Category: writing

When I was a kid, my parents insisted I go to church. My older sister and brothers didn’t have to put on a scratchy suit and sit in the bum-polished pews of Norwood United for an hour or so of tepid religion – either because they were already saved or irredeemable, I didn’t know which. But I had no choice.

Then, at some point, Mum and Dad stopped attending, but insisted I continue to make my weekly pilgrimage to the House of God. I resented this arrangement, felt like a sacrificial lamb, being sent as a proxy to atone for my family’s guilt. The only redeeming factor in the whole situation was Rev. Kennedy’s daughter, who sat in the front pew, revering her father, while I sat toward the back, revering her.

Eventually, having recognized my own apostasy and the unattainable nature of the reverend’s daughter, I stopped going to church, too, saving the offertory money for other entertainments that might or might not have required forgiveness, but certainly had nothing to do with salvation.

Thus I spiralled like a misguided spark down the black hole of disbelief. I didn’t permit myself to know it at the time, but I’d stumbled upon my own sort of absolution at the drained font of atheism. It took decades for me to realize I was an atheist, decades more to believe it. I suppose it was mostly the unsettling notion of personal mortality that kept me in suspended animation all those years.

Having lived long enough to know that I don’t want to live forever, though, I’ve freed myself from that more or less selfish entanglement for imposing God on the universe. And what other reason could there be?

Well, it turns out that belief sort of sneaks up on you. If there is no God, I found myself asking, how do I explain all this? ‘All this’ referring to a seemingly infinite and eternal universe which harbours that most astonishing of all miracles: living Beings? Entities that are conscious, that procreate, and that have evolved into something as complex and incomprehensible as my self?

If you are not awed by the panoply of life buzzing, rooting, galloping, creeping, wriggling and a thousand other …ingings all around you, and inside you, and before you, and after… if you aren’t amazed, utterly and profoundly amazed by every bug on every leaf on every tree in the forest, then you can’t be fully human, can you?

That’s where religion sneaks back in. Aren’t awe, wonder and other such terms clearly in the religious realm? Don’t you have to be certifiably religious to use that kind of language in public? Doesn’t it bespeak things we mere mortals can’t understand, or even appreciate wholly. And if we can’t comprehend this universe of ours, who can? I mean someone has to? Otherwise, just like a bunch of passengers on a jumbo airliner, whose pilot has just died of a heart attack, we’re doomed.

The catch to that sentence, “I don’t understand!” is it presumes there is someone who does. And of course, there have been plenty of prophets throughout the ages, who have proclaimed God’s word in fulfilment of that presumption. And most people throughout history have taken a proclamation of some sort as their truth.

Who knows, they might be right. That I don’t believe in a divine being who exists outside the realms of the physical universe and animal consciousness doesn’t mean all those prophets have been wrong, or charlatans. I don’t have to disprove the existence of God to disbelieve; nor do believers – despite the strenuous logic of thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scotus et al – have to prove His existence as a prelude to common faith.

As an existentialist I refuse to waste everybody’s time and energy with elaborately futile refutations of God’s existence. Is God possible? Yes. Therefore he cannot be denied with certainty. That’s an end to it. In fact, existentialism is not incompatible with faith.

On the other hand, I don’t have to listen politely to the strenuous attempts of believers to ‘save’ me. Or accede to claims about God-given rights in the realms of morality, justice and politics. I don’t mean to quibble, but there’s a stark contradiction to the lyric “God keep our land glorious and free” in the Canadian National Anthem. Who’s God are we talking about? And how is this presumed God going to be fair and impartial to citizens who don’t believe in Him?

Rev. Kennedy was a nice man. I liked him. Most believers are tolerant people. But there’s an underlying pity, or smugness in perverse cases, to the religious outlook. Not only are non-believers damned, according to the Bible, they are also incapable of true wonder, true awe. The heathens are not experiencing the eternal light of salvation; their vision is dimmed by blinding cataracts of sin. The presumption here is that, without God’s divine light we cannot be truly spiritual.

The damage done in the name of that kind of faith has been incalculable.

The other day I was sitting with a group of people in our workshop, the only indoor space on our property where we can practice the edicts of social distancing in accordance with COVID-19 protocols. We heard a cricket chirping in the room, and I spotted him next to the baseboard on the opposite wall. I excused myself from the conversation, walked over and coaxed the creature onto my hand. What a delight! To accompany a living Being out-of-doors and let him go about his singing in a place where it might attract a mate.

Awe is scaleable. Some people need dramatic music and dazzling vistas to achieve that sense of wonder; some need prospects of omnipotence, eternity and infinity; others find it in the minutest of details, in the awareness of spirit infusing every space, every nook and cranny of consciousness.

As an existentialist and atheist I’m reminded every day of my spiritual connection to this world, and I want to celebrate its wonders every moment. In that sense, I’m a believer, too.