All Dressed Up With No Place To Go
All Dressed Up With No Place To Go
By Jack Kinsella
Originally Published in December 2011.
This morning I read the somber news about celebrated militant atheist Christopher Hitchens. He died last night of esophageal cancer at the tender age of sixty-two.
Hitchens was a prolific essayist and author whose life’s work was defined by his worldview.
His last book, God is Not Great was a bitter polemic against organized religion, which Hitchens accused of being the “main source of hatred in the world.”
He referred to religion as “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
When one gets right down to it, it is hard to argue against Hitchens’ assessment of organized religion — it is all those things and more. But Hitchens’ was unable to distinguish the difference between religion and faith.
He saw them as two sides of the same coin. And nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that religion serves as a substitute for faith. Religion is man-made whereas faith is God-breathed. Religion, according to the entry at dictionary.com, is defined as;
“a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.”
So “religion” describes every kind of human belief system from militant atheism and Borneo head-hunters to mainstream Christian denominationalism. But it has very little to do with God.
Religion, where it involves the worship of a deity, is a formalized system developed by human beings that postulates adherence to its rules and regulations will make one more acceptable to the deity it claims to worship.
One can be a religious Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, scientist, Constitutionalist, environmentalist, ecologist, nationalist, humanist or atheist. A religious person is a worshipper — where they differ has to do with the object of worship.
Religion itself is nothing more than a codified system of rituals used in the worship of that deity. All religions share the same characteristics; structure, dependency, intimacy, hierarchy, symbolism, a moral code, philosophy, devotion, culture and tradition.
And so, while the late Christopher Hitchens described himself as a “free thinker” who regularly challenged all comers to debate the existence of God, Hitchens was himself a deeply religious man.
Hitchens served on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group for atheists and humanists in Washington, DC. Last year Hitchens debated Tony Blair in Toronto after Blair publicly converted to Catholicism.
Blair argued religion is a force for good, while Hitchens argued the opposite. Not surprisingly, Hitchens won the debate by a two to one margin, according to the audience.
I say ‘not surprisingly’ because Hitchens had both logic and history working for him, whereas Blair was stuck defending the Vatican’s religious history.
Hitchens was free to bring up the medieval papal excesses, the Borgia popes, the Inquisition, the expulsions and pogroms against Jews, the papal wars, the Crusades, etc., and Tony Blair’s task was to defend them as a force for good.
Hitchens was right about religion. Where he went wrong was when he blamed God for its existence.
Assessment
God has no more use for religion than did the late Christopher Hitchens. He gave Moses Ten Commandments. The rabbis discovered 613 more, around which they built their religion.
The Bible says that religion was the reason that Jesus took on the form of sinful man and that it was religion that hanged Him on a tree.
“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” (Matthew 5:17)
“But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23-24)
“But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.” (Matthew 23:13)
“Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” (Matthew 23:28)
Religion, as noted earlier, is man’s way of making himself acceptable to God. Roman Catholicism teaches that obedience to Church ordinances and traditions are essential to salvation.
Missing Mass on Sunday or a “holy day of obligation”, failing to take Communion during Easter, failing to confess one’s sins to a priest, getting divorced or remarrying, or even questioning Church dogma where it conflicts with Scripture can result in the loss of one’s salvation and excommunication from the religion.
According to the Catholic encyclopedia, excommunication (or being kicked out) from the Church means excommunication from God’s grace. The Church claims that it holds the keys to heaven and hell and that no man can come to the Father outside the Catholic religion.
Hitchens’ supremely fatal error is that he failed to see the difference between religion and God. The fact is that the more religious one is, the further one gets from God. Let me repeat it one more time.
God is not the author of religion. God is the author of salvation. Man can never be.
It is completely irrational to believe that God is what the Bible says about God, and then argue that God ceded over to mankind the ability to redeem himself through a series of codes and rules and regulations.
Religion and faith are not two sides of the same coin, they are opposite sides. One can have religion without faith. One can have faith without religion.
But the more religious one is, the less faith one needs. Religion substitutes works and calls it faith.
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)
A very religious person trusts in his ability to maintain his religiosity, attending church, obeying church rules, living a moral life, not smoking or drinking or cussing, etc. He may pay lip service to God and Jesus and the Cross and salvation, but his faith is in his ability to perform, not in God’s ability to maintain.
Christopher Hitchens looked at all that is wrong with religion and blamed it on God because his atheist worldview prevented him from seeing the obvious. What religion teaches is that man is not great.
What the Bible teaches is that God is so great that He found a way to overcome religion and save man in spite of himself.
“Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.” (Titus 3:5)
Religion cannot save anyone. The author of religion is Satan, not God. The first religion was not Judaism. It was idol worship. Abraham’s father, Terah, was an idol-maker. When Joshua led the children of Israel into the Promised Land, it was populated by Caananite worshippers of Molech.
The entire story of the Bible is about religion and religious wars and the total inability of religion to save.
Indeed, the Bible says the purpose for religion is to demonstrate our inability to save ourselves and to underscore our desperate need for a Savior.
“Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” (Romans 3:20)
Religion is the systematic application of religious law. Satan knows that, which is why organized religion was already a well-developed concept before Abram left Ur, before Joshua entered the promised land, and even before Noah entered the ark.
Christopher Hitchens life and death is a tragedy of immeasurable proportions. Had he gotten it right, Hitchens could have made almost all the same arguments and still been one of the greatest evangelists of his time.
“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Corinthians 2:13-14)
Religion is not great. But religion is not God, either. Christopher Hitchens never bothered to drill down enough to see what all the fuss was really all about. He couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
And now he can see, but it is too late.
“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie…” (2 Thessalonians 2:11)
In Christopher Hitchens, we have a perfect object lesson relative to this Scripture. For which cause?
“That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.” (2 Thessalonians 2:12)
Hitchens took great pleasure in being a bon vivant. Hitchens was well aware that many Christians were praying he would undergo a deathbed conversion and surrender to Christ, something he steadfastly refused to do, right up to the end.
Writing only three weeks before his death, Hitchens said this in the December issue of Vanity Fair:
“My own opinion is enough for me, and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get in line and kiss my a**.”
There is an old joke about the atheist at his funeral being ‘all dressed up with no place to go’. It is the saddest joke imaginable.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t know — Hitchens could probably deliver the Gospel message better than many Christians. Hitchens had a choice about where he would spend eternity.
God honors the choices we make. Even the bad ones.