God

“Up a bit, up a bit…left, more left, no right… RIGHT. Oy veh, this creating is hard work.”

Dear kids,

You go to a Church of England school, so the contradictions here are awful, I know. But all that God stuff they feed you? It’s not true. Just like Father Christmas only without the presents.

The Bible says, in the beginning, God created Man in His image. It’s the other way round. Man created God. Some people were more creative and enthusiastic about life and created loads of gods – gods of life and death and thunder but also kittens and rainbows and bugs. Other people were a bit more miserly and created only one. Why? To explain what they couldn’t explain. To explain thunder and death and war and the vicissitudes of daily existence. Some people created the Devil too but that was overdoing it.

The thing is, over the millennia of human existence, we’ve step-by-step come to understand many of the things that puzzled the crap out of our ancestors. And one of the things we understand (or should understand) better now is why we even have experiences that we come to label religious, even “road to Damascus” moments of blinding clarity. So much of it is connected with our ability to be ‘primed’ emotionally, to be loaded up like a gun and then fired by a skilful priest/medium/whatever.

Don’t believe me? Check out this (assuming the link still works — it’s Derren Brown’s TV series ‘Miracles for Sale’). Or read Derren’s books. Brilliant. A committed Christian who came to see the psychology at work in his belief system, and thus came to doubt the line he was being fed.

We go along with this stuff because we are fundamentally creatures who seek meaning. We create stories to explain our lives, and are not good at coping with the thought that (a) we are going to die and (b) the universe is a lot, lot bigger than us. It’s a fundamentally human thing to think of ourselves as the centre of all stories, but the more we learn about life and our place within the universe the more we realise that we are a tiny little story on the edge of cosmic magnificence. And that it’s how we treat each other that matters, not whether we prayed to an image or an idea.

Sincere people sincerely believe in God. Their sincerity of belief doesn’t make them right. There are godly people who are also very good, kind people. Their goodness and kindness doesn’t make them any less wrong about the sources of their goodness and kindness. Don’t mistake  passionate belief for access to truth. Don’t mistake the absence of belief for evidence of wickedness and degeneracy. The more you let go of the Big Guy in the Sky idea, the freer you are to see the stupendous beauty around you, to revel in this chance to be alive and conscious of that beauty.

Evil isn’t about devils and suchlike. It’s about the cramping of your imagination, the disapproval of your sense of humour. It’s the peddling of simplistic visions as the one truth, when the truth is always more wonderful.

Be mischevious. Think big thoughts. Listen, learn, be slow to judge and quick to reach for evidence. Learn what counts as good evidence and bad. Love each other and love this slightly mad species we’re part of. Religion is a ritual and a story and a way of relating together that can produce great ethics and kindness and love. But so can philosophy, so can carpentry. So can hairdressing if you do it right.

I love you.

Dad.

Everyone (well, right now everyone) goes on about Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, but if you’re interested, I found the following books very helpful:

• Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1991)
• Gerald Mesadié, A History of the Devil (1997)
• Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind (2006)