It’s true that there is a culture of death here on earth. There’s a little-known statistic that every human being who has ever walked the planet has at some time or other dabbled with death. Shocking. We can change that. Like all good Christians, they value human life as a God-given and beautiful thing, to be treasured and respected and loved.
They would also: ‘Maintain a well-resourced military with a nuclear deterrent.’ In case it turns out that life isn’t as special, sacred or important as they thought. Turn the other cheek? Well, yes, you could do that, or you could invest in a weapons system that would indiscriminately kill every man, woman, child, animal and plant it came near. Force other nations to play a deadly game of catch-up, leaving their people without sustenance, education and sanitation in order to keep spending on the latest weaponry, and hope the dominoes never start to fall. Turn that life-respectin’-cheek, bitch!
Hmm, I wonder what Jesus would do?
The Christian Party sent out their double-decker proclamation ‘There definitely is a God’, and if there is, I’m sure He was pleased that the argument was settled in his favour once and for all … on the side of a bus. The Christian Party is not to be confused with a Christian party – I went to one of those once and was asked to leave after I accidentally dunked the body of Christ in some hummus. It’s odd how much the body of Christ looks like a Pringle. Also, if you’re looking up ‘The Christian Party’ online, take a look at Christian Party Games, which includes Biblical Bingo. Match a row of ways in which God has killed people and win a bishop’s hat!
The Christian Party’s ‘There definitely is a God’ retort to the Humanist campaign looked like it might excite further debate. Had funds allowed, it could have led to an enjoyable to and fro on the buses between the forces of God and the atheist rabble. Advertisements changed on a weekly, daily and then hourly basis as the exchanges heated up.
‘Yes, there is.’
‘No, there isn’t.’
‘Is!’
‘Isn’t!’
‘There is a God!’
‘I’ll get you, Butler!’
‘Prove it!’
‘You claim there is one – you prove it, you gullible hump!’
‘That’s it, you Godless bastard, I’m going to hit your children.’
The Trinitarian Bible Society – which publish Bibles – took the view that the best way to preserve their lucrative business would be to place advertisements quoting from Psalm 53.1. The slogan read ‘The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God’. It’s an insult, it’s childish, it’s factually doubtful and yet because it’s straight from the pages of ‘The Good Book’ it carries weight. It is, let’s face it, a massive diss. I’m no fool. And the part of my body that tells me there is no God is my brain, not my heart. I tend to use my brain instead of my heart when it comes to deciding on the important stuff. My brain is flawed, jumbled, logical and illogical all at once. My brain has looked at the facts as they are and has said there probably is no God. This isn’t foolishness. Ignoring information is foolishness. Research, thought, discussion and debate seem reasonable to me. What is a fool? Well, to quote President George W. Bush: ‘There’s an old saying in Tennessee I know … it’s in Texas – probably in Tennessee, that says – Fool me once … Shame on … um … Shame on you … Er, a fool … Me, you can’t get fooled again.’ That’s what a fool is.
Looking at the Trinitarian Bible Society’s marketing plan, you can at least say they are consistent with the best traditions of why many people believe in God. It’s the ‘give ’em a good old scare’ approach. There’s a reason why many people describe themselves as God-fearing. He’s a scary bastard. If I thought He really was up there, I’d be God-fearing too. It’s believers I fear the most at present, but if there was a God I knew existed I’d be never-leaving-my-house, hiding-under-the-table-shaking-like-a-leaf, pissing-in-my-pants God-fearing. The Trinitarians quote from the Bible and make it clear in slightly fancy language that any questions you might have regarding God have already been answered. Well, not answered exactly, but it feels like they have if you stop asking them, and the book that has been the number-one bestseller since before even Bruce Forsyth was born takes a dim view of such questions anyway (and I do mean dim).
