Anthropocentrism – the persistent idea that we are made in God’s image and likeness and that, somehow, the universe is here just for us, is one of the reasons I find religion to be lacking in imagination, and thus all-too-human in origin.

We live in a world 4.5 billion years old, where humans did not exist until 200,000 years ago. There are over 1.5 million species of animal on the planet and yet we can’t communicate properly with even our closest animal friends (dogs and cats).  The musings of intelligent animals such as whales and dolphins are a complete mystery to us. They certainly don’t speak any of our languages or think like we do. Many animals (the ones we haven’t pushed to extinction, that is)  seem content to live their lives oblivious to our presence. We live in a world where microbes treat us no differently to any other animals, where people get sunburn and hypothermia if they are not wearing suitable clothes. So much for us being designed for this world..

We live in a universe, 13 billion years old, where our galaxy is just one of many trillions,  where our star is nothing special and where the distances between the stars are so great, we may never reach even our closest stellar neighbour. This universe is full of natural structures sometimes thousands of light years in breath, with super-heavy stars routinely exploding and black-holes capable of sucking up time itself. We now know that some of our close neighbours have planets – how long more before signals of life begin to be detected from such far away places?

And yet, despite this great knowledge, billions of people subscribe to religions that claim to put them at the top of the pyramid, where the creator of this vastness has us as the pinnacle of his achievements and where supposedly he takes time out of his heavy schedule to talk to each one of us every day.

All the major religions were born in a time when anthropomorphism might have seemed half-reasonable. Most of the world at that time was unknown (if it was otherwise, surely there might have been a mention of kangaroos or polar bears in the bible). Humans, the only known technologically adept animal around, seemed to be on their own. Knowing so little and being so close to the edge for all of their short lives, God must have seemed so real to them – a tempestuous master who permitted romance and music and children, who revealed to them the beauty and the bounty of nature, but who, at a whim, could cancel a harvest, kill hordes of loved ones and destroy livelihoods. In the light of such times, the Old Testament, with all its cruelty and savagery, seems vaguely understandable.  The people who wrote and dictated all those old books were products of their times. They knew no different.

Now we do know different. In the last thousand years, our eyes have been woken up to a universe of an entirely vaster, more complex scale than could possibly have been imagined at the time of Moses, Mohammed or Christ. Instead of carrying the burden of being at the centre of creation (and responsible for its messes), we are no more in control than a song-bird would be on the periphery of the Amazonian rain forest. The notion of an arbitrarily generous and vengeful God has been thrown aside in the light of an altogether grander vision.

Religions, practically by their nature, have been unsuccessful in keeping up with the pace of discovery. “This is what God wants, no wait, this is now what God wants, no wait…”. It seems as if the ones that remain today are either wilfully ignorant of reality, or they have morphed into semi-humanist organisations adept at using psychology and bluff to avoid too many close questions from their adherents.

If a Messiah were to arrive today in the middle of a secular, humanist, scientific and rationalist world, would any religion founded on a fish-bowl view of the universe be founded?

How wonderful
It must be
To be saved.
Cozily seeing others
With pity
In your heart.
Doomed they are
By mad thoughts
Infecting their minds.

Spare a thought
Then, for cancer.
It seems not
To care for
Your specific creed
It goes to work
Destroying life
With no time
For inner belief.

Strange that.

And so too,
For bereavement, depression,
Shame, psychosis,
Poverty, loss, despair
Loneliness and old age.
Slicing through
Those thin yet
Fervent hopes
Without the slightest sigh.

Now look abroad
Africa, America, Asia, Arabia.
Always the same
Cries from within
That universal language
Of shared anguish
With inner prayers
Alone not equal
To the challenge.

So if saved you are
And lost we be
Why is Your life
Of suffering,
Your Great Justification
So mirrored by
Unbelieving brothers?
Who rewards
Their fortitude?

In 1990, on a boat trip back to Ireland from Europe, my travelling companion and I had a few drinks and inevitably managed to get into a conversation on religion.

“Do you think”, said he, “that one day we will one day be able to build robots that will think, feel and behave like humans?”

“Yes”, I responded, “it’s quite likely”.

“OK then. What if you turned one of those robots off for good? What if you destroyed the robots so that you couldn’t possibly rebuild it? What if you just took a sledgehammer to it? Would it go to heaven?”

That was the exact moment my house of cards fell down.

I had no answer to his question, apart from the blindingly obvious. One day we probably will build robots that will behave and feel a lot like us. When they die, they won’t go to heaven. And neither will we. They will just turn off and fade out. And so will we.

