God Collar

by Marcus Brigstocke

  So it was that, on a cold January day in 2009, a bus whose belief system until then had been very much its own business departed Hyde Park proudly bearing the message: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ The statement was bold, funny and challenging. It was refreshing to see an intellectual notion promoted alongside the endless crap we are encouraged to consume in the name of ‘growth’. I’ve no idea how much the passengers inside the bus felt part of the message their irreligious double-decker was spreading – there’s every reason to suspect they felt no more moved by the provocation they were sitting within than they would have been had there been an advertisement encouraging people to sit on a sofa they wouldn’t have to pay for until next year, eat a McFlurry or go to see a film featuring a man shot mainly in silhouette who has stubble and a gun. Perhaps the passengers didn’t care at all – perhaps they hadn’t noticed the message of theological scepticism emblazoned on the bus they were riding about in. Perhaps they were distracted by the jaw-grindingly irritating R&B played through the tinny 1cm speaker of a shiny mobile phone clutched with pride in the hand of a thoughtless, dead-eyed ‘statistic’ in a baseball cap. Often I’ve wished I could direct a bank of speakers some 30 metres across at a faceless hoodie with a fistful of Nokia dance beats and literally pin them to the back seat of the bus with 1,000 decibels of Jenni Murray and the Woman’s Hour team on BBC Radio 4 whilst screaming, ‘Not everybody’s tastes are the same as yours, you feckless desert of empathy and hope. Learn something, you dumb-proud hate crime!’ But that’s me – I’m not much for the R and the B and I get a bit tense on public transport.

  Regardless of who within or without the bus cared, the message went out there for all to see. Only a few actually did see it; the rest read about it in the press and got cross or excited or both. A challenge, ‘There’s probably no God’, and then an affirmative invitation to do something positive, ‘Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ This seemed a particularly good combination to me. ‘We have no lasagne. Now why not go dancing?’ ‘There’s no such thing as unicorns. Honey is delicious and extraordinary, eat some.’ ‘Everything that is living dies. Give someone you care about a dirty great orgasm.’ ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ It’s a clever message and it captured the spirit of a way of thinking I felt excited to see thunder past me as I clung nervously to my bicycle to prevent myself from wearing the bus as a jazzy new four-wheeled death hat.

  In truth, I’d read about the campaign long before I saw one of the Godless buses drift across the cycle lane without so much as a cheeky wink of its indicator. It was only when I saw it first hand that I realized I hadn’t actually been worrying and I had been enjoying my life, and since then I’ve slipped into a sort of existential crisis bordering on a depression. But nonetheless it was an interesting and thought-provoking idea to put out on the streets of Britain and I hope it succeeded in providing reassurance to some who might have been concerned by the whole ‘burning for all eternity’ suggestion. In any case, it made me feel less alone for a while.

  The appeal was copied by other humanist and atheist groups all over the world. The secular community took a huge lurch forward, and then shuddered to an awkward stop again while an anxious-looking atheist fumbled for the correct change to ride the Godless bus to enlightenment. I felt the bus pull away; I’d got on early and nabbed a window seat. It seemed exciting to be on board and I began to scour the bus for faces I knew. There was a good deal of chatter and much ambitious discussion about how far we might take this bus. As an atheist used to a courteous discretion on matters of belief in public discourse, I felt a mixture of pride, vindication and just enough nervousness to make me tingle. This felt like a movement. This was atheism for the mass market. Hallelujah, let the word go forth that we are alone in the universe … Ooh, and look, it’s Creme Egg season again. I thought it must be because I’ve just put the Christmas decorations away.

  I don’t know how well received the message was elsewhere in the world but if there’s a bus driver idling at a set of lights in Tehran, Jerusalem or Houston, Texas sporting the same slogan, then I take my hat off to you. I’m sure your hat will come off too, quite possibly with your head still in it.

  One curious upshot of the British Humanist Association putting their message out there was that some Christian organizations replied. A perfectly reasonable thing to do – their faith had been challenged, so they responded. What I liked about it was that their responses were also written on the sides of buses. Ha ha! Who says the church is humourless? Well, me actually – but this I liked. You wait for a message about God on a bus and then three come along at once. For a few glorious weeks in 2009 there were atheist buses being overtaken by religious buses and vice versa. Sweaty, nonchalant drivers leaning over their giant steering wheels shrugging at each other as they battled out questions of theology, belief, existence, creation and hope. Is there a God? What better way to settle this age-old question than with a game of bus chicken? Determinedly revving their giant red proclamations in a deadly joust with no less at stake than the answer to the very purpose of mankind. Could a scene set at the lights by Chicken Cottage in Tooting be more dramatic? I imagined God playing dice with the outcome as he looked on (the trouble with omnipresence is you can never look away even when you’re being dissed, denied or royally slagged off), mumbling to himself, ‘Right then – if the atheist bus reaches the third Carphone Warehouse on the left first I’m abandoning mankind for all time.’ Then he’d have to wait for the lights to change. Powerful he may be, but you don’t mess with Transport for London.

