Truth
A Critique of “Runaway World” by Michael Green 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, August 23, 2001
Transcending Nature
Green’s final pathetic argument is that there is no reason why anyone should believe anything that is the product of a random concourse of atoms wandering in a world devoid of meaning or purpose. Here he cites Professor Paul Ramsey:
If any viewpoint is known to be true, then nothing can be more certain than that man transcends nature in apprehending the truth about nature.
Green is his usual addled-brained self in his understanding of evolution, and indicates that the only meaning or purpose we can have is is whatever is given to us by God. In fact, all of us are given an evolutionary purpose when we are born whether we are conscious or not. It is to continue our life into another generation by reproducing, or, in some cases, by assisting our close relatives to reproduce. Green will think it is a pretty poor purpose and, if it only led to dunces like him, he would be right, but this simple mechanism has led to the beauty in our eyes of trees, flowers, horses, fine art and the music of Beethoven.
Organisms that survive through many geological periods are perfectly adapted, unless there is a sudden marked change in the environment. For some, it means thay have achieved remarkable survival skills that include self-awareness, ethics and aesthetics. No god need be hypothesised to explain such qualities.
As for Professor Paul Ramsey, it seems to have escaped his attention that he does not know what nature “apprehends” about itself. He thinks he is himself a god who knows all of nature and that is the view he is putting. Whether nature has any awareness of itself that we do not know of or not, Ramsey is himself such a dunce, to judge from Green’s citation, that he does not even realize that human beings are part of nature, and by apprehending the truth of it, they are not transcending it but doing what they cannot perceive—allowing nature to apprehend. It is like saying that eyes transcend the human being because eyes can see but humans cannot. We see because eyes are part of us. Does Ramsey know that human beings have not evolved to be nature’s eyes?
Green says, “This transcending of nature is what gives men their value.” In the sense we have just explained, there is truth in this but no one knows what ultimate role human beings could have in nature, and no one knows which line it might come through. It is therefore a crime against nature for a human to kill another. Green tells us, It is “surely” the myth that god made man in His own image that stops man being reduced to the “level of a machine.” Well, no, Reverend. The whole concept that this transcendent yet immanent God has, for all we know, an image and it is that of man is absurd. It is called having your cake and eating it, believing impossibilities, or saying anything that suits you, and, if it is irrational, calling it a mystery of God. These are the beliefs of fools not saints.
Despite having insulted humanists, Green thinks that Christians can work with them, even though some of them are “unashamedly selfish.” Is it not astonishing? Never walk with rogues, if you wish to reach your journey’s end. Christians have been fond of fooling people over the years, only to mug them when the time was ripe. Christianity has surivied because it was ruthless not because it was loving. The Pagan religions expected religious people to respect others when all were venerating some or other aspect of nature, but Christians would have none of that sort of devilment. Green admits that Christians have much to be ashamed of but it was not “characteristic,” so every Christian can feel that it had nothing to do with them. All modern Christians are, of course, “characteristic!”
The love of people and the love of truth, and of social freedom and welfare are the characteristics of Christians. So where were these characteristics for 2000 years? Why were people monstrously oppressed by the church for most of these centuries and why are Christians incapable of telling the truth still? Green tells the same jaded gospel stories to illustrate the humanity of the Christian God, and even His drunkenness. Many of these stories are versions of the ceremonies and occasions of the Essenes, distorted deliberately for the gentiles by the Christian bishops.
“Love your neighbour as yourself,” is quoted as Jesus’s teaching on fellowship among the human race, but for a Christian to quote it at this end of two millennia of Christian hatred of any rival is cynical spouting. Not only that but the teaching is far from original with Jesus, and other religions that profess a similar sentiment have adhered to it more faithfully than Christianity has. If these sentiments are why Christians are Christians, then they ought to consider Buddhism or Confucianism, religions that not only show more inclination to practice what they preach but do not have the absurd childishness of a cosmic father and son.
