I've started this blog as a way of continuing the discussion outside of the confine of Youtube's 500 character comment limitations, something that I have at times found to be exceptionally stifling to conversation and discussion. I'm sure that we have all felt this at times; Make a video, then the comment section starts to go into overdrive, and just as you're in full flow... BAM... the red letters come up "you have exceeded the 500 character limit"... So you continue by attaching about five or six comments to each other... Do that often enough, and suddenly a radomized computer program is asking you to type in a case sensitive handful of gibberish characters to prove that you're human.... Irritating is not a strong enough word, let's face it.So... One of the most common criticisms of my latest video, my little essay about Christopher Hitchens is that you cannot hear what I'm saying in some parts because of the music that I've used. (I say common... at the time of writing this, two youtubers have made this criticism... so never let it be said that I don't listen). Just on the off chance that there are more people who share this sentiment, I figured that I'd post the whole essay here for everyone to peruse at their own leisure...
"Dear Youtube, I would be lying to you if I said that the story of how I came to reject the claims of the supernatural was one that was full of woe, full of hardship, full of misery, full of long nights of the soul where I saw everything that I had previously believed in rising into nothingness, like the smoke from the too numerous cigarettes that I smoke, or disappear to some oblivion like the too copious amounts of bourbon that I claim as one of my many vices.
I would like to say that my rejection of the supernatural was a torturous and protracted affair that resulted in the very real effects of losing friends, losing family, losing a significant other, or losing a job. It almost seems that there would be more dignity in my rejection of the fantastical were there some achingly poignant story behind the struggle for what I see as my intellectual freedom.
In truth, it was no real struggle. Raised in an Anglican country where religion didn’t really mean anything more than the occasional visit to a church to be bored for a few hours on a Sunday, educated in two institutions nominally backed by a faith, I did not feel many ill effects of religion and the religious impulse.
Yes, there are some stories from my youth which may raise some irritated heckles from fellow non believers; Such as the time I was sent to the headmaster of my Primary school to explain why at the age of ten years old I did not believe in God... And it wasn’t that I didn’t believe at the time; I did. But I was ten years old, and wished to stir the waters, as one frequently does at that age. Others may feel distinctly aggrieved at the fact that I was confirmed in the catholic faith at no older than twelve years of age, hardly the age where one may reasonably decide what they do and don’t believe to be the truth of life, the universe and everything. They may be further irritated by the fact that for five years attending a school supposedly founded by Edward the Confessor, I attended Chapel every Thursday, because it was a compulsory requirement of the school.
But these are not struggles. They are minor irritations. The confirmation has had zero impact on my life, neither has five years of chapel, and many other things distressed me to a far greater extent at ten years of age than a simple visit to the Headmaster’s office. There were other visits to that headmasters office that distressed me to a far greater extent. If I’m truthful, the only reason I remember it is because I was asked if there were any memories from my childhood of religion that were unfavourable. It was such a non event that I had almost forgotten it until asked.
And leaving religion was no struggle either. For a few fanciful teenage years, I toyed with Buddhism, proclaimed myself a Buddhist, even though it took me a while to actually learn the eightfold path, and I remember surprise if finding out that there was more to this faith than the idea of reincarnation... Ironically, I found this out in Religious Education lessons at my secondary school, lessons run almost exclusively by The School Chaplain.
As I was leaving Sixth Form, I had heard about the religion of Shinto, and drew to it. For a while, I was very devout. I saw Kami in everything, but only really worshipped one... The Japanese God of Thunder and Lightning. If I am honest, I held affinity with this God because I am awed by Lightning and its elemental power... Even to this day, watching lightning in the sky, I have to remind myself that that power is a static charge built up in clouds by the ceaseless friction of water molecules. Cold and dispassionate though those words may seem, it’s a reminder that Nature and the natural world is far more impressive than the idea that some being with a frightening countenance surrounded by floating wardrums is hurling lightning at the ground in its wrath.
