Me and God

I started calling myself an atheist at 13. Not that I'd had a faith prior to that - I'd just never regarded religion as important enough to give myself a label on the issue before.

So far as I can remember, believing in heaven and going to church were just two more perplexing and annoying things that adults did. Like hitting me for "telling lies" (telling a truth they didn't want to believe) before sternly instructing me to "be polite" (tell people lies they want to hear).

I was raised in the British tradition of extremely vague protestantism, and was fortunate enough to go to a primary school where christian faith was highly encouraged by bundling dozens of young children into a cold church and making them sit through sermons.

But without explaining why a 70 year old man in a dog collar was reading us fairy stories, or threatening us with hellfire for not listening. I don't recall a single child professing anything more than boredom for the whole exercise - it was just another thing the teachers thought was vitally important, like correctly spelling words we didn't use and calculating the hypotenuse.

So, religion wasn't something I rejected - it was something I'd never been concerned about enough to embrace or rail against. What changed was that I went to a new school - a small privately run single sex affair with three classrooms and a headmaster who was a fully quallified catholic priest.

Martin H Williams was his name, and his favourite biblical story was the one about the pillar of salt. He often thundered against "unnatural vice" and "immorality", reading the goriest passages of his bible to the classes. He also liked to spank 12 year old boys and tell them they were pretty.

He took me under his wing somewhat, as I was frequently bullied by the other boys for being small, smart and gentle. No, there was no sex - not with him. I think if he had any "urges" they never reached his conscious mind. But we did discuss faith.

He was a well-read man, but his defence of his catholcism boiled down to Pascal's Gambit - the idea that there's no good empirical evidence for the existence or nonexistance of god, but if you chose to believe then you won't go to hell, whatever the truth. It seemed an instantly unconvincing argument.

There was, however, sex elsewhere in the school - furtive gropings, sometimes under the excuse of bullying. It's probably ironic that, at an age when most boys were discovering girls and some were discovering religion, I was discovering boys and atheism - and even now my faithlessness and my sexuality remain oddly linked in my mind.

Until my mid-20s, I sparodically felt a religion shaped hole in my life, and tried to fill it with the company of christians. But it never lasted for more than a few weeks.

At age 24, I even took the first year of a theology degree, and it was probably this that finally stopped my wanderings among the faithful. Most of my fellow students couldn't defend or even define their faith and the eternal truths of the catechism turned out the be the political expediancy of centuries ago.

So now, once again religion itself doesn't greatly interest me, except as a psychological oddity, or a coping mechanism exhibited by people under trauma. Unfortunately, religion has now become a political issue - creationism, holy wars and faith based schooling mean I again have to explain and defend my atheism.