God only knows

About a year or so ago, my 33 year conversion from maternally indoctrinated Catholicism through Agnosticism to Atheism was completed. Thanks be to Richard Dawkins for 'The God Delusion' and its televisual translation 'The Root of all Evil?'.

At the age of 14 I started to challenge my Mum on why God would insist on me going to Church every Sunday instead of letting me play football with my mates. If God really loved me then wouldn't he give that love unconditionally? Isn't that the very essence of the emotion called Love? Why would he be so cruel as to stop me doing something I enjoyed that was also healthy, in favour of sitting through 90 minutes of full Catholic Mass in glorious mumbo-jumbo latin? Even when the church decided that as English speaking people we might be better served with Mass taking place in our own language all this did was shave about 5 minutes off the service. A 14 year old football mad kid is made to go to Church, whilst his laughing mates take the mickey and go off to the fields to practice the art of the volley, the feint, the dribble and argue over the foibles of the offside rule. You can see why this might be a catalyst for some alternative ideas to form in a malleable mind.

From this confusion on why God would expect such worship as a condition of alleged love and where I'd end up when its all over and the insistence on such worship taking place in direct competition with a young boy's passion for football there came a greater set of questions. Why does God put conditions on our existence. Why did God seemingly have no issues with the taking of life displayed in his treatment of Sodom and Gomorrah? Why so willing to lay plague, pestilence and flood on the world to teach us a lesson? Why allow people in his name to oppress others with such vicious cruelty? Why allow people to be born with extraordinarily cruel disabilities? Why insist that every newborn child be born with Original Sin when they have no concept of any human conditions such as justice, good, evil, love and hate amongst others? The more I questioned, the more I was rebuffed with answers derived from Faith. Non-answers I called them - the equivalent of replying to a child's innocent question with 'Because I said so' or 'Because that's the way it is'.

Nothing filled me with more anger than and confusion than the 'God moves in mysterious ways' maxim. I will never understand the solace people derive from turning to a God that has allowed their son or daughter, mother or father to be brutally murdered, or die from some horrendous disease. A God that not only allowed the person to suffer, but also those closest to that person as well. it all seems so vindictive and spiteful. An apparently all seeing, all encompassing, omnipotent being sat on his arse and allowed Madeline McCann to be abducted, Sarah Payne to be murdered, Jamie Bulger to be killed...the list goes on. And here's the thing, if we saw these acts taking place and did nothing, then according to the Bible we would be classed as sinners for turning the other cheek. Apparently Gods own law doesn't apply to him though. He can sit back and allow such acts or inflict disease with complete impunity. Some will blame another mythical figure for such evils, that of Satan, but by definition of omnipotence shouldn't God have rooted Satan out by now and done away with him? Shouldn't God forgive all those moving into the afterlife rather than further condemning them to an eternity of Fire and Brimstone? If the essence of Christianity is peace and forgiveness then does this also exclude him when he judges our lives?

So many questions remain unanswered and philosophically I just can't see any religious argument standing up. But why this tirade? Well last week I went to a funeral for my Uncle. He was also my Godfather, a title bestowed as part of his and my family's Catholicism. He was a decent chap, lived a good life and made 83 years of age, despite being so seriously ill 25 years ago he was given the last rites. This event was just one in a series of thought challenging ones that have happened in the last year, all of which would test anyone's beliefs. There was Hellsbells breast cancer scare. There was the redundancies at work, not once but twice and now prospectively a third time. The loss of friends and colleagues wasn't on a parallel with death, but it still hit home. During this time I shielded the team from a lot of the crap because in my old fashioned way that's what I believe a good manager should do. My eldest daughter, Kid, was in final year GCSE mode and the associated exams combined with the big moment of leaving school and watching adulthood bloom is another pressure. Pie's transformation from sweet little Daddy's girl into feisty teenagehood and development into a young woman was another change you can never be prepared for. The debilitating intercostal muscle tear, blood pressure and high cholesterol issues added another layer. The studying for the degree and the pressure of the exam piled up. The car accident which should have left us dead happened, but we walked away relatively unharmed. The death of a favourite uncle. The reason I'm writing this is to highlight the battering my new suit of Atheist armour seems to have taken in one year.

Its almost as if God had decided to put me through a series of tests in order to regain my Faith. It hasn't worked. Everything still has a logical explanation. Gods hand did not hold my car and prevent it from being squashed or flipped. The Atheism was always 99% with just a little bit of room for doubt as the truth is, despite there being no evidence to prove God's existence, there is also nothing to conclusively disprove it. If God does exist and he wants me back in the fold then there's an easy way to do that.

Meet me for a pint, prove your existence and explain yourself.

Later , GJ