CULTURAL CHRISTAINITY

 

Rcihard Dawkins (from Wikipedia)

Curiously enough, it was that famous atheist Richard Dawkins who introduced me to the concept. Maybe he was trying to deflect attention away from his notorious atheism – in effect, saying that there was more to him than just his lack of belief in a deity overlooking humanity – or maybe he did genuinely believe in what he was saying, which was that he had a great affection for things like evensong and festivals associated with Christianity. He was a ‘cultural Christian’, a concept I identified with, although I had not come across if before. 

 

I would go a little further than Dawkins and say that inventing religion – and the concept of an afterlife that goes with it – is one of the most creative things that human beings have done and that we should not throw out everything that it encompasses if we choose to follow Darwin in believing that humans are just sophisticated animals, who have evolved over centuries and now stand at the apex of the world, dominating the landscape.

 

Try as hard as I can, I find it impossible to believe in an afterlife. In that sense, I am an atheist and I believe, as my own ends draws ever nearer, that our life – traditionally three score years and ten – is all that we have to enjoy and that we should make the most of it because nothing comes afterwards. Maybe I am wrong, but I do not believe in either Heaven of Hell coming after death – just oblivion.

With life traditionally 'nasty, brutish and short' in days of old the promise of an afterlife were things would get better was particularly attractive to people who could not enjoy riches in this world. They were promised them in the next world and might be expected to accept their lot more phlegmatically (and less revolutionarily) in this one. In this way religions can be seen as the handmaiden of conservative government systems that required mass obedience. 

 

Apart from anything else, perpetual life might turn out to be rather dull. Just imagine being stuck in Heaven (or Hell) with nothing to do except being nice to your neighbours, who you might not have got on well with in this world and do not want to be stuck with in the next. This idea was expressed in an article in The New Yorker magazine and I found myself agreeing with it – as I often do with things I read there, the world’s best magazine. 

 

I found it repeated in John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Around My Father, in which the father in question did not look forward to an afterlife once he had died. In fact, he dreaded being unable to enjoy his garden and the few things he had left after his sight was lost in, ironically perhaps, a gardening accident. His blindness was then ignored and never mentioned by the family for the rest of his time on earth and things continued pretty much as before.

 

I have seen the play three times now with actors like Laurence Olivier, Derek Jacobi and now Rupert Everett (a gay actor like Jacobi) who nevertheless took on the role of Mortimer’s father. They are portraying a man they cannot be like in real life because they will never marry and have a family. That is not to say that gay men (and women) cannot be parents, as Elton John has shown, just that they cannot marry someone of the opposite gender.

 

I have seen the play several times but had forgotten the father’s outburst at Christianity, an antipathy that was shared by his son. However, Mortimer said that he took his own children to Midnight Mass at Christmas and, like Dawkins, enjoyed the cultural aspects of Christianity without sharing the belief system behind it. I do not think that these well-known atheists are being hypocritical, just that they accept parts of Christianity they like and reject others.

I have no desire to live in a godless society and the idea of a Museum of Atheism, which apparently are found in communist countries, fills me with horror. 

Religion teaches us humility, which many of us could use. When Vladimir Putin was asked to confess his sins, he reportedly replied that he was leader of the world’s greatest nation and had nothing to fear. All I can say is that I hope he rots in hell, having being brought down by God, probably the only figure who is more powerful than him. His power is eternal and omnipotent. Putin’s is merely temporal and, therefore, temporary in comparison.

 

The church maybe has more to fear from those who are indifferent to religion totally rather than those who reject it intellectually but accept it emotionally – as I do. As a teenager I was an atheist but, as an adult, I have come around to accepting some of the premises – but not all – of the premises of Christianity. Much of this, of course, has to do with my work as a tourist guide. Some of that religion has rubbed off on me after taking people into churches.

   

It was, I think, Coleridge who said that intelligence means being able to hold two apparently  contradictory ideas in your head at the same time without fully rejecting either of them. I do (and should) not claim to be a particularly intelligent person but, in religion, I am able to accept religion and its contributions to society completely while rejecting its fundamental belief system. If that means that I am a hypocrite, so be it or, as they say in church, Amen.    

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com