Death is a no-win situation for the atheist. If you’re right, you don’t get to tell anyone; if you’re wrong, everyone, including God, gets to tell you. That’s the scary bit.

There is of course an upside to being right – you don’t have to worry about being tormented for eternity by some divine psychopath. The downside is that you are inevitably going to find yourself, like Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue: ‘stone dead, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, a stiff, bereft of life, snuffed it, up the creek and kicked the bucket, extinct in its entirety, an ex-parrot’. Well, an ex-atheist really.

Death is first and foremost an affront to the ego. It’s not the fear of eternal damnation that bothers me about dying, not even the terror of the unknown; it’s the ‘no more, ceased to be, extinct in its entirety’ bit that gets up my nose. How dare things go on as usual with me not there! How dare the earth presume to turn, the sun to rise, the moon to shine, flowers to grow, birds to sing, Judge Judy to smite the wicked! How dare people continue to conduct conversations without seeking my opinion! How dare there be newspapers and magazines and books and radio and television and the Internet and yet-to-be-invented  forms of mass communication without my being in or on them! How dare I not exist!

‘Vanity of vanities,’ saith the Preacher, ‘all is vanity.’ And mark that fellow down for the sin of pride.

There is a view among my religious friends that I will undergo a last-minute Road to Damascus-style conversion. I doubt it. If there is a god, I’m sure she’s not going to be fooled by a piece of self-interested, panic-induced hypocrisy like that.

And anyway, I just couldn’t do it. No need for any sophisticated dialectics here. Belief in god or an afterlife just doesn’t make sense. Homo sapiens has been around for maybe 200,000 years. Billions of us have been born, lived and died, and there isn’t a single verifiable example of survival after death, not a shred, not a scintilla, not a scrap, not an iota, jot or tittle of evidence of the existence of a divine being. Thank god for that! The versions we’ve made so far in our own image haven’t been too attractive.

Still, there could be an argument for hedging your bets, just in case. Trouble is, it’s not a two-horse race, not just a simple choice between believing and not-believing, between theism and atheism. It’s the Everlasting Cup and there are a stack of runners. Put your money on the wrong nag – Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity – and you’re a gonner. ‘You know the odds,’ says the celestial TAB, ‘now beat them!’

I prefer to put my money on the nose. Win/lose. No great dividend either way. But whichever horse romps home, I’ll still have kept my dignity and self-respect.

Imagine for a moment that I’m right, that there is no god. Imagine that every time you get down on your knees to pray, you’re actually talking to yourself. Imagine that each time you call on god for help in time of trouble, only the wind hears your entreaties. Imagine that for years you’ve prostrated yourself before, glorified, worshipped… no-one. Imagine that the guilt, the self-denial, the adherence to a set of arbitrary, illogical and often punitive tenets, has been totally without point or profit.

Imagine that the centuries of  ecclesiastical ritual, the pomp and circumstance were all mere dressing-up and play-acting. Imagine that the churches, cathedrals, synagogues, temples, mosques are nothing more than monuments to man’s despair and delusion. Imagine that all the martyrs to religious belief, all the victims of religious persecution, died in their hundreds of millions for… nothing.

Imagine that everything you were taught, believed, clung to for meaning and comfort is wrong.  Imagine that it’s all been the most terrible joke, the most cruel hoax conceivable, and you the butt of it.

Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Which is why so many people don’t.

On the other hand, I could be wrong. God may not be non-existent, he may merely be painfully shy. And if he does exist, there’s just the possibility that he may be assisted by a devil with all the wit and style of Rowen Atkinson’s ‘Toby’, as he welcomes the latest  batch of newcomers to Hell -  murderers, looters, pillagers, thieves, bank-managers, adulterers, Americans, sodomites, Christians (‘I’m afraid the Jews were right’), everyone who saw The Life of Brian (“He can’t take a joke after all.”) and atheists (‘You must be feeling a right lot of charlies!’).

Well, that would be embarrassing, I admit. But I’m betting it’s never going to happen. I’m betting that god doesn’t exist.

And have you never had a moment of doubt, Brian?

Oh yes – as a  20-year-old student of Germanic languages, standing under a tree during a thunderstorm in Göttingen with lightning strafing the rain-sodden pavement less than a metre from my feet. I did have a moment of doubt then. We atheists hate lightning.

But still…

[Originally published in the New Zealand Listener. Last of the lazy posts.!]