Why I am an atheist

If God spoke in the world, His voice would be irresistible.

Karl Jasper
___________

I am what I suppose could be called a natural atheist, never having believed in the existence
of God for a second. But, in a very real sense, I am an atheist because my parents, grandparents, and best friends have also been atheists. My mother, in particular had what can be described as an intense dislike of the church. As a child she had been forced to attend services and to be confirmed; and she thought the whole business ridiculous and tedious. For doctrine “as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.” And did Christ ever laugh? Was he possessed of a sense of humour? Not as he is presented in that work of subtle propaganda and relentless anti–Semitism, entitled the New Testament. So why drag a village child from the woods and haystacks to present her with deathly doctrines, culled from that most unreliable of sources: a book written by we know not whom about a man whose very existence has to be questioned? And which is very thin gruel, even for adults. Religion is not for children. And adults should be freethinkers: open to all ideas, and bound to none. If the Archangel Gabriel appeared to me tomorrow, then I would convert. But I know, and you now, that this is never going to happen. Such things 'happened' centuries ago, and are on a par with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Nights of King Arthur. They are not history, they are myth. 

As a result of my mother’s experiences she determined to leave me entirely to my own devices, and I have never attended a church service – with the exceptions of weddings and funerals. School assembly I could not of course avoid; but all I remember is the aching boredom of it all – and a particular dislike of ‘All things bright and beautiful...’ What about all things grim and terrible: did God create them as well? “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” But it didn’t wash: the latter was palpably untrue, and God seemed guilty of a profound dereliction of duty. But, “Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” But it isn’t true: ships go down; earthquakes kill thousands; and diseases spread like the agents of hell. “Life is appalling!” said Cezanne; and, taken in the spirit in which he expresses it, so it is.

It is said that religion gives meaning to life. But I see not how. I may believe in a certain doctrine on a Thursday, but can I hold it in the small hours of Friday – that time of the very nadir of confidence? I doubt it; for there is no absolute certainty, and I cannot believe that most officiating ministers do not live a lie. They have to, for they dare not admit a doubt, less the entire painted veil collapses, and Piers Plowman returns to the soil that he knows how to work, and the seasons that he knows how to counter. Vast cathedrals never were in the mind of the putative Christ as presented in the Synoptic Gospels. “Give up all that ye have, and follow me.” “It is no wonder that the church has never been able to take Christ seriously.” And we may wonder if the fishermen followers were not unutterably gullible, and under the spell of a first century Derren Brown. “Who is my mother? and who are my brothers?” What a truly delightful sentiment.

Well, we are orbiting the sun at 9 kilometres per second. And if we want to consider our size in relationship to the universe, there are about 500 million atoms on the head of a pin, and it is entirely possible that the earth is less than the size of one of those atoms – in the unimaginable immensity of the universe. Well, as Albert Schweitzer has written, “We are entirely ignorant of what significance we have for the earth [which we may easily imagine is none]. How much more then may we presume to try attribute to the infinite universe a meaning which has us for its object, or which can be explained in terms of our existence!” And I do not anyway want to be doing the will of someone who can perfectly well do it Himself. Religion would anyway give no meaning to my life, which – in any numinous or ontological sense – I suspect has absolutely none. As the painter, France Bacon, has said, “Man has learned that the game is not worth the candle; therefore he must deepen the game.” So we must, and in truth we do not measure our enthusiasms against the size of the universe: the staggering complexity of which does not enter into our domestic pursuits, and for most of our days does not enter into our thoughts at all. A life without thinking would be intolerably dull, yet – for balance we need some equivalent of Candide's garden, or Hume's friends, Backgammon, and wine.

Well, I’ll end with this piece from John Cowper Powys’s The Art of Happiness, Bodley Head, 1935:

We can all love, we can all hate, we can all pity ourselves, we can all condemn ourselves. We can all admire ourselves, we can all be selfish, we can all be unselfish. But below these things there is something else. There is a deep strange, unaccountable response within us to the mystery of life and the mystery of death; and this response subsists below grief and pain and misery and disappointment, below all care and all futility.  

And the startling thing about this response is, that it is independent of love, independent of pleasure, independent of hope, and can continue, as long as we remain true to ourselves, in spite of all reason, to the end of our days.