It was not until reaching early adulthood that the realisation came to me that I could not square away these things I believed, or wanted to believe with the contradictory knowledge gleaned from scientific enterprise. I wanted there to be beings in the clouds, but Science said that there weren’t, and more to the point, it showed me why there weren’t.
Much like when presented with the logical impossibility of Santa Claus being able to visit every single child in a single night, or the logical impossibility of such a small sleigh containing over six billion presents, I had to discard the beliefs that led to too many logical impossibilities.
It wasn’t painful. It just made sense.
It further wasn’t painful because I was free to do this. I was free to explore different faiths, and I did. I was free to reject faith, and I did. I faced no discrimination, no ostracism, no hardship, and no loss of self at the idea of things that I had previously believed in just slipping away.
But I still gave religion a wide berth. There was no reason not to. It didn’t impact my life much as a believer, and it didn’t impact my life much as a non believer. My aposticism to every system of faith this world has to offer was just another dull fact about me, something you could add to a list of fluff knowledge... He plays guitar, he smokes a lot, doesn’t believe in God, drinks too much, listens to metal and lives in Cardiff.
Of course religion wasn’t impacting my life... Or was it?
It started slowly at first... I seemed to notice more the Hare Krishna’s dancing down Queen’s Street. I suddenly noticed that The Jehovah’s witnesses seemed to have a regular pattern for knocking on the doors of the various houses I have lived in. My father laughing with disdain through stories of my parents latest holiday in America, scoffing at be-perfumed, overly slick snake oil salesmen that called themselves preachers. “People actually send them money!” He’d say, laughing.
It continued in this vein for some time. Religion was an amusing delusion held by others that they were more than welcome to hold, because it didn’t impact my life. Then slowly, I started noticing that those Hare Krishna’s turned into Street Preachers with Microphones and placards, nervously and insecurely decrying at the top of their lungs that we were all going to hell because we’re sinners, and because we didn’t believe the way he believed. The Jehovah’s witnesses didn’t just visit like clockwork, but left breadcrumbs of their influence everywhere in the form of several hundred copies of the Watchtower scattered like confetti on the Cardiff streets.
Then, as if sensing my disbelief as I stood and watched, amused by the hysterical preaching, the street preachers started directing their sermons to me, asking me direct questions, challenging me, questioning my moral fibre because I had rejected their God. Even then, I didn’t get angry. I’d argue my corner and then have a story to tell at the pub to my exasperated friends, who’d tell me that I should just leave the preachers alone, seemingly forgetting that childish as an assertion it may be, I didn’t start it.
Stories began appearing in the UK media of the great big terror of Islam, and while I was smart enough to dismiss the daily mail fueled hatred as nothing more than fear of something we didn’t fully understand, I felt it creep up on me. I wasn’t blind, I’d seen what happened in New York.
Then it happened to us in London. And that frightened me, because even though I hate that sprawling architectural mongrel that’s too big, too noisy, and too clogged with traffic and rude people, I had friends in London. I had family in London. It was affecting me now. Religion was encroaching on my life.
Not long after that, the Danish cartoon scandal really hit home, and it hit Cardiff and my personal sphere in a big way. I was not long graduated, not long moved to Cardiff permenantly, and not long out of writing for the Student Newspaper, the Gair Ryhdd, Welsh for free word. The paper published the cartoons. It was the only one in the UK to do so, I am given to understand.
I never saw that issue. I never will. There is not one surving copy. They were all destroyed, because it was felt that an editorial piece, commenting on the controversy and discussing it in depth as the paper was known to do could have done so without the accompanying context of the cartoons themselves. The paper and its staff were heavily criticised, the Gair Ryhdd did not put out an issue the following week, and for two weeks, security surrounded a Students Union, where the paper was based, closed for fear of reprisals.
From this point onwards, I really started to notice. I started to notice the ill effects of religion in the world. I noticed for the first time the hypocrisy of Christian Aid to Africa, hypocritical for its exacerbation of an AIDs epidemic by condemning condoms, coming from the highest offices of these churches. I started to notice America’s backwards slide to religious fundamentalism spreading beyond the often ridiculed bible belt. I started to notice troubling signs that Oil is not the only thing being deliberately exported throughout the world by certain Islamic nations, but a twisted ultra orthodox and ultra fundamentalist version of Islam, and more troubling was the knowledge that it was winning converts, and it was impossible not to notice the sordid news of just how big the child sex abuse scandal as perpetrated by supposed godly men.
