Vested Interests--Innoculating Against Belief

A High Opinion of One's Own Virtue

It is commonplace in our age to sneer at the Christian faith and those who believe.  This attitude is used to cover over the hypocrisy, the cant, and the prejudices of  Unbelief.  Peter Hitchens in his book, Rage Against God documents Virginia Woolf's reflexive arrogance and sarcasm towards those who believe, as an example of this cant.  But it is the arrogant who are usually the most blind--as Hitchens himself came to realise as he reflected on his years as a Prodigal Son.

The fury and almost physical disgust of the Bloomsbury novelist Virginia Woolf at T.S. Eliot's conversion to Christianity is an open expression of the private feelings of the educated British middle class, normally left unspoken but conveyed by body language or facial expression when the subject of religion cannot be avoided.  Mrs Woolf wrote to her sister in 1928, in terms that perfectly epitomize the enlightened English person's scorn for faith and those who hold it:

I had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward.  He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church.  I was really shocked.  A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is.  I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God. 

Look at these bilious, ill-tempered words: "Shameful, distressing, obscene, dead to us all."  There has always seemed to me to be something frantic and enraged about this passage, concealing its real emotion--which I suspect is fear that Eliot, as well as being a greater talent than her, may also be right.  [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 23f.]

Most people in our day make the same mistake that Hitchens made at the time.
  He reasoned that if the illuminati, the celebrity-set, the educated, the intellectuals, and the cognoscenti of the Chattering Classes dismissed and sneered at Jesus Christ then this amounted to definitive proof that Christianity, the Bible, and Jesus Christ were lies and fakes.   But, as he later came to realise, he wanted "proof" all along and, therefore, became credulous and easily persuaded.  A lie repeatedly told easily takes on an air of infallible certitude if one wishes to believe it. 

This blatant truth, that we hold opinions because we wish to, and reject them because we wish to, is so obvious that it is too seldom mentioned.  I had reasons for wanting that proof [for Unbelief]. . . . I had spotted the dry, disillusioned, and apparently disinterested atheism of so many intellectuals, artists, and leaders of our age.  I liked their crooked smiles, their knowing worldliness, and their air of finding human credulity amusing.  I envied their confidence that we lived in a place where there was no darkness, where death was the end, the dead were gone, and there would be no judgment.  It did not then cross my mind that they, like religious apologists, might have any personal reasons for holding to this disbelief.  It certainly did not cross my mind that I had any low motives for it.  Unlike Christians, atheists have a high opinion of their own virtue. [Ibid., p.24f.]