At this point, Green again shows his bare faced gall by citing: “You will know them by their fruits.” That is exactly what he knows no modern Christian will know! If they did, they could not be Christian, because the fruits of Christianity have been terror, torment, torture and burning human flesh. It is not a record that genuinely good people could ignore. Christians do. Fruit mean nothing to them. That is the trouble with Christians. They do not have the least compassion in their supposedly loving heads for the myriads of people who have suffered grievously at Christian hands in life and death. If there are a few that do, the pope has apologised for it, so everything is all right. Even if it were possible to prove that Jesus was himself the son of God, it would not alter the reality of Christianity, throughout its history, being the Devil’s own work. Christians want the kudos of divine sponsorship, while ignoring the Satanic outcome.
Love of Others
Green now wants us to tax ourselves about why a humanist should love other human beings. All other human beings? It is doubtful that the humanist has to do any such impossible thing. The humanist has to believe and teach that we should treat others as we would like to be treated by them. That is what Christian love means in practical terms, and everyone benefits from it. The Church proves it is hypocritical and has double standards by telling us to love our neighbour, then tying us to a stake and incinerating us. It sends out crusaders to kill the infidel, witch hunters to find and torture to death old men and women, Inquisitors to find and torture to death those who disagree with the way the Church interprets Christianity. It purges honest and hard working people like the Albigenses and the Huguenots, murdering them and robbing them, encourages people to treat the Jews as the killers of God, also to be killed and robbed. It blesses bombs and battleships and battalions, encouraging young men to fight for causes that are not necessarily just, but are approved by Christian clergymen, and therefore seem to be approved by God.
Green is quite incapable of seeing why we should not all be murdering each other if there is no God. It might be possible for a psychologist to find in this the roots of Christianity’s homicidal tendencies. Only knowing there is a God stops everyone from killing everyone else. There is only one proper God, and He is the Christian one, who is not concerned about the godless, whom He will punish in hell fire. Only believers in the Christ will be saved. Therefore killing the enemies of the Christian God is perfectly sensible. Since the unbelievers have no proper god, and Christian believers must be saved, there can be no retribution. This is the logic of Christianity which emerges time and time again in history.
Green even mentions the “dying in Vietnam,” a reference not to “dying” but the killing of non-Christian peasants by dropping highly explosive bombs on to them from six miles in the sky, bombs blessed, at the time when Green wrote this, by Christian padres, bomb aimers, most of whom were proud to call themselves Christian, and more than half of whom attended church in normal life. Christians persuaded themselves it was a just war between the most advanced technological people in the world, set in place by their Christian God, against the most primitive people in the world, abandoned by God as the sons of Satan—mere Gooks. Many Christians in the USA still believe this. Never mind “Thou shalt not kill,” it is only an optional command.
Green, a teacher of divinity, cannot comprehend how a humanist, like Russell, could value human life, a “fortuitous concourse of atoms.” Green thinks humanists have nothing to counter the self-interest of individuals and nations, as if the Christian had. Christianity is openly selfish, appealing to a natural desire to avoid death and fraudulently offering immortality as a reward for believing the Christian cheat sheet. Humanism values life and uses it in practical selfishness that benefits all, as Christianity should, if it were not devilish. Everyone will feel safer when no one has a justification for killing and robbing others. Respect others that they will respect you too. It is a simple moral principle to promote a civilized society and a long life secure from murder and mugging. It needs no God. It is common sense, a concept that the clergy like to suppress, in case it leads to questioning belief, which is far from it. Christians think all good sense is God-given and all other is the work of the Devil, yet despite this Christians also contrive to believe in free-will.