I’m sure they needn’t worry, people will still keep buying Bibles. Even the most foolish amongst us recognize how important a book it is, and funny too. There are passages that make me laugh out loud, some that can make you cry and lots that should anger anyone who has even the vaguest care for humanity. There’s a Bible in almost every hotel room in the world, thanks to the Gideons. To date the Gideons have deposited 1.7 billion Bibles in top drawers of hotels, theatres, businesses and libraries all over the world. The Gideons are a group of enormously forgetful Christian businessmen who never travel without a Bible and almost always forget to take it with them when they leave. Occasionally they leave other items behind too, but it’s usually a Bible. I once found a pair of socks in a drawer in a Travelodge saying ‘Placed here by the Gideons’. As a touring comedian I stay in a lot of hotels and I’ve been collecting Bibles from each one I stay at. I assume they’re like the biscuits, soap, dressing gowns and kettle that you’re allowed to take with you when you leave. I’ve got thousands of Gideon Bibles. Enough to construct a Pagan temple, as it happens.
There were some atheists who pressed for their message to read ‘There is no God’ without the ‘probably’ – I for one am glad they failed. However unlikely the existence of a deity is, we don’t yet know for sure that there isn’t or never has been one. Why insist on an absolute position when you don’t know for sure? Dismiss at will the absurd, offensive, destructive, oppressive and dishonest, but this more than qualified as a ‘probably’ statement in my view. It’s quite possible that the ‘probably’ inspired more thought and debate than the ‘definitely’ anyway. ‘Occam’s razor’ is a brilliant and important principle to apply here: discard that which overcomplicates the answer and has to travel the longest route in its attempt to arrive at plausibility. That principle shouldn’t mean we refuse to reconsider that which we are sure of. The sun will rise tomorrow … probably. I think, therefore I am … probably. Courgette plants cannot hear the approach of a hungry gardener with a knife … probably. Simon Cowell produces cynical, lazy, bland records and he’s a grasping, vapid twat … some things we can be pretty certain of.
The Christian Party will have enjoyed the divinely assured confidence of the definite statement and the secular community will have enjoyed with pride the open-minded nature of scientific enquiry … probably. The key, it seems to me, is to remain open-minded, unless to do so hinders further enquiry or should be dismissed because the matter at hand has been satisfactorily demonstrated to be wrong. I strive to be open-minded on all things. That said, I’m not eating Cheestrings no matter what my children tell me about how yummy they are. They are an affront to cheese and a vile blight on the good name of variously rotted milks.
I recognize that I am not open-minded on a great many matters. I try to be but I’m just not. A fully open mind seems to me as dangerous as a closed one. Who knows what rubbish might pour in and, worse still, what might ferment into an opinion and come back out. On religion I have decided that none of the ones I’ve read up on so far are for me. On faith, though, I’m not so sure. I’m not depressed, but my lack of belief doesn’t make me happy and I sometimes wonder what I might have to impose over the blank page in order to be content.
Open-mindedness is a difficult state to maintain (so is North Korea, but for very different reasons). Not when you’re young, obviously. When you’re young, open-mindedness comes as easily as a young person does. The fickle gift of being fickle is enjoyed without question by most young people, who wake up vowing undying love for Stephanie from class 4b and listening exclusively to N-Dubz, and by bedtime everything’s changed: they are now definitely going to marry ‘weird Mary’ who sits on the wall outside the Spar shop and have replaced their N-Dubz posters with
those of Justin Bieber. This joyful, guiltless freedom of thought lasts until the day you wake up and find a squashed can of Tango has been inserted into the hedge in front of your house, and suddenly you are dreaming up severe and violent penalties for pretty much anyone younger than you are. Perhaps the Christian Party could drive a large car at speed towards whatever child shoved the partially squashed drink can into the hedge as the ultimate corporal punishment. These uncompromising views come with age. I’m pretty liberal, which is to say if you put me in a room full of people of a similar age, the odds are that I’ll be the one wearing the most corduroy. It can’t be a coincidence that as I get older I find that my position on the question of the voting age is that it should be whatever age I am at the time the election is called. A fixed and conclusive view of the world has a mysterious magnetism that seems to get quietly stronger as each year rolls by. A settled and certain viewpoint on what is absolutely right or wrong in the world almost always serves to make us unhappy as we are very unlikely to find the world willing to bend itself to fit our position and yet, give most of us a chance to attach ourselves to this or that ‘take on life’, and we are like chewing gum in a plait.
