God and alcohol have a massive amount in common. Most drinkers and prayers choose to do their worshipping at weekends. You should be frightened of large groups of people worshipping all together, but not as frightened as you should be of individuals worshipping on their own, all the time. Amy Winehouse is the high priestess of one of these churches.
I should read more. There might be a book out there with the answers to all the concerns I have. Perhaps a little-known religious text that inspires without needing to fill its followers with fear. A version of the Bible or Qur’an where the role of God is played by someone really nice like Michael Palin or Monty Don. Perhaps a secular text that speaks to the parts of me left cold by Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest. Maybe a children’s book so simple in its ideas that the truth shines from it like the sun. I’ll have another go at The Very Hungry Caterpillar …
But there isn’t a book out there with the answer in it. There are a few with some of the answer, some with none of the answer and a vast number claiming to have all of the answer. The very best of any of these contains plenty of stuff that should be ignored or rejected because the answer is likely to be different for everyone. For religious people their special book contains the answer but only if they read very selectively and ignore great glaring chunks of nonsense. This is much easier to do if it happens to be the only book you ever read. Even the most fundamental nut jobs who believe the Bible, Qur’an or Torah represents the perfect word of God are left with no choice but to gloss over the hypocrisy and contradictions. They will, of course, insist that it’s all true and all perfect until you point out these glaring errors and inconsistencies and then suddenly it’s still all true but it’s a metaphor.
Every time I’ve performed the touring show of God Collar or talked about these ideas with friends, a great many kindly people have recommended all manner of literary solutions to my quest for serenity, inspiration or whatever it is I think I’m after. ‘Marcus, you must read … this’ or ‘I’ll tell what convinced me is … that’. I’ve read some of the suggested texts and thanks for the reading list but I’m still neither wholly Holy nor the philosophically fulfilled atheist. I’m still confused and lost but now I have an urge to show off and the worrying feeling that books on faith are like literary crack. Just one more title then you’ll quit. A.C. Grayling and one or two other philosophers have helped but I’m quite lazy and the idea of continuing to read books on theology, atheism, faith and philosophy fills me with a sense of dread and a yearning for a really good novel. At this stage I’d be willing to turn to Jilly Cooper to see if some randy jockeys and society hostesses hold the key to the satisfied existence.
I am an atheist by default. I am a moderately well-read atheist, but one without a sense of my secularism serving any real purpose. It’s not proactive or positive. I don’t feel any better about being an atheist than I do about wearing glasses. I don’t find myself particularly keen to be identified with the new, rather dogmatic atheism I see around me. Raise a banner and march to the beat of the big atheist drum if you wish. Fill your days being busy not being a believer and correcting those who are, but I’ve got stuff I’d like to do.
The reason for this particular contemptuous malaise is that atheism is not a thing. It’s an absence of a thing. Atheism can be wonderfully liberating, I suppose, but not on its own. It’s as potentially exciting as the blank page, waiting to be filled with whatever the creator chooses. That is wonderful, unless you happen to be a crap artist with a sincere and well-founded fear of what your page might be filled with once you set about colouring it in. That’s not a reason to hem in your potential by imposing God on to the scene and ceasing your questioning, but not all of us know what to put there and the blank page holds as much fear for many as it does excitement. For my wonderful daughter any blank surface is an invitation to draw Mummy, Daddy, some fairies, a unicorn and to practise writing her name in different colours. For me a blank page in the morning represents optimism and ambition. A blank page in the afternoon tells me I really need to look at my addiction to Twitter and porn and get some bloody work done. An absence of belief requires you to build a philosophy out of what you can believe in. Atheism is just identifying a sense of ‘I’m not that’, ‘I’m not religious’, ‘I’m not one of them’, ‘I don’t believe in the same as you’. That’s fine as far as it goes, but I don’t like fennel. I don’t hang out with other anti-fennelists at weekends. I have no desire to get together and sing songs about how we hate the flavour of aniseed-based vegetables. Although I do. Sincerely. I’d be happy to start a Facebook group if I felt I had a constituency of support. I’d be happy to throw in chicory if anyone felt they might join the group if our aims were broader. Salad that tastes of earwax. What the hell is that anyway?
I have the Richard Dawkins website T-shirt – the one with the big red ‘A’ on it. I’m assured that the big red ‘A’ stands for Atheist, but whenever I see someone wearing one I’m always curious to see if it has the word ‘hole’ written on the back. The ‘A’ T-shirt is supposed to send a message out to passers-by that the wearer in question doesn’t believe in God. Ask many church people to pick an atheist out of the crowd and they’ll tell you not to look for the big red ‘A’ but for the pregnant ones with needles hanging out of their arms, smoking and calling Winston Churchill a twat. Wearing the Atheist T-shirt is a bit like standing up on a train and announcing that you don’t watch EastEnders. It’s somewhat likely to provoke two thoughts amongst everyone else in the carriage. First, why did he need us to know that? Secondly, I wonder if Wellard is still in it. It’s irrelevant to most people.
