Chapter 14

Divorcing Jesus: The step of unfaith

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

…

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, ‘Wild geese’

On a conspicuous rise overlooking the motorway to the south of my home town of Auckland, an ugly, grey soulless factory of a building is taking shape. Its boxy steeple gives it away as a monument to monumental gullibility: a brand-new Mormon temple, standing proudly in an area of town with an educational deficit, looking like it was co-designed by Walt Disney and Albert Speer. Considering this monstrosity I have a few questions.

If religion is a great inspirer of art, as we are often told, then where does this brash lack of style and taste come from? Cue Christians exclaiming with self-satisfaction, ‘not all religion: we have the great Cathedrals!’ But then another question might occur: how come most of the great artistic achievements trumpeted by the church were coincident with the European Renaissance and the revolutionary spirit of Romanticism that followed, including those of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, Mozart, Haydn, and Bach? Over centuries, these great human movements broke the monolithic power of the church in the West and ushered in the revolutions that formed the modern world.

If the principle of divine artistic inspiration holds true, then where is the Christopher Wren or Giovanni di Simone of the buildings of the Vineyard Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or these Mormons and their money-making operation? Where is the Mimar Sinan of the mosques of the Taliban or the Islamic State? Admittedly the Catholics recently had Gaudí for Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, but even his modernist inspiration was also drawn solidly from the Catalan Renaixença and the natural world: the caves of Mallorca and the Fraguerau Gorge. Maybe it’s simply that the gods have got less interesting as they have grown older. Possibly they have retreated into senility. They’ve aged not so much like Bob Dylan as like Morrissey. Like all of their many thousands of predecessors, these uninspiring gods are also destined to die out.

Something else is afoot here also. Just like the people that invented them, some gods are stupider than others. Hence, some religions are dumber than others. Mormonism for instance is a religious scam of the highest order perpetrated on the especially credulous through its extremely efficient administrative structures and its interesting take on genealogy. Its operative principle is an example of the highest form of intellectual dishonesty, and this is well worth looking at because it’s one of the most extreme examples of a cult going mainstream. It has been able to do this because it mimics the older religions and, unlike something like Scientology whose actual beliefs are so far beyond silly that they really belong at Comic Con, Mormonism seems to be able to keep hold of people even once its ridiculous beliefs are allowed into the public sphere. It can do this perhaps because it takes the time to balance its teaching of ridiculous things with the necessity to share those things on a regular basis.

But there is also a surprising principle at work underlying this stability. It is the ridiculous religious beliefs themselves that glue the community together, like a terrible shared family secret. We might call this the Law of Shared Absurdity. This law simply states that the more outrageous a belief is, the more it tends to bind together the people who believe it. Some beliefs in this category are so far beyond stupid that they even defy the logic of the confirmation bias principle. Leaving Mormonism aside for a second, a belief of this kind from standard 21st-century Christianity, might be something like the direct temptation of the Devil.

Here you might confess that you were trying your best to walk past a pub but the Devil really got on your case and whispered into your ear something hurtful from your childhood that made you need to go and sink ten pints of lager. I mean, God wouldn’t tempt you in that way so it must’ve been the Devil, right, or how could he have known what was in your head from your deep past? This is something that you could only suggest had happened to you within a pretty close circle of believers, or you’d be thought mentally unwell. Even in that context you’d have to be pretty selective about who was present. In the same manner, some modern-day Christians also take the guidance of God to the level of expecting him to tell them what to do in every moment. They won’t get out of bed until God ‘tells them to’. They won’t go and talk to a person, they won’t go shopping, or pay a bill, or do a kindness unless God ‘tells them to’. Of course, this extremely personal treatment implies that they are very, very special indeed. But they wouldn’t mention this to somebody who wasn’t within the circle of believers; those who take that sort of thing relatively seriously, and might even admire their spiritual attunement.

Mormons are open to all the same nonsense that Christians find themselves believing, but they add to it some other cute little absurdities. One of the beliefs is that if a Mormon is a good enough Mormon, once they die and go to heaven they could be promoted further than that to even higher heavens and one day perhaps even get to be the God of a planet of their own. It’s pretty obvious what kind of teenage megalomania and egotism this appeals to. But if you are a believer in the more established monotheisms, you might like to have a think about the implications of what we’ve just said. That is, to desire to be the god of a single planet would make a person such a suspect human being that you would want to ridicule the whole idea as being some thing on the edge of mental illness. But that is to some extent at least the character of the being that you worship as God Almighty except that, rather than a single planet, he wants to rule the whole universe in that way.

