2:14-16)

The explicit demonization of the Jews appears in the Gospel of John:

Jesus said unto them [the Jews], If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I
proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not
understand my speech? Even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the
devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and
abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he
speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the
truth, ye believe me not. (John 8:41-45)

With the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Christiansgentile and Jew alikefelt that they
were witnessing the fulfillment of prophecy, imagining that the Roman legions were meting
out God's punishment to the betrayers of Christ. Anti-Semitism soon acquired a triumphal
smugness, and with the ascension of Chris- tianity as the state religion in 312 CE, with
the conversion of Constantine, Christians began openly to relish and engineer the
degradation of world Jewry.36 Laws were passed that revoked many of the civic privileges previously granted to Jews.
Jews were excluded from the military and from holding high office and were forbidden to
proselytize or to have sexual relations with Christian women (both under penalty of
death). The Justinian Code, in the sixth century, essentially declared the legal status of
the Jews null and voidoutlawing the Mishnah (the codification of Jewish oral law) and
making disbelief in the Resurrection and the Last Judgment a capital offense.37 Augustine, ever the ready sectarian, rejoiced at the subjugation of the Jews and took
special pleasure in the knowledge that they were doomed to wander the earth bearing
witness to the truth of scripture and the salvation of the gentiles. The suffering and
servitude of the Jews was proof that Christ had been the messiah after all.38

Like witches, the Jews of Europe were often accused of incredible

crimes, the most prevalent of which has come to be known as the “blood libel”born of the
belief that Jews require the blood of Christians (generally newborn) for use in a variety
of rituals. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews were regularly accused of mur- dering
Christian infants, a crime for which they were duly despised. It was well known that all
Jews menstruated, male and female alike, and required the blood of a Christian to
replenish their lost stores. They also suffered from terrible hemorrhoids and oozing sores
as a punishment for the murder of Christand as a retort to their improbable boast before
the “innocent” Pontius Pilate (Matthew 27:25), “His blood be on us and on our children.”
It should come as no surprise that Jews were in the habit of applying Christian blood as a
salve upon these indignities. Christian blood was also said to ease the labor pains of any
Jewess fortunate enough to have it spread upon pieces of parchment and placed into her
clenched fists. It was common knowledge, too, that all Jews were born blind and that, when
smeared upon their eyes, Christian blood granted them the faculty of sight. Jewish boys
were frequently born with their fingers attached to their foreheads, and only the blood of
a Chris- tian could allow this pensive gesture to be broken without risk to the child.

Once born, a Jew's desire for Christian blood could scarcely be slaked. During the rite of
circumcision it took the place of conse- crated oil (crissam, an exclusively Christian commodity); and later in life, Jewish children of both sexes had
their genitalia smeared with the blood of some poor, pious manwaylaid upon the road and
strangled in a ditchto make them fertile. Medieval Christians believed that Jews used
their blood for everything from a rouge to a love philter and as a prophylactic against
leprosy. Given this state of affairs, who could doubt that Jews of all ages would be fond
of suck- ing blood out of Christian children “with quills and small reeds,” for later use
by their elders during wedding feasts? Finally, with a mind to covering all their bases,
Jews smeared their dying brethren with the blood of an innocent Christian babe (recently
baptized and then

suffocated), saying, “If the Messiah promised by the prophets has really come, and he be
Jesus, may this innocent blood ensure for you eternal life!”39

The blood libel totters on shoulders of other giant misconcep- tions, of course,
especially the notion, widely accepted at the time, that the various constituents of the
human body possess magical and medicinal power. This explains the acceptance of similar
accusations leveled at witches, such as the belief that candles made from human fat could
render a man invisible while lighting up his surround- ings.40 One wonders just how many a thief was caught striding through his neighbor's foyer in
search of plunder, bearing a mal- odorous candle confidently aloft, before these
miraculous tools of subterfuge fell out of fashion.

But for sheer gothic absurdity nothing surpasses the medieval concern over host desecration, the punishment of which preoccupied pious Christians for centuries. The doctrine of
transubstantiation was formally established in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council (the
same one that sanctioned the use of torture by inquisitors and pro- hibited Jews from
owning land or embarking upon civil or military careers), and thereafter became the
centerpiece of the Christian (now Catholic) faith. (The relevant passage from The Profession of Faith of the Roman Catholic was cited in chapter 2.) Henceforth, it was an indisputable fact of this world that the
communion host is actually transformed at the Mass into the living body of Jesus Christ.
After this incredible dogma had been established, by mere reiteration, to the satisfaction
of everyone, Christians began to worry that these living wafers might be subjected to all
manner of mistreatment, and even physical torture, at the hands of heretics and Jews. (One
might wonder why eating the body of Jesus would be any less of a torment to him.) Could there be any doubt that
the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily
accessible in the form of defenseless crackers? Historical accounts suggest that as many
as three thousand Jews were murdered in response to a single allegation of this imaginary

crime. The crime of host desecration was punished throughout Europe for centuries.41

It is out of this history of theologically mandated persecution that secular anti-Semitism
emerged. Even explicitly anti-Christian movements, as in the cases of German Nazism and
Russian social- ism, managed to inherit and enact the doctrinal intolerance of the church.
Astonishingly, ideas as spurious as the blood libel are still very much with us, having
found a large cult of believers in the Muslim world.42

The Holocaust

The National Socialism of all of us is anchored in uncritical loy- alty, in the surrender
to the FŸhrer that does not ask for the why in individual cases, in the silent execution
of his orders. We believe that the FŸhrer is obeying a higher call to fashion German
history. There can be no criticism of this belief.

Rudolf Hess, in a speech, June 1934.43

The rise of Nazism in Germany required much in the way of “uncritical loyalty.” Beyond the
abject (and religious) loyalty to Hitler, the Holocaust emerged out of people's acceptance of some very
implausible ideas.

Heinrich Himmler thought the SS should have leeks and mineral water for breakfast. He
thought people could be made to confess by telepathy. Following King Arthur and the round
table, he would have only twelve people to dinner. He believed that Aryans had not evolved
from monkeys and apes like other races, but had come down to earth from the heavens, where
they had been pre- served in ice from the beginning of time. He established a mete-
orology division which was given the task of proving this cosmic ice theory. He also
thought he was a reincarnation of Heinrich the

First. Himmler was an extreme case: the picture is perhaps one of someone quite mad. But
one of his characteristics was much more widely sharedhis mind had not been encouraged to
grow. Filled with information and opinion, he had no critical powers.44