The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (18 page)

Chapter 33
God Isn’t Real

R
OBBIE
F
ULKS

One August afternoon twelve years ago, as I sat daydreaming on my suburban back porch, a churchy three-quarter Appalachian melody came humming into my head. I picked up a composition book and jotted down some words:

God Isn’t Real

A world filled with wonder, a cold fathomless sky

A man’s life so meager, he can but wonder why

He cries out to heaven, its truth to reveal

The answer, only silence: for God isn’t real.

Go ask the starving millions under Stalin’s cruel reign

Go ask the child with cancer who eases her pain

Then go to your churches, if that’s how you feel,

But don’t ask me to follow, for God isn’t real.

He forms in his image a weak and foolish man

Speaks to him in symbols that few understand

For a life of devotion, the death-blow he deals

We’d owe him only hatred—but God isn’t real.

Go tell the execution
er of the power he can’t defy

Go tell his hapless victim of the mercy on high

Then go to your churches, go beg pray and kneel

But don’t ask me to follow, for God isn’t real.

No, no matter how He should be . . .

God isn’t real.

Makes a statement,
I thought, and set down the pencil. A statement, assuredly, doesn’t equal a song, and not everyone who agrees with
x
may dance to it, while others favoring
y
. . . well, I was shortly to find out about the
y
people. The most obvious limitation of overtly literal lyrics like the above is an effect of slightness. Epic narratives, moody word paintings, and love songs, by comparison, show their weight in labor and confession. A flexibility in its meanings is
useful to a song, which stands to be performed or experienced, pardon the saying, God knows how many times. Still, the polemic has its appeal—easier to frame and finish, and more open to acidity and playfulness. So I counted “God Isn’t Real” a keeper, and a week later knocked out a demo and mailed it to Affiliated Publishers, Inc., the generically named Nashville concern for which I was a staff songwriter, and who contractually owned copyrights on all I made up.

As expected, I received no response. They were over me by this time. Since being hired I had written them a good number of empowered-women-in-or-out-of-love efforts, following the mid-1990s commercial template. But mixed with these were so many oddments—talk-radio themes, fiddle tunes, spirituals from imaginary Depression-era musicals, barroom weepers, amused little riffs on pig meat and pocket pool—that they finally concluded it was more profitable to turn tastefully away than to sift. If I thought I might prod these peaceable Tennesseeans alert with my brief against the Bearded One, I was
in error. The blond policeman’s wife who typed lyric sheets and sent titles to ASCAP and BMI for copyright registration was, like the rest at API, an observant and faithful church-goer who was nonetheless, in matters of business, consistently unsupernatural.

So my musical infant might have died quietly, with its hundred-odd siblings, at API’s doorstep. But I also had a sideline as a performer, and before long I was trying out what I assumed was country music’s first atheist ballad on my ragged little audience of honky-tonk traditionalists and urban hipsters. Their response commingled chatty indifference—put a low-key waltz about theology before a Saturday night dancehall crowd yourself if you don’t believe me—with sharp feedback at the margins.

Two old ladies in Oklahoma City walked out on me, loudly, with a skreek of their folding chairs and grim-set faces. At a club in Hoboken, a woman standing alone by the back wall, tall and fine-boned and dressed like a jet-setting David Lean heroine, got switched on by the lyrics; at my next date in that town she returned with a rich-rouged gaggle of disbeliever girlfriends to form a little cheering section—godless girls gone wild. In Houston an older married couple waited in line to tell me tremulously that I was a messenger of evil. At Second City, the improv comedy institut
ion in Chicago, the tune went over like gangbusters and soon became a staple of my Christmas shows there.

In 1998 I recorded “God Isn’t Real.” The studio, once owned by the country singer Ronnie Milsap, was back in Nashville. To up the song’s authenticity, I called in a few A-list old-timers to play. But as tape rolled, I found myself stricken by cowardice, unable to intone the sacrilegious phrases. The great and gentlemanly John Hughey was pulling heart-wrenching swells from the pedal steel, as he had
on a hundred Conway Twitty and Vince Gill songs, while I was lamely burbling from the vocal booth: “A hm full of hm-hm / A cold hm-hm hm-hm . . .” Later, after my vocal was done and there was no disguising it, another name picker came in to overdub. Emerging from the booth, he approached me, mandolin in hand. “About this song,” he said, and his voice fell to a whisper, “I actually kind of agree with it.”

