I’m also aware that many religious people claim to feel almost exactly what I have described. Perfect love, heavenly light, an all-consuming reassurance … good for them. I can’t get there and I’m not really sure I believe them when they tell me they have. There are descriptions of God I’ve heard over the years that I find beautiful and inspiring. I marvel as I listen to those who are genuinely moved by their religious experience. It never takes long before I qualify what I’ve been told with the aspects of religion that enrage and frustrate me, but for a few shining moments I have thought of God existing in the very loveliest of places, expressed by people I trust, and I’d like to know Him.
When I talk to religious people, I’m not for the most part baffled or irritated by them. (I did once meet Stephen Green – alleged wife- and child-beater – from Christian Voice and was baffled, irritated, saddened, enraged, confused and livid and ended up feeling like the hand that shook his might never be clean again.) I am often quite envious of the devout. People with faith in their lives, who know that it’s going to be OK. They know they are loved and that there’s a plan. I don’t think there’s a plan – I feel like I’m teetering on the brink of chaos all the time. They are convinced there is a place for them and their loved ones to depart to after this life. I’m not. Every time I check into a hotel I’m pretty sure they will have forgotten my reservation, and if they have then what chance St Peter will have my name down? They believe in God and they believe He will see them safely to the good place and not the eternally burny one. I don’t have any clue as to what will happen next, I don’t even know where my keys are … Or my wife, come to that, and that feeling scares me. It excites me too, as it suggests that anything is possible, some of which might turn out to be satisfactory or possibly even better than that. We all share a fear of the unknown, some harness it and enjoy the thrill of exploration, others are consumed by it and limit new experience and excitement to watching Midsomer Murders with the lights off. People with faith lead their lives in the knowledge that beneath them lies the safety net of a loving God. Even if He turns out not to be there at all it doesn’t matter. They can walk the tightrope with a feeling that if they fall, they will be held. Whether that confidence turns out to be good for the rest of us is another question entirely. I would much prefer that a great many of the world’s leaders were not emboldened by the feeling that they are doing ‘God’s work’ and He’ll catch us all if we fall. He might not.
If you believe in God, then there is a promise he will be there for you. He’s eternal. Religious people know God is there for them and they trust in the kind magnificence of His love. They know they are right. I talk like I’m sure of myself a lot of the time but often I feel like I’m lost and, like most of the men I’ve met, the less I know the louder I talk. Believers know that the choice they have made to trust in God is the right one. I don’t believe in God, but it wasn’t really a choice, it just happened. I can’t believe in God at present because none of the versions of God I’ve been presented with satisfies the questions that their existence poses. I can’t seem to make up a God that I like or trust either. In any case a God created by me would be part of me, rather than me a part of it, and even in my most arrogant moments I don’t wish to create God.
I know this is all based on illusion and that the faithful have doubts, worries and concerns too but all of my envy for their serenity in life exists in an imagined and perfect ideal. Never compare your insides with other people’s outsides, it makes for unhappiness and there’s no point making yourself unhappy with something based on a lie. I get the same thing with food envy. I can be enjoying a perfectly delicious meal and look over at someone else’s plate and decide it’s so much better than mine that I start to invoke the power of my psycho-killer God to strike them down and magically hoover the remains from their perfect meal through the air in the direction of my mouth. None of this is sensible or logical, I know that. Be it God, people or someone else’s lunch, I can see that what I do is daft, but I can’t seem to prevent myself from doing it. Hi, I’m Marcus, and I’m only just clever enough to realize what a pillock I am.
I never feel like it’s all going to be OK. In fact, most of the time I’m pretty sure it’s not. This feeling is not helped by the fact that I read most of the British newspapers every day. Take my advice – don’t do this, unless you wish to become so deeply depressed that even a video of a bear cub sliding on some ice won’t make you smile. Often I get up and have a good thumb through all of the newspapers and the Daily Mail as well. For those of you not familiar with the Mail, try to imagine a copy of the Metro with the nerve to charge. I read the papers so I know what’s going on for work – not because I hate myself and can’t be bothered to self-harm properly.
If you regularly read the British press you will know the world is broken. Very rarely do they tackle the ways in which it really is broken and could be fixed, but on any given day you can assemble a list of things that will give you cancer ranging between eating butter, watching films, breathing, having children, working, being unemployed, running, sleeping, picking your nose and not eating butter. You can read how the worst off bring it on themselves, especially those lazy, fly-soaked tykes lying about in dusty fields in Africa. It’s the corruption, don’t you know. You can read how often your children are exposed to paedophiles and how little is done about it. On the same day you can read how unfair it is that everyone working with children has to be checked in case they’re a paedophile. You can read how women are being objectified by the media and then see a picture of an actress getting older and wince at the public decay of her horrid wrinkly body. Yuk! How could she grow older while people can see her? The ugly bitch! You can read how species and environments are dying out and then how the interfering nanny state wants us to reuse things we used to only use once. You can read about Princess Diana though there’s nothing left to say and you can play the ‘where’s Madeleine McCann game’. It’s a fun-filled game in which, with no new information, you are invited to imagine scenarios as to who’s got her and what really happened. Why not take part in a phone poll exclusive to the Daily Express? ‘Phone Polls are an unrepresentative rip-off. For YES they are, dial 08987221784. For NO I don’t agree, dial 08987221784.’ Yesterday’s poll result – 89 per cent of Daily Express readers believe Madeleine McCann is living in Morocco with Princess Diana and recycling’s for poofs.
