Believing

I'm in the grip - every so slightly - of a religious crisis.

This is quite hard to carry off if you're not religious, but I'm doing my best. It's probably more to do with my massive distrust of certainty and people who display it. While this normally involves me hating the Pope and Mrs Thatcher, this Christmas I'm getting more bothered by atheists.

Atheists are *not* the same as agnostics, who I love since if they were actually a religion and needed a gesture equivalent of the Catholic crossing of one's self would be to give a gentle shrug.

Our father, who might just possibly be in heaven.
Hallowed be thy name, though obviously you don't have one. Certainly not in this prayer. That's a bit of an oversight, isn't it?
Thy kingdom be available to believers of other faiths or none
As they possibly are right about all this and you may not exist at all or at least not in the way presented by generations of Judeo-Christian scholars
Thy will be done as it is in heaven, which is a great get-out clause because if heaven doesn't exist then your will won't be done, in which case that will be just fine.
Give us this day our daily bread, but if not we'll just make it ourselves or get it from Tesco's...

Etc

But I'm struggling with two things lately. The first is a few friends who've been heading off to "Godless Carols". The idea of trying to strip Christmas of any remaining religious overtones after years of steadily suffocating commercialisation hits me as about as necessary as launching a campaign to eradicate the letter "H" in the speech of Essex school children. It's happening anyway, and frankly you're making yourself look weird.

The second is that this actually made me angry*. Not because they're necessarily wrong, or that I even disagree with most of it - Creationists are scary bastards and should stay out of our schools. If God exists he'll survive scientists, after all. But principally it's the bit about how atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby.

I'll believe that when I see non-stamp collectors make a short film about how people shouldn't collect stamps and that everyone who does is a cunt. Or when people post on Facebook that they're heading off to buy a "stampless" stamp-album. I found that little video to be screamingly smug and so full of its own righteousness that it made me wonder how long it would be before we have our own atheist suicide bomber.

I recognise that the rise of of the Christian right and creationists in America requires response, but we don't have them over here, instead we have millions of people who believe in all sort of things (and are treated equally nonetheless), some of them, every now again, perfectly reasonable.

So leave off all the stuff about believing in invisible men in the sky being mental: now mater how seductive a viewpoint, it's intolerant. And if you've got a problem with the religious aspects of Christmas, don't sing fucking carols in the first place.


* yes, I was a bit surprised at my reaction too