“Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is friendship.”
EPICURUS
Proverbs 1:7 says, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge”. I would not generally describe myself as a fearful person. There are, however, things that make me genuinely afraid. And I will admit that, buried between these ideological concerns, I am pleased to be confident that there is not a god (capitalised or otherwise) that I need to fear on top of everything else. Now, before I start making fresh enemies, I should perhaps clarify the varying levels of my position on God and their relevance to what will be coming in this writing. In the past I would have very easily described my position as one of simple atheism and would have been satisfied with that one word. Soon after, I would have added a kind of conditional clause in the form of one more word: cautious atheist. Strictly speaking, I don’t believe in the existence of a god. However, I am also aware that my disbelief guarantees nothing about that. There are a lot of reasons for my atheism, which I won’t recount here. It would take too long and it’s not really all that relevant. My actual relevant position is significantly more concise in explaining. That position is not of mere disbelief but of dissent and dissatisfaction. I don’t like the idea of God and I don’t want one to exist at all.
Many people in the world are glad – even proud – to be living within a democracy and its socio-political model seems to be expanding over the globe, albeit very slowly. It can be a frustrating experience but, at least, theoretically, its goals are encouragingly trying to move life towards self-determinism and equality. We in these democracies also often decry enslavement and totalitarianism as the opposition to these things. The big problem I have with theistic religion (monotheistic in particular) shaping the populace of the world isn’t just its out-dated dogma or laws – although those are disturbing – but the fact that their assumptions, if true, make any democratic struggle completely pointless. There is nothing democratic about religion or God.
Imagine for a moment that the scriptures are correct. That you are created by a being that absolutely holds and owns your existence in its entirety. A being that you never voted for, that will never leave Office, and that is the unchallengeable, unappealeable court judge and master. The Leader in an Orwellian totalitarian system. There is a line from Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that says of life in its culture, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.” Existence under the Abrahamic God doesn’t even allow you that much. Imagine yourself and your feelings being constantly watched. That nothing you want, dream, experience or do is really yours. That you can be convicted of thoughtcrime while awake or asleep. That you are, inherently from birth, corrupt but ordered to become good. Fulke Greville, the Elizabethan writer, wrote it so unforgettably:
“Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound”
Imagine a universal dictatorship, which owns you for an infinite amount of time longer than any human government could ever hope to try to keep someone. From the moment you’re born (in fact, many say before that), throughout your life and even – and this is where the real fun begins – after you’re dead. Imagine judgement based on the incontestable decisions and whims of a subjective consciousness, which carries through eternally, with no concept of time served and no goal of simple rehabilitation. The absolute dictation of what your existence will forever be only begins after you have died. And, while this is happening, the entire purpose of your being is to praise and love your Leader. Every totalitarian regime in history, including this one, has excused such behaviour as “for their own good.” To accept this relationship on its own terms with open arms is to be either trusting to a terrible fault or to be consciously consenting to the total dismissal of your own ideals and will forever. This is the master/slave relationship. Anybody who has just imagined everything I’ve described and can still look me in the eye and very seriously say that they’re in favour of (let alone looking forward to) all of this must be a considerably optimistic gambler with their own, and other peoples’, fortunes. I can’t find this comforting and it honestly frightens me that people will not only wish this upon themselves but on the people I love too.
It also baffles me that people will make a god an exception to every ethical standard that they would hold anything else up to. I could read everything I’ve written here so far to many people and (I’m betting) the majority of them would respond with something similar to, “I see exactly what you mean. It is really like that … But it’s God!” Let’s examine this exceptional being. I have an older brother, one of the people in the world I respect the most, who is gay: a love and sexuality that is overtly condemned by every official source of God’s desires. To this God, my brother could say, honestly, “I’ve been patient, I’ve been tolerant, I’ve been supportive and I’ve been generous without thought of reward.” And, by all official accounts, this God would say, “but you’re a little faggot!” and nothing – nothing – else would ever matter. When I died I would be judged on if I would defend my brother’s lifestyle or not. There’s an old story, much beloved by Christians, of a man walking along with his dog, his faithful friend of many years. The man and his dog come to a brilliant gate of pearl with a golden road leading beyond. A shining winged figure tells the man that this is Heaven. But when the man starts to enter, he is told that no pets are allowed, that his friend must be left behind. The man, declining, turns away and continues down a different path. Later, he comes to a simple green pasture with a humble old hayseed farmer who invites the man in for a drink. The dog, too, is welcomed and refreshed. When the man asks the farmer where he is, he is told that this is Heaven. The pearl-gated place back down the road is Hell and it serves the useful purpose of screening out those unpleasant people who would willingly abandon their friends. Nice story. But, according to the official word of God, I am only moral if I abandon my gay friend because Heaven doesn’t want him. Powerless and doomed to punishment or not, I sincerely hope I always reject this.
In addition to that, I would also say that we, not only, shouldn’t take our sense of what is acceptable/unacceptable from God but that we – for the not hateful or braindead of our population – already don’t. Example: There is possibly someone reading this who believes in God but also doesn’t believe that homosexuality is unacceptable at all or an abomination against anything. To take this position on official religious scripture, you need to pick through the verses and support the ones you feel are inclusive and compassionate while rejecting the ones that you interpret as violent, irresponsible or out-dated (this even happens with things Jesus said). Doing this requires you to have your own independent standard for deciding what you will find acceptable, whether you’re religious or not. A standard that obviously isn’t coming from the scripture itself. Neither religious scripture nor churches are necessary for this. None of us need Big Brother above to tell us what to do; therefore, we have no need to care what He wants.
Blaise Pascal, French mathematician (among other things) from the 1600’s, made a probability/thought experiment referred to as “Pascal’s Wager” about the gamble of God’s existence. To summarise its essentials: Given the lack of proof on either side, reason alone cannot help you decide whether God exists or not. In this case, you need to make your decision by coming from another angle – as a wager. If you believe in God and he doesn’t exist then you neither gain nor lose anything. You, similarly, break even if you don’t believe and are correct that God doesn’t exist. If you don’t believe in God and He does exist then you lose everything. If you believe in God and he does exist then you have everything to gain. The answer, then, is to be faithful to God as it’s the safest or the winning choice, in either case. It’s been said by others, and I’ll agree, that referring to it as a “wager” is fairly appropriate, given its carnival “pick-a-card” sideshow-like way of approaching affairs. It’s a, sadly, accurate way of describing the paradise versus punishment gamble that God’s universe would be though. But let’s look at this another way.
Every day someone willingly undergoes a dangerous operation in order to donate an organ to a fellow human being. Every day someone refuses to give the names of their friends in order to save those people from the torture they are currently screaming under. Every day someone willingly puts themselves between violence and their children. We honour people like this and their bravery all the time. To describe these things done as a regular “duty” to God, or as things done for divine reward or done out of fear to avoid divine punishment, is to strip these peoples’ actions of all integrity. It also makes a joke of choices, accomplishments and tragedies. Who cares if innocent people were savagely raped in a prison for ten years? They’ll have a better time in eternity when they die! In every way the presence of God would affect the universe, there’s no way that I can look at it with affection or satisfaction.
While I’m not content to die just yet, I would also hate to live forever. And, given the colours, sounds, textures, literature, songs, technology, geography, questions, answers and people all around me, I will never understand those who are disappointed with the idea of there being ‘only this’ world or life. What else do you want? I’ll end now (as many things should) on a Richard Dawkins quote and the hope that, perhaps, eventually, more people learn to think like this: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
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