Did I, though? Some folks have asked in the years since. I’m surprised that that set of lyrics leaves much interpretive room. But I’ve read the suggestion that the song is anti-establishment, not anti-theist, while another listener detected devious satire—a believer’s mockery of coarse-witted atheism. Though deviousness isn’t my thing, I do confess to a dalliance with belief.

At fourteen, impelled by curiosity, rural loneliness, and a desire to know which group I stood with, if any, I resolved to read the Bible from front to back. I had inherited a small-town Protestantism that, more and more, felt unexamined and ill-defined. Aside from occasional services and before-meals prayers, its ritual demands and doctrinal content were about zero. Much of what my family valued—social justice, honest work, some capacity for personal humility, and quiet inward focus—reflected a Christian attitude without requiring any particular stance on ancient miracle working in the Mid
dle East.

As I read the book, a mealy King James distillate for “today’s teens,” at the rate of a few chapters a night, I began trying out a few of the churches in the little town a few miles from our North Carolina farm. The Baptists opposite the bank on Main Street had a clarion-voiced preacher who looked a little trashy to me, with anchorman hair and electric blue sport jacket. Across town, in a white clapboard structure on a scraggy parcel of land inclining down from the street, sat the evangelical black church. The service there went on for hours, with intense singing, linked hands, a hug-your
-neighbor interlude, and, after the sermon, a home-cooked lunch in the grass outside with yet more singing. Uplifting, and welcoming—but, sitting among them in my Saxon pallor, I might as well have worn a pith helmet marked
ANTHROPOLOGIST
.

The Methodists were a better fit. Their pastor was a gentle, white-haired man with the inapt name of Rouse. The man exuded a reassuring lack of passion. One of his deacons was a stocky man in his mid-twenties, whose full but neatly tended facial hair was 1977 fashionese for “I totally get where you youngsters are coming from.” With two other teenagers, I joined his Wednesday night Bible study. These classes, it turned out, were not laid-back, Me Decade–style informal group sessions, but stupefying accounts of tribal clashes and the plodding movements of populations in the Canaan region so
me 1,977 years previously. By the third week my two classmates
had disappeared, and as a consequence, the tone of Bible study night changed straightaway to more of a laid-back dialogue. Sitting together on the side steps of the handsome old church, my with-it tutor and I rambled freely. He was like me—not quite fitted to Hickville. One night he handed me a book, a slender, modern-English vade mecum that might, he suggested, be used as a thought-provoking scriptural adjunct in my search for higher purpose.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull
did tie in with the Bible, loosely. (Smoking a joint helped clarify the connection a little.) It counseled sensual renunciation: “Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you . . . look with your understanding” echoed Corinthians’ “For we walk by faith not by sight.” Faith and resurrection were encoded in the theme of flight, by which Jonathan is determined to lift himself from his earthly bounds and his transcendentally tone-deaf flock, who mainly think about eating. A gladsome vibe of seventies self-empowerment suffused the book. “We can lift ourselves out of i
gnorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!”

These motivational “cans,” especially next to the scary and admonitory Old Testament, looked a lot like cant. The Bible’s a messy book, but all its ambiguities, contradictions, numerological digressions, magic, clan trivia, anachronistic injunctions, bad science, and bloodletting make for a much better read than a streamlined modern book delivering a vaguely Jesus-y uplift. Oddly, the Bible’s flawed coherence and cohesion can have the effect of burnishing its authority, its flesh-tingling lifelikeness.

