God hasn’t visited Earth for a very long time. Sure, there are odious bigots like Stephen Green from Christian Voice who say the floods in New Orleans were God wiping away the sins of America’s Sodom and Gomorrah and an alarming number of American Christians with similar theories about the 26 December 2006 tsunami in south-east Asia, but no one sane thinks that. Sometimes people claim some sort of visitation but it usually amounts to little more than a bit of bread with a faintly Jesus-shaped image on it or a sweet potato that looks like Mary as long as you ignore all but one bit of it, in a certain light, from the right angle, if you’re pissed and lonely. Muslims tend not to find images of the Prophet Mohammed in slices of bread. Thank goodness, too – no one wants to see Hovis the subject of a mental jihad because they accidentally baked a forbidden image into a loaf of malted granary.
Perhaps with the advent of cheap travel God no longer chooses to spend His holidays here. I’d hate to think of Earth being like some sort of musty and neglected Butlins, which no longer holds any appeal for God because He’s realized that for the same money He can have two weeks all-inclusive in some exotic Galaxy far far away. If our home is God’s Butlins then I hope He remembers fondly the exceptional value and entertainment we provided with our hilarious knobbly knees and old-fashioned singalongs. It seems more likely that God viewed Earth as a business destination and now He’s either done a merger and moved on or He thinks there’s no future in the humans market. Whatever the case, He doesn’t come and see us any more and that’s a shame. I say it’s a shame because if I were Him (and despite the boorish over-confidence afforded by a private education I make NO such claim), I would come down, just once should do it, and make it plain to everyone that I existed and that the correct path for those who wish to spend eternity with Me is to become (insert whichever religious viewpoint you find most appealing here). Druid?
Some people have suggested God no longer comes to see us because He’s dead. Maybe He is, but if the God of Abraham ever existed then a large part of His appeal seems to be predicated around the idea that He is eternal. Evidence suggests otherwise, but the evidence for or against God’s existence or the promise of his eternal presence doesn’t concern me as much as the need for Him to have done so. That fascinates me, and the possibility of it and the recognition of my desire for that sort of heavenly reassurance resonates right through my atheism. You can’t prove for sure that God does or doesn’t exist. I concur with the theory that the burden of proof lies with the believer, not the sceptic, but it’s very unlikely ever to be a provable thing one way or the other. That being the case, is there a more interesting question to ask? I hope so.
Where is God? I know how to get next to God – you do that through cleanliness. I know how to meet my maker – you do that by picking a fight with someone devoutly religious. God is everything or God is nothing. Well, if He’s everything in the truest sense, He’s also nothing, and then I’m confused. Even a narrower take on that notion still makes God a bogey and a virus and a parasite living in a child’s eye and that, to me, diminishes Him. I can’t buy into the notion that God is everything and everything is as it’s meant to be. This is because I arrogantly believe the world to be an imperfect and improvable place in need of our effort. A lot of the time it’s chaos down here and if there is a plan, it’s a shitty one. Maybe I’m wrong, but whoever it was that planned dementia, childhood leukaemia, AIDS, cancer, malaria and for BAE Systems to be one of the UK’s biggest exporters needs to take their plan back to their celestial drawing board and have a think.