I don’t wear my Atheist T-shirt. That said, I have three Pink Floyd T-shirts I wear often and with pride. (Even though I have ‘technically’ never been a member of Pink Floyd, wearing a fan T-shirt still invests me with the nonsensical feeling of belonging and is my diploma to prove I am a discerning music nerd.) I think it’s about subtly advertising the things you might have in common with people you’ve yet to meet. The big ‘A’ T-shirt says, ‘Hello, I’d like to meet other secularists who recognize the fact that I’ve read a clever book.’ It’s a non-believer’s response to those people who have the Jesus Fish as a sticker on their car. They are telling other motorists, ‘Jesus is my sat nav, please expect a courteous response if you cut me up. Jesus said – turn the other indicator.’ The ‘A’ is supposed to say, ‘I am an atheist and I don’t need to hide it, thank you very much. I’m proud to let you know that I have made a different decision about life from the one my mother made.’ I don’t wear my one because I don’t need strangers out of context to know that I’m an atheist, and it’s a little too big.
For the secular community to come together and press for rationalism, knowledge, learning, science and reason to be held up as the holiest of holies is something I support wholeheartedly. I’ll happily wave a flag for more thinking and less guesswork (I’m not totally convinced that waving flags will bring that about but it’s a futile gesture and that’s just what we need at this time). Even as I waft my flag to and fro I’ll do so with the niggling fear that in reality I’m inviting a great many people to experience a truer but ultimately more unhappy life. ‘Join us – we’re clever and sad. Come on in, the water’s really cold …’ Perhaps we need some coming together in order to bring that about. For a start it would be helpful to know how many of ‘us’ there are. Counting atheists is what sheep do to fall asleep.
There was a move to convince people in 2011 to put on their census form ‘no religion’ so that instead of a hilarious acknowledgement that Jedis are here and must be respected (‘These are not the statistics you were looking for’), the number of non-religious people becomes a respected group whose agenda, such as it is, must be considered. Every group claims to be under-represented; secularists really are, though … Honest, our lives are quite terrible. We have it far worse than everyone else. We’re often hunted down by packs of the faithful and openly bullied in the press … probably. It would be delightful
to see Jedi or Muggle or X-man made official religions by buggering about on the census form, but perhaps if it turned out that the largest group of people who expressed any preference were in fact non-believers then some of the political wind could be taken out of the sails of religious ideologues, leaving the faithful still free to practise as they please but with less collective power. It’s not that I wish to see the faithful punished or neutered, but I don’t wish for them to assume they speak for a majority they almost certainly don’t represent. We wouldn’t let Ronald McDonald speak for us in the House of Lords or anywhere else, so why a bishop?
Secularists have as much right to be heard as anyone else, even if as a group their opinions are disparate. I believe that a common goal amongst secularists is to push for humanity as we experience it here and now to be respected, before we consider how to please something that no one can prove is waiting for us when we’ve finished living. I’ll never understand those people who refuse to take the plastic cover off the sofa in case someone important ever wants to sit on it. You sit on it. You bought it, get egg on it, fart into it, lounge on it, make love on it, sleep on it, lose money down the back of it and when it’s knackered dump it on someone else’s front lawn. Life’s for living. You wouldn’t spend your life dressed in black tie and remaining still and spotless in your living room just in case someone was preparing a formal dinner in the other room, would you? There simply isn’t time. We wear what is practical and get sweaty and creased and covered in gravy as the occasion demands. We are busy living. Bugger pleasing God, let us learn how to please each other and live well. If there’s a God to be found anywhere and He had anything to do with making us, then the aim of cherishing life, learning, loving and sucking the marrow out of experience surely would please Him somewhat. Wouldn’t it?
Living well seems a good aim, but even with that humanist agenda settled and agreed upon, it’s hard to make the case for atheism because in and of itself it’s a vacuum. Atheism is an answer to a question which, with better information, we need never have asked in the first place. Atheism is nothing. It does nothing, says nothing and provides nothing. Those nothings are preferable to me, by some margin, to the somethings religion offers, and yet, be it because society tells me it is so or a meme or for some other unfathomable reason, I am searching for something else to believe in.
9
Why not, then?
THIS RELUCTANT ATHEIST WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE IN God, if only I could, but I couldn’t be religious. That is to say I couldn’t join any of the major faith groups. I am most familiar with the Abrahamic faiths but I couldn’t be a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim because I just don’t hate women that much. I really don’t hate women at all. If truth be told, I rather like them. Obviously, as a man, I’m often baffled by women. They are strange and exotic and clever and soft and multi tasky and alluring, and there have been at least three I can think of who have made me feel dizzy. They aren’t from Venus and we men aren’t from Mars. Martians are from Mars, Venetians are from Venus, men are from sheds and women are from shoe shops. The differences between the sexes are pronounced enough for generation after generation of comedians to build entire careers out of playing spot the difference between the two and keeping audiences in thrall to the variations. Sheds and shoes … As a comedian I have to pretend to be much more baffled by women than I actually am. Before I worked out what sort of comedian I wanted to be, I was almost contractually bound to say things like ‘Oh, where’s the clitoris?’ The answer is that the clitoris is broadly where you’d expect it to be. The key is to keep poking until you hear a noise. Unless it’s ouch, then you’re probably in the wrong place. (Of course, in some places where religion is used to its most barbaric effect the clitoris is to be found beneath the scalpel of a maniac zealot, but it’s harder to make people laugh with that observation.)