Sadly, these same qualities make the Bible impractical as a guide for living, or so I was coming to think as I neared Revelations. An eye for an eye, or turn the other cheek? Love thy neighbor, but sacrifice thy son? Wisdom—a joy or a misery? Make up your corporate mind. Speaking of which, who wrote all this? And how many generations of translation stood between me and whoever that was? The Christians around me were as in the dark as I was. Tellingly, they didn’t follow half the teachings of their holy book: their women wore pants, for instance, and wouldn’t consider abandoning their
families to follow gentle teacher-seers into the desert. They picked which church to attend, and by extension which teachings to focus on, according to their own temperaments and cultural makeup. I couldn’t reconcile the Bible’s status as scripture with the mix-and-match approach it made necessary, or reconcile the actuality of a million creeds with the idea of a single Creator, a unified and unimpeachable truth. This wore away my effort at faith, which over the years was further eroded by the evidence problem, and the problem of suffering laid out in “God Isn’t Real.”

Turning away from God definitely did not lay to rest any of the elusive objects that brought me to seek him—“what is true” and “how best to live” and so on. (Possibly a stereotype held by believers about their opposite numbers is that, having cleared our desks of the slipperiest of humankind’s eternal questions, we live out the rest of our days in shells of glib materialistic certainty.) Country songwriting, though it may be a tool of sub-Aquinas subtlety, makes for a pretty mean existential chisel in the hands of its best practitioners, to whose ranks I aspired as a mature man. Twenty-one year
s after leaving Methodist Bible study, I was back in the Carolinas, now as a professional troubadour. Along with my band, I was performing “God Isn’t Real” night after night, promoting my new record and alienating the devout across multiple markets.

My friend Dan was the drummer. A native South Side Chicagoan, he had a stolid demeanor and a near-chromosomal bias toward the practical and the provable. We were tooling along a state highway near Raleigh and talking about the previous night’s reception, which had verged on fists joining faces. “I don’t get why people get so bent out of shape over that song,” he said.

“You don’t?” I said, surprised. “I do. People take their religion seriously. And this is North Carolina, for God’s sake.”

He shook his head skeptically. “But we’re not playing in churches. And I don’t see where’s the offense in what you’re singing. It’s a point of view. Nobody’s forced to agree with it.”

“Well . . . that’s a sensible statement about an inflammatory song about an emotional subject. I’m not a believer, but I’m much more in line with the one guy who’s mad at me for cutting down God than the ten guys who’re bored with the whole idea and yelling for a louder song. I mean, the question of what happens after you die, the mystery of who if anyone is minding the cosmological store . . . those are important questions, right? I can’t think of anything more important than that.”

He studied the road ahead for a few moments, then shook his head once more and finally. “I guess I never worry about that stuff.”

The vital contingent of Americans to whom things like string theory, Keynesian economics, and Baptist theology are just three of the many faces of “that stuff’ represent a healthy, commonsense strain in our national life. The highly touted culture war is just never going to take hold here in the States. Too many people are too content to raise kids, make a dollar, grill a burger, go to the show.

I’m not one of them. I honestly think “He should be” real, as my song’s coda says, and while I think we should be able to laugh with 100 percent lung capacity at any subject, I don’t take the evident absence of a celestial Creator as cause to crow. Take away God, and our basic problems—what to make of our lives and desires, how to address ou
r hardwired need for a kind of higher narrative order—suddenly become much more vexing. And our shelves fill with gaseous books about bellyaching birds.

I began with a cocky diatribe. Let me end with a call for a little epistemological humility. We skeptics would do well to emulate that titan among skeptics, H. L. Mencken, whose pro forma printed response to all letters of disagreement was “You may be right.” Humans are higher animals only relative to such as dogs and turkeys, and it’s possible, as has been noted, that our brains as presently evolved are no better equipped for scanning the cosmic fabric than a poodle’s (or mine, actually) is for mastering math. This sobering possibility should ground all metaphysical editorializing.

That’s why, besides tiring of the rigid lyrics after a couple hundred performances, I stopped doing “God Isn’t Real.” Einstein spoke with poetry and power of “this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle.” On this ground, I believe thoughtful believers and atheists alike can stand in real, if fragile, alliance.

Chapter 34
The Godless Concerts

R
OBIN
I
NCE

“Ladies and gentleman, that was Jarvis Cocker. Now please welcome Professor Richard Dawkins!” And the Hammersmith Apollo continued to go wild.