It’s been suggested to me that I judge God by too many of my own criteria. I wrongly assume that because I have created an idealized moral code for the world, it must be the right one. I am told sometimes the presumption that God should meet with my approval is not the point of God. He sees all, does all, created all and knows all. He knows the dire suffering that is so commonplace in the poorest areas of the world is no more than they can cope with. It serves some higher purpose only He understands. Of course, empathy makes me imagine how I would feel if fortunes were reversed and I found myself living on the edge of starvation in a shanty town while a very confused Kenyan man tuts and paces up and down the corridor of a Wandsworth semi waiting for the bloody dishwasher man to come. When I imagine myself trying to manage in extreme and challenging conditions, I see terrible outcomes. I’m not used to it. I’ve been to Wolverhampton but apart from that I’m totally ill equipped. I’m ‘Westernized’, comfortable and weak. Leave me in sub-Saharan Africa without a mosquito net and water and (fat reserves aside) I’d be a hopeless wobbly wreck within minutes. I’d give it all of three days before I’d become little more than an additional burden on the people who live there. Perhaps they might put together some sort of telethon fronted by Lenny Henry to save my sobbing white ass. Who knows? But if my empathy gland is too swollen, if my assumptions about the world are too fixed or just plain wrong, if my morality is not supposed to apply to God and His divine higher plan … if all that’s true, then why in God’s name did God make me like this? If He’s all-knowing and has a plan, then I’m right to think the way I do about Him. I’m part of God’s natural order. My scepticism, my cynicism, the questions I have for God – they’re all just as they’re meant to be. God made me mind about what He does. God made me hate the versions of Him I’ve been offered so far. God knew I wouldn’t believe in Him and that I’d find most of the routes to His house impassably thorny and distasteful. God is everything? God sees all? Knows all? Created all? Really? God, I need to talk to you, because this is a shitty and mean trick you’re playing. Now, where are you? Hmm? Seriously now. Come out, come out, wherever you are …
Nothing so far. I’m still searching. I have been told that God lives in Heaven and the only way there is through His son Jesus Christ … That’s not helpful because I’ve no more idea where Jesus is than I do his neglectful father. I don’t think it’s too much to say that as dads go, God was not a good one. Personally I’d put him up there with Josef Fritzl, but once you become a dad you do find yourself more judgemental about other parents. Granted there was no ‘Fathers For Justice’ movement back in Jesus’ day, but even if there had been I doubt the heavenly father would have popped on a Batman costume and climbed up the side of that tower in Babel to get his boy back. My son once asked me why I worked away from home so often. I felt a sharp sting of regret and sadness as I tried to explain to him where I went and why. It was a painful moment, but it’s not a patch on being asked, ‘Father, why hast thou forsaken me?’ I mean, ouch. What a question. ‘Sorry, son … erm, Daddy’s been really busy with work. You got the Action Man I sent, right?’
God is in your heart. I’ve heard that a few times but He doesn’t show up on a CAT scan, and open-heart surgery to see if He’s in there seems dramatic and dangerous. Sure it might end up with my death and then I’d get to meet Him anyway, but that’s not the point. I had a heart murmur once. If that was God then I wish He’d speak up. I can’t bear mumblers. I want to know where to find God while I’m still alive, and I can’t find Him anywhere. He’ll probably be in the last place I look. That’s where things usually are.
The point is, if God’s here somewhere, my wife will know where He is. She knows where everything is. She does a number of things extremely well, but the location of missing items is her speciality. She’s like a sort of domestic sat nav device. She doesn’t like it when I call her TomTom. For a while she was excellent at remembering where I was supposed to be, and held in her head an astonishing number of addresses and contact details for our friends. All this, and I get to have sex with her. As nicknames go, Filofux went down even worse than TomTom. These elevated powers my wife possesses to locate missing stuff could be a form of voodoo bestowed upon her by a wild Haitian priestess. An exciting and exotic thought, though locating God through the powers of voodoo is almost certainly frowned upon by the sort of people who do frowning upon things so very very well. If God’s anywhere nearby, He’ll be in the second dra
wer down, I suspect. My wife seems to locate most stuff in the second drawer down, though, mysteriously, it’s never there when I look. Voodoo … My wife has no more idea where God is than I do. If she can’t find Him, then He’s properly lost.
