#BTColumn The God imperative – Barbados Today

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by Ralph Jemmott

A new group has sprung up in Barbados calling itself Humanists Barbados. Two of the persons I recognise. One is Mr. Peter Wickham and the other is Ms. Maachelle Farley who I think is the daughter of the late Mathew D. Farley, who I knew as a child. She is apparently the President and spokesperson for the body.

I have known three persons who have boldly proclaimed that there is no God. One such person is Mr. Philip Stahl, the physics teacher at Harrison College who once said to a sixth form General Studies class that believing in God was like believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

We once had a conversation where I reminded him that the great thinker Malcolm Muggeridge was a confirmed atheist before he travelled to the Holy Land where he converted to Christianity. Stahl responded that Muggeridge was getting old and foolish, to which I replied: So there is still hope for you, Philip.

At various times I have called myself an agnostic and a sceptic, but never an atheist. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, it is impossible for my puny intellect to comprehend the infinite nature of the entity we call God.

I dont think that God is an entity one can know simply through human reasoning. An understanding of God is a matter either of faith or of some profound experience that fundamentally changes ones life, a kind of Saul on the Road to Damascus, John Wesleys Aldersgate or Saint Ignatius Loyola experience at Manresa. Faith and spiritual vision are both uniquely personal.

Regrettably, I have never had the faith or the profound experience to consider myself a firm believer. For many people who say they believe in God, it appears to be little more than a convention. Invariably their daily lives hardly ever reflect a profound knowledge and spiritual understanding of the Godhead.

The native Indians of North America refer to God as The Great Spirit. The Muslims call him Allah, the Rasta brethren and sistren call him Jah. I personally like the notion of The Great Spirit.

The second reason why I have never been an atheist is a real fear that my grandmother from the Pilgrim Holiness Church would rise up from her grave and bring down the wrath of her God on my heretical head and I might then be cast into the outer darkness. A third reason is that the Bible says the fool hath said in his own heart that there is no God. I am wary of adding another folly to my multiple collection of follies.

For some, the concept of God is problematic. They are confronted by what the Methodist Minister the Rev. Philip Saunders once called the problem of intellectual doubt. A caller to Brass Tacks posed a question that haunts me.

He asked: Are we created in Gods image or do we create a God in our own image? We are told of a jealous God who was known to get angry and destroy hordes of people, Philistines, Hittites and Jebusites, men, women and children. Isnt that a rather silly concept of a God who created the whole universe? Terms like

Humanism are subject to various interpretations.As it emerged in the Renaissance period, humanism implied a greater reliance on mans ability to forge his own destiny.

It stood in opposition to the medieval reliance on God and an authoritarian Catholic Church that claimed infallibility and that did not tolerate heresy.Renaissance humanism did not deny the existence of God, in fact there was a number of humanist scholars like Desiderius Erasmus who adhered to the notion of Christian Humanism which did not question a notion of a Deity, but allowed from greater human agency.

Mr. Wickham is right when he states that one can have sound values and not profess Christianity. By the same token one can profess Christianity and be the devil incarnate. Look at the number of Catholic clerics found guilty of sexual child abuse a heinous crime.

Awful things have been done in the name of Christianity and religion generally, including slavery and colonialism. In Africa the missionaries came first and softened up the heads of the blacks with talk of turning the other cheek and the meek inheriting the earth. Then the white settlers came and they inherited the earth. Many blacks suffered and died, inheriting only six feet of Gods good earth.

Historic Christianity tied to intolerance has produced tyrannies from persons convinced of their own dogmatic certainties, many claiming to know the will and hear the voice of God.

On 27 October 1553 the great Protestant reformer John Calvin had Michael Servetus burned at the stake for formulating heretical and dangerous ideas concerning the nature of the Holy Trinity. On the Catholic side, the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions were committing similar atrocities all in the name of God.

In my text An Uncommon Currency I included at the very end an article entitled, O Magnum Mysterium: Religion and Transcendence in a Secular World. I contended: The great religions of the world were all attempts to define the purposeful life in the face of the dreaded contingencies of human experience in particular the numbing universality of death and decay. All of these faiths hold to some notion of the moral life, what is good and what is bad.

God as the symbol of the GOOD is an imperative because without God as a representative of what is good in human nature and human experience, we would be lower than the animals. As Dostoievski said, without God anything is possible.

The second imperative is that without a belief in God, we would be without hope. Life would indeed be in Hobbesian terms poor, nasty, brutish and short not to mention, pointless.

Barbados is a society whose corpus of moral values are based on the Christian faith. With GOD still on the peoples side, those values have served us well in the past. Why are the likes of a young Farley suggesting that the coming Republic should be based on non-Christian values or that religious values should not be taught in schools at a time when we need to hold on to values more than ever before.

If we dont try to teach values based on our majority Christian faith, where will our children obtain a moral compass? Perhaps on the ZR vans? Maachelle Farley demonstrates an immaturity beyond her years. Barbadians have to be careful of neophytes seeking the spotlight and wanting to define our upcoming Republic in their own image and in keeping with their own untutored propensities. It has been suggested that the separation of state and church and the disappearance of religion from American schools is a key factor in the degeneracy of American youth that leads to the plethora of school shootings and other juvenile criminalities.

We dont miss Lord Nelson and in time, we wont miss the Queen as she passes on. Her heirs and successors may not be worth the allegiance, but leave God alone however you conceive him or her to be.

Ralph Jemmott is a respected retired educator.

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#BTColumn The God imperative - Barbados Today