So it is that Green claims, as Justin Martyr did 1800 years earlier, that even the good done by unbelievers is God’s good. “God sets the truth in their hearts” even when they “turn their back on God’s revelation in scripture.” Goodbye, free-will. Christianity claims all the good and rejects all the evil. Those who reject Christianity but lead exemplary lives are Christians nevertheless, but professed Christians, even who have reached the highest ranks available in their superstition, that commit crimes of unspeakable enormity are no longer Christians. It is puerile and irrational. Christianity is an unreasonable religion for irrational people—the religion of dunces enouraged to think they know all.
Green concludes by saying that God’s love magnetizes others into loving others. He cannot resist trying to seem scientific. God magnetized Christians into spreading a vile poison, 2,4-D, over Vietnamese fields causing birth defects until today 35 years later, but this was an affectionate token of God’s magnetic love. Vietnamese cripples must praise God he loved them.
Green returns to his obsession—the blind spot he has about evolution—the conviction that only God stops us from being merely a “fortuitous concourse of atoms.” He cannot see that God is merely a figment of the mind of these concourses of atoms. Instead, he wants us to see there are absolutes in the world, a dubious belief for him to add to the mass of other dubious and positively harmful beliefs that Christians hold. He remains quite bemused by evolution and how it can select for characteristics favourable to the circumstances, fitting most of us to our environment.
There is not the least doubt that humanity has evolved an aggressive streak. If that were unchecked, we should long ago have gone extinct through mutual destruction. We might yet go down that road sooner rather than later but what has stopped us is the evolution of various ethical senses. Ethical sense are natural but it our conscious duty to other humans to inculcate them as limits to human aggression, if life is to be tolerable. We see the sense of bringing up our children not to harm each other, but often teach them little compunction to harming strangers. Green, blind as a worm, simply cannot see this. He does not want to see. It would dispose of his need for an imaginery papa in heaven. So, again he turns to his theme of the value of the individual to God, a value that he skates over in Christian history because it proves it to be as figmentary as the heavenly father.
History
Bending historical truth into hoops, Green tells us that “morality does not long survive the decease of religion.” His proof is that Trotsky, an advocate of atheism, finished up with a pickaxe in his head, presumably a communist pickaxe and therefore an atheist pickaxe, but it was ordered to be placed where it was by a man who trained through his formative years to be a Christian priest—Stalin. Stalin doubtless discovered a lot about terrorism in the seminary. He certainly did no more than professed Christians did with pride to Pagans and heretics.
Green also highlights Nazi Germany as being atheistic, but why then did it make a great display of various types of crosses and adopt the motto, “God with us?” Christians always blamed the Jews for killing their god, and organized murderous pogroms against them whenever it suited them, but Hitler’s holocaust was nothing to do with the example offered by Christianity, it seems.
Green continues with his travesty of history by slagging off classical Pagan societies in Rome and Greece. Moral decline, he claimed, set in when the “fires of religion died.” In fact, the Stoics had largely liberated women—Christianity enslaved them again. The Stoics were campaigning against slavery itself—Christianity instituted it as the natural order, and continued it into the feudal period as enslavement by an estate. Green cites the Israelites who abandoned God and turned to licentious nature worship, except that the biblical stories are propaganda meant to discourage nature worship and oblige people to turn to the monotheistic figmentary father. The scriptures were exactly the sort of propaganda as this being written by the Reverend Green. The authors of the scriptures, like Green, knew it was a compilation of lies and half-truths, but it worked, and the same principles have been applied with the same vigour, ostensible success and practical misery ever since.
Green continues to highlight the Germany of the 30s and 40s of the twentieth century, claiming that Auschwitz was the result of the rejection of God. The result of this rejection of God was that millions of Jews, homosexual men, communists, and trades unionists disappeared. All of them happen to be pet hates of the Christian churches. How came it that the godless society came to be following in extremis the policies desired by most Christians—a mystery of God?