I had a miserable night that night, as I considered the implications of what this meant.

But it soon enough faded away. My house of cards, that had been teetering for years, had finally given up under the strain. I stopped going to Mass and I got on with my life.

When something bad happens, what is easier?

To blame God or yourself for your misfortune or to accept that bad things just happen to people sometimes?

My dad died of a very long, drawn out illness. It took him ten years to die. It was a pretty miserable death too. Every vestige of his being was slowly and steadily erased until he passed away in 2005, twenty years before his time. During that time I don’t remember ever thinking that God (or bob forbid, he) was to blame for what happened to him. You see, he lived a good life. I still think of him as one of the most caring, gentle, kind, friendly and unjudgemental people I have ever met. If he were alive and well today we would be the best of friends, as we were when I was growing up. He never “deserved” what happened to him in later life, as if “deserving” meant anything in this context.

How people die has rarely anything to do with how they live. And bad things often happen to individuals for no reason that can be attributed back to them.  Once that is accepted, we can get on with our lives without any unfounded expectations on us regarding some sort of cosmic justice-giver.

Realising this has helped me to get on with life. It helped me to get over my father’s death, and the other things that have been thrown in my way since then. Why? Because I could deal with my feelings, emotions and relationship in the present without having to dwell on non-sequiturs from the past.

An alternative is to look at bad things in the light of a supreme being, who is either trying to punish you or test you. Trying to posit a reason or blame for these things is both an exercise in futility, as well as the cause of significant mental anguish. Imagine working through your past to discover a “reason” for getting cancer, or losing a loved one, or being attacked by someone you didn’t know. The outcome of this mental exercise is going to be painful, no matter how it ends up. Any “reason” you find will most likely be wrong, or you won’t find a good reason, and you will continue to hurt yourself until the grief and despair eventually subsides. The reality is bad enough already without having to invent further sources of guilt and trauma.

Of course, sometimes bad things happen to people that were caused by them in the first place, but usually in those situations the reasons are easy to uncover. It’s important to realise though that not everything bad happens as a result of personal fault. In the many situations where you are left asking “what did I do?”, the answer is almost always “nothing at all”.

I find Sod’s Law, therefore, to be both reasonable and uplifting. And I’m also happy to accept that it has a very important corollary: Good Things Happen too.

I’ve just finished reading Hemant Mehta’s “I Sold My Soul on eBay” and I found it quite interesting.

Mehta, an atheist, decided to “auction off his soul” on eBay in early 2006, the proposal being that he would go to church for a number of days, and the more money that was offered, the more church services he would attend. The competition was won by Jim Henderson, who agreed with Mehta that he would visit a wide variety of Christian church services, and report back on his experiences.

What follows is a fascinating odyssey into American churchgoing from the perspective of a non-Christian (Mehta himself was brought up in the Jain religion). It’s honest, humorous at times, and yet always highly respectful. The aim of the book is three-fold. To help Christians understand atheism and atheists, to help Christians rethink how their services might appeal more to outsiders, and to help atheists understand better the Christian perspective, and the common ground that is often shared between us.

Mehta visited all kinds of services, from the small and traditional to the mega-churches that have sprouted up around America. In one church he was invited up on stage to discuss his atheism, and the different perspective he shared, with the pastor. What he found both delighted and perplexed him. While he found the rituals and some of the beliefs and attitudes utterly unconvincing, he also discovered a strong sense of energy and humanity, as well as a desire to improve the lives of the less well off.

The result is a critique of American Christianity, almost in the way someone would write a school report. Mehta had both good and bad to say about the churches he visited. Mehta found the motivational talents of many of the pastors enormously uplifting, even if he himself didn’t buy into the underlying dogma. He praised their sense of community and their programs to help the disadvantaged. Nevertheless he also found a relatively high level of distrust for outsiders and a corresponding lack of engagement with those of differing world-views. He criticised the tardiness of many churchgoers and an apparent lack of courage to stand up to religious extremists, and he also had some things to say about churches who seemed to put a higher premium on erecting new churches in deprived countries than on improving the quality of life of those people who were being helped.

Mehta’s book is primarily aimed at Christians. It is not an effort to deconvert them, just to explain his point of view and how Christian services appear to an outsider. The book is devoid of insults or sarcasm, and thus will probably do a better job in explaining the atheist mindset to a Christian, than will any of the recent works of Dawkins, Harris or Hitchens. I share many of Mehta’s perspectives and I was impressed with his sense of optimism, openness and thoroughgoing common-sense throughout the book.