If you can’t get to God through religion, then it’s hard to know where to look. I could go to a church, mosque or temple and see if God’s really in there somewhere, but I don’t think He is. I feel more conscious of the idea of God in a holy place, but this always leads quickly to my feeling more certain than ever there isn’t a God and never has been. Often when I visit a church, or better still a cathedral, I am truly and profoundly awed by the grandeur of the place. The towering ornate ceilings, the whispering enclaves, the chapels inviting your exploration to touch the cold, exquisite stonework, the solemnity of quiet in a place capable of amplifying the still small voice of calm into a cry to the heavens. The soft flickery glow of a candle lit in remembrance of a lost friend. The beatific face of a sole worshipper in the tidal swell of empty pews tilted up towards the warmth of a stained-glass window, eyes misted as the journey into faithful meditation soothes the crumpled brow … It moves me and then I wonder to myself – isn’t this massive, imposing, empty building missing the point? Is this really what God wants? Is this what Jesus was talking about? A great, big, expensive, pointy, inspiring but usually empty building? I hope not. I’ve enjoyed a lot of churches I’ve seen, though I’ve learned that, like laws and sausages, the less you know about how they were made and by whom the better. There’s barely a decent cathedral in the land that didn’t involve poor people giving their time and effort for nothing but the promise of eternal salvation. That’s all very well, but the people making the promises were in no position to do so. They didn’t know they could offer that. The descendants of these people are now bankers. Most big religious buildings involved exploitative building methods and dead construction workers. The Health and Safety officer was a priest telling people that to plummet from the roof to the floor below would constitute a great honour and the Lord would look down on them favourably. Then He’d post the video up on YouTube.
I don’t think God’s in the big cathedral, and even if He is, that’s not where I want to meet Him. It’s too quiet and too removed from the life I lead. If I met God I’d want to be excited by it and do some shouting. Wow! It wouldn’t do at all to meet God, to stand face to face before the Lord and, before you could begin to express your excitement at this defining event, to be shushed into embarrassed silence by a lady with a cat’s bottom where her mouth should be. That’s not the God I’m looking for, and if that’s the only place you can find Him then I’ll go without. Thank you, and here’s a quid for the new roof.
I’d like to visit New Zealand one day, but if I have to swim there I’ll probably not bother with it. That journey seems dangerous and long and who knows if I’d even survive it. As it stands, the long flight, the time change and the over-representation of backpacks and extreme sports enthusiasts are enough to put me off making the voyage to Kiwi-land anyway. I’m not a lazy man but the route to God through conventional religious observation is a swim to New Zealand as far as I’m concerned. I want God, but if the only way to have a belief system is to hand my life over to people whose politics make me shudder with disgust, I’d rather stagger my way through this existence without Him, thanks.
There are, of course, many places of worship where devotional practice is not hushed and maudlin but rather a no-holds-barred celebration of the coming of the Lord. The gospel and revival church gatherings I’ve seen have been alive with excitement and praise. Even as a posh English white man it’s hard not to leap headlong into the upcurrent of these powerful and sincere meetings of the faithful. Hands clapping awkwardly and always out of time, head swaying to the soul-shaking harmonies of a gospel choir in full voice, mouth open waiting for the Lord to enter me and have me speak in tongues and pass out on the floor. It’s exciting and happy and I want in … until you talk to the individuals involved. Once the singing subsides and the red palms of hands clapped in reverence and celebration have turned back to pink, you will find these are places where bigotry most vile is as alive and vibrant as the services themselves. Great music thrives in many Christian churches, but so does illogical, unchallengeable hate, fear and selected ignorance.
The way Muslims worship has a profound and moving devotion to it. The preparation, the washing and gathering together to face Mecca and literally prostrate oneself before Allah speaks to a passion I wish I could find in myself. It also speaks to a rebellious defiance that insists any God who took the time to create me would not be so vain as to require that five times a day I stop what I am doing to say thank you and lie about on the floor with my shoes off. I can do that at home with a box set of The West Wing and a beanbag. I’ve seldom been inside a mosque. The impressive ones do some of what cathedrals do for me. It’s easy to be awed by them, and to admire elements of the commitment made by worshippers inside them, but none persuades me that Allah is alive and Al Qur’an is the answer to my questions. Men in one room, women in another … not for my God, thank you. Frankly there’s not enough music either.
