I know Peter Beck, the Dean of Christchurch Cathedral, reasonably well. We’ve had a few decent atheist/believer donnybrooks in the past and I admire and like him. His great sadness at what has happened to the Cathedral and the people of Christchurch could not be more patent or moving. So I write this with a degree of trepidation for two reasons: first, because the timing isn’t great; and second, because I have no interest in denying anyone the comfort which religion brings them at times like this.

But what I have to say arises directly from my enormous admiration for the generosity, bravery and self sacrifice of the people of Christchurch and of the hundreds of others, from all parts of the world, who came to their aid.

Answering the question ‘Where is God?’ Peter recently replied as follows:

‘God is in all these people. God is in the midst of all this. God is weeping with those who weep. God is alongside those who are finding the energy to just keep going. God is in the people who are reaching out and seeking to sustain one another. God is about building community, about empowering people.’

He was then asked:

‘Yes, but where was God was when offices pancaked and burned and hundreds died?’

He replied:

‘Well, we live on a dynamic, creating planet that’s doing its thing. For whatever reason, our forebears chose to build this city on this place. They didn’t know we were on this faultline. God doesn’t make bad things happen to good people. We make our own choices about what we do.’  

Every year millions of innocent people die in natural disasters. Every year bad things happen to millions of good people. Peter, a liberal priest, says it isn’t God’s doing. He’s not a believer in a god of (often capricious) retribution. ‘God’, he tells us, ‘is weeping with those who weep’. That’s nice. A sympathetic, do-nothing God. A sympathetic did-nothing God.

There are so many problems with the idea of God ‘weeping’ that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Weeping involves sorrow about an event. It seems to imply  lack of foreknowledge of the event and impotence to prevent the event or its aftermath. Such concepts are incompatible with the Christian idea of an omniscient, omnipotent creator. And, perhaps more significantly, incompatible with the idea of a loving father.

So where was God when those offices pancaked and burned and hundreds died? The nitty gritty question, to which  Peter replies:  ‘Well, we live on a dynamic, creating planet that’s doing its thing.’

He then seems to suggest that the tragedy of Christchurch was somehow of our own making, the same sort of argument that John Key has been making about the poor – bad choices:

‘For whatever reason, our forebears chose to build this city on this place. They didn’t know we were on this faultline. God doesn’t make bad things happen to good people. We make our own choices about what we do.’

You might have thought that not knowing about the faultline would absolve our ancestors of any blame for siting Christchurch where they did. And anyway, for the Christian believer,  that ‘dynamic, creating planet, doing its thing’ was designed not by man, but by God, who might be weeping less out of sympathy for those in Christchurch who have lost everything, some including their lives, than for the divine design flaw which led to it all.

I was about 15 when I first started to question the idea that all the good things came from God and all the bad things were man-made.

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wide and wonderful.
The Lord God made them all.

Each little flower that opens,
Each little bird that sings,
He made their glowing colours,
He made their tiny wings.

I wrote a parody of this lovely children’s hymn, substituting bad things for all the nice things. I wouldn’t do it now. Atheists have to be wary of blaming bad things on an entity they don’t believe in.

But if you do believe in God, then you have to ask the question: how come God, the loving father, allows terrible things to happen to good people? How come He doesn’t intervene? That is the most troubling question for the believer.

The theological answer is that God can’t intervene, because He has given us free will. We’re on our own, free to get it right or get it wrong, to make good choices or bad choices. Not terribly comforting really, since it means that prayer is totally pointless, because to answer a single prayer would require God to intervene in the natural course of events, thus breaching the free will principle. That sort of god is less likely to be weeping with those who weep than saying, ‘Told you so!’ 

What offended me about Peter’s statement was that it was an invitation to deal with the effects of a natural disaster by recognising that God shared in your suffering, that, however bleak things seemed, you were not alone, that you could put your faith in Him.

Yet all around him as he spoke was the incontrovertible evidence that you can’t put your faith in God, that, if there is  a god, the prevention of suffering is not on his agenda. And all around him too was the incontrovertible evidence that the best, the only place to put your faith is in the indomitable spirit, the limitless courage, the unfailing generosity, the inexhaustible kindness, the selfless dedication of men. 