In my life of low achievement, my high remains putting on a show where Jarvis Cocker sang “I Believe in Father Christmas” before Richard Dawkins came on to talk of the size of the universe and ape behavior, which was followed by an interpretative dance to “I Can’t Live if Living Is Without You” by
Pan’s Person
Joanna Neary.

It all happened because of a feud on a regional television debate show. I had been asked to appear on
London Talking
as a mouthy stand-up comedian atheist. The researchers had seen a debunking of intelligent design titled “Magic Man Done It” on the Internet and thought I could add a little levity to their TV debate on the question “Is Britain becoming more secular?” In the end, rather than levity, I injected a sort of crazed rage that might normally be seen from a man dressed in hessian with carrier bags for shoes. This is the risk of agreeing to enter the fatuous terrain of TV debate shows. Th
ey are, after moments of extremism, delivered as succinctly and volubly as possible, with a neat wrap-up as they take you into the ad break. No member of the TV audience should gain anything but a reupholstering of his preconceived notions.

When I arrived at the studio I had an inkling things might go awry. The debate had transformed from “Is Britain becoming more secular?” to the far more tabloid-warming “Who is taking the Christ out of Christmas?”—the favorite of lazy journalists who have a pathological fear of facts.

I had been informed that the debate would involve religious heavyweights. Sadly, this did not mean Archbishop Rowan Williams or a papal emissary. Instead, the religious goodness of Britain was represented by radio shock jock Nick Ferrari and by Vanessa Feltz, people who form opinions for financial gain and celebrity. Also within this televisual general synod sat Stephen Green, leader of Christian Voice, a marginal but caterwauling gang who are as representat
ive of British Christians as a black and white minstrel is representative of multiculturalism.

Within seconds of the debate beginning, I was puce and itchy. Debunked story after debunked story was dragged out again and spouted as truth.

When they finally got to me there was no time for facetious levity, and in the few allotted moments I had, I thundered through evidence. The other guests and audience members were not fans of evidence or facts; they had heard their hearsay and that was that. Despite the number of Christmas cards in shops saying “Happy Christmas,” you could not buy a card saying “Happy Christmas.” Despite the Christmas lights in town upon town, no lights could be seen. Despite the carol services in every church in the land, there were no carol concerts. They had plucked out their own eyes, and now berat
ed others for what they could not see.

I also made it clear that, as the antsy atheist rep, I was not against celebrating Christmas; in fact, I rather enjoyed this time for contemplation, ginger wine, and gift disappointment. Each time I suggested this, Stephen Green would smugly point out that he knew I would like Christmas banned. It didn’t matter that I said that it wasn’t true; God had been in his head and told Stephen I was lying.

Some weeks later, I had finally calmed down and started to sleep again. It was then that I decided I would prove to Green that atheists could enjoy a Christmas celebration as much as the devout. Rather than celebrating mythical wise men, angels, and the mythical messiah, we could celebrate rational thought and scientific thinking. My years of Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman worship would come to fruition.

Fortunately, in the next few days, I bumped into Richard Dawkins while appearing on the
Richard and Judy Show
. He discussed the importance of Charles Darwin while I showed funny clips from the Internet of men being peed on by incontinent puppies. After a brief conversation on the way to his cab, Richard Dawkins looked like he would be the first of the guests on the rational Christmas show. I soon found out that it was not going to be difficult to gather together a group of musicians, scientists, and comedians to sing the praises of science. Charlatan destructor Ben Goldacre, physics po
pularizer Simon Singh (whose participation reminded me I really must finally read that copy of
Fermat’s Last Theorem
that had been perched on my bookshelf of good intentions),
Jerry Springer: The Opera
librettist Stewart Lee, and singer and giant-killer-crab lover Robyn Hitchcock all said yes.

