YOU BETTER BELIEVE IT…

I do not believe in God because I believe in man.  Whatever his mistakes, man has for thousands of years past been working to undo the botched job your God has made.
Emma Goldman

I watched a fascinating programme the other night about spiritualism.  Two married couples & two women on their own sought comfort following recent bereavements.  Alongside the showbiz flash of the public displays of supposed contact with the spirit world & the dismissive scepticism of the psychological pundits, there was real heartbreak.  One couple had lost their 17-year-old son in a car accident only seven weeks before & their hunger to have word from him was deeply affecting.  Equally striking was the apparent perspicacity of one or two of the mediums.  And the more specific & acute their perceptions, the greater their humility &, indeed, their sheer ordinariness.

But what prevailed throughout, & what is uppermost in my mind now, was the sheer desperation to know that there is a dimension of existence beyond death.  It represented for me a sort of stripped down intensification of the imperative that I believe drives all religion: the need to know the unknowable - specifically to apprehend the purpose of our existence while we live & to understand what happens to us after death. 

As an atheist interested in the constituents of religious faith (& by no means in denial of the existence of some manner of spiritual dimension), it has struck me constantly how the individual’s discovery of faith has been the result of a conscious search.  Seldom have I found myself in debate with a Pauline believer whose God has arrived unbidden & unannounced.   I don’t remember when or where I came upon the famous observation by Voltaire that if God didn’t already exist it would be necessary to invent him, but encountering that statement had all the impact of a Damascene event.  It informed my nascent atheism immediately &, subsequently, conviction of an indissoluble link between need & belief was confirmed again & again as I argued with believers against the existence of an all-powerful God.  At times, I have to say, it has been an uncomfortable conviction because it devalues entirely a profession of personal faith in one’s debating partner & thus seems to brand them either as fool or liar & oneself as suffocatingly arrogant & presumptuous.  But then for thousands of years & across the face of the planet it has been the unbeliever who has burned at the stake at the behest of the believer so conscience troubles me only briefly!

So what does this leave me in terms of an existential view?  Well, not a lot, it has to be said.  Or rather not a lot in the way of answers, anyway.  Now, questions flock & throng in abundance all the time &, in the face of those moments of bleak despair when confronting the organised brutishness of humankind or one’s own all-too-acute intimations of personal mortality, the same crippling fears & voracious needs that feed religious belief afflict me.  But the simple fact of the matter is that I cannot believe in God.  The notion of a spiritual entity, whether detached & judgemental or intimate & all forgiving, has absolutely no currency in my sense of what is fundamentally true about my existence.  And this incapacity is neither the product of a frustrated desire to believe nor an energetic desire not to.  It’s simply how things are in a world in which we try to capture the ineffable with words.  Or, as one of my favourites H.L. Mencken put it, ‘Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing’.

So, since accommodating this set of perspectives on existence & God, I have come to embrace with cheerful enthusiasm both specific scepticism & general doubt.  I am excited by my lack of belief; it energises me because it alerts me continuously to all possibilities – including, of course, the possibility of the existence of God.  I enter a beautiful church &, in its architecture, its stained glass windows, its sheer antiquity, I am immediately aware of the numinous.  I listen to a piece of liturgical music – say, Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis - & I am conscious of its absolute spirituality.  But from this emerges no configuration of God, merely an overwhelming sense of the human spirit’s constant aspirations towards perfection in the face of all experience, personal & historical.  Which brings with it, paradoxically, a kind of cockeyed optimism, irrational but unquenchable - which is, I guess, about as far as I go along the road of faith.

Pic from: http://www.route79.com