And so somehow, though no doubt he did not intend it, I was angered by the sheer irrelevance of this fine-sounding nonsense against the backdrop of real human tears that have been shed here and around the world and will continue to be shed for months and years to come. If the people of Christchurch are to take comfort from anything, it should be in the knowledge that there is one thing they can rely on – the unfailing goodness of their neighbours, next door and across the world.

The Bard, of course, said it first and best:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven

  All’s Well That Ends Well

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.!]

Watch almost any television news bulletin and you’ll  hear someone praying for something to happen, or not happen. The background to their prayers is normally a real or potential  tragedy of some sort.

Individuals pray for themselves or those close to them to be cured of life-threatening illnesses. The relatives of people who have gone missing pray for them to be found and returned home safely. Families pray that the names of loved ones will not appear on the lists of those killed in plane crashes. Churchgoers pray for the victims of natural disasters.  World leaders pray for peace.

Prayers are often at odds with one another. A nation prays for victory in war. Its enemies do the same. Drought-stricken farmers pray for rain. Holiday makers pray for good weather. Sports fans from opposing teams pray that their team will win.

There is no correlation between prayer and goodness. Saints pray. Suicide bombers pray. Both expect their reward in heaven.

Our parliamentarians pray, beseeching Almighty God ‘to grant that we may conduct the affairs this House and of our country to the glory of Thy holy name, the maintenance of true religion and justice, the honour of the Queen, and the public welfare, peace and tranquility of New Zealand, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’

No-one who watches parliament could conclude that this prayer has ever been or is ever likely to be answered.

But then, in Christian theology, prayers can never be answered, since the doctrine of free will means that God cannot interfere in human affairs. That, at least, is the justification given by Christian theologians for God’s failure to prevent human suffering. He cannot interfere. In reality then, Christian prayers are only ever answered in the sense that something wished for actually happens. What really determines whether a prayer is answered is luck, fate, karma, being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time – whatever you want to call it. This is the only way you can explain the randomness of ‘answered’ prayer.

Two hundred more or less equally innocent people are on a plane which disappears off the radar over the Tasman Sea. A search begins. Across New Zealand and Australia, relatives of the passengers pray that their husband, wife, son, daughter, mother, father, sister, brother will be saved. Only ten have their prayer answered. They and the media describe the survival of the ten people as ‘a miracle’ . The word has religious connotations, leading people to say, ‘Thank God!’.

This immediately begs the question as to what the attitude should be of the relatives and friends of the 190 people who perished in the accident. Perhaps they should  curse God? After all, the very concept of answered and unanswered prayer presupposes a selection process, based on some unknown divine criteria. God chose to answer the prayers of the relatives of ten of the passengers and not the prayers of the relatives of the other 190. Why?

Keeping God out of the equation altogether seems to be a more rational approach. The survival of the ten  passengers was a ‘miracle’ only in the sense that it was, like all miracles, an outcome hugely against the odds. Crash investigation and the testimony of the ten survivors is considerably more likely to produce reasons for the crash and its aftermath in terms of human life  than attempting to fathom the mind of some supernatural being.

I’m an atheist myself, but even if I accepted the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent god, I would still be mind-boggled by the concept of Him/Her responding to ten trillion voice-mails a day asking for  ten more years of life or a win on the Lotto. If I were God, I’d probably regret ever having created the sniveling, wheedling, importuning little creatures in the first place.

I’d have a point. It’s hard to decide whether talking to God reflects the most extraordinary hubris or the most abject lack of dignity. As a non-believer I find it a depressing and demeaning picture – centuries of human beings on their knees, genuflecting, abasing themselves, trading worship for favours and forgiveness. And all for nothing.

Of course the trouble with being an atheist is that if you’re wrong you’re going to take a lot of stick in the afterlife, but if you’re right, you won’t know it, let alone be able to crow about it. It’s a risk, but on the whole, I think the argument against there being a god or an afterlife is pretty conclusive. If I’m right, then all that praying and praising has just been white noise, lost in the ether. Return to sender, address unknown, no such number, no such zone.

Sad, eh?