An Exquisite Torture

I frequently despair of our local journalists. I had a telephone call from one of them this week asking me if I was an ‘atheist’. Apparently he was looking for a bona fide atheist to comment on the Bishop of Swansea and Brecon’s Christmas message. Apparently Bishop John, for whom I have a lot of respect, had expressed some impatience at press reports of militant atheists attacking the biblical stories on which the Christian faith is based, especially at this time of year.

I was rather taken aback. It is rather disconcerting to be telephoned out of the blue and asked if you are an atheist. I thought it a far too personal a question and refused to offer any comment at all. I do firmly believe in the separation of Church from State and I believe that church schools should not receive state support, but that’s a long way from being an atheist, and I began to suspect that the journalist didn’t really understand the immense complexity of personal belief.

However, it set me thinking about the whole messy business of classifying people and then labelling them based on their beliefs. It’s part of this modern obsession with categorisation, much of which is done on very flimsy evidence. What a person believes in is the product of a variety of influences: family, upbringing, social conditioning, peer pressure, and I suspect rather more rarely, deep thinking and balanced consideration. I reflect on my personal experience of religion, Presbyterian Sunday School, Anglican choir, long period of being anti all forms of religion, confirmed as an Anglican as an adult followed by a gradual and inevitable scepticism reinforced by absolute contempt for the preaching and activities of religious fundamentalists of all persuasions.

If I am unable to resist being labelled then I want to choose my own label rather than have ignorant journalists jumping to stupid and ill-considered conclusions. I guess I am an agnostic, one who adheres to the view that nothing is or can be known of the existence of God. It is a difficult but honourable position. It’s like being perched on a knife-edge, unwilling either to make a leap towards the obvious safety net of blind faith or to rely absolutely on reason and reject any possibility of the divine. Either of these alternatives can seem very attractive; both offer certainty, community and comfort. But it is their very certainty that feeds the scepticism of the agnostic. How do they know that God exists or doesn’t exist? What evidence do they have? How reliable is this evidence? The questions are endless, but being a questioner ensures that one approaches the subject with an open mind, open to the possibility that God exists and open to the possibility that He/She doesn’t. Being an agnostic is an exquisite torture, but by way of compensation, it offers endless amusement at the activities and pronouncements of both militant Christianity and militant atheism.