For the longest time, whenever a census came round or a questionnaire required filling in, I always wrote “Christian” in the box labelled “Faith”. This was always unthinkingly and without giving much consideration as to what this meant. I wasn’t muslim or hindhu, I had very little idea what it meant to be agnostic and I thought I believed in something; so couldn’t be athiest.
However over the last couple of years I really started to think about faith and what it meant to be “Christian”. The problem was in the fact that I just didn’t believe there was some omnipotent being ‘somewhere’ in space watching everything I did. I also believed that when I die, I would be worm food, rather than transcend my body into heaven – and what was wrong with that? Worms need to feed too!
I started to, privately, label myself as agnostic. I thought I believed in something, just not the faintly ridiculous God that would be preached to me on the odd occassion I did go to Church (baptisms, marriages, deaths, etc). In fact on a number of these occassions I felt I had wandered into a Monty Python sketch;
Ooooh God, you are so big,
so absolutely huge,
Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you.
Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying…
However, in the past month I have come to the realisation that I am neither of these but am in fact an atheist. There, all said and done! So I can happily walk around without having to justify ridiculousness such as intelligent design, extreme pro-lifers, women and homosexuals being some form of ‘sub-human’, and the list goes on…
A lot of these views have been cemented (notice the boldening, it was only a cementing not a conversion) whilst reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, which I found to be a bloody good read, when not wandering into the realms of Fundamentalist Atheism in some places (..also I think he is bidding for entry into the Guiness Book of Records for the most use of the word “zeitgeist” in one of the chapters).
Anyways, I have now “come out of the closet” as it were and trying to understand how this plays out with the work I do with the Scouts… after all, the main promise for the scouts is;
I promise to do my best, and to love God
How can you love something that does not exist? Interesting times (..and my longest post to date!)
Am on the countdown, in hours, to the official start of my hols for this year! Not sure I am going to be able to dial in at all during this little break, as we will be in the back of beyond in Spain – in splendid isolation in the hills around Madrid.
