GOD. BLOGGERER

I call my­self an athe­ist be­cause god has not been proven to any clear de­gree, but like other peo­ple I can enjoy cer­tain things that are called “the spir­i­tual”.

I think the biggest mys­tery is to do with what we call con­scious­ness and this is one of the en­tic­ingly ’won­der-full’ areas that art and cre­ativ­ity can put to use so well.

One prob­lem of athe­ism is that some athe­ists go too far by main­tain­ing that re­li­gious-in­spired work is au­to­mat­i­cally some­how wrong, re­gard­less of its con­tent.

I only have to lis­ten to some­one like the Pak­istani singer Nus­rat Fateh Ali Khan to feel the power of his voice as an ex­pres­sion of some­thing right and good, even though I don’t share the love of Allah that fuels that voice.

We all need that sense of awe and hu­mil­ity that comes from, say, the ex­tra­or­di­nar­i­ness of so much in the nat­ural world: all that sci­ence can­not ex­plain or come near to doing jus­tice to. (There is after all, not even an ad­e­quate de­f­i­n­i­tion of what a thought is.)

Plenty of sci­en­tist-athe­ists have no prob­lem with the un­known and the tran­sient, in fact they em­brace it and some even work at find­ing an­swers in it, though they often end up with more ques­tions than they started with.

When re­li­gion asks ques­tions, I ap­plaud it. But when it sim­ply quotes an­cient texts or ‘in­ter­prets’ them I start to twitch.

I think it makes per­fect sense to doubt what you know. The at­ti­tude of “I could be wrong, but...[in­sert opin­ion]” is the most sen­si­ble one to have be­cause with­out it there is ei­ther blind faith or the con­ceit of ab­solute cer­tainty.

I think this is the healthy basis of what we could call moral con­cerns. Or­gan­ised re­li­gion often likes to claim that it has a mo­nop­oly on the eth­i­cally cor­rect out­look but too often the peo­ple who are mak­ing the claims have not gen­uinely ques­tioned their be­liefs and have in­stead re­lied on their tra­di­tional lead­ers to set out a po­si­tion first.

Equally, the celebri­ties that are so ad­mired in today’s world are often ig­no­rant about basic sci­en­tific truth but we still hold many of them up as role mod­els and guid­ing lights. Even some­one as cere­bral as Barack Obama re­cently made com­ments link­ing vac­cines to a sup­posed rise in autism.

It seems like this era’s ob­ses­sion with the body, rather than the mind or the con­tin­u­ing in­equal­ity that ex­ists across the globe, means that every­thing from karma to as­trol­ogy to detox di­et­ing is le­git­i­mate as some­thing to be­lieve in and use as a basis of liv­ing.

If our species can elim­i­nate su­per­sti­tion we will have elim­i­nated a major cause of our prob­lems.