God – Part 1

Sitting on the train yesterday, on my way to rehearsals, a man in a bright green suit reading a book entitled ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Kaballah’ suddenly stood up, crossed the aisle, sat down next to me, lent across the table and said, “May I tell you about the most important thing you’ll ever hear?”

Oh dear, I thought.  8 hours of rehearsals to go, and it’s gonna begin with some preaching.  But hell, the train had just left Ashford, and I was getting off at Canterbury, so at least there was a fixed time limit on everything so, okay, bring it on…

… and what happened next, I will tell you another time.  For now, let’s go bigger than the St. Pancras-Margate Express… let’s have a conversation about God.

I am atheist.  Could you tell?  It’s been fairly apparent across this blog, but I’ve always danced around the issue of why I’m atheist and why I don’t believe in god – and oddly, I do feel the need to separate these two things into different categories, for reasons I’ll come to – for the simple reason that it’s something people still get worked up about in this day and age.  So!  Here let me lay it down – these are my personal beliefs, you are allowed, indeed, invited to disagree entirely with me, but I am aiming to avoid too many flaming arguments or, worse, opinions from either side of the debate which are precisely that – opinions, rather than reasoned thought.  With this caveat laid, please read on…

Firstly, let me tackle the atheism part.  I am, in all probability, atheist because my parents are.  Simple fact.  Most people are religious because their parents are – converts are still few and far between – and while the nature of faith may differ from generation to generation, it’s never-the-less one of those simple things we have to acknowledge in life.  Kids tend to believe what their parents believe, and I was raised atheist.

Atheism has, interestingly, acquired connotations in recent years which I was not raised in.  At its simplest level, it is denying the existence of a god – which I do – but as our society gets more secular, atheism has itself become raised to an almost ideological level.  At its best, it is the application of rationalism to tradition, the use of reason and the scientific method, and I have plenty of time for it, as these are all sane things and far more prone to clear thinking and, oddly enough, compassion than many religious doctrines are.  I say compassion, in the sense that a big part of being religious is being not someone else’s religion.  Social identities are frequently constructed based on polar opposites – I am a woman in that I am not a man; I am British in that I am not French; I am Christian in that I am not Jew and so on and so forth, and even within various faiths there are distinctions.  I am Catholic, not Protestant; Lutheran not Kalvinist etc. – and we’ve all seen where these divisions lead.  Atheism is arguably therefore a compassionate ideology, in that there is no distinction between man, woman, Muslim or Hindu, none whatsoever, and no reason for there to be.

However!  Put the word ‘militant’ in front of anything, and you’ve got a problem, and atheism can, like all good ‘ism’s be militant, dismissing – with reason – the philosophical structures of religion and, at the same time, also dismissing the people who harbour them.  There is an ugly implication here, that those who believe in god are, for this simple act, irrational, foolish and quite possibly stupid, and at this destructive logical position, I draw the line.  It is a militancy that makes no allowance for those who believe in a god, with a moral code thoughtfully derived from this faith, and those who believe in the literal truth of an ancient text.  Certainly, to believe in the literal truth of often contradictory and unprovable texts does seem irrational; but to believe in god for the answers which have not yet been given, and to follow a moral code derived from this faith, is neither irrational, nor something which any sane person would condemn.

However, militancy is something that has haunted religion for a few thousand years too, with frequently disastrous consequences.  But, as this is already turning into something of an essay, I’ll guess we’ll come onto that in the next part of this ramble…