we should heed correction from atheists
“what kind of god are you defending?”
If only you would lock My doors, and not kindle fire on My altar to no purpose!
—Malachi 1:10
The prophet Malachi faced a serious set of issues. Sacrifices being brought to the Temple were worthless and the priests of his time were disgraces to the Levite house. Through Malachi, God says to the people bringing deficient sacrifices: better that the doors of the Temple be locked than defiled with unacceptable offerings. Sometimes I think atheists are Malachi, delivering a message that we people of faith ought to listen to. When our devotion is hypocritical and worldly, when we’ve become evil in pursuit of holiness, atheists are often the first to call us on our nonsense. In fact I’ve seldom met a religious person as willing to call out worldliness and heretical hypocrisy as an atheist. We should listen to them instead of getting defensive or scoffing. “Whoever spurns reproof is a brute” (Proverbs 12:1).
Atheists can be spiritually far better off than blasphemers who profane the eternal on behalf of the mortal. Atheists can’t truly blaspheme: they aren’t pretending to believe in God. If they diss “God,” it’s like dissing Santa for them, not dealing an insult toward a real Being. When a person of faith (at least an ostensible one) blasphemes, it’s serious. And the alleged faithful do often blaspheme, so so often, and publicly. It upsets me. I would rather the door be shut than blasphemous prayers enter it. I would rather billions of wise and kind atheists mull about outside the door than one blasphemer pollute the sanctuary. If we leave the door open for everything, faux-pious idolaters will “abolish the regular offering and set up the appalling abomination” (Daniel 11:31) — which is to say, they will meander on in with ill intent, deceptively erecting their idols and wreaking havoc on all faiths. Better the doors be shut. Better we ally with discerning atheists than with idolaters who appear to be faithful. Atheists are often the ones most harshly critiquing false piety. That is a gift.
When you enter the land of Canaan that I give you as a possession, and I inflict an eruptive plague upon a house in the land you possess, the owner of the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, “Something like a plague has appeared upon my house.”
—Leviticus 14:34-35
Last week’s double Torah portion was Tazria-M’tzorah (Leviticus 12-15), proverbially everyone’s least favourite duo, concerning skin diseases and laws of ritual impurity resulting from bodily emissions. I, however, being equipped with immense stubbornness, find this area of halakha (Jewish law) very interesting and my favourite tractate of Talmud is accordingly Niddah, which is about laws of menstrual purity and is sort of like Tazria-M’tzorah on steroids. It’s a complicated area of halakha, which is what got me stubbornly engaged in it, and involves a lot of rulings to do with the colouration of sacs of pus or how atypical a newborn can look and still be considered offspring. The latter is a topic I’ll be writing about at some point since I think it carries a lot of ethical weight.
A notoriously odd aspect of Tazria-M’tzorah is the disease called tzaraat, which seems from a modern perspective to cover a number of diseases and… curses? Translations often inaccurately give tzaraat as “leprosy,” which is confusing, because it infests clothes and houses. There is no scientific reason to think that the infection of a house is due to a human disease and the house’s infection is directly handed down by God, as we see in the above passage.
Once told of the house’s disease, the priest has to undergo a series of steps to try to contain the tzaraat; stones are removed, plaster is reapplied. But:
If the plague again breaks out in the house, after the stones have been pulled out and the house has been scraped and replastered, the priest shall come to examine: if the plague has spread in the house, it is a malignant eruption in the house; it is impure. The house shall be torn down — its stones and timber and all the coating on the house — and taken to an impure place outside the city. (14:43-45)
The Sages take this whole section as being of purely abstract interest. In reality, they tell us, tzaraat has never infected a house. The passage is only there for theoretical pondering. But what can we learn from it if we take “house” less literally? What if sometimes the very houses of our faiths have been polluted?
We should listen to more (not all) of the ruthless and totalising institutional critiques levelled by atheists. They’re sometimes the least biased toward keeping the stones of our houses stacked even as disease creeps into them. Atheists — especially ex-believers — know very well how deep the rot can go. And they often have less compunction about calling it how they see it than we do. We disagree with atheists on the existence of God, sure, and other things besides, but atheists can be an ample source of camaraderie and wisdom when it comes time to blast away rot.
Toward the beginning of 1 Samuel, we learn that the sons of the priest Eli are causing issues, mistreating sacrifices and fornicating with female ritual workers. God tells Eli:
I intended for you and your father’s house to remain in My service forever. But now — declares God — far be it from Me! For I honour those who honour Me, but those who spurn Me shall be dishonoured. A time is coming when I will break your power and that of your father’s house, and there shall be no elder in your house. (1 Samuel 2:28-29)
God ends up purifying the house of Eli by destroying it, the house having become so thoroughly rotten that it needs uprooted. “I swear concerning the house of Eli that the iniquity of the house of Eli will never be expiated by sacrifice or offering” (1 Samuel 3:14). Nor, to return to Malachi, is this remotely the only time that God gets on the priests’ cases for evildoing.
