I wanted to write about the absurdities in organised religion. The way children are brainwashed, the power games, the nonsensical myths, the ridiculous rules and dogma; to expose religion as the human-created power game it is.
I wrote it as a novel in order to make it interesting and readable. It has a light touch. There is everything in this novel, life, death, work and retirement. It’s all mixed up with diatribes on the absurdity of religion.
It’s a good read if nothing else..
The Antitheist’s Bible: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9798391606536: Books
‘So why am I writing all this?’ I repeated the question Tobes had just asked as we sat in the front room, as if my brain could not quite believe what my ears were telling me.
Tobes just raised his eyebrows and look askance, making a slight chuckling noise to show he was not being confrontational; he merely wanted me to explain.
‘I’m writing it because I feel it. I am angered by it!’ I explained angrily. We sat for a few moments allowing the question to hang in the air. ‘The world infuriates me,’ I added, looking up, eyes full of glinting intensity. ‘People infuriate me. I hate all the intolerance and bigotry. I just hate it.’
Tobes shrugged. ‘Opher. Opher, mate. You have to chill out a bit. You get too worked up. Take things as they come.’
We’d got back from walking along the beach and cliff tops. There were big rollers churning in from the North Sea driven by a stiff cooling breeze. The girls had gone ahead chatting and we’d brought up the rear, skimming stones into the waves and talking. A seal had popped his head out of the water to study us. We’d come back for a cup of coffee and the women had gone upstairs to look at something on the computer.
‘Look Tobes, the world is a wonder. I’m knocked out by the whole universe, by nature, by geology. I love it. It amazes me. The whole world is a miracle,’ I said intensely.
‘Aaah you used a religious word,’ Tobes admonished. ‘That’s very Freudian.’
‘Yes but I didn’t intend it to have a religious connotation,’ I complained, peeved at the very idea. I was in one of those moods. Tobes was well able to push my buttons and get me going. ‘Besides,’ I added, looking to justify my use of the term, ‘surely things can be miracles because of the sheer enormity of chance. Things can be miracles because the chance of their inception, development, sophistication and beauty is so incredibly unlikely. It doesn’t infer that some extra-terrestrial tooth fairy designed it. Life is a miracle but it is obviously not designed.’
Tobes chuckled. He knew he had me on the ropes. ‘I think the connotation of the word miracle infers design,’ Tobes replied in a slightly mocking tone. ‘It infers a god and a religious event of unnatural dimension. To be a miracle it has to go against the laws of the natural world. It has to be impossible.’
‘OK, then I retract it,’ I replied grumpily. ‘I’ll substitute awe and wonder. The universe is unbelievable awesome. How’s that?’
Tobes nodded his acceptance. ‘Though it doesn’t explain why you have to indulge in a diatribe against religion. You are not focusing much on the wonder or awe of the universe so much as systematically attacking religion, aren’t you? What’s the point of that?’
‘Maybe,’ I conceded. In my present mood I had no intention of writing about nature, fabulous and ‘miraculous’ as it might be. I was too riled up about religion. At this moment in time I was horrified by the whole spectre of fundamentalist Islam, Evangelical Christians and Bible bashing Baptists. They’re radical antics were reprehensible. Every bomb that went off, every intolerant jibe and idiotic stance either infuriated or irritated me. It felt as if they were intruding into my life. They should get the hell out! Religion was a personal matter as far as I was concerned, and personally I had no use for it. I had this firmly held view that any attempt to foist it on others or restrict the freedoms of any human being was an obscenity that should be opposed with all the might that could be mustered. That’s why I’d had the idea of an Antitheist’s Bible. I felt the need to expose the power mania and control. I needed Tobes to understand that. It was eating into me. ‘But there are reasons. I am infuriated by the way organised religion reduces that awe and wonder, confines it, and creates a lesser thing out of it,’ I explained. ‘It needs saying.’
We quietly sipped our coffee and thought about it for a while.
‘I’m not quite with you?’ Tobes said looking a bit perplexed. ‘How does religion make things less?’
‘Well, you know, instead of going WOW!!’ I said, sweeping my hand out to illustrate towards some imaginary spectacle that was spread out before us. ‘Look at that sunset; look at the majesty of the universe, a zillion suns, look at the amoeba and the impossibility of the chemistry of that single cell,’ I raised both palm and eyebrows. I placed my cup on the table so that I could illustrate the fantastical scene even better with both hands. ‘Instead of the full scope of wonder and awe, the marvel of the unlikeliness of such a thing naturally occurring, they try to reduce it down to some creation by god. For me that makes everything more mundane.’
