[UA] Re: What Do You Believe?

[James Palmer]

Well, I was raised in an Anglican household, which can mean virtually 
anything.  We went to an Anglican church when I was very little, a Methodist 
one when I was kinda little, and back to the Anglicans when I was 
medium-sized.  My father’s an Anglican lay preacher and my grandfather’s a 
vicar, so it was kind of inevitable.  (There are an awful lot of vicar’s 
sons and grandsons in English gaming, which probably has more to do with the 
makeup of the middle-classes than anything else.)

My father runs a consultancy which deals mainly with the organised 
religions, so I’d been to pretty much everything by the time I was, oh, six 
or seven; Buddhist, Jewish, pagan, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Catholic, Lutheran, 
Muslim, Bahai.  The only ones that have ever meant anything to me were the 
Jewish, Christian, and Sikh services, because I always valued the quality of 
the language far more than anything else, and
the Christians and Jews, of course, have the Old Testament, plus either the 
New Testament or the Talmud, and the Sikhs have the Guru Granth Sahib, which 
is a splendid book, full of profound poetry of peace and unity and love of 
G-d in different forms, and the occasional bit about how the Hindus and 
Muslims are all bastards.

I’ve never rated the Qu’ran; I am constantly told how beautiful it is in 
Arabic, but when translated into English (I believe it can, officially, only 
be ‘interpreted’ into English, in fact, not translated, because it’s so 
bound up with Arabic) it always seems to acquire a deadly, repetitive 
quality.  ‘Lo!  Behold!  Is not Allah great!’  It’s kind of like the cheap 
knockoff version of the Bible.  Buddhist texts have a fatal resemblance to 
angst-ridden teenage poetry and there is nothing more boring on earth than 
listening to the exposition of Hindu philosophy (“And so we see how the 
nature of the divine playfulness of the uniting of the coming-together of 
the deities is reflecting a profundity which is making a unity of the 
diversity of the beingness of the oneness of the whole.”  That is a more or 
less literal transliteration of a minute fragment on the concept of lila 
that I heard once from a normally very articulate and funny Hindu.)

I was a fairly good Anglican until I was about fourteen or so, when I 
developed a pronounced anti-theistic streak, which eventually developed into 
me becoming the kind of atheist who is angry at G-d for not existing. It was 
about that point that I started reading the Bible seriously, and found in 
Job and Abraham and Isaiah a streak of anti-theism that appealed to me 
greatly.  Read the story of Abraham and Isaac and then tell me that G-d is 
good.  I read the New Testament, and discovered that both the Jesus of 
authority and the soppy, one-note Jesus of love and peace weren’t supported 
by the text; the Jesus that comes out of the Gospels is an angry, half-mad, 
brilliant, apocalyptic preacher who bears a close resemblance to William 
Blake.

So now I’m a reasonably religious atheist, who finds the structures and 
ideas of religion useful.  I’ve never found any explanation of a good G-d 
that could stand up to earthquakes, miscarriages, and cystic fibrosis and, 
if I did believe in G-d, it would be some almighty warped Zoroastrian G-d 
that combined both good and evil - for which I could cite good biblical 
justification.  I’m not very tolerant of a lot of religious/spiritual talk; 
I respect other people’s right to believe what they choose, and my closest 
friend is a devout Presbyterian, but I don’t feel any need to necessarily 
respect the validity of the beliefs themselves.  You are perfectly at 
liberty to believe in the existence of wonderful divine nature energies 
flowing in ley lines, or in the infallibility of the Pope, but that does not 
mean I have to respect that belief, except as part of normal courtesy if I’m 
your friend or your guest - indeed, if I find out that someone believes crap 
like that, I am distinctly inclined to take them much less seriously.   If 
it ever comes down to science or history vs a belief, I side with the first 
two ninety-percent of the time.

I’ve never found any evidence that the idea of universal religion is 
anything other than a romantic pipe dream; the major religions have three 
times as many serious differences as they do similarities, and the only 
thing I’ve ever seen that all have in common is seriously bad taste in 
souvenirs.  I find the whole Jung-Campbell-Eliade myth thing deeply 
fascinating, but am convinced that many myths contain deep inner falsehoods, 
and not all of them are wonderful life-enhancing archetypal things.  Plus, 
going by the track record of mythologists, it’s a pretty short slippery road 
to fascism.   I’ve seen some very strange things and had a few religious 
experiences when I couldn’t tell heaven and earth apart, but am more 
inclined to put that down to the power of imagination - which is a 
marvellous thing in itself - than to the supernatural.

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