You have made the many stumble through your rulings; you have corrupted the covenant of the Levites — said the God of Hosts. And I, in turn, have made you despicable and vile in the eyes of all the people, because you disregard My ways and show partiality in your rulings. (Malachi 2:8-9)
Religious leaders can be unjust and religious followers can prop their failed leaders up to the bitter end. One of the things I most admire about atheists is that they — again, especially those who are ex-religious — often have exquisite sensitivity to spiritual injustice and a willingness to speak about it. This peculiar sense of justice seems acutest among atheists, which might seem ironic. But they’re looking from the outside, or looking back. They have less at stake if the stones of the house start tumbling. Their vision can be blurred by anger or sorrow, sure, but it can also be crystal-clear, lacking an excessively optimistic filter. Whether or not a justice-seeker believes her sensitivity is God-given, she is right to exercise it, and she is right to crush the stones of a house she justly abhors. God is in favour of tearing down religious leadership structures when they have chosen to rot. In this way atheists are often more godlike than the faithful.
The bigger question that’s presented
Is, “What kind of God are you defending?”—Sofia Isella, “Numbers 31:17-18”
Many ex-religious atheists have faced spiritual abuse. Many have looked at injustices perpetrated by the ostensible faithful and received cold and stupid words in answer to their troubled questions. I have known ex-religious atheists who have faced abuse and suffered cultish conditioning that can take years or a lifetime to get past. And I have heard the faithful mostly give dull, dull answers as to why their God condones spiritual abuse. Justifies it, even.
Relax your furrowed brow for the rape was blessed by the Lord
There is no need for concern, there is no need for a fight
The drug of God’s permission will help you sleep
At night
We should not create an evil God in the image of evil men. We should relentlessly hound evil religious teachers out of authority. I find that atheists very often have the state of mind necessary for this purgation while the faithful all too often stick up for evil rather than for victims.
Inasmuch as they have misled My people, saying, “It is well,” when nothing is well, daubing with plaster the flimsy wall that the people were building, say to those daubers of plaster: It shall collapse… I will throw down the wall that you daubed with plaster, and I will raze it to the ground so that its foundation is exposed; and when it falls, you shall perish in its midst…
—Ezekiel 13:10-11, 14
I don’t mean to imply in all this that atheists are only “useful” to faith because they can provide good critiques, like they’re just good covenental sandpaper. Atheists are people, not means to an end. I’m only talking so instrumentally because I’m referring to the importance and benefits of listening to them. Such is not my entire perspective on atheists, who are people and ought to be thought of with the same love and humanity as any people. Duh. I’m also a pluralist and fully expect to see many atheists in the redeemed world. I have no interest in converting them to my sectarian Jewish faith. That would be weird for me.
We religious people should listen to correction wherever it’s coming from. Atheists provide a constant stream of critique of religious hypocrisy and corruption. No, not all the critique will be valid. But when it hits, it hits hard. We should appreciate wise atheists who don’t hold their tongues. Sometimes there really is a rot seeping through our house and we need to be willing to notice it, destroy it, and totally rebuild. And in any case: those outside the door to the sanctuary are better than those who would drag pollution inside it.
Much gratitude to Forest Gren for inspiring me to write my thoughts on this, months ago; we have also discussed the topic a little here.
Feels seen. But I disagree with the contention that atheists dismiss God like Santa Claus. Many do spend considerable time pondering concepts like the incarnate word of god, or at least deserve credit for knowing religious texts better than believers. I don't really consider myself among the latter, but it's funny how often it is proved otherwise.
Tzaraat is so fascinating, enjoying this read of it. There are two references in gaming to it that I've found interesting before:
1. In Disco Elysium lore, the "Antecentennial revolution," an attempted communist world revolt, is blamed by some historians on "a pandemic of tzaraat, a particularly virulent prion disease, which the authorities in Graad proved unable to contain." Which is I think a funny "communist mind control" joke and reference to material crises being taken advantage of/laying the ground for irl revolutions, but also to the "stickiness" of the "infection" (which was suppressed with overwhelming firepower).
2. In Pathologic, as districts becoming "infected" houses start to literally scab over (seemingly diegetically). I actually haven't found anyone analyzing the use of tzaraath imagery in the game but it was the first thing I thought of when I first read about the Biblical concept.
In either case, it occurs to me now that you could see the metaphorical tzaraat as almost an anti-infection - because its presence forces fastidious and total treatment, it's almost purifying in an accelerationist kinda way. But now I'm rambling far from your point (unless there's someone framing the presence of atheists as itself a plague!)