How To Be An Agnostic
to cover harsh realities: in truth, there is no ‘more’. For spiri-
tual read superstition. For transcendent yearnings read The God
Delusion. After a little less than three years in the church, I quit.
I had become a conviction atheist, a lover of the freedom and
reason of the deicidal age.
It felt like growing up, like the history of humanity’s con-
ception of divinity played out in my own life. For centuries,
people believed in many gods. Then, in a gradual process that
began before Christ, tribal cultures mingled with each other and
realised that their gods were like other gods: polytheism gave
way to monotheism. And after that – and this, I now reckoned,
was the genius of Christianity – God became a man, which also
meant that Man had become God. Paradoxical though it may
seem, with the birth of Christ, the death of God was only a
matter of time. How lucky we are that this has been made mani-
fest in our own age.
Cultures of certainty
It was exhilarating. Living waters of Enlightenment thought were
mine for the imbibing in a new phase of life. So it surprised me,
18 months or so after leaving the church, that I had a breakdown.
The presenting symptoms of my collapse were not unusual: a
love affair that did not work out. That I could not stop weeping
for days after its denouement, so much so that I had to hide away
in a friend’s house, was a sign that something more substantial
was wrong. I had precipitous dreams in which I fell down dark
tunnels and woke up conscious of living in a godless world.
Once I managed to gather myself again, I interpreted this
fl ood of feeling as my emotions catching up with what had
been an almost wholly mental decision to doff the clerical
collar. This, I reckoned, must be what it is like to stare empti-
ness in the face. The question was whether I had the courage to
continue in what I then took to be an ultimately meaningless
life. I envisaged the experience as a kind of rite of passage: my
whole person had now been born into atheism.