Is the Pope Atheist?

Is the Pope Atheist?

It is dangerous to be a Pope, but you get good medical attention—Talk is just talk—Religion manages rituals

After Pope John Paul II was shot in 1981, he was rushed to the emergency room of the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic, where he met a collection of some of the most skilled doctors—modern doctors—Italy could produce, in contrast with the neighboring public hospital with lower-quality care. The Gemelli clinic later became the preferred destination for the pontiff at the first sign of a health problem.

At no point during the emergency period did the drivers of the ambulance consider taking John Paul the Second to a chapel for a prayer, or some equivalent form of intercession with the Lord, to give the sacred first right of refusal for the treatment. And not one of his successors seemed to have considered giving precedence to dealing with the Lord with the hope of some miraculous intervention in place of the trappings of modern medicine.

This is not to say that the bishops, cardinals, priests, and mere laypeople didn’t pray and ask the Lord for help, nor that they believed that prayers weren’t subsequently answered, given the remarkable recovery of the saintly man. But it remains that nobody in the Vatican seems to ever take chances by going first to the Lord, subsequently to the doctor, and, what is even more surprising, nobody seems to see a conflict with such inversion of the logical sequence. In fact the opposite course of action would have been considered madness. It would be in opposition to the tenets of the Catholic church, as it would be considered voluntary death, which is banned.

Note that the putative predecessors of the pope, the various Roman emperors, had a similar policy of seeking treatment first, and having recourse to theology after, although some of their treatments were packaged as delivered by the deities, such as the Greek god Asclepius or the weaker Roman equivalent Vediovis.

Now try to imagine a powerful head of an “atheist” sect, equivalent to the pope in rank, suffering a similar health exigency. He would have arrived at Gemelli (not some second-rate hospital in Latium) at the same time as John Paul. He would have had a similar-looking crowd of “atheist” well-wishers come to give him something called “hope” (or “wishes” for a good recovery) in their very atheistic language, with some self-consistent narrative about what they would like or “wish” to happen to their prominent man. The atheists would have been less colorfully dressed; their vocabulary would have been a bit less ornamental as well, but their actions would have been nearly identical.

Clearly, there are a lot of differences between the Most Holy Father and an atheist of equivalent rank, but these concern matters that are not life-threatening. These include sacrifices. His Holiness has given up on certain activities in the bedroom, other than reading and praying, though at least a dozen of his predecessors, the most famous one being Alexander IV, fathered a great deal of children, at least one when he was in his sixties, and by the conventional (not the immaculate) route. (There have been so many playboy popes that people are bored with their stories.) His Holiness spends considerable time praying, organizing every minute of his life according to certain Christian practices. And yet, while they devote less of their time to what they believe is not “religion,” many atheists engage in yoga and similar collective activities, or sit in concert halls in awe and silence (you can’t even smoke a cigar or shout buy orders on your cell phone), spending considerable time doing what to a Martian would look like similar ritualistic gestures.

There was a period, the Albigensian crusade, in the thirteenth century, during which Catholics engaged in the mass killing of heretics. Some slaughtered indiscriminately, heretics and nonheretics, as a time saver and complexity-reduction approach. To them, it did not matter who was who, since “The Lord would be able to tell them apart.” Those times are long gone. Most Christians, when it comes to central medical, ethical, and decision-making situations (like myself, an Orthodox Christian) do not act any differently than atheists. Those who do (such as Christian Scientists) are few. Most Christians have accepted the modern trappings of democracy, oligarchy, or military dictatorship, all these heathen political regimes, rather than seeking theocracies. Their decisions on central matters are indistinguishable from those of an atheist.

RELIGIOUS IN WORDS

So we define atheism or secularism in deeds, by the distance between one’s actions and those of an atheistic person for an equivalent situation, rather than by stated beliefs and symbolic practices.

Let us take stock here. There are people who are

atheists in actions, religious in words (most Orthodox and Catholic Christians)

and others who are

religious in actions, religious in words (Salafi Islamists and suicide bombers)

but I know of nobody who is atheist in both actions and words, completely devoid of rituals, respect for the dead, and superstitions (say a belief in economics, or in the miraculous powers of the mighty state and its institutions).

The claim is that rationality resides in what you do, rather than what you think or “believe” (skin in the game), and that rationality is about survival.