Green finally asks how the humanist could inculcate a sense of morality. He immediately discounts secular education, a central hate of professional Christians since Paul—Christians are meant to be ignorant, and education is the work of Satan. Green tells us that Christianity has the answer, the example of the perfect man. Jesus for the sake of this argument is a man, not a god, and a perfect one too, despite his rudeness and anger. Nelson had one good eye and one blind eye, looking from his blind eye when he chose not to see, but Christians are blind, deaf and brain-dead to accept the astonishing confusion of beliefs that they hold. Jesus arguably was a good man among his people, but even the partial and tendentious accounts of him that we have show he was not perfect. Why do Christians have to lie continuously?
Green now seeks to disparage humanists by saying the came in two types, optimistic and pessimistic. He is talking about the future of the human race. Green drops a lot of mainly literary names on either sides of this divide that he perceives. Green blames the pessimism on to science for inventing the atom-bomb. It is like blaming the baker for obesity, or the mint for gambling. We are in an overwhelmingly Christian society still, but where are the massed ranks of church leaders campaigning for governments not ot make weapons like the atom-bomb? Where are the Christian Presidents and Prime Ministers who announce that they will destroy their national stockpiles because such mass destruction is against God’s commandments? Green says we must “rely upon God who is above history,” so why has God allowed His creation to get into such a state? Free-will is the Christian answer here, because it suits them to forget that all good is God’s work and all ill is Satan’s, their other argument.
The main danger today is probably less that of nuclear destruction than that of the environment. This is entirely Christian in its cause. Christians can have no sincere regard for the natural world when their whole interest is on the supernatural world they expect to be in after death. Christians, in their sacred book, read that God has granted them stewardship over nature, and that their God is not the god of oxen! These are the fundamental attitudes that allow species to be destroyed, rivers to be poisoned and hillsides to be dug away for hardcore, with no regard for future consequences.
Green now tells us the Christian answer, sounding utterly loopy in claiming that their God, Christ, was both optimistic and pessimistic simultaneously—typically Christian, the observer might conclude. In fact, Green gets more complicated, trying to have four not just two simultaneous truths. The optimism was that the kingdom of God for the righteous would be instituted, illustrating the point that the Christian has no regard for the present world. The kingdom of God is countered by human wickedness, the logical outcome of which was ruin, however, the ruin is not inevitable. So, how to stop it? Easy! Change human nature—be like Jesus! Be obedient and patient in the face of intolerable treatment, and the reward comes after death! He was resurrected, and so will we be, but only if we are believers.
This is not shutting your eyes to the ugliness of human nature like humanism, it is accepting it passively and hoping that Christians actually know that our reward is eternal life when we are dead.
In Christ’s resurrection, we see foreshadowed the destiny of redeemed mankind.
The purpose of all patriarchal religions is precisely to encourage obedience—obey uncomplainingly the powers that be who are appointed by God and we shall live forever—even though we are dead! This is the religion of the used car dealer, the Chase-the-Lady trickster, the widow’s comforter and the Dutch auctioneer. It is crooked.
Green tells us that only Jesus conceived of this idea of eternal life, a staggering lie. Green cannot be ignorant of religions that had the same idea millennia before, nor is he, but the idea of Jesus about it was different from what the others believed—it was very, very, very slightly different! This difference was sufficient to make the old ideas utterly wrong while the very subtly different Christian variety is correct. Green assures us “this hope is no more wish-fulfilment.” Green even revises the message of his God by insisting that the “great new society” will be made up of “sinful men and women who have accepted his royal pardon.” Green thinks this makes sense. Perhaps it does to madmen, but that seems to be an essential requirement of Christianity. “There is no escapism in such a creed,” he says, returning to his central theme. What then does it amount to? You do not have to be good, because sinners will be pardoned, and human nature will change when God creates his kingdom for all of mankind that believes the Christian scam, and even some who do not. This takes care of the bad in mankind, but it is not escapism. No! It is rubbish.
