Just another piece in my puzzle.
When I awoke to the realisation - at age 10 or 11 - that the christian god and bible were nothing but myths, I struggled with the concept of why I was the only one who could see through it. Everyone around me assured me that there was indeed a god somewhere and used the christian bible and "miracles" as some kind of proof.
Even at that tender age, the bible was as transparent as Glad Wrap in its inaccuracies, contradictions and downright stupidity, while the only miracles evident seemed no more than plain chance.
By high school and the fifth form, I'd begun to find that there were actually other kids and people who thought religion was a joke in poor taste. We all believed that such nonsense would not survive in the second half of the twentieth century; a time of moon landings, supersonic travel and electronics. How, we wondered, could a parable written for the illiterate and ignorant, not perish under scrutiny by people who understood that the world was billions of years old and that humans are an insignificant part of an almost-infinite universe?
Because we didn't understand voluntary self-delusion at that age, the concept of people believing in god/s because they wanted to did not occur to us.
Live & learn, huh?
I have realised for many years now that that's why religion continues to flourish - because people who participate simply want to believe it's true.
From the bereaved who want to believe they'll be reunited with loved ones, to the bible-thumping nerd in the staff cafeteria, to the heads of churches - they all have a reason for believing, so they do! It's that simple. Whatever question can be asked can be answered by allowing one's faith to be greater than one's need for reality.
I'm prompted to write this today of all days, because I've just read one of the most stark examples of religion-by-want that I've ever seen, written by "Britain's most respected/influential muslin*!", Timothy Winter, or, to give him his muslin name, Sheikh Abdul-Hakim Murad.
This geek sheik, who just happens to be Shaykh Zayed Lecturer of Islamic Studies at no less an institution than Cambridge University, converted to islam as a teenager.
"I remember being on the beach and seeing conjured up before my adolescent eyes every 15-year-old boy's most fervent fantasy. There was a moment when I saw peach juice running off the chin of one of these bathing beauties and I had a moment of realisation: the world is not just the consequence of material forces. Beauty is not something that can be explained away just as an aspect of brain function."
You what?
"Beauty cannot be explained away as material in origin"?
Have you never seen a peacock, or are muslins just too busy with sheep's eyes?
This is a common - and absurd - reason that many people have given me as a reason to believe in the sky-daddy, as I prefer to call it.
I consider it to be the final and irrefutable proof that belief is chosen, rather than the result of a process.
What would he have done had she been coyote-ugly? Would that have convinced him of the veracity of Satan and made him join Anton oy Vey's Church of the Teenage Masturbator?
*Ronnie Barker joke. If you're too young to get it, hard luck.
Copyright © Alan Charman