Guest post: It started with that little sparrow
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on The Covenant.
When I learned Santa Claus was definitely just a story (I’d had my suspicions for a while,) I did think of God, and while I didn’t turn into a baby atheist immediately, I’m quite sure a seed of skepticism was planted.
My seeds of doubt were planted in public school, when there was still a fair amount of religious stuff (particularly songs we sang during daily “opening excersizes.”) One of those songs, “God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall,” was one of the things that started me on the road to doubt:
God sees the little sparrow fall,
It meets His tender view;
If God so loves the little birds,
I know He loves me, too.
I wanted to know why God didn’t catch the sparrow. It was not obvious to me that his seeing the falling sparrow he failed to catch meant that he had any regard for me. Catch the sparrow, then we’ll talk. I’m sure that kindly Mrs. Luke would have been saddened that teaching this children’s song of childlike (or childish?) faith had a result directly opposite to the one she had intended. This was grade three, so I would have been around eight years old. I know maybe the year before I’d tried staying up late in Christmas Eve in my oldest brother’s room, to listen for Santa. (His room was closest to the chimney, so it was a natural place for a Santa stakeout). I don’t ever recall trying the milk and cookies thing; sleigh bells on the roof would have been enough. God was much less inspiring of empirical investigation or hypothesis testing. God drove no reindeer.
So I learned about God and Christianity. I remember thinking very seriously about it all, and trying to read the Bible (I was an early reader.) I also remember thinking it all sounded a bit unlikely, a bit like a story, but grownups believed it and said it was true, so…
Atheism took a lot longer than Santa letdown, but I’d given up on traditional Christianity by the time I got to high school. I’d read the Gospels, and was rather impressed with some of Jesus’s ideas. But I had no interest in Paul’s letters or Acts or any of the other bits of the New Testament. I noticed some of the variations and discrepancies between the Gospels, and learned a bit about their origins in specific times and places, for particular audiences (and much later, learning that each had their own theological axes to grind).
I came up with my own set of rules or guidelines as to what a fair, just god should and should not be and most traditional religions missed most of the boxes I needed or ticked the ones that were deal breakers. In the course of this progression into disbelief, I never sat up on a stakeout for god. God was never going to be that “real” or corporeal; I’d already absorbed enough theological cop outs that I knew that such a being wasn’t going to be knocking on the door or coming down the chimney… I would tell people I was agnostic or atheist depending on what kind of day I was having. Oddly enough I tended to ascribe my “better days” to my agnostic phases while on a bad day There Was No God. It was my early thirties when the final, attenuated flickers of deistic ideation finally guttered out.
And it started with that little sparrow.
The seeds of disbelief were planted very early in my case. We were sent to Sunday School, which I at once disliked and used to try to get out of by hiding under my bed or behind the tree at the end of the garden; there wasn’t anywhere else to hide. I suppose I was 4 or 5, when a very devout Sunday School teacher told the little circle of children sitting around her the story of Jesus staying behind at the Temple in Jerusalem, the confusion when he couldn’t be found, and his response to his mother when he was found: ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ The teacher immediately went on to to say, ‘Now, it was all right for Jesus to say that, but you little boys must never say that sort of thing to your mummies.’ ‘Why not?’ I immediately felt. ‘They say Jesus was the best man who has ever existed in the world, so why the devil can’t I follow his example, and say things like that to Mummy?’ (I did not in fact entertain the thought of the devil at that age, but I have stuck the reference to him in to show how the devil may slip into even the most innocent minds, as clearly he did in my case.)
An introduction to the power of organised religion occurred about a year later, when a beaming primary schoolteacher suddenly started out with, ‘Do you little boys and girls know that your names have meanings? Timmy, do you know what your name means?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘It means GOD-FEARING!’ she burst out delightedly. The class ended, the teacher disappeared, and I was surrounded by a group of small boys. ‘You fear God!’ ‘You’re God’s enemy!’ SMACK! SMACK! ‘Get him!’…
Oh lordy, how I hated Sunday school. I don’t remember a damn thing about it, just the hatred. I hated church almost as much. It felt like this awful boring pointless excruciating grown-up thing that I wanted no part of. I remember staring at some panels with numbers on them on the wall…I suppose they were Bible verse references or something. Permanent though: wooden panels with goldy numbers painted on. I would stare at them in boredom. Fortunately I wasn’t made to go forever. It was just up the street when we lived in town but when we moved back to the country it was a 5 mile drive and thank FUCK nobody wanted to make it.
I hated church then, and again when I was adult. When I was a kid, it was about like watching sports to me. It made no sense, and it was boring. As an adult, it was worse. The ritual! God, how I hate ritual. Bowing. Praying. Standing and turning and greeting your neighbor – that was my least favorite, and I’m starting to see that happen at some conferences I attend, usually teaching conferences. Oh, please, let them not tell us to stand and greet our neighbor, and share some stupid little story about ourselves that we don’t want to tell and they don’t want to hear!
