The GOD Delusion by Unknown Read Free Book Online

branch of Christianity that pushes its recurrent flirtation
with polytheism towards runaway inflation. The Trinity is (are?) joined
by Mary, 'Queen of Heaven', a goddess in all but name, who surely runs
God himself a close second as a target of prayers. The pantheon is
further swollen by an army of saints, whose intercessory power makes
them, if not demigods, well worth approaching on their own specialist
subjects. The Catholic Community Forum helpfully lists 5,120 saints, 18 together with their areas of expertise, which include abdominal pains,
abuse victims, anorexia,
arms dealers, blacksmiths, broken bones, bomb technicians and bowel
disorders, to venture no further than the Bs. And we mustn't forget the
four Choirs of Angelic Hosts, arrayed in nine orders: Seraphim,
Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities,
Archangels (heads of all hosts), and just plain old Angels, including
our closest friends, the ever-watchful Guardian Angels. What impresses
me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly
the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as
they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.
    Pope
John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past
several centuries put together, and he had a special affinity with the
Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated
in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and
attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: 'A
maternal hand guided the bullet.' One cannot help wondering why she
didn't guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of
surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of
the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided. The
relevant point is that it wasn't just Our Lady who, in the Pope's
opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of
Fatima. Presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of
Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of
Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on
other errands at the time.
    How
did the Greeks, the Romans and the Vikings cope with such
polytheological conundrums? Was Venus just another name for Aphrodite,
or were they two distinct goddesses of love? Was Thor with his hammer a
manifestation of Wotan, or a separate god? Who cares? Life is too short
to bother with the distinction between one figment of the imagination
and many. Having gestured towards polytheism to cover myself against a
charge of neglect, I shall say no more about it. For brevity I shall
refer to all deities, whether poly- or monotheistic, as simply 'God'. I
am also conscious that the Abrahamic God is (to put it mildly)
aggressively male, and this too I shall accept as a convention in my
use of pronouns. More sophisticated theologians proclaim the
sexlessness of God, while some
feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating
her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a
non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the
ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might
indeed be a less salient attribute than gender.
    I am
aware that critics of religion can be attacked for failing to credit
the fertile diversity of traditions and world-views that have been
called religious. Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James
Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion
Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly
document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read
such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility.
    But
that is not the way of this book. I decry supernaturalism in all its
forms, and the most effective way to proceed will be to concentrate on
the form most likely to be familiar to my readers - the form that
impinges most threateningly on all our societies. Most of my readers
will have been reared in one or