  I like the idea of the great theological debate of our times being carried out via the medium of public transport. I look forward to seeing a tram with ‘Buddha was a twat’ written on the side of it, or boarding a train to hear the announcement crackle with static, then: ‘Welcome aboard this 15.00 service from London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads. We’d like to remind passengers that the only way to the Father is through His son, our Lord Jesus Christ. There are currently engineering works just outside Didcot Parkway. So, in a very similar fashion, the only way to Bristol is also via the medium of prayer, thank you.’

  The Christians’ bus messages were more confident and assertive than the Humanists’. One of them read, ‘There definitely is a God. So join the Christian Party and enjoy your life.’ Definitely? It seemed a big claim to me, but then given the stories explaining what God does to non-believers, if I were Christian I’d want to look like I was absolutely certain He was out there. I presume they wrote ‘definitely’ because as Christians they’re tired of being questioned on the subject and wished to draw a line under it once and for all by saying something stupid in public. Since it was written on a bus you’d have to be a pretty confident atheist to challenge it with anything much other than an irritable tut and shrug of the shoulders as the multi-storey testament to the existence of a monotheistic creator screeched by you. It’s a bus. What are you going to do? Challenge it to a fight?

  There were a great many complaints made to the Advertising Standards Authority about the Humanist Association’s ‘There’s probably no …’ campaign. It made the top ten most-complained-about advertisements. However, there were many more complaints made about the unsubstantiated Christian Party’s ‘There’s definitely …’ That really got up people’s noses. The complaints were registered and the result was so oddly pathetic it fell into that category of realizations that mean you have to retreat to your ‘mental safe place’ for fear you will do something publicly unacceptable and unsettling like shout at the sky or watch Deal or No Deal all the way through. It transpires the advert had been placed there by the Christian (political) Party, so, according to the Advertising Standards Authority, they, as a political party, are uniquely allowed under advertising regulations to … how best to put this? Well, they are allowed to … lie. Or if not actually lie, then at least to promise things for which there is no evidence at all. That’s the ruling
on political advertising. You can talk crap and no one expects any different. Good-oh.

  The Advertising Standards Authority ruled against the many complaints about the Christian Party ads, saying they were an ‘expression of the advertiser’s opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation’. They can say, ‘There definitely is a God’ because, as a political party, no one realistically expects them to deliver on statements made before they rise to power. It’s so utterly bizarre and perverse it’s brilliant. ‘Vote Labour – we will give you the power of flight.’ ‘The Conservative Party – we have mastered the science of alchemy.’ ‘Support the Lib Dems – we might win!’

  Having done my research, I don’t want to join the Christian Party, even if there definitely is a God. I’ve read up on them and I think they’re horrible. I deeply resent their choosing to revel in biblically selective bigotry. If only they were just unpleasant, but to be honest their manifesto is distinctly odd as well. They are very clear about what is needed to improve education. They would ‘allow schools to elect to use supervised corporal punishment’. These are the words grown-ups use when they want to hit children. ‘Supervised’ means that other adults can watch the children being hit in order to make sure that child is being hit properly by the adult who is hitting the child. Improper hitting of a child by an adult would mean the hitting of the child would have to be done again, maybe by a different adult, or by the same one after he or she has attended the Christian Party course on how to hit children. Hitting children is usually promoted by men who say things like ‘never did me any harm’ – when quite clearly it did; the tell-tale twitch in the left eye or private weekends spent wearing nappies are the usual giveaways. Sometimes they say, ‘Made me the man I am today.’ Sadly this is probably accurate, a childhood spent in awe of the power one person can exert over another if the circumstances allow can turn most people into psychopathic bullies in rose-tinted, tear-stained glasses. Never once have I heard those phrases spew their frothy way out of any man’s mouth I didn’t suspect was in fact a colossal pervert.

  I don’t like hitting. I’ve never been in a fight, although I have been hit. I was hit as a child, not by my parents, but by bigger kids and a few teachers. On one occasion I was given six of the best with a cricket bat. They said it was ‘of the best’ but it didn’t feel like the best of anything much to me. I felt degraded and bruised. I grew big quite quickly as a child so it wasn’t long before I became one of those children you’d think twice about before hitting in case I hit you back or ate you. I don’t intend to hit anyone any time soon. I really don’t like violence. It sickens more than scares me, though I do wonder sometimes how far I might go if I ever really lost it. I’d be very disappointed to discover that I was one of those psychos who is able to beat a man to death with just my hands. I don’t hit my children, but if you hit them, I’ll hit you. Hard. I send my children to school to learn things; none of those things is calculating how long it will be before they’re too big for anyone to assume that hitting them is anything other than abuse. What it is that children are supposed to learn at school from being corporally punished I don’t know.