When the Sunday Assemblies started up, so many people were saying how atheists miss church, the social side of it, so we’ll make these nice little religionless churches for atheists, where they can stand and turn and greet their neighbor and then do rational thinking kinds of things and then have coffee. I said “who misses church?” When I started looking at these, it seems like a lot of them were devised by former clergy who had left the church because they no longer believed. I decided they didn’t like being just one of the mass, they liked standing up and telling people things and being the center of attention once a week, and that’s why they missed church. Because even among the devout believers, I rarely ran into many who actually liked church. They do it because they think they have to suffer for the blissful eternity of their immortal soul.
Yeah, boredom is mostly what I remember from my early church and Sunday school experiences, which thankfully were few — my parents weren’t very religious, so they just made a few perfunctory efforts, mostly at Christmas and Easter.
Actually, from Sunday School I just remember that the regular kids were cliquey, so I didn’t even get to enjoy being around other kids. And church was just stultifying. All those voices droning on in unison, mumbling rote prayers or tuneless songs as ordered to by the agenda or whatever they call it.. Maybe they would have had a chance of hooking me with some fire-breathing fundamentalist preacher, or something that engaged or challenged or instilled any kind of emotion, but that dull, middle-of-the-road shit wasn’t going to do it.
I also smelled a bit of a rat. If church was so important, then why didn’t we go every week? Why didn’t my friends’ families go every week? It seemed like only some families took it seriously, and they didn’t seem any smarter or nobler or better behaved, so what was the point? It would be a long time before I would call myself an atheist, but I was quite content to dismiss organized religion from a fairly young age.
And then there was St Paul’s (the alma mater of the poets John Milton and Edward Thomas, both of whom I revere, though not because they went to St Paul’s, which in the main I definitely did not enjoy). There was the Lord’s Prayer in Latin every morning, and there was the school chaplain, the dreadful Reverend Hampton, a handsome and wholly humourless man with dark hair who when he wasn’t being religious taught physics to the youngest boys — badly, and in the most boring way imaginable. We hated each other from the word go for no very clear reason. I like to think it was because when, at the outset of the very first lesson in physics, we were instructed to write in our notebooks ‘Matter can neither be created or destroyed’, I stuck up my hand and said, ‘Please, sir, how does this square with the Christian religion?’ I certainly thought of doing that at the time, and because I liked the thought of my daring to ask that question, at some time in my life it came to seem almost as though I actually had asked it, but I’m pretty sure I did not — though perhaps I did, I hope I did! Anyway, whether I did or not, we hated each other.
Then came confirmation into the Anglican Communion, which my parents seemed to want, perhaps because they thought it would give me morality, as you might geld a cat — to steal a phrase from an essay by a friend, the poet C.H. Sisson. We were given, by the Reverend Hampton, little booklets of Bible texts with explanations that seemed designed for a tribe of mentally deficient Boy Scouts. I found them unreadable. Then, a little time before the great day, we all had to have a private interview with the Reverend Hampton. ‘Well, Harris, have you been reading those booklets I passed out to everyone?’ ‘I’m afraid I haven’t, sir. I found them very childish, so I’ve been reading The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis instead.’ He was naturally enraged, but could not, in the circumstances, express his rage. He spluttered a bit, and then got himself under control. ‘Yes, I see, Harris — well, perhaps the booklets I gave you were a bit young for you, but…’ — he got up and got some more booklets from a shelf — ‘here are some more advanced ones, so make sure you read these.’ That was the end of the interview. I looked at one and found it just as infantile as the former booklets, and so naturally I did not read any of them. (Though I did actually read some of Thomas a Kempis.)
The great day came when we were to be confirmed into the Christian faith in St Paul’s Cathedral by the Bishop of London. We had to go up in pairs and kneel before the bishop. He placed one hand on the head of each kneeling boy and burbled something. As I sat waiting my turn, I found my mind filling with bad words (it must have been the devil!) and I found myself saying silently, ‘F..k you, God, you appalling old b…..d. If you’re there, go on, throw a thunderbolt or something as I go up to that s…dding bishop and strike me dead!’ Of course, nothing happened. The bishop burbled, having laid an unwelcome hand on my head. I returned unscathed to my seat when he had done, and that was that. After that, I simply stopped going to church, despite my father’s remonstrations. Some weeks later, I was walking past the Rectory when the Rector, a nice and good man who had formerly been a teacher of mathematics, emerged. ‘Ah, Tim, I don’t see you in church nowadays…’ ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I believe in God any more.’ ‘But it’s much the nicer hypothesis!’ I nearly retorted that I didn’t want a bloody hypothesis, but refrained. I can’t remember now what I said (I was polite), but I never went too church again.