Like most people I know – comprehensively schooled beyond the strictly necessary – I grew up thinking religion was about as relevant as rickets. It was a reminder of less enlightened times, clinging on in backward, insular, incomprehensible pockets such as abortion clinic protests, Orange Order Parades or my Auntie Liza’s spiritualist knitting circle. Belief in God was a symptom of a mass deficiency. Religion was a crutch we’d soon all be able to kick away. Secular humanism was a jab freely available at the point of delivery. Progress would make religious belief as unexpected and uncanny as the old chaps with bandy legs who drank milk stout and tapped Navy Cuts off my grandad in the taproom of The Old Blue Ball.
I never ruled out the possibility I might succumb to a deathbed conversion – one of the few genuinely interesting things I’d learned in all the wasted hours in RE lessons was Pascal’s Wager. And in the event of a nuclear war I reckoned I could go ga-ga for god in that split second between mushroom cloud and vapourized smudge on the pavement. I’d even said to friends that if ever I was theologically tempted I’d definitely go the whole crazy and gamble all my chips on Catholicism; they seemed to offer the best after-life terms and conditions.
But, Armageddon apart, I was pretty sure I’d never have any use for the Almighty. In fact, the only time I felt anything resembling a spiritual pang was watching the film version of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, a book that was all the rage with my more sensitive peers at the all-boys school where I sat my mock O Levels. Coincidentally, this was also the occasion on which I discovered alcohol and the opposite sex.
In my teens I naturally professed my unbelief with an absolute solemnity bordering on the sociopathic. Atheism answered everything, no questions, no equivocations, no grey areas where god could insinuate himself. Matter was all that mattered. Godliness was next to gormlessness. If I’d had a passport at 16, and access to the air fare, I’m sure I’d have flown off to wherever the battle against the worshipful was most intense – it may have been Nicaragua, so that may have been problematic from Leeds/Bradford – and bulldozed my share of churches. I remember talking about it loudly in the pub. My commitment to the cause really impressed the girls.
But I was a teenager back then, and hence an insufferable know-it-all. Now I realise it was just a phase. I broke out in absolutist atheism the same time I came down with rampant acne. I’m still an unbeliever, that will never change. But the angry rash has thankfully cleared and I no longer need to squeeze out my white hot rage against the guy in the sky.
My brand of unbelief has become amiable, cheerful, and ironic. I’m not militant or proselytising any more, so my atheism is not at all of the new variety. For all I care, you can believe in any holy book, holy man, or holy order that floats your Ark. Pray away. Worship all you want. Be my guest and prostrate yourself any where and any time that your contract with the Creator stipulates. If it makes you happy, cut off all your hair, wear an orange throw, chant Hare Krishna as you wind your way down Briggate jingling a cowbell and I’ll happily chuck a couple of bob in your collection tin and enjoy the merry spectacle. Honestly, you won’t find me blaming any religion for all the ills of the world. All ideologies have a mindless minority who cause all the bother. It’s not as if atheists have ever been paragons of virtue. There’s Stalin and Mao, and… well, Richard Dawkins, who probably ought to have stuck to dissecting slugs. Atheists can be dicks too. Give me a peaceable god botherer any day of the week.
Actually, I don’t reckon religion has much influence on how the world really works. I tend to make sense of the world in metaphors and images, and if I had to explain religion’s relation to reality to a ten year old I’d draw a picture an old steam train; I’d label the track Economics, the fuel would be Politics, and Religion simply the smoke belching from the engine – it may be dark and choking, and certainly spoils the atmosphere, but it has no bearing at all on where we are all going. There’s no getting away from it though. We have to just live with it.
However, I don’t want to stick my face in the smokestack and pretend the fumes send me skyward with the heavenly emissions.
If I choke and retch it’s not because I’m faithophobic. I simply have Deity Intolerance.
God’s not good for me.