Marx
Green turns from science to various other critics of Christianity, beginning with Marx and the communists, a favourite target of Christians who consider communism as a Christian heresy and secular relgion—in short, a potential rival. Christians deflect communist criticism typically simply by criticizing the communists or failings of communist governments. By the same token, Christianity should be criticized by picking out the faults of Christian kings and states, but no Christian will accept that. If the criticisms are true, then the king or state was not Christian—see!
Marx had noted the awful conditions of working people in Victorian England and Germany, and saw religion as “the illusory compensation offerred to the oppressed, the bogus palliative for the ills of a hopelessly perverted society.” That is why he summarized his conclusion as:
Religion is the opium of the people.
Green concedes that this view had “plenty of justification” because there was “sickening hypocrisy in Victorian religion which often seems to have been a sop offered by the exploiters to the exploited.” Green is agreeing with Marx, but cannot bring himself to say that “Victorian religion” means Christianity. Green’s counter is that some Victorian clergymen were also outraged at some of the attitudes of church and state and preached against the poor social conditions and the hypocrisy in religion. That is as may be but when Christianity makes the claims it does, it is not sufficient to accept that the bulk of the Church was hypocritical, but Christianity was saved because a few Christians were not.
“Large numbers” of people in the Victorian churches “remained untouched by the spirit and attitudes of true Christianity,” Green tells us. What he means is that typical Christians were not “true” Christians, and true Christians are those who are judged favourably after the event. In other words, most Christians are not touched by the spirit of Christianity, judged retrospectively. If that is not an admission that Christianity is bogus, it is hard to see what it is. Before the judgement was made in the light of history, the typical Christians would doubtless have cried down the reformers, because the people doing the exploiting were prominent churchgoers, and contributors to the ill-gotten riches of Christianity. If Christianity meant anything at all, it would have prevented the exploitation instead of getting rich through it. What happens is that later Christians always claim to be the inheritors of the “true” Christians of previous ages, then proceed to behave like the typical ones. Every typical Christian believes they are a “true” Christian. This attitude is no less an illusion than their own God.
Green highlights the fact that Jesus in the gospels criticized the religious hypocrisy of his day, helping us to appreciate that, whatever Jesus might have said, Christians habitually ignore it.
It was indeed a ghastly thing that little children had to climb up chimneys to clean them for a fifteen hour day at derisory wages in a country that professed the Christian faith.
Christians are easily satisfied by these pseudo-apologies by their ministers, but not the rest of us. Christianity is supposed to be a wonderful blessing of God and His holy spirit on His believers, yet they behave no better and arguably often worse than people untouched by this great blessing. Green’s answer is that “absolute power corrupts,” according to Lord Acton’s dictum, and the rulers of the Victorian age had absolute power. But these leaders with absolute power in the age of Victoria were almost exclusively Christian. Why were they not saved from corruption? Did they still get to enjoy eternal life because they were professed Christian believers?
Despite all this, Marx was wrong! He “never examined Christianity with any care,” and was “wilfully blind to historical evidence.” You will note that Green agreed with what Marx said about Victorian religion, but he was nevertheless wrong. This is typical Christian dishonesty, and Green also typically projects Christian failings blatantly on to others without a blush. It is Christians who ignore history, at every level, when it stains the character or background of their belief. Christians are interested in history only to the extent that they can use it to trick others into converting, and to bolster the beliefs of the gullible. Marx spent much of his life sitting in libraries reading history, because he hoped to be able to formulate a theory of social development. Whether his theories are right or wrong, he was studying history to do something useful. Green studies divinity, a subject that is no use to anybody and involves little serious history. Invited to judge who was more likely to be “blind to history,” Green would be the choice, not Marx, whatever his other failings might have been.
Marx got his idea of Christianity wrong because in Victorian times “the church was so far astray from its moorings.” We are entitled to ask why the church always seems to be astray from its moorings, or, at least, is more often astray than moored. The metaphorical drift from its moorings is only the Christian excuse for the failure of the church to be what Christians want it to be. This is so often the case that the church and the basis of Christianity have to be considered fundamentally flawed.
