Atheism

'Don't talk about politics or religion' was a piece of advice my dad gave me when I first started visiting pubs in my late teens. Two areas of life where saying the wrong thing can upset people. Because people always seem to 'know' what's right in those contexts. Well, I'm not in a pub, even if I have got a glass of wine in front of me, so I'm going to talk about religion, because it's a subject that has exercised my mind a great deal over the years, and one I have to admit to having strong feelings about.
From the outset, I want to make one thing clear. I have no objection to anyone believing in anything they want to. Belief is a personal issue, and purely a matter for the individual. What I do object to, however, is the use of belief to impose a world view on other people. I've mentioned my dad, and now I'll mention my mum. I went to a Church of England affiliated primary school, so there were regular visits to church, once or twice a term, for the whole school for services for Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, Harvest Festival, occasionally others besides, and parents were invited to some of these services. On one of these occasions - I must have been around 10 - those of us whose parents had come to the service were allowed to go straight home from the church rather than having to go back to school, and my mum was there, so my siblings and I met up with her at the end of the service, and headed for the main door of the church. The vicar was there, saying his goodbyes to those leaving, and, as my mum passed him, he made a disapproving comment along the lines of why did he never see us in church on a Sunday. Without missing a beat, she replied 'I don't need to go to church to be a good person'. That stuck in my mind, and does to this day, as perhaps the first time in my life anyone in my ambit had questioned the certitudes of Christianity, taught to us, as I suppose it has to be to young children if it's going to be taught at all, as fact, given the relatively limited capacity for abstraction of those children. I can't say, even with hindsight, that was the day I became an atheist, but it was probably the day when the seed was sown in my mind.
Ironically, it wasn't very long after that - probably four or five months later - when I entered the phase of my life when I was most exposed to organised religion. I attended, and passed, an audition to be in the church choir, and spent the next almost five years attending church twice, and once a month three times, each Sunday, along with extra wedding and funeral services, Remembrance Days at the War Memorial, and sundry other church and town events when choral services were required. In short, I experienced vastly more religion than almost all of my contemporaries between the ages of 10 and 14. And I listened to what was being said, and thought about it, weighing the words I heard from the pulpit and lectern against what I already knew, and, especially after I went to grammar school, what I was learning of the scientific ideas about the world, the universe, and how it all came to be, and came to be the way it is. By the time I was 13, I was having serious doubts about the veracity of the Christian version of events, and before I left the choir, as my voice was breaking just after my 14th birthday, I had made my final decision. I felt there was no need to invoke a supernatural explanation for natural phenomena, including the existence of the world and all it contains, and I still hold to that belief to this day. I don't believe in 'God', or gods, or anything beyond natural processes to elucidate anything about the natural world and its reason for being here. Religious belief itself, in my opinion, is explicable within those parameters, as a construct of neurological activity, an attempt to explain that which not immediately apparent, a function of the evolutionary adaptation by which the human brain looks to identify patterns within the environment, an adaptation which probably originally allowed our hominid ancestors to avoid predators.
But again, thereby hangs a tale. Biblical literalists would claim that such evolutionary concepts are unnecessary and wrong, because 'God' created everything as it is now 6000 or so years ago, negating the idea of either a mechanism or a timescale for anything to have evolved. My answer to that kind of argument is encapsulated in the 'Occam's Razor' adage, which states that the hypothesis most likely to be true is that which requires the least assumptions. It is possible to posit that 'God', being omnipotent, could create a universe in which fossils appear in the correct strata, or the exact degree of galactic redshift, as viewed from Earth, could be concocted to conform to spurious geological or cosmological theories, but ism't it simpler to assume that such evidence exists because it is a natural consequence of natural processes, rather than the product of 'micromanagement' by a celestial creator?
I'm no proselytiser, I have no interest in persuading anyone to believe what I believe, or telling anyone how to live their lives. Sadly, there are many who wouldn't extend the same courtesy to me - instead I would doubtless be told I was destined to be damned to Hell and eternal torment because of what I believe and who I would choose, in my ideal world, to love. Going back to Occam's Razor, it's all evidence to me that there is no 'God', because a benevolent deity would surely have instilled empathy and tolerance into their creation, qualities which, to me, are noticeably rare in the contemporary world.
So, I'm an atheist. Q.E.D., as far as I'm concerned.

Love & best wishes to all
Sammy B