~by Jillian Becker

I am a convinced law-and-order conservative, an eagerly practicing capitalist, an ideological libertarian. I accept enthusiastically the whole package of US Republican Party policy and sentiment - pro-America, pro-victory in Iraq, pro-gun, anti-abortion (with sensible reservations), pro-death penalty, pro-tax cuts, pro-smaller government, pro-spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world, pro-Israel, anti-welfare - all except one of its usual ingredients: belief in God. I do not accept God.

Quite simply, I cannot believe in God. I am old, past my three score years and ten, and decade upon decade I have read and listened, and there cannot be much that is old or new, famous, terse, verbose, smart, innocent, insidious, widely published or commonly uttered, learnedly debated or popularly discussed on the subject of God that I have not read or heard.

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“There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric God.” - Bertrand Russell

Few if any people in the world today would put faith in the Gods presented in the epic poem The Iliad of ancient Greece. Most Christians and Muslims would treat such theistic claims as humorous folly akin to a child believing in the tooth fairy. The majority of Atheists would concur with the addendum that Abrahamic Monotheism is as equally daft.

The above notion was part of the reason I became an Atheist at the age of seventeen. My parents had provided a solid foundation of religious belief in the assumption that it would be a bedrock from which to either continue to build or reject when I was old enough to choose. Both my parents were agnostics but each held great interest in all the religions of the world, past and present. I was baptised Roman Catholic shortly after birth and would later go through my first Holy Confession and Communions, as well as attending an all boys Roman Catholic Prep School where prayers were said twice daily.

As a child, I strangely never questioned the existence of God and took for granted the religious teachings as truth. I did the same with Father Christmas who in many ways was more magical and endearing than Jesus Christ. It could be said that the terrible revelation about the non-existence of the bearded man in red shook the foundations of my religious core just a little too much, thereby weakening the essence of ‘belief’ for the aftershocks of later contemplation and study. If one highly regarded invisible charachter was fiction, then what about the rest?

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I’ve long thought of Agnosticism as the lazy thinker’s way out of cerebral toil. Whilst not personally sharing the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins, I had concluded before I read his fascinating book, The God Delusion, that people who declared there might or might not be a divine being, were as bad as those who caught splinters sitting on the political fence. Surely if the agnostic in question has delved into the history of man’s belief in Gods and the religious and cultural evolution of such concepts, then there would appear to those with doubt, that indeed God does not exist, except as a mental construct. Add to the melting pot, the imperfections of life, from the mass extinctions through to the tendency for one in three people to get cancer in their life times, then one has to ponder that if there is a God, He is as imperfect as we are, and therefore not worthy of praise and worship.

I might be seen to be attacking Theists but that is not my agenda. In my view, religious belief in a higher being is perfectly natural to humanity and it is therefore pointless and perhaps damaging to fight against such a phenomenon. If a person is to hold a devout belief in God, whilst I might disagree, they are at least prepared to sink and lay foundations of moral absolutes and principles.

We’ve been taught in modern society that there is no such thing as right or wrong, only different perceptions. I fully believe this nihilist relativism is in danger of undermining our identity, our cultures, our principles and indeed our freedoms. When we cannot be prepared to stand up for something that is morally right, of which I believe there is only one course, then our whole system is weak to the attack of those with wrong, but unfortunately strong, moralistic absolutisms.

When we start to equate Islamic suicide bombers to noble and brave freedom fighters, or the Communist tyrant Fidel Castro to a saviour of his people, then we must assume our morals are in danger of rotting away. In my humble opinion, it is a mixture of self-gratifying pomposity and dire intellectual fraud to suppose the ‘rights’ we have cultivated over centuries are open to question from the morally corrupt and retrograde forces of, for example, Socialism, or worst still, Islamism.

Whilst a belief in God is not a necessity, the concept of the religiously inspired battle of ‘good versus evil’ is vital. There is not, in my eyes, a giant intellect in the Universe setting the standards of what is right or wrong. However, if democratic and free values are to be defended on our insignificant planet, then humanity in the West must grasp and champion the morally correct universal human rights set out in both the Judeo-Christian scriptures, in the works of the Philosophers of old and indeed, the likes of the American Constitution.

Otherwise we let our comfortable Liberalism self defeat itself and open the doors to those with no doubts about what is right and wrong, but who are in fact, entirely morally bankrupt.

~from Beaman’s World