God Collar

by Marcus Brigstocke

  But then, just when you thought God might be an irredeemably unpleasant character, He sent His rainbow. His promise to man that He would never flood the Earth again. Which is why so few religious people take the threat to climate change seriously. Unless they happen to live in Cumbria or Bangladesh. God put a rainbow in the sky. This was his promise to man that the flood thing was a once only. As I type these words the radio is telling me about a massive tsunami that has just hit Japan … hmm. The rainbow wasn’t a manifesto pledge then, I assume. If you read in the Bible about the rainbow and the end of the flood, it says, ‘I place my bow in the cloud, and this shall be my covenant, my promise to man. And when I see it I will remember never to flood the Earth again.’ I will remember? It’s an aide memoire? The rainbow is God’s Post-it note. A little sticker saying, ‘Note to self – try not to murder everything.’ Good for you, God. Go on, stick that message on a cloud and hope you don’t forget …

  For me, the worst kind of genocidal deity is the scatterbrained genocidal deity. My research suggests that God kills 2,038,334 people in the Bible; 2,038,334 killed by God. It seems a lot, doesn’t it? So I wondered just how many Satan kills. Is it higher or lower? What do we think? Quick game of ‘Play Your Cards Right’. God just over two million, good game, good game. What about Satan? The prince of darkness, what do we think? Is it higher or lower?

  Lower?

  Maybe …

  It’s ten. There are ten people killed by Satan in the Bible. Ten people killed. In a bet with God. God bet Satan that Job would not renounce his faith. And he said to Satan, ‘Kill Job’s wife. Kill Job’s family, kill Job’s children and I bet you Job doesn’t give up on his love for me because Job’s my kind of guy.’ Satan lost. But not as much as Job did.

  Even if I knew for a fact that God existed, the God of Abraham, if I was absolutely certain He was real, if there were some way to know, perhaps if I had proof … I still couldn’t worship that. That God is a pitiless, bigoted, paranoid, violent, inconsistent, jealous, genocidal, scatter-brained, murdering fuck. I couldn’t hang out with Him. Not with the liberal company I keep. The dinner parties would be so awkward. ‘Hey, this is God, everyone … Erm, shhh, He’s a bit racist. Sorry. Oh, and for Christ’s sake, don’t get him going on slavery or poofters.’

  Whoever it was who thought the flood story was OK to introduce to my son as a threat aimed at non-believers, you’re a fucking idiot. It makes me so angry that people – Christians, believers, teachers, whoever – think this stuff is all right. Abraham trying to kill his son to please God – a horrible, twisted story. God closing the ocean over the Egyptians’ heads after he’d parted the water for the Israelites – evidence of a vindictive, unforgiving and violent thug, not appropriate for children. Sodom and Gomorrah – this is not the case made against homosexuality, it’s the case closed on the question of God’s inability to discriminate between good and bad, it’s as close to an endorsement of child rape as any book on sale might get away with. Not to mention the fact that all of the major religious texts glorify murder. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and the Lord doth enjoy the taking away a hell of a lot and does it to anyone He fancies regardless of age, race, creed, religious persuasion or shoe size. God should be on the sex offenders’ register.

  Is it just floods God sends or are all the foul and upsetting things encountered by people every day part of God’s plan for us? A road death. Is that a punishment? Cancer? Aids? Starvation? Which of these are subtle coded messages from the forgetful rainbow God? He said He wouldn’t do it again, but if we push our luck He’s still capable of bringing His A-game and getting medieval on our arses. How is it that the focus of that horrific story has remained for so long on the tiny happy detail of Noah and his family? What about the follow-up stuff where the land is littered with the rotting corpses of the dead and the water turning stagnant and infected with disease? Where’s that written down? That’s the reality of a major flood disaster, not the ‘Don’t it put a smile on ya face’ bullshit about a dove with an olive branch in its beak. Not even Fox News would report a story that badly. OK, maybe they would, but for almost every instance of God doing something nice for some people, someone, somewhere else was getting the shitty end of a particularly shitty stick.

  14

  A traditional church wedding

  or

  The Darling Buds of Maybe Not …

  PERHAPS NOT SURPRISINGLY I COULDN’T GET MARRIED IN church. There are many reasons for this: not believing in God, not being good at lying, being a contrarian and an ASBO. It turns out that replacing the wafers with Berocca was not as well received as I’d hoped. My father-in-law was very keen that we get married in church. He’s also keen on early nights, silence and Conservatism. It’s a wonder we get along at all, but we do. He knows a great deal about old farming methods and trains – both of which have been increasingly badly managed for a long while now, so I like to hear what he has to say on those subjects. Best keep him off the topic of ‘seen anything good on telly recently’ though, because he hasn’t. I think a lot of fathers, religious or not, dream of seeing their little girl marry in a nice old church. Proudly walking their blushing virgin child down the aisle towards a beaming vicar and entirely suitable young man. The image seems right somehow, particularly when it’s followed by a huge balmy outdoor feast with blossom floating on the breeze and the rest of the details filled in by H.E. Bates. ‘Perfick.’ Even modern, liberal Dads like myself take a brief pause before imagining a same-sex, inner-city civil service to a Dub Step soundtrack followed by a reception in a night club with a group battle on the PlayStation, a toast made with class-A drugs and Domino’s pizza and Jägermeister all round. That’s what I imagine at least one of my kids will choose, and of course I’m totally fine with it. I’d also be happy to compromise and go traditional English with Ma Larkin and a vintage Rolls-Royce.