If you think that’s not to some extent true, then you may want to ask yourself why you are so repelled by the idea of that Mormon doctrine. Maybe it’s a good idea after all? The Bible does have one verse that seems to point to us being ‘gods’. If indeed that appeals to you then maybe you should shift over to the true church of the ‘Latter Day Saints’, as their modesty allows them to call themselves. Only don’t. The level of personal dishonesty and the lack of self-knowledge required to be a part of such an organisation are extremely destructive to human well-being. Unless what really attracts you is the propensity for human beings to spend their whole lives celebrating an obviously concocted falsehood, its not a good idea for you to get involved in that either.

When I was a Christian, I used to find the fact that people believed the kind of bonkers stuff in the book of Mormon really annoying. All that horsedrop about Joseph Smith being visited by an angel called Moroni (!), finding golden plates in upstate New York and not being allowed to show them to anybody else, reading them out from behind a curtain to credulous yokels. And then making himself the prophet of the ensuing church and giving himself access to all money and the women of the church, of course. Obviously.

What is a plain matter of fact though (and probably what secretly dug at me so deeply) is that the Christian scriptures are just as fanciful, even when they are recognisably part of an identifiable historical period. Despite seeming sanctified by their antiquity, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible are poorly-researched period fiction from beginning to end, from the non-existent slavery of the tribe to the non-existent forty years wandering in the desert and the non-existent conquest of Canaan by the non-existent armies of a non-existent nation. Israeli archaeology itself has conclusively disproven the idea that ancient Israelites escaped from slavery in Egypt in some great exodus before wandering across the desert for forty years. We now know that 600,000 people cannot have lived for that time in an environment that records the tiniest encampments of ancient Bedouin tribes, and preserves the intricate details of 5000-year-old mineworker villages, without leaving an archaeological trace.

Then also, no known ancient records outside the Bible mention Moses, an enslaved Israel, or any event of the Exodus. Egyptian records of the period are comprehensive and highly detailed and would certainly have picked this up.[i] Judaism was at that time simply emerging as a religious identity both within and on the fringes of the Canaanite states, exhibiting all of the characteristics of Canaanite culture. Its scribes mimicked ancient narratives from its host cultures and simply made up or appropriated events like the conquest of Jericho and Ai that had each been laid waste centuries before by unrelated tribes from the far North. Even the most credulous biblical archaeologists of the early 20th century didn’t take long to find out that the scriptural narratives of this emergent people were completely out of sync with the archaeological realities of the region. So even before we get to the extremely contentious events of the New Testament, we find the supposed basic historical realities of the Old Testament to be nothing more than fictionalised accounts of the wish thinking of people who wanted to create a national identity out of almost nothing of substance.

Similar fictional battles are also a part of the Mormon account, written by Joseph Smith who is quite as imaginatively creative as the concocters of the Bible. It’s not really accurate to say these scripture inventors were loose with the truth, because the truth is really nothing to do with these narratives at all. The earlier one is an attempt by a coalition of tribes to create a kind of religio-ethnic identity out of a fairly distinctive new form of monotheism, while the second is a bad faith attempt to create a religious identity from scratch in order to increase its single creator’s access to sex, money and power.

I chose Mormonism as the example here because it is relatively successful and at the same time its beliefs are outrageously outlandish to most intelligent people. But in fact, the closer we look at the things that Christians believe, the more we see that the superstructure is basically the same. Number one: claim special divine revelation. Number two: promote this divine revelation to credulous and uneducated people. Number three: write scriptures that glorify your own identity and elevate you to the heights of exclusive divine favour and include compulsory incredible beliefs which bind the community together by the Law of Shared Absurdity. Number four: create a religious and ceremonial structure that takes up people’s time and reserves the right to all their excess energies. Number five: massage the belief system so that it necessitates donations of money and facilitates privileged access to the system’s underlings: the poor, the socially disempowered, the women and the children.