When I was younger I used to think of God as some sort of divine friend, always beside me, always up for an internal chat  – the process that’s called “prayer”. And one of the things I was taught was that God loved me. Apparently, there was no greater kind of love. He was always there for me, and I believed this fervently, sometimes despite evidence to the contrary.

Looking back on this, my thoughts seem somewhat naive. Is there really no greater kind of love?

God doesn’t always protect people from harm, or malice or suffering. When you are feeling miserable, he’s not a physical presence that holds you close. God, they say, gives us free will, but that’s quite a different thing to a caring, protective kind of love – it exposes us to grim reality, without anyone pulling back or saying “stop”. God’s love might be great, but it’s not a protective and caring love.

However, I am fortunate enough to have known a source of love that is protective and caring and all those things – my parents. Being a parent myself now, I know how strong that love is towards my own children. With parental love, it is possible to deliberately change conditions and events to prevent harm happening to another person.

So, if God’s love is great and perfect and all those things, then it’s a lesser kind of love than parental love can be. Or the love of two people for each other. Or even the love that a small child might have for a pet animal.

Now, maybe I’m reading this incorrectly – maybe God’s love is defined as encompassing all these things. But why attribute this love to God? Why not just dispense with this unnecessary assumption and focus on the people who are showing you love?

Can there still be a separate type of love from God which is different to the love of those around you? And if so, why is it so poor in quality?

Christopher Hitchens was a guest on Sam Smyth’s Sunday Supplement show over the weekend along with David Quinn, Eamonn McCann, Max McGuinness and Brendan Keenan. Hitchens was on the panel to publicise his book “God is not Great” (or “God is not Good” as Sam Smyth mis-named it). Quinn, a Catholic commentator, was somewhat outnumbered, given that Hitchens, McCann and McGuinness are all atheists, but it was nevertheless a robust and entertaining debate.

A lot of the initial discussion centred on the notion of what God is, with Quinn asserting that since the origins of the universe and the origins of matter are still unknown, God must be at least considered as an answer. Hitchens was having none of it. “You’ve got all your work ahead of you still”, he said, as it was up to Quinn to link the origins to why we humans could not eat certains foods on certain days and refrain from certain sexual positions.

Quinn then moved to discussing the religious impulse – “man seeks meaning and purpose and transcendence and a transcendent reference point” – and that this, in some way, directs us to the existence of God. Hitchens questioned this, pointing out that some European societies now had a majority atheist population – they could live their life morally without requiring any significant impulse to give daily praise to a deity.

On at least three occasions, Quinn tried to bait Hitchens into a corner by getting him to take a side on positions such as the existence of atheist fanatics, that some of Hitchen’s heros had crackpot ideas, and that left-wing secularists were teaming up with Islamic fundamentalists. On each occasion, Hitchens failed to take the bait, agreeing with Quinn each time but also exposing the false dichotomy – (these were not either-or questions where you needed to take the wrong side in all cases).

Quinn then brought out the issue of free will. Quinn steadfastly maintains that the existence of free will is proof of the existence of God. I find this deeply unconvincing, as did the other panellists. If I read it correctly, Quinn’s view is that scientific materialism, with its emphasis on thoughts and emotions and impulses being merely chemical in nature, should result in humans being mere automatons, reacting in a predictable way to all events and incapable of awe, wonder and higher thought. Some of the conclusions of 20th century science (chaos theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology) would suggest quite firmly that the Universe is a deeply unpredictable place from a macro, micro and mid-size scale . The clockwork model of the Universe has been shelved for some time, so why should Quinn still hold fast to this idea?

The conclusion of the debate centred around Iran and what a miserable place it was and how religion, given free reign, made a mess of things. The debate, to me, petered out somewhat here with McCann citing deep political roots to the problems of Iran and Quinn trying to get Hitchens to deal with the issue of secular liberals siding with Islamic fundamentalists.

There was definitely a (somewhat successful) attempt in the discussion to move the spotlight from religion to more unanswerable questions, but even still, I don’t think Quinn so much as landed a clear punch.

Anyway, that’s just my view. I’m sure others listening will have taken up things differently.

The podcast is here. The last half-hour is the meaty stuff, so feel free to skip the first hour unless you are a big fan of Beverly Flynn..

This was the intriguing topic* being discussed by Ryan Tubridy this morning, it’s worth a listen in. Roman graveyards found in Bray in the 18th Century? Now who’d a thunk it?