  So, hitting children then … What else would a Christian Party government deliver for this country? They would: ‘Seek sanctions for schools that refused to comply with their obligation to assemble pupils for an act of daily worship. Such acts of worship should be Christian.’

  Secular or non-Christian children will soon find that being hit by an adult will help them to understand what Christ’s teachings were all about. Perhaps the sanctions would mean that bigger adults would be allowed to come and hit the teachers if the school failed to gather the children together for their act of daily worship. Attendance in any school should be an act of the profoundest worship anyway. The worship of knowledge, the joy of understanding, the communion of shared exploration of ideas, thoughts and freedom of expression. Children should clamber and leap with unbridled enthusiasm over the hills and valleys of what there is to be discovered. Their indiscriminate trampling through ideas and theories should leave a mess of intellectual debris that only need be assembled into anything resembling a thesis once formal education is done with. Sure, you could line the children up in sombre rows with heads bowed in reverence, you could have them mumble meaningless and exclusive prayers they don’t understand to a God they are told they should fear. You could make this happen every morning in an act of daily worship, but frankly I’m not convinced there’s time. There’s so much to achieve before adulthood comes along and ruins that ability to absorb new ideas and meet each one without fear. You could make the children read their star signs and give the Sagittarius ones Wednesdays off because Russell Grant says they’re expecting turmoil and should look to their laurels, but there are books to be read and great and interesting ideas to discuss.

  The Christian Party would: ‘Ensure that proper balanced teaching and debate occurs in schools around the concepts of “Evolution” and “Creation/Design in the universe”.’ This one I don’t mind at all, as it should only take around five to ten minutes for any decent teacher to explain that creationism was once a justifiable way of explaining the world (in the absence of the data we have now collected, verified and understood) but that now creationism is just a made-up story and to suggest that it serves any purpose other than to preserve the power of the organizations who claim it as the truth is predictable and dull. The evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution continues to flood in, on an almost biblical scale. ‘Now then, children, who wants to colour in this picture of a dinosaur and then post it to the Pope?’

  The Christian Party would: ‘Call for the end of the promotion and teaching in schools of homosexuality as a family relationship.’ Yeah yeah yeah, evil queers, Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve, God Hates Fags … so far so hateful, and then …

  ‘Raise the motorway speed limit to 90mph.’

  Pardon? 90mph? Why? What’s that got to do with anything? And then …

  ‘Enact a speeding fines amnesty in cases where fines were more a matter of revenue collection than road safety.’

  What? Forget the queer-bashing rhetoric for a second. This is interesting stuff. I’ve cross-checked this with the Bible and even the complete King James has depressingly little to say on donkey speed limits, sandal tread restrictions and camel congestion around the eye of the needle. The biblical speed camera consisted of a slave with some papyrus hiding crouched in a yellow box on a pole near the road to Damascus (27 DEATHS LAST YEAR! REDUCE YOUR SPEED!). The slave would draw, as fast as his papyrus and charcoal would let him, any speeding hoofed mammals as they trotted by. Even the most knackered ass could amble brazenly past before he’d had time to draw the vaguest sketch of the beast or get a peek at its number plate. In any case, a lot of the yellow boxes didn’t even have a slave in them. They were just there as a deterrent.

  The Christian Party seem very keen on matters relating to drivers and how they’re treated in the UK. One suspects that in spreading the word of God with this level of enthusiasm some of the members may have had to attend the National Speed Awareness Course to explain themselves …

  ‘I was caught doing 37mph in a 30mph limit outside a school. No, I’m not ashamed – the work of Jesus cannot be restricted by arbitrary, secular, traffic-calming measures. “Godspeed” is around 90mph – fact. God is omnipresent but only because he isn’t limited to the draconian and punitive anti-driver legislation this country has become obsessed with over the years.’

  Fail.

  It’s not just how fast the Christian Party want to be allowed to get where they are going. They’ve also given real thought to the serious issue of what to do with their car when they arrive for their afternoon of child hitting or whatever it is they do.

  ‘Limit fines for overstaying in car parks to a maximum of the cost of the day rate for parking in the facility.’

  This is in line with mainstream Christian values in this country. I think. Or if it isn’t, it
’s in line with the experience of whichever child-whacking, science-phobic, gay-hating dolt put together the manifesto for the Christian Party; a man I suspect has a statuette of the Stig hanging from his rear-view mirror.

  The Christian Party (18,621 votes in 2010 General Election – God help us!) would make abortion illegal, halt stem cell research and seriously toughen laws around assisted dying. They would, as they say, ‘Challenge the culture of death by seeking legislation which confers the full protection of the law on all human life from the conception until natural death.’