Green goes on to say the “absurd” theories of Strauss and Bauer that Marx used have been “decisively refuted many times.” The Christian propensity to give themselves away by over-egging their apologetic pudding rises up once more. Only a single “decisive refutation” of anything is needed to discredit it. If other “decisive refutations” are put forward, the clear implication is that they were attempts to improve on the previous ones, so that they cannot have been decisive enough! “Many decisive refutations” declares that the refutations were anything but decisive. They were attempts by Christians at refutation, and Christians will claim that they were all decisive because for them any refutation would be decisive, or none at all, because they believe in spite of any evidence.
What they were trying to refute so decisively was the idea that the gospel stories were a second century invention to make tangible the prevailing belief in a cosmic Christ. Far from being refuted, this idea is proposed as firmly as ever by Christian critics. Green says these ideas are “rubbish… churned out with parrot-like regularity” and are “laughably untrue.” Obviously, the people who “churn out” these ideas do not consider they have been “decisively refuted,” and Christians find it “laughably untrue” because they have no refutation but only their unreasoned belief. Celsus, at the time the story was first propagated knew that Christians simply believed with no reason, so merely reasserting their belief is sufficient for them to refute any contradiction. It is not a valid refutation of the evidence, but it suffices for them!
Green says Marx made a “particularly unfortunate gaffe” in history by thinking that the mid-second century was “war-weary” when it was “one of the most prosperous, contented and stable periods in history.” Any gaffe is Green’s not Marx’s. These apologists will say anything, depending on the utter gullibility and ignorance of their readers and, even more, on the reluctance of any critics to expose Christianity as a fraud. The Jewish War of Bar Kosiba was from 132-135 AD. It needed twelve legions to put down this Jewish rebellion. Widespread riots and massacres between Jews and Romans occurred throughout the empire causing much distress. Plague was also rife, and what of the persecutions that Christians always claim were going on? Only this latter is nonsense, and it is true that the emperors in the period were enlightened, but the war of Bar Kosiba caused much savagery and ill-will, not least among Christians themselves—like Marcion.
Green claims, in this context, that Christianity was adding to the contentment by easing social equalities. The basis of this calumny is the case of the slave Onesimus mentioned in the New Testament. Slaves and masters were as one in the churches, we are told, but they were not in the workplaces! What is more, slaves and masters had been “as one” in the grottos of Mithras for longer than they had in the Christian churches, so how can Christianity claim sole credit for any benefits that can be detected? In fact, the slave system ended only when the Western empire ended, even though Christianity had had the power to change it for 150 years before that.
Turning to the Soviet attitude to religion, Green again concedes that it was “understandable.” The Russian Orthodox Church, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was “a mere tool in the hands of the Czar and was implicated in some of the most appalling abuses of government and oppression of the poor. Ghastly crimes were committed under the aegis of the church.” These Christians seem to think that by recognizing these crimes, they are absolving them, and that is what the Christian novice reading books like this are meant to think. The church is wicked but not Christianity. Just what good is Christianity?
Green proudly quotes Dostoievsky:
The religious instinct will not succumb to any argument or any form of atheism. The Idiot.
Whatever cannot succumb to argument can only be irrational superstition. That is what Christianity is. Dostoievsky had the idea that Russia, through the Orthodox Church that Green has disparaged, would be the spiritual leader of the world, and, in The Idiot, portrayed himself as a messianic figure.