I started digging further, and in doing so re read the bible, and read the Koran... And discovered that in both books, there are some awful, unsavoury pronouncements about how to treat your fellow human beings, based on arbitrary lines of gender, skin colour, and sexual orientation. During the course of this digging, I knew I wanted to speak out, I knew I wanted to say something, because I realised that religion had been affecting my life. Just because it did not as a child was irrelevant. And not only that, but religion was affecting the lives of others, sometimes in the most savage, brutal and pitiless ways. You and I both know, Youtube, that the list of crimes as committed directly by, and inspired directly by religion, are long, laundry, sordid, and embarrassing.
In this digging, I found other voices that succinctly collated all of my fears, arguments, misgivings and in some cases, rage at what religion was attempting to, and had wrought on this world.
One of those voices is Christopher Hitchens.
I did not discover him first. I discovered Dawkins first. I read the God Delusion, found it to be a worthy read. This was what I was looking for! Something that made no apologies for the distaste and revulsion it felt at what religion was doing to this world and its inhabitants. The famous quote, which runs thus : “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Was music to my ears. It didn’t grant religion an exaggerated level of respect that it did not deserve and only held in societies around the world because of the blind luck advantage it had of coming first.
I had heard Christopher Hitchens name before. My father had probably mentioned him in passing, some muttered reference about a Brit masquerading as an American, and I had heard that he tended to be contentious to put it mildly. I noted with some surprise that he’d gone after Mother Teresa, a person I would have previously thought of as an example of religion motivating someone to act in a decent and selfless manner. So I looked up Christopher Hitchens... And I did it right here on Youtube.
To say that he was an eye opener is an abhorrent understatement. Christopher Hitchens in his ‘A’ game is mesmerising to behold, both in sight and sound. I watched as he steamrollered opponents into quiet submission or stammering incoherent ramblings. He provided oratorical fireworks that would take you on a journey from laughter, deep contemplation, disgust, indignation, and hope. This was a crystalisation of what I wanted to say about religion, and Christopher Hitchens gave me an example... It helped to reinforce the idea in my head that religion is just like any other belief or position held; As such, it is not immune to criticism, even when the miserable excuse of “you might offend someone” is trotted out in a last ditch effort to stop people shining a light on as the man himself says “the mind forged manacles”, the lies and inconsistencies and flat out incompatibility of religion, the modern world, science, and in my opinion, humble as it is, morality.
I had not long finished reading this book when I started seeing stickers appearing in the area I lived in at the time. They were were everywhere. If I turned a corner, I saw one. If I looked on a lamppost, I saw one. If I saw a signpost declaring a street name, I saw. This sticker proudly proclaimed that “Real Muslims Do Not Vote For Democracy.”
This was in the run up to the May 2010 General Election. And this was around the time I started making videos on Youtube.
And now here I am, telling you all how I came to be here.
I’m telling you this because I have not long finished watching a video by Concordance in which he reads out Christopher Hitchens address to the American Atheists conference 2011. The reason it is the voice of Concordance and not Hitchens himself is because that faculty, the ability to talk is one that that he currently no longer possesses. This is one of the things that has suffered in the staredown that Hitchens is having with death, and it is a poignant reminder that it is a staredown that Christopher Hitchens, even as unflinching and unassailable at his best is probably going to lose.
I tell you all of this because while I am not an atheist because of Christopher Hitchens, I am the sort of atheist I am now because of him. Maybe I always was, and merely lacked the confidence or lacked an example like his to give me enough bravery to start speaking out the way I do. I don’t know how large the debt to Christopher Hitchens is that I owe. Only that I owe one.
And I felt like it was important to say that."
'Til the next time I clock a thousand heads, 'til the next time we unite through common dreads.
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