AN OLD ATHEIST FEELS GOOD
15th AUGUST 2002
The next issue, Number 75, will appear on 15th SEPTEMBER 2002.
I am crusing contentledly down 'the home straight' coming towards the end of a reasonably long life - I suppose that, at nearly seventy-eight years of age, some ninety percent of its likely span now belongs to the past. My life has been bearable at worst and very satisfying at best. How come that I have had such an easy ride in a world in which poverty, oppression, intimidation and torture are so widespread? How come that I have had general good health in a world of diseases and deficiencies? How come that the significant physical defects to which I am subject - defective sight and poorly performing heart - have been dealt with rather satisfactorily while elementary health care is horribly wanting in millions of lives? How come that I have been enjoying so much safety in a world in which there are so many damaged people?
One notion has to be cleared away at once; my easy ride is not attributable to a supposed just and merciful god with essentially unlimited knowledge and power. Such a god would necessarily be the author of our talent for woes as of our talent for joys and, assuming that the supposed god is just in his dispensations, then I must be a remarkably good and deserving person compared with so many of my fellows. I am not, in all conscience, especially good and deserving of benefit. (Confession and money-changing have gone together often enough; details of my fallibilities will be given to readers in return for suitable cash donations and the bigger the donation the fuller will be my confession!).
The Just God Theory simply does not add up.
The sources of my easy ride, and my contented appreciation of it, must be sought in this life in this world (the word 'this' being strictly redundant in my secularist opinion). There are several such identifiable sources. My luck has held and my judgment (more than once flowing from sound advice from others) has mostly been up to the challenges offered to me but these two are less important by far than the other two - which are the humanist ideology to which I have felt drawn and to the reciprocally good relations I have experienced with so many people.
First there is the ideological aspect of the matter. I reject absolutely the Doctrine of Original Sin. So far from our being the debased characters of evangelical fiction ('theo-fi') I think that most people, most of the time, are not sinners in need of salvation. Most people, most of the time, do what is reasonably required of them. What they need, usually, is appreciation - to be reminded of their worth not of their shortcomings.
It seems to me to be perverse to believe that we are born into a state of sinfulness from which there is no escape in this our natural life in this the natural world. I endorse E M Forster's famous dictum "I do not believe in Belief."
I have found my life rewarding and this has been partly a matter of my not being a natural prey to free-floating anxiety. I have also to claim a degree of inherited good management on my part but my main debt is to all the people who have treated me with remarkable respect, kindness, wisdom, affection and forbearance for so long. I hope that at least some people may have found me to be a valuable part of their lives. The support we can get from one another is the only support we know we can have, the only support I think we ever need.
Atheism is the outcome of natural theology and optimism taken together. The only god whom we can reasonably infer from what we observe of the world is a wayward capricious one ...... belief in whom is inhibited by wishful thinking. I hope that the god of religion does not really exist; it would be truly appalling if there were such a being presiding over us.
I repeat that "I do not believe in Belief." and my consequent freedom from the corrosive effect of the culture of wall-to-wall guilt has enabled me, usually, to reciprocate positively with my fellow people. They are, in the nature of things, truly worthy of respect and affection; they are not my fellows in depravity that the evangelical party would have us believe. I thank them all.
E.S.
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