The Humanist bus campaign won’t have changed that (or much of anything else, I suspect), but the use of ‘probably’ at least encourages the idea that we should keep on considering all the possibilities.
One driver refused to operate the Humanist bus. Mr Ron Heather from Southampton told his employers that as a Christian he was ‘shocked’ and wouldn’t drive the bus while it suggested he might be wrong to believe in God. Why he was shocked I don’t know. You’d have to have your head shoved pretty far up your own belief system not to notice that some people hold a different view to your own. I doubt anyone would seek to associate the driver with what’s written on the side of his vehicle anyway. Certainly when I see a floppy-haired driver in a Mini with ‘Foxton’s Estate Agents’ written on the side I almost never think to myself: Wow, look at that – a man with only two GCSEs with a job, a car and fat knotted pink tie. Mr Heather took his job as a Southampton bus driver before the Humanist ad campaign started so in some ways his seemed a reasonable position. I say this with caution as there seems to be an endless stream of sanctimonious dullards who whine in the press, ‘I can’t do my job because it offends my religious beliefs.’ The press are forever finding simpletons who think that having faith in something unprovable confers on them some special rights. I don’t know where they get these ideas from but perhaps the House of Lords could ask the bishops who automatically get a free seat in there if they could look into the issue … Oh I see. If your employer says don’t wear a crucifix to work, then don’t wear a crucifix. Especially if it’s full size. There was a long and tedious row about this concerning a British Airways employee who wanted to wear a crucifix to work. If you don’t trust engineering and science but you think a crucifix will keep you safe at 32,000 feet then you probably shouldn’t work for an airline. Jesus almost certainly didn’t care what the BA staff wore to work. He almost never flies anyway, what with the whole walking-on-water thing. If you’re a Muslim or a Jew, why go for a job at ‘Mr Porky’s Rib ’n’ Pig Bits House of Non-Halal Pork’? If your beliefs prevent you from working at one place, then go somewhere else. It’s really pretty simple.
Mr Heather had held his job for a while and even if it shouldn’t have, the arrival of this challenge to religious belief represented an unusual state of affairs and a quandary for the devout Mr Heather. In principle, Mr Heather’s stand is one I support. I think it’s silly, but I can see where he’s coming from, and not just because he’s in a big red bus. As it happens I’d like to see more people put up a fight when they are asked to carry a sponsor’s message as part of their work. I wouldn’t wish to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with ‘McDonald’s – I’m lovin’ it’ to my place of work, particularly if I worked at McDonald’s where I imagine ‘lovin’ it’ would be so far from my reality that I’d end up bobbing for apple pies in the deep-fat fryer just to focus the pain. If Mr Heather believed in God and that was important to him, why should he have to spend his entire working day casting doubt on that and dealing with the looks from strangers and colleagues as he drove his passengers from Southampton Central to the sixth circle of Hell, or wherever it terminates? You could argue that he should drive his passengers wherever the bus is supposed to go, but the fuss he made was minimal and he seemed to enjoy a day and a half in the newspapers. In the event the bus company said he would only have to drive one of the Humanist buses if no others were available. Mr Heather seemed content with that compromise and I’m sure God would see it his way once it had been explained by St Peter that there simply weren’t any buses proclaiming God’s love for man.
Most of the time we passively consume advertising messages without considering the effect they have on us – I’m sure that’s why advertising works so well and the industry is worth so many billions of pounds. I don’t even know for sure what ‘Ronseal’ says on the tin but I’m absolutely certain that it does it. If I wanted to ‘Bang’ off some dirt I’d turn to ‘Cillit’ for a really effective dirt banger. No M&S food is just normal food – it’s special M&S food and is therefore more full of sex than Paris Hilton staying at the Paris Hilton with the express aim of filling up on sex. When a statement comes along that seems to step outside of the meticulously researched subtleties of the usual advertisements (‘It’s Creme Egg season’), it is striking and it makes you think. Regardless of what offence the Humanist Association’s campaign may have caused, I am absolutely convinced that intellectual provocation is beneficial to us all and that offence is best taken in very small doses with a spoonful of sugar and a good book. This relaxed view of offence is, of course, much easier to lay claim to when you agree with the provocation in the first place and are therefore not offended.
