pandemian

30 January 2007

It was a Christmas spent happily picking all the orange ones out of the Quality Street and downloading and watching various recent series on atheism that made me eventually shell out twenty quid for The God Delusion. I am enjoying it, of course, in that way that people always gain satisfaction from reading views that correlate with their own, but I am finding that I have to stop every quarter of a chapter or so to give vent to my not inconsiderable feelings that Richard Dawkins is a pompous, vainglorious, self-important cunty pempslider before I am able to continue. I'm not making as much progress as I had hoped.

My parents are Christians for whom god is a benevolent absolute; believers who have no need for church but whose faith is unshakable. Having parents who believe in god but not necessarily the trappings of religion, I attended a Church of England primary school simply because it was the closest. This was not the sin and blood of Christ version of Christianity but harvest festival scrabbling in cupboards and drawers for old shoe boxes and nearly-expired tins of rice pudding, Christdingles and nativity plays and All Things Bright And Beautiful every morning at assembly with the words not destined to change to the dirty version for a good four years yet. There was just one piece of religious iconography in the school, a statue of the Virgin Mary in classic blue with outstretched arms that absolutely did not invite to you hang your bag upon them on threat of note to your mother. She was placed in a corner of the canteen, as an inducement to neighbourly behaviour in the lunch queue or perhaps as a reminder that God looks upon both gluttonous requests for seconds and unfinished plates (when there are Children Starving In Africa) with a sad, forbidding eye. It was incongruous amongst its resolutely low church surroundings and I don't recall anyone ever treating it with any more reverence than the inexplicable stuffed and mounted moose head over the headmaster's door before which the infants would quake and scatter.

I even went to Sunday school for a few years, due entirely to a combination of all my friends being there and my parents realising this would mean a couple of uninterrupted hours in the pub of a Sunday afternoon rather than any great desire on my part to read Thank You Lord for the Jeans We Wear for the thirteenth time. It would be pleasant and afford me much kudos to be able to say that even at the age of eight I knew that the idea of a god was absurd, but I no more had the ability to outright deny the existence of a god any more than I did Santa even if somewhere I had the seed of knowledge gently germinating that would eventually tell me that religion is based on just the same kind of deception that makes your father pretend it wasn't him that drank the sherry on the mantelpiece and ate the carrots left out for Rudolph. When I bowed my head in prayer at assembly and before bed it was done so because I was told that I must and though I cannot remember ever once trying to actually talk to god neither did I deliberately choose not to. It was simply that my Garbage Pail Kids swapsies pile offered me more than communion with god ever could, something that remains so to this day. I also ate my carrots, did my maths homework and refused to show my knickers to boys for the same reason, because authority instructed me so and while the benefits or validity of these actions escaped me (and again, do to this day) I was in no position to express why that might be.

God was, like my parents, teachers and the ice cream van on a Monday afternoon all knowing and something that was always just there. Nothing I had been told ever led me to question this until one day, perhaps dwelling a little too much on the embarrassed, feet shuffling girl's only talk we had received from the school nurse the day before, I asked my father that if god made us, who made him? He didn't know and had never cared to think about it. The first part of that answer set me stumbling down the path to atheism, the second to antitheism. Once I had heard, just the once, that the idea of god could be based on the triumph of faith over knowledge I couldn't accept the concept of lives lived on little more than hope and crossed fingers and to my parent's quiet dismay managed to reached fully-fledged infidel status by the time I was twelve. A couple of years after that, when I thought to consider the second part of my father's answer and realised he was happy to have his finger-crossing unchallenged that I arrived at the conclusion I'm still at now, that all religion is destructive, divisive, absurd, out and out dangerous, an impediment to free thought and yes, delusional. Which is, perhaps and with some relief, the only belief I think I am ever going to be able to say I share with Christopher Hitchens.

Atheism is, unfortunately, one of the least sexy isms (along with vegetarianism and pacifism) that it's possible to subscribe to. With feminism there might still linger in the back of the mind of even the most uncomprehending the thought that you might not be wearing a bra and if you're pro-choice, that obviously means you put it about no end but people can look at you if you're at atheist like you're somehow deliberately spoiling everyone's fun. A dog poo tart in the middle of a child's birthday party spread. It is this rather than any innate respect for freedom of religion or the opinions of others that stops me rapping people sharply on the head with enthusiasm and enquiring with notable lack of politeness about their mental health. Dawkins, it seems, does not share my reticence.