  Anyway, out of respect for my soon to be father-in-law, my fiancée and I went to meet with the local vicar to see if we could secure that dream venue with a series of lies and deceptions. It was a nice meeting. He seemed to be quite a ‘modern’ vicar with a decent sense of humour. At least to begin with. My first question to him was, why Christianity? There are so many faiths. How do you know you’ve got it right and therefore the others have got it wrong? Why Christianity? Why not Buddhism? He took a moment to consider his answer.

  I’ve always been rather drawn to Buddhism because I’m posh and I’m white. It’s the perfect get-out clause for the non-committed, panicky atheist. You probably never saw a news story that ended with you thinking, ‘Those Buddhists! Bastards. Seriously, something’s got to be done about them. They are out of control. All that sitting about. They’re planning something, I tell you.’ I like Buddhism. Fundamentally it seems to be about giving up on desire. You’re not supposed to want anything, which makes starting Buddhism very difficult. It’s a proper Catch 22. You find a Buddhist monk and explain, ‘I want to be a Buddhist.’ He says, ‘Then you cannot.’ You say, ‘Fair enough, I’ll leave it then. Thanks for your time. Wow, are you floating?’ In some ways, now would be a very good time for me to become a Buddhist. If it’s all about giving up on desire, now would seem to be ideal because I’ve already got a lot of stuff. If I got an iPhone I reckon I’d get through the first two years or so without really noticing any change at all. Just me and my pet gerbil called Zen.

  I’ve meditated. It’s difficult and it made me tense. Not entirely the point of meditation, I fear. I’m the same with massage. I really don’t enjoy being touched by strangers (a boarding school thing, I suspect). I’m not very good at sitting cross-legged either, so even preparing for a meditate made me grumble and swear. The lotus position is not for humans with ordinary legs. It might work if you’ve had polio or something but otherwise it seems to me to be as natural as Anne Robinson’s face. Sit, breathe and be present. That is the idea. I was present when I did it and became acutely aware of how uncomfortable sitting can be. Then I forgot how to breat
he. Breathing is really very easy unless you’re asthmatic or in Slough, but be careful, it’s one of those things that if you think about it too deeply, you start to think you can’t do it. After a few minutes of focused breathing I was honking like a goose and my vision went blurry. If you meditate every day it gets easier. I did it for a month, which felt good. Then I got a reworked version of Roy Castle’s ‘Record Breakers’ song stuck in a loop in my head and every time I sat to meditate I sang, ‘Meditation’s what you need …’ over and over until I wanted to smash my head against the fridge.

  There are many different forms of Buddhism. The one I liked the most was Zen practice. There’s no mysticism with it, no reincarnation or magic Kung Fu masters born in a lotus leaf. It’s based on the idea that the Buddha was a bright sort of chap with some good ideas. He was a cosseted prince who went to see how normal people lived and was appalled by what he saw. It made him sad and frustrated. It’s similar for Prince Philip, except that instead of describing a system of philosophical thought in which one aims to be present and accepting of reality, he’s a bit racist. There’s a saying, ‘If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.’ It’s supposed to mean, don’t treat the Buddha as anything other than a normal man. He’s not to be revered or worshipped. That seems sensible, except that in any ‘faith’ an invitation to kill anyone will almost always be accepted and acted upon.

  I’m not a Buddhist. I’d like to be but I’m too busy and there simply isn’t time to make time. I find too many things unacceptable. Cheestrings, for a start. Acceptance isn’t really the point anyway. The word ‘acceptance’ suggests there is something to accept, rather than the truth as explained in Zen practice, which is that the universe just ‘is’. I can’t even accept that. I try to be present in the moment but the idea of putting the kettle on and having a cup of tea when it’s boiled takes me about three minutes forward in time and that soon becomes a fantasy about where I will be in eight hundred cups of tea’s time. Asleep, is my main hope, though I’d settle for dancing, laughing, having sex or perhaps enjoying another cup of tea.

  I wanted the good vicar to tell me how he knew he was right to be Christian and not Buddhist or one of the other ones. Had he looked at the other faiths and rejected them, or just taken up the faith he inherited from his parents? Most people do, which is hardly profound or sincere. I made it clear that I was asking if he’d considered the older religions. I wasn’t trying to draw him on why he wasn’t a Scientologist. To which the answer would seem to be: because I’m not rich, needy or easily led. If you haven’t done it already and can spare an afternoon, I do recommend trying the Scientology ‘personality test’ they offer in their centres. It works like this: if you’ve got a personality, they ask you to leave. If you don’t have one, you can stay and be ‘worked on’; if you have several personalities, you get to meet Tom Cruise. It’s not really a religion, Scientology; it’s more of a savings club for people who think Star Trek is a documentary.