Despite all of this, I think we’d be right to say that Christianity is still on the whole a more credible religion than Mormonism. Some gods are indeed stupider than others. But these religions also have so many structural similarities that any thinking person should be made very uncomfortable by the ease of the comparison. If you’re still looking for a reason to take the necessary step and declare yourself free of this ancient nonsense, you might like to add into the equation the thought that for most non-religious people the differences between Christianity and Mormonism are minimal, and the credibility of the one is just about as the same as the other. Those who see this clearly and still want to continue to associate themselves with these nonsensical systems perhaps don’t feel persuaded by an argument of guilt by association or maybe just lack a sense of social shame. Personally, I’d suggest investing your precious days and energies in activities and organisations that are more use to people and carry more weight. At this stage I am having trouble thinking of a single activity that is not more use to the world than offering your time and energies to the service of an extremely needy and non-existent supernatural being. The only thing I can come up with is deliberate self-destruction.

Giving the church its due of course, we know that it, like Islam or any other totalising solution, can sometimes have a beneficial effect on people, and especially those who are engaged in things that will kill them slowly. It is also the case that addiction may both feed and be fed by an enormous ego. Religions love a performer as much as they love a penitent. When these come together in the same individual that's evangelical gold. I have seen plenty of these individuals come and go. Such a performer in-waiting sat on the bench near the town-centre McDonalds for years, drinking ever larger amounts of alcohol, weaning himself gradually off life. It is a normal human feeling to wish we could be seen as special as we secretly suspect ourselves to be, to be discovered. In this case, as in many like it, this tendency did not manifest itself in the exercise of any particular skill. The town passed by and watched this elaborate performance of suicide by degrees over time. They’d seen it all before. Such a publicly obvious display of despair in this prominent place was bound to result in detection by religionists. Once discovered by enterprising evangelists, the performer was not as surprised as we might think to find that a niche role has been prepared for him in the local church’s theatre of repentance. He was special after all. Nor should we have been surprised at his conversion and instant transformation as he was in turn paraded, celebrated, cosseted, then quickly employed, consulted, and finally even respected by his new-found tribe. Give a human being a meaningful and rewarding role in the world and ninety-percent of the time they will step up to it admirably.

Besides the general well-wishers of his new family there are those using him for their own self-aggrandisement within the group, ‘we the redeemers!’ There are also many for whom he is vital proof of the message, those desperately in need of evidence to confirm beliefs held unsteadily. In his new reality meanwhile, he can perhaps do some good by helping to save others from the same fate. This is the only good outcome but is of course to be recognised. It is often better to be a church person than a suicidal junkie or a hopeless alcoholic living on a town-centre bench. He can even offer some a similar career path, although top spot is obviously taken. In this work, lives really may be rescued from addictive practices. Generational cycles of abuse may even be interrupted. But there is also a hidden cost for all involved: an expectation of commitment to a variety of outdated, nonsensical or otherwise socially and personally damaging beliefs. And the consequent butterfly-wing effect of the associated systems of thought rippling out into the lives of everybody they know or come into contact with for the rest of their lives. Religion is itself addictive, as studies have shown. The extent to which it is self-destructive is a matter of debate. There are some benefits then, but these can be easily replicated outside religious contexts. In this particular case a good twelve-step programme will break an addiction better than most religious packages. The related deficits of the religious version are many and complex.

But here’s the real good news. It doesn't matter whether you started off as the child of church leaders or whether your journey to the faith began in an alcoholic haze on a town centre bench. You don't owe anything to a non-existent deity. He did not save you. That was down to human beings with their own religious motives, simply combined with your own personal choices. This means you can now choose to be free of guilt, shame and fear of the unknown beyond without making oblations and orisons to the old gods.

