The Life-Negation of Certain Religious Views
Saturday, December 6th, 2008“Give God a chance and He will make something of your life.” I encountered this astonishing proposition on a church sign while driving home from work. It strikes me at once how destructive an idea it is—destructive of the self, of one’s self worth, of personal autonomy, of one’s confidence in one’s life and one’s ability to make something of it. A translation and exposition of this life-negating sentence might go like this:
It is impossible for you to make anything out of your life without God, and without God your life is worthless because nothing can be made of it. If you do not accept God, your life will never amount to anything. In sum, no person can ever make anything of their lives of their own accord, out of their own will and hard work.
How completely absurd, how utterly life-destroying. This kind of attitude crushes the individual human person; shatters and stomps on any notion of a person’s overcoming life’s obstacles and forging a good life for themselves through hard work, determination, and virtue. No, instead what is needed is complete submission to a higher power that will make your life good for you. You needn’t do anything but bow down to Him, and he will bestow you with a good life because you haven’t the necessary constitution to give one to yourself.
The more I think about this the more irate I become. This self-negating, life-negating attitude is perhaps what I dislike the most about certain religious beliefs, and many self-help programs based on religious principles (e.g., Alcoholics Anonymous). We should be encouraging people to take responsibility for their own lives, telling them that they have the power within them to fulfill their potential and create a good life for themselves. Because we do, all of us. Life is extraordinarily complex and difficult, and at times it can be a daunting task just to get out of bed in the morning to face it. But we have the potential within us to overcome the obstacles placed in our way, and to remove those that we place there ourselves. We have the potential to improve our habits and patterns of thought in order that we may lead happier, healthier lives. And all this stems from a personal autonomy which nothing save serious injury or death can take from us—the power to decide what one wishes to do with one’s life, what kind of person one wants to be, and the power to carry out the actions that can get us there, get us to where we want to go and who we want to be.
Sentiments like those expressed in the church sign are the negation of these life-affirming, positive human truths. Perhaps in that anti-human proposition we find the seeds of what makes some religions so powerful: convince someone they aren’t worth anything, that only an outside force can ever help them amount to anything, and they will keep coming back. They will keep coming back because so long as they seek the solution outside themselves, they will never attain it.
Those of us who do not embrace those life-denying words, whether we are a believer or not (for not all believers embrace them) know better. And we will never cease in our quest to convince others of this—but we will do so not through dogmatism and force, but through reasoned and respectful discourse. Our commitment to human potential will not die until we ourselves lie in the earth.