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All in Good Faith |
| Written by John Thorley | |
| Thursday, 14 February 2008 | |
All in Good Faith. By John Thorley One of my earliest childhood memories is sitting cross legged on a dusty wooden floor staring into the large round face of Mrs Mason, my Sunday school teacher. Why was I there? Nearly half a century later I still can’t answer the question. I was there because in my family that was where you were supposed to be on a Sunday. It was a slavish blind devotion, a convention that went unchallenged. It was simply what always was and always would be. It was not until later in life that I learned from both of my parents that they didn’t really believe in God. They never had. They were as much in servitude to conformity as holding any conviction in the existence of an omnipotent Deity. The seeds of my father’s atheism germinated in the sights of Belson only days after its liberation by spearhead units of the British 11th armoured division; house size piles of festering flesh that were once people, mountains of spectacles, shoes and children’s toys, the last testament to sixty thousand ghosts. These were the demonic images burned into the psyche of a 19 year old that never left him until the day he died. My father asked the copiously asked question, “How could this happen?” I have never heard an answer that remotely satisfied me as plausible. How could this be part of a divine plan for the world? If there is a God, are we sure that he is in complete control? I realise that to the Christian right (and many others) it sounds a ridiculous question but why? The phrase, “the Lord works in mysterious ways” (author anonymous) was the most useful phrase Christianity ever dreamed up. If everything is the will of God then He has an agenda that is not obvious. Beelzebub seems to win most days. I can only mirror my father’s sentiments when he ventured that in all his years he had never seen, heard or experienced anything that would persuade him that there existed an all seeing, benign, loving God, the keeper and protector of us all. He had, however, seen, heard and experienced a great deal that persuaded him that there was not. My father died in 1997 and ten years later I find myself engaged in the same discourse with my 13 year old daughter. I agree with the view that teenage girls are a cruel trick of evolution engineered to make the approach of middle age more arduous, as if that was possible. There is no doubt that 13 year olds are a separate species of human being beyond comprehension but one thing that they are capable of is profound observation, it’s accuracy uncluttered by prejudice or political bias. She tells me of a recent visit to a church with the Guide movement. Her story paints the picture of an echoing, half empty, cold stone building. She compares the experience with the televised images of Friday prayers at a mosque; the thronging crowds and fiery, passionate speakers. Why, she enquires, is the Muslim faith so widespread, so absolute and so popular. I have always been fastidious regarding revealing in front of my daughter my carefully nurtured cynicism in respect of religion lest it is misinterpreted but as she has grown her questioning has become more acute. She now demands answers to such poignant questions as “Why did Grandma die of cancer when she never smoked or drank or did anything wrong?” or “Why are those Iraqi people killing each other everyday. Aren’t they all Muslims?” Heady questions indeed. The first occupied my thoughts on many sleepless nights during the most distressing six months of my life. The second is now occupying the thoughts of far weightier intellects than mine. The truth is that it is tribal, the kind that has existed ever since humans have existed. So, how do I answer my daughter, why is Islam the fastest growing religion in the world? Why are its followers so steadfast in their devotion? The answers lie in relatively recent times. Traditional Islamic teaching forbids the taking of innocent life, even in war. It most certainly forbids suicide, (Quran 4:29), explaining that those who take their own lives will be in the fires of hell. However, a modern interpretation promises paradise for those who die “struggling in the way of God”, the literal translation of the word ‘Jihad’ (Quran 2:154). There is a passage in the Quran that states that Muslims should be ready to defend Islam even in the military sense. Fundamentalists use this to justify the violence of attacking anyone who in their view undermines Islam, even other Muslims. This has somehow ‘morphed’ into total indiscriminate mass slaughter of anyone who happens to be nearby and calling it ‘defence’. Such paradoxes are as common in this as any other religion. The Klu Klux Klan regarded themselves as good Christians and only in relatively recent times have we stopped buying and selling people as slaves. Strangling and burning witches was a popular pastime in Europe for the best part of 200 years. Approximately 50,000 men, women and children as young as 9 years old were dispatched in this way. The Gospels, the accounts of the life of Jesus, were written between 30 and 100 years after his death. Were the writers economical with their accuracy? Were they trying to make things fit with prophesies of the Old Testament? Different people’s interpretations and memories of the same events only a few years previously in times of modern communications and recording can vary alarmingly. What are we to make of a century of ‘word of mouth’ before being written? Herod, a man known to exist through accounts in Roman literature was allegedly responsible for the slaughter of the innocents while searching for newly born Jesus. Herod in fact died in 4 BC. So, totally contrary to tradition beliefs, radical Islamic fundamentalists have created a political and religious ideology by which a huge number of devout followers can search for an identity under the mask of ‘Jihad’. The new teaching offers a total way of life as a viable alternative to western secular ideology. The appeal resonates in the hearts of the impoverished and the uneducated. The Imams and other fundamentalist scholars take the concept of classic conflict, God v Satan, Good v Evil, believers v non believers and package it all in appealingly humanistic slogans to deceive uneducated masses. Islam is good, West is bad. It’s simple, so simple that the concept has produced a seemingly endless supply of sheep willing to detonate themselves and take as many of the infidel with them as possible (or Muslims, it doesn’t seem to be important.) The foreign policies of the west, particularly the United States, have given Muslim fundamentalists a front line in which to engage western imperialism at close quarters and by the 4th year of the Iraqi occupation they will know that the west, even the USA and the United Kingdom have little will and diminishing recourses with which to service another conflict. So they carry on the killing; markets, shops, people queuing for jobs, children playing football even using ‘Down Syndrome’ girls as human bombs. Why have I no faith? I suppose if I had to answer this question in one sentence it would be because people who have faith can do things like this……. and reduce people to slaves…… and burn witches……. and torture heretics. Where does faith come from? Faith is presented to us as a package before we are old enough think for ourselves. Faith or the lack of it is not a matter of choice. An atheist does not choose to be an atheist; the absence of belief is not a conscious act. A more important question is ‘What sustains faith in the face of so much contradiction and malevolence?’ I believe the answer is that humanity needs faith in something. I think sometimes it matters not what; it needs something beyond the physical that can begin to explain who we are and why we are as opposed to being simply a biological accident blended in some primordial sludge 4 billion years ago. I would like to believe but I cannot. I am waiting; for what I don’t know. I am told by the pious that God doesn’t need to justify himself but my perception of the Old Testament is that God was regularly showing himself to somebody. Would a glimpse and a few words be so much to ask? Why should religion be all hidden massages and secret codes? If He is reality can he not recognise the crisis of faith that affects the majority of the world? If I have learned one thing in my life it is that human wickedness cannot be cured. Tell me why God cannot show himself? Ask the holocaust victims or the 20 million Russians. Ask the Ghosts of the millions packed onto slave ships or the Rwandans or the 3000 people in the world trade centre on 9/11. Ask those who so blindly follow the teachings of the Bible, (or the bits that suit them anyway), or the children waiting for assembly to start in a little school in a Welsh valley on 21st October 1966. Copyright 2008 John Thorley |
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