One of the things that’s fantastic about coming out of faith is the sudden lack of any need to make stupid excuses for the inexcusable. This includes the words and actions of people and gods. The release from that tense compulsion is palpable. We often underestimate the mental anguish of the cognitive dissonance that faith generates for anyone who tries to make it into a coherent whole. The most obvious example of this is that classic discrepancy in one’s own value in the eyes of God, between being utterly abject on the one hand and somehow at the centre of the universe on the other. Since Christianity teaches the believer that their good deeds are no good before the Lord – ‘we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags’ (…) – they cannot do any good whatsoever in the cosmic scheme of things without the assistance and approval of the divine being. As such, in yourself, you are utterly pointless and useless. Even worse, since the ‘rags’ refered to here are likely menstrual rags, this suggests that not only is God unable to count your good actions as good in themselves, but he actually finds them disgusting, in that obviously misogynistic way the Bible characterises anything to do with women’s reproductive systems.

This imagery is supposed to emphasise the fact that you cannot bring yourself to salvation and that God has to reach down to you and give it to you gratis, either because you are one of his chosen tribe, or because you have opted to follow Christ. The outworking of this teaching may have been fairly radical in the history of religious thought, which normally included some form of salvation earned through sacrifices or good works. Nevertheless its primary effect is to cause you to despise your own efforts at self improvement and any just and merciful actions towards others as nothing special. Because of this, Christians often look upon their own goodness as worthless. In the eyes of God, they will always miss the mark. They can never in themselves be good enough and even their efforts are disgusting.

And then, on the other hand, they are informed that God has a plan for their lives, that he’s intimately interested in what they think, what they plan, what they do with their personal lives, what they are doing in the morning, whether they go to the pub tonight, how they speak to their workmates, where they park your car, what they eat, what they do with their money and their time. And he’s very particularly interested in what they do with their genitals. In this way, the universe is all about them and their every gesture is of cosmic significance. This extremely individualised treatment – something like the constant presence of a very close friend crossed with the eternal surveillance of a celestial autocrat – can lead them to feel they are quite important. After all the one who cast the stars into space is equally interested in what goes through their heads when they’re masturbating. He very much hopes it isn’t anyone in church. God forbid.

You might see where this is headed. The tension that the experience of being strung out between these two extremes creates is psychologically destructive and a huge amount of anxiety is coming your way if you continue to think about yourself in this manner. For the believer however it can be very addictive. It is at the same time infantilising and flattering, generating a feeling like the security of a child who is constantly policed and closely supervised but then is allowed into the room where the adults are planning the future of the world. Step out of the faith once and for all and you can sort out an integrated mind for yourself and be free of such twisted thinking. No more debilitating mental gymnastics. Coming out from this understanding of the world is not really like the terrifying experience of being flushed out of some Matrix-like machine world into a grimy underworld existence of reality. It is more like coming out of the cinema on a beautiful summer’s afternoon, with the pleasant fantasy behind you and the rest of the day stretching out with all its exciting possibilities of friends, drinks, intelligent conversation and amatory adventures.

And this is not the only cognitive anomaly that one gets to leave behind. As a thinking Christian you will always be apologising for certain obvious contradictions in the Bible and in the traditions of the faith. In my experience, this goes on right until the end of your religious journey, even in the vague garden where more consciously considered philosophical opinions or thoughtfulness can be brought to bear on the most ridiculous concepts to provide them with some form of intellectual credibility. My own work in this area included explaining away problems around the concept of angels, the account of creation, the virgin birth, the implausibility of the desert wandering, the extreme cruelty of the Old Testament God, the Bible’s obvious sexism, racism, violent xenophobia and hearty recommendation of genocide, the debased nature of biblical poetry, many large discrepancies between various biblical texts and their obvious very late composition, and aspects of church history too numerous to mention. This activity does you no good and there is almost no possibility that you will be thanked for it. The vast majority of believers will never ask themselves the kinds of questions that occur to you and will never appreciate your efforts. The unbelievers you may be trying to convince can easily see that you protest too much, making the subject suspicious. What a relief it is not to have to hold up the rotting net that contains all of this rubbish, and to see it all for what it is: a combination of pre-civilised tribal self-assertion and pre-philosophical dabbling. A bunch of often-dubious life advice thrown in with a huge amount of errant time-specific and place-specific organisational rules and paranoid pronouncements, designed to exclude foreigners from the community in the Old Testament or to help define a new tribe in the New one. Whatever it was to us in the past, taken as a whole it’s now useless historical baggage and it is to the vast benefit of the post-believer that they are free to discard it and to move on without restraint, suddenly travelling very lightly indeed.