Doubtless some would-be passengers refused to board a bus denying the probable existence of God, choosing instead to wait for the next one with something less challenging on it, like an advert for BP, which now stands for Beyond Petroleum, Burst Pipe or Big Polluter, according to taste. If a bus pulled up claiming, ‘There’s probably no climate change so stop worrying and don’t use this bus’, I’m quite sure I’d wait for the next one, or go home and get my bicycle … Or perhaps a taxi … Or, failing that, one of my cars. I’m no better than anyone else and considerably worse than some. Those passengers are free to choose and immensely fortunate that we live in a country where another bus is likely to arrive fairly soon with something entirely different written on it. As long as that something isn’t ‘Out of Service’ then it should all work out fine and our ability to usefully discriminate between what we are OK with and what we are not is to be celebrated with a return ticket to the swimming baths, please, driver.
I spotted one of the Humanist buses on a Sunday morning in London. I was out for a walk and the bus was stuck in heavy traffic outside a church. I saw the ‘There’s probably no God …’ message and was already enjoying the irony of it being held up outside a church when I noticed that on the front it read ‘Sorry, Not In Service’. A bus that was clearly suffering from some post-religious guilt complex. Defiant but still somehow ashamed of its lack of faith. Struggling to let go of the sense of emotional devotion to a set of ideas it had intellectually abandoned years before.
I wish there were still buses whizzing about with theological provocations on the side of them. It was all so refreshing and different. This was my church coming together, not to worship, but to say that your church was wrong to worship. It was, let’s face it, in the very best traditions of religious practice. ‘You’re wrong!’ ‘Nope, screw you, you’re wrong.’ The idea of it excited me and I wanted there to be a row and a fuss and for someone to get cross and say something daft on Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 show: ‘I think the bus drivers should be arrested’ – that sort of thing. Perhaps a strongly worded and overtly intolerant letter to the Daily Telegraph, to include the words ‘disgraceful’, ‘moral decl
ine’, ‘traditionally Christian nation’, ‘tolerance’, ‘string ’em up’, and something about ‘not fighting in World War Two so that these sorts of people can say what they want and put squashed Tango cans in my hedge!’ I like a bit of a furore; it helps to clarify where people really stand. A few people stand in the most appalling positions on these issues, but I feel it’s preferable to have everyone’s views out in the open so we can discuss them. I am capable and guilty of zealotry and am unashamedly prejudiced (all based on research and debate, of course). I hoped that the provocation of the Godless, no matter how upsetting for some, would lead to greater honesty in the end. Rather that than the sort of passive approval or cursory dismissal most of us give to ideas worthy of a far more thoughtful response.
The thoughts and ideas I had hoped would be discussed, were, to some extent, although like most of these things the debate seemed to entrench those whose views would most readily suggest themselves for moderation and empathy. My own thoughts were not entirely as I’d expected. I actually found the ‘probably no God’ campaign quite unsettling. I found myself looking at one of the buses and thinking it would be pretty bloody depressing to be run over by that bus, wouldn’t it? I mean, it’d be fairly depressing to be run over by any bus. Particularly one of London’s bendy buses. You’d lie there in the road thinking: Shit, I’ve been run over by a bendy bus. And then it would dawn on you – yep, it’s going to happen again in a minute, and then the second half of the least popular form of public transport since the zeppelin would trundle over your prone and despairing body. A dreadful sequel to the first assault, almost as bad as Weekend at Bernie’s Two. But believer, atheist, agnostic or other, it would be particularly depressing to be run over by the big secular bus, wouldn’t it? As you’re trapped under the wheel arch of a double-decker, realizing there’s very little of your life left to worry about anyway, you look up and the last words you see are, ‘There’s probably no God.’ That and a fat, sweaty driver looking down at you saying, ‘Sorry, mate, I thought you were a cyclist and as such fair game. My mistake.’
God Collar Page 3