As my journey through life has taken me from a little Christian to medium size Agnostic and now to gargantuan Atheist, I look back on my days as a Christian and wonder: Did I ever really believe in God? I think what I believed in was the message of Jesus, and what I liked was the possibility of an afterlife. But if I am brutally honest, the idea of Jesus being the son of God was always a conceit, an idea to be struggled with rather than something that I could see as a tangible fact. Some people call this conceit "Faith". The openness of Christians and other believers about the need for faith does raise a rather awkward question: If Faith is a requirement; do any of you actually believe that God is real? Do any of these so called believers, really believe in God, or do they pretend to for the sake of their religions?
Evolution, for example, is backed by mountains of irrefutable evidence, from the fossil records (which alone are proof enough for most rational people) to experiments in which evolution by natural selection has been observed in a laboratory, to DNA records and dating methods. Any rational person, with an inclination to learn can satisfy oneself beyond any reasonable doubt that the theory of evolution is correct. The theory has now been proven. No faith is required. I do not "believe" in evolution, it is now simply a fact in my mind, I have seen so much evidence that I can't conceive of a single way in which to undermine the theory and therefore I don’t need any faith or belief structure to support it. I don’t go to meetings to have my “belief” in evolution re-affirmed and I don’t pray to an imaginary sky ghost when the parts of the theory we don’t yet fully understand cause me to think long and hard for possible solutions.
So what of God? Well, there is no equivalent evidence of God's existence. The only evidence anyone ever presents to me is either some unrelated and shocking misunderstanding of the nature of science or the anecdotes of various vested interests. God is, by the believers own admission, a matter of faith. So what of faith? We know about confirmation bias, we understand about memes and the god spot, all things that can explain how humans are prone to “religion”, but aren’t humans also pre-disposed to moments of rational clarity? Can it be that the arrogant delusion brought on by religion is insurmountable and these people never actually sit and think "hang on a minute, none of this stuff really adds up?"
I don't think that can be true. To become Pope for example, you must have some reasonable level of intelligence, to have succeeded in ones chosen career to that level, Darth Ratzinger™ must actually be credited with intelligence. And so he must recognise (at least form time to time) that his own faith is just that, faith. It has no firm ground on which to stand, it is in fact a conceit. The mother of all conceits and therefore not real in any sense beyond the edge of fantasy, so if we can reasonably deduce that the Pope knows his own belief is simply his choice, he chooses to believe something rather than being forced to by irrefutable evidence, then he knows (if only at some sub conscious level) that God only exists in his head.
So is the Pope a catholic? Well, from time to time is my best guess. I would bet you £ to a penny that even he has that sinking feeling as reality takes over from fantasy. He’s obviously very good at suppressing it (probably puts it down to the Devils work or some such) But, he knows. All intelligent people of faith know. It’s just too painful for most of them to admit.
So perhaps, in the end, at the bottom of the well of thought, we are all Atheists; some just suppress it better than others. Some are just so shocked by the pointlessness of it all, that they ignore the cold blade of truth and hide under the warm blanket of religion. What most people of faith do genuinely believe is that religion is the best method with which to deliver moral structure and a sense of community (I actually disagree with this, but that's for another blog) and so, who can blame them? Putting one’s doubts and rational thinking to one side makes sense in that slightly twisted context.
The Pope is still a vile dirty Paedophile apologising, African child murdering nasty little Nazi though. Just because I have gone easy on his "faith" doesn't change the facts about this vile man's actions. ;-)
Peace.
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