Belief in Paradise is a recipe for hell on earth

MATTHEW PARRIS

T0 anyone but the believer, does it matter whether there is an after-life? Is it anybody's business but the believer's? Are we intruding — is it rude? — when we who have no faith question the religious beliefs of those who do?

It so happened that I was pondering this at the time when the World Trade Center collapsed.

Not many weeks previously I had written for the Times an essay about miracles. Taking the account of a claimed miracle performed by (or through) the late Mother Teresa, and now under investigation by the Vatican, I asked how Roman Catholics could honestly believe such things. Citing by name a list of respected Catholic figures in British

public life men and women of great influence whom I acknowledged to be of superior judgment — I asked, of each, whether they believed that, through the agency of a silver medallion that had touched Mother Teresa's corpse. God had cured an Indian peasant woman of a life-threatening tumour.

When you write about religion you get a huge response from readers. Some were kind, but how quick many Christians are to become poisonous when their faith is questioned, impugning the character or motives of the questioner rather than engaging with the question. I was soon wading through piles of letters and emails, whose analysis will deserve another column for some interesting common themes link the letters.

But one stood out. Expressed in many different ways, it amounted to this: 'My faith may be an imperfect thing, but at least I'm trying, and what I have is my own. To each his own gods. Keep your nose out.' In other words, those without faith have no right to finger the beliefs of the faithful, because faith is private, and at least believers have a belief, which is more than non-believers do.

There are two strands here. First, a person's understanding of the universe and its meaning is nobody's business but his own; second, as half a loaf is better than no bread, so some kind of faith is better than no faith at all. Religious belief becomes a sort of possession — like a beautiful painting. Whether or not others share the owner's taste is their problem, for he does not, by valuing something, force others to do so. The atheist, who cannot appreciate, should envy the believer, who can.

And. as I've said, it so happens that this was what I was pondering just before those two suicide pilots went in. They had faith, but my atheism does not envy them. Their faith was personal, but very much our business. Their God claims, as does our Christian God. to be the God of all mankind, including us infidels who do not acknowledge him. Their religion, like ours, promises Paradise to those who are faithful to its cause.

Now one had better at once make clear that no direct comparison is intended between a gentle and well-meaning Christian's faith and the perversion of Islam that drove those young hijackers to their savage acts. Or, rather, we may make the comparison, but upon making it we will find that the two are in many respects different.

There is, however, an important core common to both. Both faiths claim universality. Both teach their followers that there is another world more important than this one, and that entrance into that Paradise is to be gained or lost upon the judgment not of this world or anyone in it, but of a Being who stands beyond the here and now. Both believe that in a most important sense of the word this world is not real, and that the here and now does not matter. Meaning is elsewhere. Results, in the ultimate, are to be sought elsewhere, Judgment will be made by Another.

If I have seemed to claim an absence of faith. then I take that back. I am a great believer in the here and now. I do believe in this world, in this humanity, its present and its future, and in results sought and found here on earth. And that it is we who must judge.

I believe that the here and now is good, and worth working to improve; that human suffering is bad, and worth seeking to mitigate; and that life and peace, beauty and plenty, are to be sought as ends in themselves, for ourselves and for those who succeed us. I believe this world and its future matters, matters completely, matters more than anything. I believe this world is real. I know of no other, And I believe in the judgment of the here and now; that we and our fellow-men, in this life and for the sake of this life, can judge our contributions, applying our own standards, derivable from nobody and nothing but ourselves, rewardable or punishable by nobody and nothing but ourselves, rewardable or punishable nowhere but here. The reality in which believe is not, however, solipsistic; it includes others, including future others. There is nothing necessarily selfish in a belief in the primacy of this life; any more than there is anything necessarily unselfish in the pursuit of Paradise in an after-life.

A belief in the visible is a wonderfully steadying thing. The here and now can be horrific, shocking, painful, but if you think it is what counts, then you will so conduct yourself as to mitigate the horror, minimise the shocks, avoid the pain, for yourself and others. You will not lay waste this world in hopes of salvation in the next.

You will not fly an aeroplane into a skyscraper. Or, rather, you will not do so unless convinced that others will benefit in this life. That you could benefit in Paradise is not an available outcome.

You will not preach to wretched people the evils of birth control in this world, on the grounds that their souls' salvation is what counts and though their children may starve they will see Glory in the next. You will not incite the poor to stone the poor, and call upon God in Heaven, as Ian Paisley does, as your judge. You will not dismiss real lives, real feelings, real hopes and fears, as a mere chimera, a veil of tears.

For is the pursuit of the next life not a corrupter of this one? Is not the doctrine that this world does not matter an invitation to callousness, and the call of the next a call to madness? If we are not to judge by the evidence of our own eyes, then we are quickly in the hands of the mediators: those who claim to have glimpsed the invisible, to see illuminated by divine light what with our own eyes we cannot see, to hear voices we cannot hear, to know reasons beyond our reasoning.

As Richard Dawkins said in the Guardian last week, Paradise-seeking missiles are the deadliest of weapons. If God did not exist it would have been necessary for Osama bin Laden to invent him. Godlessness is a humanising force.