Bad Apples
April 23, 2012
A review of Losing My Religion, by William Lobdell
WILLIAM LOBDELL, a former religion correspondent with the Los Angeles Times and now a recusant Catholic, ties himself in knots and struggles manfully to keep his faith while reporting on charlatan televangelists ripping off the indigent or paedophile priests sodomising boys until they shat themselves.
A few bad apples say nothing about the Truth of God, he tries to persuade himself until he could persuade himself no longer. My doubts are a test of faith, he finds himself thinking, and God’s refusal to fully manifest himself – his willingness to allow agonising cancers to eat the innards of two-year old children, for instance – is designed to bring out the Job in all of us, a test of faith in a world in which faith, somehow, is everything.
And so, Lobdell finds himself arguing that God’s absence is proof of his failure. The sheer implausibility of Scripture is not the fault of its superstitious, Bronze Age authors, but his own fault because he is unable to make that leap of faith. He continues to indulge in elementary-school theodicy and gets everything the wrong way around until, finally, the easier and more logical option suddenly presents itself.
One finds oneself applauding his sentiments even though one at the same time asks - what took him so long? Desperate for an anchor in eternity, he plunges earnestly into his Catholic conversion courses while discovering that the Church is actually spending most of its time and resources sheltering perverts and blaming either their victims or some nebulous theological concept like Original Sin or Temptation or the Permissive Society. You realise that the whole structure of Catholic thought is designed to spread the blame, to deny individual responsibility.
We are all tainted by Satan and his, erm, temptations and it isn’t our fault. Confess and cleanse your sins and all will be well. Fundamentally, the Church remains infallible even though actually-existing Catholicism has made one or two mistakes because of its exposure to sublunary folly, vanity and lust. Naturally, the Church alone has the qualifications to decide which bits are infallible and which bits constitute folly, vanity and lust. The Bible is the Truth, unless it is Allegory, and the Church decides which is which at its own convenience.
Anyhow, Lobdell realises almost with a snap of the fingers that religion is all bullshit.
Life without God is good, he says. He feels liberated. He is driven to achieve what he needs to achieve in this world instead of making excuses and waiting until the next one, expecting some glorified Santa Claus to fulfil all his fantasies about goodness and justice and so on.
He comes out of religion with the same ease with which he entered it, like it was a self-help manual or a political party that had eventually disappointed him. Religion, for all its faults, has to be more than that.
