Many priests and ministers, and many religious organisations, Christian and otherwise, are anti-religious. I owe this insight to Elizabeth Taylor. Since I saw her in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" I have known her to be an entirely intelligent actor with an imaginative range beyond the parts she has generally played.
She has also had much experience of Life. When, therefore, she was asked what conclusions she had drawn from her experience I thought her reply would be worth considering. What she said was: "As for life and death, I think there is more to it than we are aware".
A reviewer of her latest biography thought this Sibylline utterance "not very enlightening, considering all that has gone before". I disagree. The more I think about it, the more useful it seems, but like other terse, pregnant pronouncements, it needs interpretation. Mine runs like this.
First, one can ignore life and death as serious generalized notions, and wait until specific instances force themselves upon one's notice. This seems to me an essentially anti-religious attitude, denying the existence of a religious dimension in our psychological space, robbing us of the sense of wonder at the mere fact of existence, and also of pleasure in the existence of love as another generalized notion, transcending death and the physically matter-of-fact.
So Taylor separates the religious from the anti-religious; even though the anti-religious include many people who have made successful careers in the organized religions but who claim devotion to creeds so impossible to reconcile with God as Love, so contrary to justice, scientific knowledge and common sense, that they cannot have thought seriously about their beliefs at all - though much juggling with the meaning of words may well have occurred.
The issue here is the old and simple one that creeds which compel one to believe in a personal Creator of the universe, all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful, cannot explain why our world is so full of pain and misery. "Free will" is no answer, for by definition the creator was responsible for creating the players, the playing field and the rules of the game, and must have been able to foresee all the possible consequences of giving us Pandora's box.
The alternative traditional answer to the "problem of evil", that the pain and misery are some sort of "illusion" capable of being "transcended", is equally untenable. We soon learn that whatever else may be unreal, suffering and misery are not. Word-juggling evasions of this dilemma seem to betray all who suffer and have suffered.
Why does this betrayal occur? Nostalgia, feelings of guilt, the need to earn a living and provide for dependants, even personal ambition, may all help to account for the otherwise incomprehensible suspensions of judgment which make the incredible creeds acceptable.
The second stage in my interpretation of Taylor's proposition is that it implies that there are aspects of life and death of which we can be aware.
The third is the realisation that there are aspects of life and death of which we are not, and perhaps never can be, aware. In distinguishing between the second and third stages, the meaning we attach to "aware" is crucial. If we are aware of something we obviously know about it. The confidence we have in this knowledge may range in degree all the way from the remotely possible through the whole spectrum of probabilities to the, for practical purposes, certain. But Noam Chomsky, with his linguistic investigations, and others as well, have shown that our heredity, our evolutionary history, has given us minds which seem incapable of grasping some concepts, or even of being aware of the possibility of their existence.
This second stage may be humiliating, but it is also reassuring, since it is a safeguard against intolerance. It makes us realise that all certainties are only relative, because they may depend on assumptions which our minds may be unable to test, or even to recognize as assumptions at all. To a limited mind assumptions may seem self-evident when they are anything but that.
Thus there are no beliefs certain enough to justify the cruelties of religious, political or social persecution in their defence. This is important. It robs the mythical "God as Monster", the punishing god, of his credibility, and his priests of their power to dominate and frighten us by making us feel guilty.
At the third stage, when awareness fails us, all we can experience is a mystery. Mysteries are in a different category from the knowledge of which we can be aware in stage two. Words like impossible, possible, probable and certain, which imply objective calculation of the weight of evidence, do not apply. Any context within which these words are useful is not mysterious. This has been said, so far as it can be said, much better by the mystics in many traditions, but in our century it is perhaps Wittgenstein who has explained most convincingly that religion is not a subject for ratiocination, and that it can only be approached through metaphor, the arts, personal experience, or learning from other people - especially from their example.
Whatever our response, or lack of response, to mysticism, it is easy now to see that religion is most valuable and least dangerous when God, if the word is used at all, is just a rough synonym for love in all its varieties and untidiness. This is a basis for useful action, but no basis at all for intolerance or religious authoritarianism.
Beyond life and death there are no certainties, though we may have intimations and visions which make us happy, especially when they are shared. In our day, when technology has made violence and intolerance even more repellent than they used to be, this ultimate "unknowing" is a source not of frustration - for we are learning to live with uncertainties - but of encouragement. A backlash against fundamentalist "certainties" is overdue, and it no longer seems naive to suggest that the visions and intimations associated with God as Love, or Love as God, may prove more acceptable, and powerful, than the brutal intolerances presided over by God the Monster, and practised with increasing enthusiasm by his many henchmen in the large religions.
David Dulley is a Unitarian Universalist and author of Conversations with Mona