On a day when I should really be outside enjoying the sun, I keep getting ideas to write about. How can this be? I should be able to switch my brain off on such a day, but of course I can’t. And what am I thinking about? Of all things, God.
As I have mentioned before to my loyal reader, while I don’t do God, I am trying to be more respectful for those, at least some of those, who do. Whether I can respect the religions themselves, well that’s another matter.
I am an atheist because I only believe in what’s true. Now that’s a sweeping generalisation because what defines what’s true? I’m currently reading The God Desire by David Baddiel, in which the author outlines his wish that there was a God, but there just isn’t the evidence to enable him to do so. He would like to live forever and is scared of dying. Baddiel quotes the Catholic commentator Karen Armstrong who says that religion is another form of creativity like music, dance, storytelling or sculpture. Some people will be moved by it and drawn to it and others it will leave cold. The author Naomi Alderman responds, cheekily she adds, as follows: “It’s an undeniable fact that God exists in the sense that Tony Soprano or Odysseus or Buffy the Vampire Slayer exists: as a character many people enjoy thinking about and telling stories about.” I can see that, but I can also see what she is saying. That fictional characters exist.
Either way, I think there is something in that. In the rare occasions I attend religious ceremonies, which are inevitably funerals and just occasionally weddings, the God bit leaves me cold. I hear and read the words but they mean nothing to me. But to others, the words are very real indeed. Baddiel wishes he could be part of that world but he just can’t do it. While I would, under the right circumstances, like to live forever, there is nothing about the scriptures that convince me that I might, if only I just said I believed them. Anyway, God would know if I was making stuff up.
None of this is to suggest my atheism is weakening, even if death is now far closer to the horizon than what was once the case. I don’t see any logic to life, less still a purpose for why we are alive at all. When someone says “everything happens for a reason”, my instinct is to ask, “What have you been smoking?” It’s entirely random events that have brought us here, although I do understand that if you get run over by a car the reason it happened is you got in the way of it. Hardly some grand design though, is it?
There’s no point in me proselytising, persuading believers that they should stop believing, any more than it makes sense in religious folk proselytising me. We’ve all worked out our own truth and while it’s fair enough to challenge belief and indeed non belief, I am trying to get out of the habit of overdoing things.
To an extent we all have our own version of the truth. Go to leafy Clifton in Bristol, bask in the architectural beauty of this the most affluent part of the city and tell everyone everywhere in Bristol looks like that. But someone else’s truth isn’t always the same of your truth, as the city also includes areas of severe poverty. Your truth in this instance is subjective. And so it can be with God.