My early inklings of what the evening should be had me in a vaguely facetious frame of mind. Stephen Green had worked hard to campaign against
Jerry Springer: The Opera
. His followers stood on pavements outside theaters singing hymns with the ugly accompaniment of portable electric organs, while passing out leaflets feeding misinforma
tion and downright lies about the work. Green had boasted that, thanks to his work and lies,
Jerry Springer: The Opera
would never be performed again, and so I felt that maybe the night should be an outing for a few of the juicier arias.

After initial excitement, I realized that I would be falling into a Stephen Green trap. If we aired the arias, we would soon be discounted as no more than smug atheists rubbing Christians’ noses in nappies and well-sung swear words. The night had to be joyous. Lazy hacks (of which there is no shortage) are quicker to damn a popular atheist than a religious fundamentalist. Check the Melanie Philips
Daily Mail
column of November 26, 2007, for proof: “The Real Nutters Are the Fanatics Who Despise Religious Belief.” Even real journalists write similar things. If atheists/agnostics are ever g
oing to win over the loosely religious, then it won’t be through constantly telling them they are half-wits for clinging to their deities, popes, and mullahs. As Mark Twain wrote, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

As the night took shape, I realized that it should take the form of fractured variety versions of the Royal Institute lectures, as if Niels Bohr were sandwiched between Jimmy Tarbuck and the Swingles Singers.

With no publicity save for a few plugs on science sites and skeptic websites, the first night sold out at the 550-seat Bloomsbury Theatre. Everyone seemed keen on appearing at a second night, and that sold out too. Then the madness of the megalomaniac took over. Surely we should put on a final night at the 3,500-seat Hammersmith Apollo, home to Billy Connolly and the death of Ziggy Stardust.

There was no skimping on expenditure—we would have a grand star curtain, a big screen to project Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot onto, a twenty-four-piece orchestra, plus some secret star guests should the tickets not sell on famed evolutionary biologists alone.

The first night was longer than
Hamlet
but slightly shorter than
Once Upon a Time in America
. The theater manager said he had never had so many professors collecting tickets from the box office, but it wasn’t just geneticists and cosmologists. There were teenage Goths, twelve-year-olds in cast-off woolens, and a few twentysomethings in
RICHARD DAWKINS IS GOD
T-shirts. “Oh, dear, that means I don’t exist,” said the worried professor.

The one reference to wave/particle duality got a big laugh and a round of applause, which is not a regular occurrence in comedy clubs. Tim Minchin, barefooted Australian comedian and rock god, performed a nine-minute beat poem about woolly thinking; Simon Singh reminded us of the size of the universe via the rewritten lyrics of a Katie Melua song; Ben Goldacre attacked vitamin salesman and AIDS denier Matthias Rath in a somber and compelling ten minutes; and
Stewart Lee told us that he now believes in God because of Richard Dawkins, saying, “When I look at something as intelligent and intricate as Richard Dawkins, I do not believe it could have happened by chance.”

It was a long night. As the Anglican Nine Lessons and Carols involves exactly that, I felt we had to have nine songs and nine spoken-word pieces, but comedians are not fans of brevity in front of a delightful audience. We missed closing time—not bad, considering we live in the age of twenty-four-hour drinking.

The second Bloomsbury show was equally long, and I realized I’d missed a trick by not selling godless comfy cushions for those in the harder seats.

Hammersmith merely became surreal: it was Christmas night with the stars, just that there was a higher quota of stars with Ph.D.’s than usual. It was one of the few shows at the Hammersmith Apollo that should have had a reading list given out at the end. I hope more people found the dvD of Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos
under their Christmas trees because of it. There was no attacking of religion as a whole, just a few slights at some of the more unpleasant fundamentalists. Mostly it was jokes about astronomers with golden noses, the web-making abilities of spiders, and a song titled “Me and You, a Monkey,
a Teddy, a Deaf Kid, and a Shoe” sung by mentally confused surf rocker Colin Watson. Sadly, there just aren’t that many carols about monkeys, teddies, deaf kids, and shoes.

One Catholic journal was openly disappointed that there weren’t any attacks on their deity. Maybe we’ll change tack, but why knock the nonexistent when you can praise what is really there? I had plans for rational Ramadan, but it seems some theaters are a little anxious about that one.