Certainly the idea that God loves mankind is very hard to sustain if you read the newspapers or watch the news or go online or open the door and venture outside. The world’s not OK, it hasn’t been OK for a while and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be OK any time soon. To be honest, it’s very often a bit shit. Not for me; my life is remarkable and relatively easy. I am comfortable and I live somewhere nice with very few earthquakes, wars, sudden floods or famine. But the world is a hard place to live in for a great number of people and I find that difficult to deal with. You can write it off as predictable, middle-class guilt, an overactive empathy gland fuelled by excessive liberalism perhaps, but knowing what it is doesn’t make it go away and it bothers me. You can fairly easily convince yourself that it’s all good out there in the world but you can only sustain that view if you choose to wear blinkers. My desire for God to be my friend may well be nothing more than an attempt to find a convincing pair of blinkers.
For every disaster, accidental or man-made, there is almost always someone declaring that it’s a miracle God spared them from whatever nightmare unfolded around them. Always they seem happy to credit the Good Lord with the success of their miraculous salvation and never so happy to lay the blame at his door for wreaking such havoc on them in the first place. They crawl from the rubble, scraping dust and tears from their eyes with sobbing relatives draped over their exhausted body, all of them praising the same loving God who had just put them through a very real living hell. If as a witness to the many human tragedies that unfold on a daily basis you focus on one person and the fact that they survived, then perhaps yo
u could conclude God is indeed a benevolent intervening force for good and is merciful and just. Of course he’s a loving God – look, He saved (insert foreign-sounding name of poor person here – Raul, perhaps?) from the terrible (delete as appropriate: gunfire, volcano, earthquake, tsunami, roadside bomb, avalanche, plane crash, mysterious barnyard attack). But I’m always left with the same question. What about the hundreds of others who died in this Godforsaken event? What about the parent and child who were ripped apart by the force of whatever horror it was that gripped them? One surviving just long enough to see the other die, face twisted in fear and disbelief as their exhausted lungs manage to draw one last painful, gurgling breath and then give up. What happened there then? Did God decide they and their families were not worth His time? Are miracles limited to one or two per disaster? ‘Sorry,’ says a bashful and shifty God, ‘I couldn’t save that one. No reason, I just couldn’t … erm … sorry … Hey, look over here at miracle boy Raul, who just walked unscathed from the chaos. Check me out and marvel at my love for mankind.’
I’d like to develop a faith in God so complete it would enable me to make sense of what I see around me. It would be a fantastic thing to have God in my life. But I can’t seem to get there, and the harder I’ve tried to understand God the less I like what I see. I talk to religious people a lot, I seek reassurance from them, and I’m always fascinated as to how someone sustains their faith. I am both jealous and resentful at the same time that they have that benevolent force at work in their lives. This life and its many exhilarating twists and turns often seem to exist at the very limits of what we can bear. Sometimes the pain of it is simply too much for some people, who choose to end it all or go mad. I’m not flirting with either of those states of being and non-being and don’t wish to over-dramatize my emotional turmoil, but all too often life leaves me perplexed, anxious and disturbed.
When I read that many thousands of people have put their names to a petition asking that Jeremy Clarkson be made Prime Minister, I wish there was a God. When I see that America’s Next Top Model attracts millions of viewers, I wish there was a God. When I see MPs so disconnected from the reality of modern living that the few tatty scraps of empathy and kindness they left Eton with are all but consumed by self-interest, hubris and greed, I wish there was a God. When I see an overweight woman tuck a copy of a ‘women’s magazine’ under the pizzas in her shopping trolley, I wish there was a God. Anne Robinson, Silvio Berlusconi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Louis Walsh and the Pope make me wish there was a God. George W. Bush – safely retired, in a rocking chair staring happily at a bit of wood while someone makes his lunch in Texas, Tony Blair appointed as peace envoy to the Middle East … I wish there was a God. The God I wish for would put at least some of these things right, starting with the rocking chair.
I like talking to and debating with religious people. That can be fun and you can often learn the most brilliant things from people who disagree with you. Occasionally they’ll get angry or indignant and fire a nonsensical question at you:
‘Yeah, well, if we’re descended from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?’
And then you have to try to remember to be polite and not shout:
‘Well, there are still monkeys in order to make you feel better about how few books you’ve read.’
Then the conversation usually ends. It’s best to avoid the evolution/creationism discussion until you’ve established that both parties are familiar with the theory suggested in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and that they have some understanding of the creation story as told in any of the major religious texts. Without understanding this stuff it’s only zealotry, antagonism or arrogance that would make you wish to continue to debate. I wouldn’t row across the English Channel without any oars, nor would I debate string theory with a quantum physicist; I don’t even own any string. I wouldn’t wish to discuss who was funnier between Ronnie Barker and John Cleese with someone who’d never seen Porridge or Fawlty Towers. Why try to explain the joyous yeasty mouth-gasm that is Marmite to a person who’s only ever eaten honey on toast? Simply arrange a research period, and instead of beating your heads against each other there and then, go away, do the reading and agree to come back in a few days’ time to continue the discussion. I don’t believe it’s possible to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution and still be a creationist.