Tobes nodded his acceptance of the point.
‘The point is that I think it’s more than that! The universe is wondrous. Life is incredible. Consciousness is amazing. The fact that they occurred naturally, by change, through the universal laws, only serves to make it even more amazing, in my eyes at least. Creating some fable about a supernatural being who does the whole thing in seven days just serves to reduce that into an absurdity for me.’
‘OK I can see that.’ Tobes agreed.
‘Then there’s the ridiculous way they take the wonder and try to encapsulate it into doctrine,’ I added, warming to my task with relish. ‘Then they become subjugated to the fucking doctrine so they end up having to wear stupid costumes or do stupid things because that’s what it says in the Holy book. That annoys me.’
‘But Oph, it’s not doing any harm,’ Tobes objected. ‘That’s not the real problem with religion.’
‘It may not be the main problem,’ I admitted. ‘But it is one of the many aspects that get to me.’ I paused to consider, knowing that I’d picked on something trivial. I raised my cup to take a sip, then lowered it again as another idea came charging through. ‘But to top it all, when some people have the audacity to say that they don’t happen to believe in their particular fanciful fairy story, the other side seem to think they have the right to torture them to death with electric drills, red hot pokers and acid,’ I veered off into another favourite line of thought, waving my cup around dangerously. ‘That’s not just gruesome. That’s obscene!’ I looked across at Tobes to judge the impact of this new line of reasoning. ‘That’s why I’m writing it!’
‘I think it’s more complicated than that,’ Tobes mused. ‘The world situation is highly convoluted. I think there’s a good dose of politics, colonialism, profiteering, exploitation, revenge and victimisation that’s gone into that heady mix, not just religion.’
‘I’m sure,’ I acknowledged reluctantly. ‘The world’s a very unfair place. The billionaires run the show for their own profit – but fucking religion seems to play a big part in it.’
‘I’m still not sure why you are writing this?’ Tobes ventured again. ‘It’s not as if you have anything new to say about it that hasn’t already been said.’
I could see that my words were causing some irritation.
‘Not, Oph, that it doesn’t need saying again and again,’ Tobes said, instantly picking up on my irritation. ‘I don’t doubt that. But who’s going to read it?’
‘Perhaps I want to wake people up so that we start putting our energies into solving problems instead of creating them?’ I replied in a slightly chastened tone. At least I had to justify what I was doing to myself. It was extremely possible that it was all a stupid waste of energy and time. Everybody seemed united on that front. I might not have a new slant on anything. But I did not really care. It was a compulsion and I enjoyed doing it. I felt the need to do it. That was all that was important. ‘Perhaps I’m just furious with the idiocy of human beings,’ I conceded in a more conciliatory tone. ‘And I agree, it is futile and useless to write another book about religion. But I enjoy doing it and that counts for something; even if I’m only writing it to get it out of my system.’ I’d regained a bit of my vim. ‘You know, we deserve to be wiped out by a virus,’ I added earnestly as an afterthought. ‘We humans are so fucking stupid!’
Tobes chuckled and raised his cup.
‘What good has all our intelligence done us?’ I continued posing another big rhetorical question and moving into a more mellow mode. ‘We don’t apply it to solving all the huge problems like global overpopulation, world poverty, global warming, pollution, deforestation, viral diseases.’ I intoned a long dreary list of our self-created problems. ‘It’s madness.’ My hands were back out sweeping back and forth in emphasis. ‘We put our energies into nuclear war, conventional war, political control, making ever more wealth, expansion, expansion, expansion … and fuck the cost.’
‘True enough,’ Tobes agreed, smiling sweetly. ‘Utter madness, Oph.’
‘A loose affiliation of billionaires and millionaires running the whole planet for their own gain,’ I ranted on, moving on to another of my favourite themes. ‘Like they’re playing some great big silly game of ‘Risk’ based around global domination and power. Where’s the love? Where’s the wonder and awe? Life shouldn’t be like this!’
‘So why didn’t you focus on that instead of religion?’ Tobes enquired, looking to change the subject to something less intense, if global domination could be considered less intense. ‘You could do a great book about who’s running the world – the power behind economies and governments.’
‘Because religion is one of the weapons they deploy and it pisses me off.’ I replied adamantly, not yet willing to move on. ‘Besides, you have to write about the things that are driving you. You can’t write about any old thing. Religion is so obviously repulsive and ubiquitous it’s getting to me. ’