I deliberately used the word hate in my description of why I couldn’t be a Jew, Christian or Muslim. It’s a very strong word, and I don’t use it thoughtlessly. I’m not suggesting that every individual Jew, Christian or Muslim actively hates all women but certainly none of them, man or woman, cares enough about the status of women in the world to address the leaders of their respective faiths to the problem. Perhaps complacency, contempt or ambivalence would have been better words but I think they might very well be worse. If not the people in these faiths, then the structure, culture and history of Judaism, Christianity and Islam seem to me to be deeply contemptuous of women and for that reason the followers of these faiths choose a path I cannot go down. I feel the same way when I see people shopping in Primark. They don’t all hate the children and exploited poor people stitching wear-it-once-and-bin-it garments but they don’t care enough about them to make a different choice. Amongst the Abrahamic faiths there is a level of misogyny that could make even John McCririck, the racing pundit, say, ‘Steady now. The totties have some use!’
They all believe in the same God. Jews, Christians and Muslims all share one God on a sort of aggressive dysfunctional timeshare. Each grouping is convinced they know the only way to get into His affections. Some don’t eat pork, some cover their heads, some drink wine and eat wafers or Berocca, some face east to pray, some celebrate Christmas, some dance, some ban dancing, most sing to the Lord, all are sincere and well-meaning and all are afraid of women to some degree or another. Many to a positively phobic and ludicrous extent. They all share the biblically misogynist God of Abraham. Lots of the followers of these faiths don’t even know they are praying to the same God/Allah/Yahweh as the others. The linguistic differences between God’s names are enough to convince many believers that their version of God is unique and exclusive. He’s not. He’s common to all of them, the big flirt, and His vanity and possessiveness make Him love the different ways each of them seek to butter Him up. ‘Go on, girls, fight over me. Wrestle for Daddy’s affection.’
They all believe in exactly the same God and yet these three faiths and their subdivisions have spent almost their entire history warring with each other in one form or another. You open any history book and it will show how war and religion are as intrinsically linked as Ant and Dec. You could have one without the other, but I’m not sure anyone would really see the point. If the main groups can’t fight each other because they live too far apart or the match fixtures clash with some other fight they are having, then they just divide up and fight amongst themselves. The faiths are drunken men wandering through a town centre late at night looking for a scrap. If they can’t find the much-hated tossers from the next town, they’ll simply turn it in on each other. As long as the sincerity of their righteous rage is exorcised through hate and violence, then they seem to be satisfied.
Religious people will fight over almost anything. In a loving and forgiving way, of course. Take two people born in the same community, educated in the same school: they go to the same places, drink in the same pubs, they attend the same church, they read the same Holy Book. But crucially one of those books is printed in Arial font, the other in Times New Roman, and that’s it. There’s a schism. A fight over the font, which I’m certain must be blasphemous. There then follows a thousand years of bloodshed. ‘Don’t talk to them, they’re Times New Roman Catholics.’ This is war. They all say, ‘Oh no, ours is a peaceful faith built on charity and forgiveness,’ and they mean it too. Until they meet almost anyone who doesn’t agree with them and then it’s fighty, smashy, kicky punchy all the way. ‘Did you come in the side door of the church and sit near the altar? Die, heretic.’
Violence isn’t confined to the faithful. The Godless are all too often vile as well. History shows that secularism is no guarantee of sanity, kindness or harmony. But the faithful are more practised at it, and believe they are in the service of a General who can never be brought to justice for leading them. The chain of command between God and man is broken and there’s been a dangerous military coup carried out by His self-selected pious lieutenants. In the absence of clear orders from the man upstairs, mankind has had to
assume what God would have wanted. And it’s war. Reluctantly, it is war. Apologetically, it is war. After long and careful reflection and against all the instincts of those who’ve had the burden of having to make this difficult decision, it is war. It is always war. In a just world, where the barbaric commander of these forces would make Himself known to us mere mortals dying in His name, He would be tried for war crimes in the court of human rights. It wouldn’t work, of course. The rights of humans are of little concern to God. So for now, it’s war.
It’s important to understand some of the differences between the faith groups, because a lot of them are profound and serious. An obvious one, with special relevance if you live in Northern Ireland, would be Protestants versus Catholics. Protestants and Catholics believe very different things. Different entirely; their whole approach is worlds apart and diametrically opposed. Hence the ‘troubles’. Protestants essentially believe that God sent His only son, our lord Jesus Christ, down to earth to die for our sins and that the only way to the Father is through the Son. Whereas Catholics believe something very different. They believe that God sent His only son, our lord Jesus Christ, down to earth to die for our sins. And the only way to the Father is through the Son via a man in a hat … You see, different entirely. There’s no way these two groups could ever share an understanding and so even the most committed pacifist observers can see how it would become important for them to spend decades killing each other and destroying other people’s lives in the interim. Stop me if I’m trivializing, won’t you? Because some of this shit is important.
God Collar Page 14