If there’s
one lesson that travelling’s taught me, it’s never to offer my personal
opinions on partners, politics or religion, especially when drinking. So, when
the only other English speaker asked me why I didn’t believe in God, I’d fobbed
him off with a generic answer and quickly changed the subject. But, his
question had intrigued me.
For all of
my adult life I’ve consider myself an atheist, but, I’ve never really investigated
the root of my non-belief. My parents were certainly Christian, Methodists, and
at an early age I attended Sunday school, and perhaps, that’s where my journey
towards atheism really began.
Before I
could walk, I was christened, and as soon as I could talk I would kneel at the
side of my bed each night and recite this simple prayer: Gentle Jesus meek and mild, look upon this little child, pity my
simplicity, suffer me to come to thee. It’s safe to say that being
christened wasn’t a personal choice, and the words of that first prayer had actually
scared me. Why did I want ‘pity’, pity was for people who had worse lives than
me, and why would I ever want to ‘suffer’ for anything?
Throughout my
time at junior and secondary schools, I’d struggled with reading and writing -
later diagnosed as dyslexia - but I’d known that I wasn’t an idiot and actively
tried to prove that point by asking lots of relevant questions in class. In
general my questions were welcomed by the teachers, but at Sunday school, well,
the ministers weren’t quite so accommodating.
At school,
my physics teacher had told me that the universe was almost fifteen billion
years old and measurably expanding, and that planet earth had been around for
at least four billion years. As I’d questioned his reasoning, he’d pointed me
towards an entire section of scientific research material in the school library
and encouraged me to investigate the evidence and to draw my own conclusions. In
social studies, they’d introduced me to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and shown that recognisable
humans had inhabited the earth, specifically Africa, for at least 200,000
years. If I wanted further evidence of evolution, I should visit the Natural
History Museum in London and evaluate the evidence for myself. So, at the age
of twelve, we spent our summer vacation traipsing around London on an amazing
voyage of discovery: The Science Museum, The Natural History Museum, The
British Museum and the Planetarium.
For my inquiring young mind, the school teachers’ responses to
my questions were appropriate, but in church my questions had seemed neither
reasonable, nor in most cases, answerable. I’d been told that God created the
earth, and that five days later he created Adam before taking a day of rest. But,
if Adam came two thousand years before Abraham, and Abraham lived two thousand
years before Jesus, wouldn’t that make the earth, and therefore mankind, at the
very most six thousand years old? When I’d innocently questioned the Sunday
schools teachers’ timeline, they hadn’t pointed me towards scientific papers,
to independent research or to physical evidence in various museums, they’d simply
pointed me to their book, the Holy Bible.
The Bible wasn’t an easy read, but I’d struggled through a
few random chapters and what I’d found had disturbed me far more than that
early childhood prayer. At the time, many of the words had been beyond my
comprehension, like ‘Apostasy’, but being told by a loving omnipotent God that
if members of my own family ever cease believing in him, I should stone them to
death, had seemed more than a little harsh. When it comes to wavering belief in
God, I also discovered that the name Thomas had history, and I’d decided that
it was time to stop asking questions, and, to stop attending a church that actively discouraged scrutiny.
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