Andy's Blog

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!)