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- Language was religiously inflated. When my bedroom was untidy my parents told me that this was ‘poor stewardship’, because it was not right to be careless with God’s things. Poor behaviour was ‘unworthy’ or ‘unedifying’. Sometimes it seems that my childhood was the noise around the hush of God. And at times an actual hush: I remember several episodes when my parents talked quietly about someone they knew who had ‘lost his faith’, and the solemn vibrations that would fill the house at these times, as if a doctor were visiting.
- Note: Pouring Christian ketchup on everything, spiritualizing the mundane.
- Markings: my childhood was a carpet on which Christians walked and spilt things, and then tried to clear them up. My family was loving, but I have never felt the family of God to be especially loving.
- Note: True for me as well --- though the lack of love from the family of God was a passive thing --- and there’s the question of how much active love you can expect from people who aren’t your family.
- There were many good and kind people in this church. Nevertheless, it was full of punitive hysteria. It was perhaps the wrong kind of religion for a child because it excited in me two childish responses: fear and slyness.
- The fear produced slyness, or suspicion. I noted that no sick person was ever healed of anything, despite the laying on of hands, the prayers. Indeed, one of the kindest and gentlest people in the congregation died of cancer, despite the enormous prayerful effort to save her. I was bewildered. My parents told me that God had called her. I concluded that prayer either did not work (for it could not be that people were not praying hard enough) or that God had decided not to answer this particular prayer. Either way, prayer seemed a fool’s game, and one of the cardinal promises of the New Testament – ‘If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will give it’ (John 14) – seemed not to be a promise. Faith might move mountains, but in an invisible mountain range.
- Evangelicism is most impressive, perhaps, for the intensity which it bestows on our decision to choose, and the consequences that flow from this. If we choose to accept Jesus as the saviour, then our lives will be in sublime revolution, every molecule adance, every minute scrutinised. This is what such believers mean when they talk of ‘commitment’. It is like entering prison: you must turn out your spiritual pockets and hand over all your belongings, even your shoelaces.
- Before you have read any atheist or sceptical philosophy you find that you have apparently invented for yourself the old objections to God – the problem of evil and suffering in the world, the senseless difficulty of faith, the cruelty of heaven and hell, the paganism of Jesus’s ‘sacrifice’, your own lack of religious experience. It is probably because these objections are so obvious and so old that atheism, as a philosophical tradition, is generally underpowered. Literary and philosophical atheism moves between a rather charming serenity and a spirit of naughtiness.