The common belief in Ireland is that the Romans never invaded, and yes, just one look at our roads would seem to confirm this point in spades. Nor, in a country flooded with old monuments, do we have too many remains of Roman forts or Roman baths. That I will grant you.

However, there is one particular legacy from the Roman times that has had a potent influence on Irish history right up to the present day. Yep, you guessed it. The Roman Catholic Church.

Even our native language is studded with Latin words. Our numbers for instance: Aon, Dó, Trí, Ceathair, Cúig – almost perfect Latin translations.

Is it really credible that just one man and a few like-minded buddies managed to convert over a whole country of pagans, and in such a short time as it seems? Take a look at this text and see how ridiculous the whole thing sounds.

It sounds to me you would need a lot more than a few pious priests from Wales to convert so effectively the entire country. Something a bit more systematic, surely?

Anyway, I am no historian, and if the date of Patrick’s arrival is anything to go by (AD 433), the Roman Empire was already in quite a bit of difficulty by then. Who is to say that Latinisation and Christianising didn’t start in Ireland some time before Patrick was ever supposed to have come over?

I don’t know the answer, but my hunch is that perhaps Ireland was a lot more Romanised back then that we might think. I would be interested in learning more about this.

*Real player required. Podcasting options may be available soon if you check out this link.

I’ve just been listening to the “Great God Debate” between Christopher Hitchens and Dr. Mark Roberts, and I must say I was quite impressed, both with the standard of debating, the respect shown for each other and many of the points expressed.

Roberts exemplifies a religious world view I’m fairly familiar with from my years with the Catholic church. Even though he’s not Catholic per se, his outlook reminds me of some of the more charismatic and intelligent priests I knew when I was younger. From the outside, Catholicism seems like a dogmatic, controlling organisation replete with strange beliefs, but on the inside it can actually be quite comfortable for the believer. The key is basing most of your philosophy on one major assumption: “God is Love”, and working from there, both in terms of how the Bible and the past is interpreted, and how the faithful are expected to live their lives. Not as much hell and damnation as you might think – most of the preaching, in my experience, was based on reassuring people, and giving an overall quite positive message. (Of course we got the rants as well, but as they say around here, you’ll have that). I think it is this assumption that permits so many intelligent and thoughtful people to stay with the mother church, despite its history and the ludicrousness of many of its dogmas.

Hitchens will be speaking on the Sunday Supplement with David Quinn this Sunday, as well as another well-known Irish atheist, Eamonn McCann. I can’t wait. All three are robust debaters, so it should be quite a show. The show will take place at 11am British/Irish time on Sunday morning, and the podcast will be available from this link.

Amhras is the Irish word for “doubt”.

Why this blog?

Well, I’m pretty interested in subjects such as religion and atheism and the interplay of belief systems that I don’t feel should be part of my regular blog. I’ve a feeling it may make people I know a bit uncomfortable and that’s not what the other blog is about.

Also, it appears to me that Ireland is a strange place when it comes to religion. Semi-officially, it’s a Catholic country, however, increasingly, many people have left religion aside. The churches are emptier, the pronouncements of the Vatican are greeted with a shake of the head, the parish priest has less of a role to play in modern society, and the rituals, processions and holy days of my youth seem to be fading from the collective consciousness.

Yet, few people in Ireland declare themselves to be atheists. Despite everything that has happened in the past two decades, the Catholic Church still holds a favoured position in the country. People want it both ways, to be part of a community, but yet not to have to share the values and beliefs of that community. It seems to me that a lot of people go through the motions without really challenging their beliefs. To many, Catholicism has become a convenience, a bit like a washing machine or a TV – useful for the times when you need it. It’s an easy-going approach that characterises Irish people generally, I guess.

I’m interested in this dichotomy, as I am in many things concerning the nature of belief. I’m a long-time agnostic, but increasingly now verging on atheism. Losing my beliefs has not been tumultuous or harrowing, but instead something of a voyage of discovery. It’s a voyage that is not over by a long shot either.

Atheism sometimes gets a bad name, because many atheists are perceived as insensitive, looking down their noses at believers and imputing on them a certain degree of stupidity. I would like to think I do not hold that position. My feeling is that we should be rigorous in exposing the ridiculous, but should stay clear of descending into personally directed insults. Many people believe many things, most of it harmless, some of it clearly helpful to them. Casting off the beliefs of a lifetime is not easy for any human to do, and therefore it should be treated sensitively.

So this blog is an exploration of sorts. I’m not looking to impose my views, but maybe to give some insight into what being a disbeliever is like, and how I perceive the so-called clash of cultures.

It may work, it may not. Whatever: outlets are good.