I am an atheist. I believe there is no God, nor any supreme being, no Creator, no pervading wisdom or meaning to the universe.
Cheery old soul, me.
And of course by 'soul' I mean...(insert diatribe here)
It gets tricky to state what you believe, doesn't it? Even when the distinguishing feature of your philosophy is an absence of belief. But I believe things.
I believe that people should be allowed to practise any form of religion they please.
I believe it most of the time, anyway.
Sometimes the actions of those identifying themselves with religious groups frustrate me - in their bigotry, their denial of human rights, their violence. So sometimes I'm not the biggest advocate of religion. Sometimes I think the world would be better if religion didn't exist at all.
I don't believe in a God - I believe there is no God, and to me this seems a manifest truth, as far as you may define the word, so why shouldn't everyone else believe the truth? It's the truth, after all. You'd be a fool not to believe the truth. Other people must simply be misguided, and maybe, after a good cup of tea and some unrestricted debate, they'll see the truth too. Hell, why don't I go and stand on a street corner and conspicuously not hand out religious leaflets?
When I see the repression of women, sectarian violence, war, defamation, deifically-distributed authority, bigotry...take your pick, really, I get frustrated with the whole concept of religion.
At which point, I imagine, my state of mind isn't far removed from people with religious beliefs so profound that they are moved to prosyletize, to convert...the mindset of "I'm right, you're wrong."
Which is bad.
So without having acted differently in any way at all I swing back to being a quiet atheist, maintaining my personal beliefs and lack thereof, silently advocating freedom of religion when I have none myself.
And just now, walking back to my office with my lunch, a parade of sombre-faced people behind a man holding aloft a cross were making their way to Ground Zero. It's Good Friday for a lot of Christians, but I couldn't help thinking, as I gave up waiting for the end of the procession to go by, that a lot of them wouldn't just be mourning the dead, but thinking of the difference in religion between themselves and those who killed the people in the World Trade Center.
Last night I attended a Passover Seder, hosted by the lovely Shana. I was a bit nervous, I have to say. Being honest, it was because it was all unfamiliar. I was scared of the religious unknown. I might be an atheist, but I am far more familiar with the religion I used to practise as a child, which was Roman Catholicism. I freaked out and left the room the first time I was present while an Islamic friend prayed. I was waiting for him to finish so we could go have lunch. I don't know why I freaked out. It's a sort of awkwardness. Like the feeling you get when you go to shake hands and someone else bows, and then you bow and they offer their hand, and you both stand awkwardly in a sort of void, feeling like noolies for messing up the social protocol? Like that, only multiplied by a hundred. So maybe it's ignorance and the fear of that.
And I have to say that last night I saw a lot of the benefits of religion you miss from the outside. Like Krissa says, it was amazing. The sense of history...of a cultural identity, was immense. And on top of that, the sense of not following the orthodoxy just because it is there, but adapting it and living with it. It was great.
But along with that modernist twist, of feminist values and egalitarian take on Judaism, I felt a bit confused when the group around the table started trying to remember what the forty days after passover were to signify, or when we skipped a couple of the read-out-loud bits. It seemed like that was losing a bit of what I was in awe of - the heritage and the history.
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