The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas Read Online Free PDF Page A

destined for great things there, but I never achieved them.
    However, though I was Christian and believed in Jesus, I remember that at school there were these fascinating children who were excused from assembly. They didn’t have to attend, and for a long time I thought this was because they were atheists. It was only later that I realized this was because they were Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu.
    I was fascinated by the fact that they were allowed to stay out—I would have loved to. While everybody else was in assembly, you could have wandered around the whole school by yourself without anybody watching you. That was my fantasy—to get up to mischief in the back of the art room.
    I had a lot of faith at one time. I was tempted to go to church as a child, because they told me you earned a shilling every week for singing in the choir. I thought, “Mmm, wages!” and became a choirboy.
    When you’re in a church choir, you actually go to church about five times over Christmas. You go twice on Christmas Eve, and three times on Christmas Day, if you’re doing matins, the communion service, and evensong. So that’s potentially five professional engagements for a shilling a week over Christmas. The music and the choir was very important to me, and it gave me this feeling of godliness, which I really liked—and I prayed.
    But I don’t miss that feeling—when it went, it went. It was like somebody pulled the plug out of the bath and the water went down. It didn’t feel good while it was going down, but by the time it had gone you’d got used to your body weight, got out of the bath, and got on with something else. That’s kind of how it was.
    Losing my faith was very gradual. I was confirmed, and I absolutely 100 percent believed in the Christian God. And then, aftera while, it started to change. I started losing my faith when I started trying to figure out what God was: “He can’t really look like us! This whole thing about how man created God in his own image . . .”
    When it came to working out what I really believed in, I realized that, if there is a God, he doesn’t have a personality. He certainly doesn’t have a set of morals—certainly not human morals, which we impose. And then I started thinking, “Well, what if it’s just people trying to personify life? To personify the fact that there is matter, and that there is a universe? If there is a God, that’s it. God doesn’t have a brain, God doesn’t think, God is just existence.”
    And when you get to that point, you realize that if that’s what God is, then there’s no such thing.
    • • •
    For me, the hardest thing about losing my faith was facing the possibility that this life is all there is. One of the foundation stones of all religion is people’s fear of death and nonexistence. People will do anything and believe anything if they can think, “You don’t really die. There’s somebody up there who says you carry on and you go to heaven.”
    The Buddhists believe in reincarnation, but I tend to think it’s rather unlikely that we’re going to come back. However, I think there’s strength in agnosticism, because you accept that there are things that you cannot know—I cannot know if I’ve ever existed before this life, and I cannot know if I’m going to exist again. The idea of faith is almost as though, “If I believe it enough, it’ll be true.” It’s a romantic ideal that just doesn’t wash with me—I’m too logical.
    It’s a hard truth, because our instinct is to survive and to continue existing, but I’ve come to accept that this is it. I’m not scared of not existing. Socrates said that death is unconsciousness, that there’s nothing to fear.
    I don’t want to die, and I’m scared of things that can kill me, so there is a dread of not being around, of not experiencing things, of not seeing the sun rise in the morning, of not knowing what goes on in the world, of not being part of it. But that’s normal. There’s