In the days of the Soviets in Russia, a noted Christian Professor of Old testament Studies at Leningrad university, Aleksander Osipov, left the church to join the communist campaign against religion. A baffled Christian asked him how a biblical scholar could ignore the “historic person” of Jesus. Osipov replied that Jesus Christ had never existed and was a variation of the ancient near eastern dying and rising gods. The Dead Sea Scrolls suggested that Jesus had never lived. With the normal reason of a Christian, Green said “this cock-and-bull story would have been laughable” had it been possible to gat the scrolls in Russia. It seems Christians are fond of laughing at evidence contrary to their own prejudices because they never doubt the “historic person” of Jesus. They might as well believe the “historic person” of Conan the Barbarian for all they examine evidence for their beliefs, and the only reason they do not is that Jesus offers them immortality but Conan does not. That is why the Christians were appalled that a Christian professor could apostatize. He was apparently running away from reality!
The whole story, you will note, contradicts the Christian claim that religion was forbidden in Soviet Russia. It might not have been encouraged, but it cannot have been forbidden when professors were teaching it in universities. To counter the story about the one who got away, Green tells us about Douglas Hyde, a communist who left to become a Christian. He could tell us about all the priests who are apostatizing leaving the seminaries empty, or the fact that many communists, in the UK at any rate, were ex-Catholics and Jews, any one of which could have been considered against Douglas Hyde deciding to go the other way. Green does not expect Christians to look at the figures. They must hear only anecdotes about Christian heroes, like saints and martyrs, and Douglas Hyde.
Freud and Jung
Having disposed of the commies, Green decides to have a go at the psychiatrists, beginning with Freud who criticised Christianity in The Future of an Illusion. Freud thought the heavenly father was a psychological substitute for the real father of childhood. By wrapping this figmentary comfort blanket in suitable religious awe, what would have been regarded as an immature and infantile fancy becomes respectable. Again Green accuses the critic of not understanding his subject despite the inability of professional Christians to resist adding their own version of the Christian cheat sheet to paper. If these books, available in large quantities for pennies in second-hand bookshops, do not adequately explain Christianity for the skeptical inquirer, then what are they for?
His next criticism is that Freud’s judgement was impaired because he spent all his time among the abnormal and the mentally ill! Green accepts that there is a difference between religious fantasy and religion as a responsible attitude to life, and religious fantasy was seen in the mentally sick. He does not, however, tell us what religious fantasy is, so that we can judge whether the Christians we know are among the mentally sick or the responsible citizens.
Here he brings in Jung who declared Christianity to be a mixture of fantasy and emotionalism—fantasy because nothing certain is known about a historic Jesus. The evidence of a historic Jesus has been considered and plainly is sufficient for those who need an emotional support in their heads but, on any rigorous criteria, it is unsatisfactory.
Freud wrote off Christianity as “wish-fulfilment and obsessional neurosis” to which Green’s reply is “tu quoque.” Green accepts the criticism by saying, “You are the same.” Readers of these pages can accept that both are right, but Christianity seeks to spread its own “wish-fulfilment and obsessional neuroses” to everybody else in the human race, so is by far the worst.
In his book, Freud wrote, “Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us.” It is sufficient for Green to direct attention away from Freud’s criticisms to criticisms of Freud and science. Having tried to persuade us earlier that there would have been no science without it being invented by Christians, he now blames scientists for “diabolic weapons of destruction.” On the other hand, he blames it for not being able to solve “world problems such as race-rioting, ever-increasing crime and the selfish refusal of the haves to deal realistically with the hunger problems of the have-nots.” Who has lost the plot? Religion is supposed to solve the ethical problems is it not. Christianity has been the religion of the western world for 2000 years, so why are we still having to put up with these problems? Are the rioters, the criminals and the haves and have-nots he speaks of aliens? We can be certain that most of them will be practising or lapsed Christians, brought up with Christian values.
Green cites psychiatrists who contradict Freud—Christian psychiatrists. The disagreements between them and Freud or Jung are because they are expressing different opinions, not scientific findings. So belief is just an “opinion,” and it is perfectly easy to hold a contrary opinion. Christian belief is therefore arbitary. Why then does Green find it necessary to write another fraudulent book aimed at giving a bogus reality to Christianity, and claiming that those who deny it are escaping from reality. It is worthless tosh!
