Atheism (I).

A person must undergo revision after revision before he can declare himself an atheist. By this time, I imagine it to be a learning process which is never quite finished, or, at best, a skill which is lost through lack of practice - atheism is not the proverbial bicycle which can be ridden proficiently after six months out of the saddle.

This sense of having to practice at not believing is intensified when exposed to religious sentiment at some point in the past. My grandmother was an unapologetic Catholic until the last breath; my mother less so, but still as a young woman saw the high, looming figure of a white-robed Jesus standing more-or-less floor-to-ceiling in her bedroom. Terrified, she clamped her eyes shut, hoping to dissolve the hallucination, but He was still there when she prised them open again.

These kinds of stories, delivered in a low voice full of foreboding, punctuated my childhood: nun-bitches who would tear out mother's hair in chunks, and later a religion which expelled her because she dared to marry for a second time. (Their logic, then, is that it was preferable for her to remain with the man who, when drunk, would smash her head into the wall over and over. She was told by a priest she'd never be buried on consecrated ground, to which my blunt-speaking grandfather retorted that some bastard would bury her. How many fucking bodies do you see propped up in the street?)

Religion, when administered in this way, has nothing to do with the eradication of misery or the creation of a moral narrative by which one can live a good life - it is instead about imposing order and stubbing out devastating questions before they have truly formulated.

I know this, but still I suffer guilt, like any good Catholic. That is, when something goes wrong, I tend to blame myself, in the harshest-possible language. It is unequivocal.

So, then, to the agony of Bluefish. Oh, Bluefish, if you are gone it is because I failed you; failed us, and I pray for the imminent coming-together of the two halves of the universe in deliverance of the annihilation of the scrap of flesh which is I. An atheist am I, with a creation myth and a stick with which to make the self suffer every shade of punishment under the sun.
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If I am incapable of doing mathematics, few people will ever think less of me.

Why? The strange thing is I was thinking about my number-blindness last night, and then opened the newspaper this morning to see an article expressing some of the thoughts I'd had, only far better.

Numbers, so the mathematician author claimed, are only about 10,000 years old - their first purpose was to ensure that people weren't short-changed by unscrupulous dealers of animals. If you barter for three pigs, receiving only two is a disaster, and so our species learned to hold quantities in their heads. Three pigs are greater than two pigs, but less than four.

In an evolutionary sense, then, numbers might as well have been born this afternoon, or a few seconds ago. They are so recent an addendum that not all of us feel them in our bones. They are strange objects, foreign and difficult, and we mishandle them often. It is easy, then, to forgive me for clumsiness where numbers are concerned. I can calculate how much change I am owed, but working out the forces which balance a chandelier is met with a shrug of the shoulders.

What if the ability to sustain a relationship is a similarly modern affectation - am I then to be exonerated from that as well? As much as an unyielding love is desirable, how much of the notion that it is essential has been fostered by a latent religiosity? Perhaps this is what I mean when I say I don’t belong anywhere; the world teems with coiled, delighted couples, who find in each other the solution to themselves, their other, and the assuaging of at least some guilt: I don’t believe in you, but in letting another subsume me, I have anyway appeased you. This is the settling of the Pascalian wager.

There is no need, then, for love. There is a need for sex, if you think Dawkins is anywhere close to the mark, because I require a bag to carry along some of my genes into the future, and the imperative, supposedly, of my existence is to go ahead and make one or many. Love, though? Love is akin to the invention of numbers - it is useful, but we can do without it (although I do not want to.)

Those of us fitted with retro-brains, though, must take what comfort we can - I failed because of my urgent wish to scramble for the zenith of a religion I never believed in. I have been knocked out of the clouds by a pretend God, a God who is nothing more than a shiver across the collective consciousness, yet the pain is real enough.