Tag Archives: atheism

Hocus Pocus – Religion and Nonsense

I usually start the day in the laziest imaginable way, first, by not getting out of bed for at least half an hour after my alarm has sounded, and then by watching BBC Breakfast. I’ve recently acquired something called IPTV and so the BBC’s UK-only channels can be piped directly to the TV in my sitting-room.

biscuit

Breakfast television is pap, a cocktail of undemanding topics and mild jocularity. It goes well with a hot shower, a cup of tea and a biscuit called a Morning Tea Finger (see above). But my ears pricked up the other day when the subject of religion came up (you’d think that would be no-go before about lunchtime). It was prompted by a report that had just been published by some august institution, though I can’t remember which (you see, I don’t really pay attention). Apparently, more than half of the UK’s population now describe themselves as non-religious.

‘Worse than that,’ one of the invited commentators said, ‘Fewer and fewer are going to church, temple, mosque or synagogue.’

WORSE THAT THAT?!

WORSE???!!!

I would think it’s cause for celebration, myself. At least for those of us, like me, who can’t bear the posturing and utterances of most religious figures (consider the sanctimonious antics and unctuous, oleaginous tones of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury). It’s all hocus-pocus to me, nonsense, superstition, and it’s socially retrogressive too. I can’t understand how anyone can be taken in by it.

I describe myself as ‘culturally Christian’. That’s not something I can undo since it’s the context I was born into, but I’d as happily be ‘culturally Buddhist’, or ‘culturally Moslem’, ‘culturally Hindu’ or ‘culturally Jewish.’ I don’t know that these ways of being would actually be very different from one another. Most religions recommend compassion as a good way of getting started. But I’m not sure about ‘culturally Jehovah’s Witness’ since it’s not so clear to me what that would mean (I certainly wouldn’t reject blood transfusion or refuse the companionship of non-Witness folks). If religions were biscuits, the Church of England would certainly be the Morning Tea Finger. It’s a relatively tolerant and innocuous biscuit.

I am all for atheism. I enjoy ‘religious’ moments at the top of mountains, in the naves of great Gothic cathedrals and in the middle of great symphonies, just as anyone does, but let’s not let moments of contemplation and awe get churned into dogma. Frankly, I can’t understand how you can ever get from what one might loosely describe as the ‘spiritual’ (without any other-worldly implications) to a fat book of rules such as the Catechism.

But religion doesn’t necessarily place my friends and family quite beyond the pale, though I find it a challenge, the more so when it affects their opinions and actions. For example, there’s a branch of my family that’s staunchly Jehovah’s Witness and they are the kindest of all. I have a niece who is fanatically Roman Catholic and a nephew who is falling prey to Russian Orthodoxy but I won’t entirely reject them. Frankly, though, it’s hard to know what to do or say. There’s a part of me that insists they must be stupid to believe the nonsense that they do, and yet they’re not stupid. And some of my best friends are religious too (well, a small few of my friends).

It wouldn’t trouble me at all if I didn’t also believe that nonsense, in the long run, does harm.

All I Want for Christmas

Downton_Abbey_season_1

All I want for Christmas this year is that Edith should marry Bertie in the final episode of Downton Abbey. She’s certainly the more likeable of the two surviving sisters – sensible, independent, brave, intelligent and she’s had more than her fair share of bad luck. The decent man she’d planned to marry a few series earlier, and whose baby she bore, got himself murdered in Germany and she was left alone to conceal her bastard daughter and publish the magazine he left her. She’s ever so much more likeable than her stuck-up bitch sister Mary, who, undeserving by comparison, won her man in the penultimate episode. I suspect he’ll turn out to be a cad, but we shall never know because this really is the final episode.

I’d also love to see a happy ending for Thomas. He’s the bitter, lonely, gay under-butler at Downton, whose destiny is only to scowl, and scheme and be unhappy. In the equations that rule period drama and generate the marvellously predictable plot lines and dialogue of Downton Abbey, homosexuality means unhappiness. Sadly the cast doesn’t, as far as I can tell, offer Thomas many candidates for companionship, but who knows, Carson may yet ditch his overly dour wife and surprise us all. But it would be churlish, surely, of Julian Fellowes not to sprinkle a little magic dust over the only gay at the Abbey, especially at Christmas. I wouldn’t want to think he’s homophobic.

The fact is that Downton Abbey is as real to me as the Gospels, which is to say they’re both a lot of lovely nonsense. Lovely nonsense is what Christmas is all about, a pause from the laws of physics, biology, and dog-eat-dog. For a day or two, reindeers fly, Santa squirms through a billion chimneys and consumes a billion mince pies, and for a moment we believe that a baby can be fashioned out of a single set of chromosomes. The nostalgia we feel for simple make-believe must, I suppose, occasionally be indulged, though I’m hard pressed to understand why we feel such joy in children’s misplaced hope. Even if we want so much to believe that anything is possible, faith in the supernatural is usually a mistake.

My own disillusion came when I was about five. I couldn’t quite see how Santa could get everything done, and at a children’s party in Newport, Shropshire, in the early 1960s I set him a trap. Safely ensconced on Santa’s lap (the laps of elderly gentlemen were safe in those innocent days) I asked Santa what he planned to bring me for Christmas. I’d sent him a letter up the chimney just a day or two earlier and it seemed reasonable that he’d remember what I’d asked for. I half suspected, of course, that he wouldn’t know and his artful ‘Well, just let me think for a moment. I get so many letters from little boys like you.’ didn’t fool me for a moment. When he admitted to being stumped, my faith in Santa, fairies, leprechauns, and talking animals, was immediately, and forever, lost. I became then the knowing, smug cynic I am today.

Just a few years later I realised there isn’t much difference between Santa, God and little Baby Jesus. Religion may promote more complex ethical ideas, I suppose, and I’m not against a ‘religious sense’. I just can’t bear the words and strictures that the unctuous derive from it. These can be absurdly complex (the sheer technical detail of Roman Catholic dogma, for example, is astonishing, indeed impressive) but it’s still the wrong answer even if to a deeper need. Santa and God, they’re on the same spectrum in my opinion.

But I’m not against Christmas. Make believe, as long as we know what it is, reminds us that the world can be a wonderful place where dreams, both the selfish and the unselfish ones, come true. But I won’t be kneeling in a drafty church for my dose of hope this year, but will watch the last episode of Downton Abbey instead in the warmth and comfort of my mother’s home, with a mince pie and a glass of wine. I can’t wait for the final Christmas Special. I hope Edith gets her man. And Thomas his.

Have a Happy Christmas, all you of great, little and no faith at all. Be good, but don’t be credulous.