  The vicar was ready with his answer. I was nervous. I repeated my question, ‘How do you know you’ve got it right and the others, the Buddhists or whoever, have got it wrong?’ He said, ‘I don’t.’ I was surprised. ‘I don’t know. This is just the choice I’ve made. This is the path for me, it works for me. But that’s not to say that they’ve got it wrong.’ This of course flies in the face of what’s written in each of the Abrahamic holy books, which are very specific about the requirement to reject all other approaches to God. However, I liked his answer. It spoke of a more open mind than I’d expected to find. This guy’s a liberal, I thought. This is all going to work out; I’ll tell mother we are a go on the flowers. A sane, thinking, forward-looking, open-minded vicar with some of the same doubts and questions I have … I like this man. Then he sang the whole of ‘The Lord of the Dance’ to us. I shit you not. The whole thing in a small room, just my fiancée, him and me. He’d asked which songs we thought we might have at the wedding. I said, ‘Probably nothing religious, to be honest. Sorry.’ He told us that a lot of the songs he liked to sing in church were hardly religious at all. ‘I like this one,’ he said, and then in full voice and with a big smile he began:

  Dance, dance, wherever you may be.

  I am the lord of the dance said he,

  And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be,

  For I am the lord of the dance said he …

  I thought, well, that was unexpected. The look on my fiancée’s face said she was taken aback too. She has a history of choral singing so I was looking to her for reassurance. Is this normal, for people who like singing this sort of thing? A pair of wide startled eyes told me it wasn’t. And then he continued. A little louder and with swinging arms.

  And he danced in the morning and he danced in the night.

  He danced in his trousers and he danced in his tights.

  I forget the precise words he used but there it all was. He sang the entire song. My bride-to-be and I continued to share nervous glances, thinking he’s not going all the way, is he? But he was and he did. He even used the ‘join in when you’re ready’ nod that teachers used to use when trying to encourage participation. A raised eyebrow, half a pause in the song, a big open mouth and … The same look I used to use to trick my brother into launching into a hymn one bar too soon. I whispered to Sophie during round three of the chorus, ‘We must leave, we’re in very real danger.’ And then he stopped and was calm, mild-mannered and smiling again. I was freaked out and making plans for a wedding in a cave.

  He read some bits from the Bible. Which just like the Torah and the Qur’an is full of beautiful, positive, affirming, well-thought-out and well-written ideas … and quite a few other things too. But there are beautiful ideas in all of these books; they’re well worth reading and considering before moving on to a nice bit of Philip Pullman or a Jilly Cooper. He read out some kindly thoughts on how to live, how to love and being together, and it felt good. After the singalong, anything would have been a relief. He could have done fifty pages from Mein Kampf and I’d have been smiling. Quite suddenly his eyes lit up. He reached a passage and told me that this bit might answer my question about other religious groups. ‘This is one of my favourite passages,’ he said, then he read, ‘A man shall be judged by his faith, and not by his works.’ Then he slammed his Bible shut, looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Tell that to the Buddhists.’ So you see, if you leave it long enough, say, the duration of one toe-curlingly awkward rendition of ‘Dance, dance wherever you may be’, it turns out you can’t be a liberal and a Christian preacher. The two things are mutually exclusive. You can only be good at one if you’re shit at the other. Which is what I explained to him, then stole a candle and we left as fast as we could.

  I spent an afternoon with a seemingly delightful vicar in Surrey once. (Another christening: this time I was invited to anoint my Godson’s head with holy water. The font boiled when I touched it. That’s not normal, right?) The vicar seemed kindly and was sincere, unabashed and thoughtful in his faith. I liked him. Then he asked one of the other Godparents if he had children yet. The man (another atheist, who’d found the ceremony about as comfortable as a body cavity search) told him yes, he had two children. The vicar then pressed on and asked if there were plans for any more. The father of two said, ‘Yes, quite possibly, we might have another.’ To which the vicar replied, ‘Oh good, we need more white children in this country.’ Welcome to the church of This is ENGLAND, you know!

  My wife and I got married outside. We had a Humanist celebrant. You have to be careful with the word ‘Humanist’. Especially when you say it out loud. If you don’t watch yourself it can sound awfully similar to humourless, and they’re anything but that. No, really. They don’t take themselves too seriously at all … It’s probably because a church wedding already has gravitas whereas the non-religious ceremony is competing with some element of doubt that it is sincere or proper. There’s often a whiff of cynicism that the happy couple might well be divorced before the cake’s been cut.<
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  We had a beautiful wedding. It was important for us to get married outside. We wanted to make that promise to each other in the presence of something bigger, grander and altogether more impressive than us. So we chose to do it on the side of a magnificent hill in Somerset. We needn’t have bothered because my uncle Nige came and he’s bigger, grander and altogether more impressive than us on his own. Getting married outside instinctively felt right and meant that a huge number of people neither my wife nor I really knew could come to the wedding. There’s such a fine balance between the impersonal nature of a marquee filled with strange faces on an otherwise intimate and special day versus the extra gifts from the list at John Lewis. Go with the numbers, you won’t remember much of it anyway.