Studying Islam has made me an atheist

http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/the-magazine/features/3194231/studyi...
Studying Islam has made me an atheist
Douglas MurrayMonday, 29th December 2008
Douglas Murray says that he stopped being an Anglican after analysing
Muslim texts and deciding that no book — of any religion — could claim
infallibility
Just over a year ago I told a lie. In print. In this magazine. I was
one of those asked by The Spectator last Christmas whether I believed
in the virgin birth. Since it had always seemed to me that if you
believed in God a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the central tenets of the
faith was pointless, I said ‘yes’. But in fact I felt ‘no’. It wasn’t
that I had been wrestling over the doctrine of the incarnation, I
simply felt that if I didn’t believe in the virgin birth, I would not
believe in God. The truth is I didn’t and don’t. The guilt has been
lingering since. This is my atheist mea culpa.
Many people hold on to belief as an unquestioned part of their make-
up. They never have to confront the source of their belief, and as
long as nothing actively pushes them into addressing it, they keep it
as something which rarely does much harm and might actually do some
good. I have been an Anglican since birth — and not just a cultural
Anglican but at times (rarest of things) a real, worshipping,
believing Anglican. Like a lot of believers, I knew that there were
parts of my belief that wouldn’t stand up to analysis. But that was
fine. I didn’t need to analyse them. I only lost faith when I was
forced to.
Charles Darwin didn’t do for God. German biblical criticism did — the
scholarship on lost texts, discoveries of added-to texts and edited
texts. All pointed away from the initial starting-block of faith —
that the texts transmitted immutable truths. Realising that ‘holy’
texts are, like most other things in life, the result of an accretion
of human effort and human error is one of the most troubling
discoveries any believer can make. I remember trying to read some of
this scholarship when I was younger, and finding it so terrifying, so
ground-shaking, that I put it off for another day.
But it found me via another route. Some years ago I started studying
Islam. It didn’t take long to recognise the problems of that
religion’s texts — the repetitions, contradictions and absurdities.
Unlike Christianity, scholarship on these problems in Islam has barely
begun. But they are manifest for anyone to see. For a holy book which
in its opening lines boasts ‘that is the book, wherein is no doubt’,
plenty of doubt emerges. Not least in recognising demonstrable
plagiarisms from the Torah and the Christian Bible. If God spoke
through an archangel to one illiterate tradesman in 7th-century
Arabia, then — just for starters — why was he stealing material? Or
was he just repeating himself?
Gradually, scepticism of the claims made by one religion was joined by
scepticism of all such claims. Incredulity that anybody thought an
archangel dictated a book to Mohammed produced a strange
contradiction. I found myself still clinging to belief in
Christianity. I was trying to believe — though rarely arguing — ‘Well,
your guy didn’t hear voices: but I know a man who did.’ This last,
shortest and sharpest, phase pulled down the whole thing. In the end
Mohammed made me an atheist.
Though it was a supplementary realisation, the problems that these
texts have caused cannot be avoided either. Where else does your real
bona-fide bigot find his metier? Anyone can repress a woman, but you
need ‘dictated’ scriptures to feel you’re really right in repressing
her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel
you’ve got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious ‘Adam
and Eve not Adam and Steve’-style arguments instead of just
recognising that some people are different to you.
Anyone can be a bigot. But divine bigots must count as the most
intractable — the most infuriatingly impervious to reason. Besides —
to a bibliophile, indeed bibliomaniac — the idea that there is any
book ‘wherein is no doubt’ is insulting as well demonstrably untrue.
Even when I stopped believing I pretended I did, or said I did for a
bit, for fear of the break in the dike. Like many people, the first
thing that troubled me about leaving religion was fear of
meaninglessness. Where would ethics come from? If nothing was revealed
then surely everything would be relative — and that way lay nihilism.
As it happens, it becomes clearer the more I look at it that religious
texts are not only unnecessary to the ethical life. More often than
believers like to admit, they are directly contrary to it.
Then there is the loss of the guiding hand. It is the one utterly
irreplaceable aspect of belief. Without God, where is the enduring
melody — the cantus firmus — of life? Alexander Herzen asked, ‘Where
is the song before it is sung?’ It is impossible to replace the belief
in a deity’s plans for you. Though less comforting, it is simply
observably truer that there is no song before you sing it — no path
before you tread it. You make the song as you sing it. You make the
path as you tread it. It makes life more precarious, certainly — but
just as the risk of falling is greater, so, likewise, is the
possibility of soaring.
My final fear was one which I think a lot of Christians in this
country feel, particularly as they see Islam re-emerging and gaining
adherents in spite (or perhaps because) of its intransigence and
intractability. It is, I suppose, a sense of cultural abandonment. We
know how much of what we enjoy and relish comes through Christianity.
Can we really go on without it? Doesn’t it leave our building without
foundations? Slowly I discover that it doesn’t. I still can’t pass a
country church or cathedral without going in. The texts are still
essential to me. They are just (and ‘just’ hardly does the job here)
no more divine than Shakespeare.
The question of how, without believing it, we transmit the good of our
historical faith to another generation is certainly problematic.
Perhaps like many Jewish people who rejoice in their identity but
don’t believe in God we could be better — and franker — at being
cultural Christians. I tried it this year, at my first atheist
Christmas.
I went to church on Christmas morning, and went with my family to the
carol service a few nights before. The readings were comforting not
only because of their familiarity but because taken as great stories
they still transmit, like all great literature, truths which you can
live by. The momentousness and simplicity of Adam’s fall was as tragic
and resonant to this atheist heart as it once was to the believing
one.
Fundamentalist Islam challenges us politically. But tackling
literalism of one kind with literalism of another doesn’t work.
Complexity is harder to accept, but more evident to the eye. After
long struggle, I find reason enough.
My first non-believing Christmas was different, certainly. Different —
but, contrary to my fears, no shallower. Quite the opposite. Things
this year seemed both more open and more possible. More fragile and
more precious. It also struck me, in ways which are hard to explain —
and the religious language cannot be avoided — that it was all, if
anything, even more miraculous.