Jewish temple worship is based on a version of the Old Testament, so, to be blunt, even if they were giving away pie at the door and the ceremony included letting loose to the strains of a deep James Brown soul classic and God showed up every Friday to say, ‘Yep, you’re doing great, kids, I love you and here’s a present’ – it would still hold the same appeal for me as an appointment with a dental hygienist whose wife I’d been caught shtupping the day before. Jewish temple and their reverence for the Torah make me turn on my heels as quick as you can say, ‘Hey, but Neil Diamond’s a Jew.’ I don’t care, the God of the Old Testament wouldn’t like me and I know I don’t like Him. This is not where He lives.
So where do you find God if you can’t go to church?
In my search for divine guidance, I’ve checked in all the most obvious places. They don’t do God in John Lewis. I asked and was met with a very blank stare and the offer of a squirt of ‘Something-or-other’ for men. She blasted a mist of something sickly at my wrist, missed and soaked me in it. I don’t mind people thinking I’m odd or even crazy. I have a view of the world framed by my experiences and I’m ashamed of very few of them. Crazy is fine, but smelly sort of bothered me. I only asked if they thought God would be down in household items or whether he’d been moved to the Christmas department, what with the family connection and all. Next thing I knew I’d been squirted and I smelled like Peter Stringfellow’s neck. You cross the line from charmingly eccentric into dangerous and untrustworthy nutter if you’re strange and smelly. It’s a shame neither John Lewis nor Selfridges do God. There are plenty of people who would no doubt put Him on their wedding list. Anything to guarantee that church venue and a place in the local school. I decided that God was unlikely to be available in ‘all good stores now’. That said, I was surprised to see how much religious insignia was available on the high street if you don’t mind looking like you’re a magnet who’s just been dunked in a tub of cheap metallic tat. River Island and Topshop looked like they were expecting Mr T from The A-Team to pop in and stock up on crucifixes.
I checked on eBay to see if anyone was selling an old God they didn’t need. Plenty of people have abandoned their faith and perhaps one of these desolate lost souls had considered its resale value. The seller would have to photograph their God for sale, so I didn’t expect to see much from apostate Muslims, but surely, given the number of Gods once devoutly worshipped and fought over who’ve now been abandoned for the latest absolute, unerring truth, there had to be some unwanted deity on offer to the highest bidder. I was disappointed. There was someone who looked like they might be about to let God go, then at the last minute they pulled out. I’ve no idea which faith that might have been … Catholic perhaps?
I suppose you wouldn’t want to get God off the internet anyway, would you? For a start, it would be so hard to know what sta
te the God you were buying was in anyway. Of the people who shop online, I would guess all but a very few will have made internet purchases that, on arrival, turned out to bear closer relation to ambition than to the actual size you were after. I am primarily referring to clothes here, although I suspect the same rules apply to sex toys too. You almost certainly couldn’t trust the seller in any case. How do you establish and then maintain your eBay trusted-seller rating if you’ve already sold one monotheistic deity to someone else?
If God were for sale on eBay, I’d have to bid against some of the large faith organizations and most of them have more money than they know what to do with. Instinct says they could spend it on the poor and needy, but as I said they literally have so much they don’t know what to do with it. In any case, if the Catholic Church wanted to buy God, they could probably afford to buy Him direct from the seller with enough left over for a really lovely new pair of red shoes for the Pope.
Even if you did manage to find the right God at the right price from the right seller, you’d then have to get your deity delivered. ‘Collection only’ might be an answer, but if it’s collection from a place of worship I probably don’t want that God anyway. You couldn’t very well turn up at a synagogue and tell them Barry said it was cool if I came and took God out the back way. If He’s not to be collected from a place of worship, then where? And how did they get hold of God anyway? What qualifies it as a worthwhile deity? It might be knackered. I don’t want to turn up at a warehouse and have a pair of ill-fitting overalls shuffle into a back room, only to return with a crumpled cardboard container, a clipboard and a mumbled ‘Sign here, please’, then watch him bump my parcel-taped packet through the hatch, the contents of which are to become the ordering principle for the rest of my existence. It’s all too risky. I don’t expect that would be a serviceable God as we would recognize Him anyway.
God Collar Page 10