Often it is the religious interlocutor who brings down the curtain on the conversation. You’re chatting away, there’s a good bit of to and fro, some heated exchanges, some challenging of ideas and rhetoric, and suddenly they say something akin to:
‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam and you’re going to Hell.’
This is the point in the conversation where they refuse to employ reason at all and instead explain that they believe because they have faith and they have faith because they believe and nothing you can say will change that. No proof, no logic, no reason. There is nothing you can say. Wow! Faith is amazing. I don’t feel like that about anything, apart perhaps from the love of my family and my ongoing commitment to Stilton – what a cheese. When faith is faith and won’t be questioned at all, you have to stop saying anything and I find that hard. It’s frustrating because it’s the end of something that should have no end. The theme park of ideas announces it’s closing early and you have to get off the ride and leave.
That’s what faith is, I suppose, an end to searching, a moment where you decide that you’ve asked enough questions and are ready to make that leap into a place of absolute trust without evidence. Despite so many aspects of it baffling and irritating me, it’s also exactly what I’m envious of. When I run up against the immovable wall of a person’s belief it sometimes brings out a sulky malevolence in me. I don’t wish to destroy another person’s truly held belief. That is mean and vindictive, and seems to be unnecessary. I do, however, wish to understand it, and in so doing I am willing to take it apart. I also value it less when it stands as an insuperable obstacle to political and social development (see Ann Widdecombe). Regardless of my gentle respect for another person’s right to seek comfort in whatever beliefs they choose, I would stand in front of the solid brick wall of religious observance and without hesitation seek to deconstruct it into its component parts and examine each one under the spotlight of reason. If that breaks it for ever then it wasn’t what any of us thought it was anyway. It was a lie. If it can be examined thoroughly and illuminated without fear or dishonesty, each piece rolled over in the bright light of enquiry and then reassembled into what it was before, I’ll be satisfied that belief is belief, faith is faith and God is perfect.
That hasn’t happened yet. Not even close. I’ve often been impressed and certainly been given pause for thought by many of the exchanges I’ve had with the faithful, but almost always there comes a point where a line is drawn and the shutters of faith are rolled down right in front of my eyes. I want to scream.
‘You can’t stop talking to me now. You can’t be a creationist. It’s not possible. You arrived here in a car, a car has oil in it. We know where oil comes from and we can tell with astonishing accuracy how long it took to get there.’
It’s often the way that the people who make the most use of oil know the very least about where it came from and how it came to be (see Sarah Palin).
We know where oil came from and how old it is and that means we know for a fact that the earth is much more than three and a half thousand years old. And yet the faith that so many profess to believe in suggests that the earth’s about three and a half, possibly four thousand years old. One is faith; the other is fact. So I’ve won the debate. Haven’t I? Don’t you have to say sorry, I’ll have another think about this stuff? Didn’t the debate and the exchange of ideas that we just had arrive at a point where you had to admit that at least part of what you were saying was rubbish? Hey! Where are you going? Don’t walk away – I’ll go mental if you leave this stuff in my head.
They walk away because they can and because I can be a persistent
and pompous pain in the arse. Fair enough. Also I suspect that the conversation is brought to an unsatisfactory close because to indulge it further would be to invite an unhelpful and destructive doubt into their belief system. If I were a believer looking back at someone like me and the turmoil that constant enquiry and questioning have brought me, I wouldn’t necessarily choose to switch sides either. Sometimes they look at me with a passive look on their face and a warm almost sympathetic smile. At that point I imagine they are singing a religious song in their head to drive my insistent babble out of their mind. There’s a spelling song I once heard that has an unforgettably perky and annoying tune to it. It was sung by some shrill American children, filled to the very brim with good Christian cheer (either that or they were about to be hit by a supervised adult), at high volume over the sound of a cheap electric piano.
I am a C …
I am a C.H …
I am a C.H.R.I.S.T.I.A.N …
And I have C.H.R.I.S.T. in my H.E.A.R.T. and I will L.I.V.E. E.T.E.R.N.A.L.L.Y.
I am a C …
I am a C.H.
I am a C.H.R.I.S.T.I.A.N …
And so it went on. It’s a delightful, fast-paced Christian spelling song that tells dyslexics, just like Jews and poofs, that they are not welcome in Heaven either. Trust me, I am dyslexic and, yes, it took me a very long time to learn that song. Also I once went to a toga party dressed as a goat.
I will never forget the day this evil ditty wormed its way into my ear. And now you won’t either. Come on, clap your hands and sing it with me.
I am a C …
I am a C.H …
I am a C.H.R.I.S.T.I.A.N …
And I have C.H.R.I.S.T. in my H.E.A.R.T. and I will L.I.V.E. E.T.E.R.N.A.L.L.Y.
God Collar Page 5