I understand that no-one likes to feel that they’ve been subject to an illusion, and we may still feel all of that sunk cost even at this point. If you’re feeling that you’ve been duped, maybe consider this. Your past Christianity was just a stage in the development of the self. Astrology was our first attempt at astronomy, alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and religion was our first attempt at philosophy. We had to surpass those early forms but without them we would not have the knowledge that has transformed our lives so profoundly. That earlier version of you is simply somebody less advanced, less mature, and with a smaller overall vision of the world than yourself at this developmental stage. It can be useful to imagine putting a comforting arm around that earlier version of you. See yourself saying ‘don't worry, you’re doing okay. And things are going get better in ways you can’t yet imagine.’

Despite all its abuses, Christianity had some constructive effects on Western civilization as a whole and in the same way it may have had some sound influences on our own lives. Whatever your role in the church, you have been a part of an ideological movement that will have its own place in the wider social history of your area. Then on a personal level, we have to honour our own past good intentions if we can and be satisfied with them even when the overall context or results of our actions are compromised. We must at least value ourselves for having tried to do the good thing in life. Many people just don’t bother trying. Whatever our mistakes, we were attempting to act honourably and to stay true to a vision.

As a part of this process, it is good to look back and acknowledge with the fresh eyes of the external viewer the any positive legacies the faith might have left in our lives. As much as is possible within religious movements, you probably did some people some good. You encouraged people when they were down, offered them guidance. Like the reformed drinker, you even may have helped them to become more responsible adults. It may be that you developed skills in reading and interpreting obscure texts, or in leading small groups, or even large ones. It may be that you gained some discipline in personal conduct. This can still be useful even when you change the bases upon which your conduct rests. And if you spent longer than you would have wanted in a long-term relationship the church required of you, unless this was abusive or damaging, it might be helpful to bear in mind that many people aspire to such long relationships and many others will never have one. Of course if we feel our time in the faith was a kind of prison, we tend to think of all of these as prison-tainted things when we are out in the open again. We’ve got to resist this urge.

There are worse systems of belief, and ways of life. Some people have been so morally, intellectually or socially failed that even church seems attractive. For many, Christianity is, at first, the best option. Since you are still reading this book, it's unlikely that Christianity is the best option for you now. You seem to be a person who has called yourself out from that, chosen and elected yourself to go in search of a better life. This position is very much to be respected. There comes a time, after taking all the pressures and limitations of the religious life, that we decide enough is enough. Throughout history many others have boldly done the same to preserve their moral integrity, in spite of the criticism of those still wearing religious blinkers.

So we realign ourselves according to our actual needs and desires, rather than to those we are told we should have. We celebrate the good where it exists. Then transcend it. Go further, do better. Outside the rigid walls of the faith, our good intentions do actually count.

One of the deeply freeing elements in coming out from under the strangling pressures of organisational (or ‘eternal’) purpose is the understanding that your own efforts at life are good enough now. There is no longer some institutional standard or pious highwater mark they need to hit. We may indeed have been duped, but unless we were children we have to admit that we largely made our own decisions at the time and so were ultimately self-deceived. In that case, tough luck. Time to move on. If we were children back then, perhaps some good therapy awaits. As any decent literary study will show, this is a very common experience in the process of being human and becoming a better version of yourself. Love yourself and don’t let it get the better of you. Let yourself off the hook and determine to do better next time. Also, celebrate the amazing fact that you have come to the self-realisation that brought you to this point. The unexamined life is not worth living. Yours is now pretty well on the journey towards being examined. And this time your metamorphosis is under your control. You can think of it as being born again maybe. This seems to work as an encouraging metaphor at earlier larval stages.

Also, as much as you have been a part of an historical movement you now have the opportunity to enter into a new one and contribute as meaningfully to it as you wish. For centuries now humans have been elevating themselves out of the miseries that are the staple food of religions. Those original scientists tended to call themselves natural philosophers. Their methods of checking and self-questioning and sharing results publicly became the scientific method, through which the validity of ideas can be tested. It is to this simple but crucial process that we owe all the medical and technological benefits of the modern world: our relative longevity, the glasses on our faces, the stents in our hearts, our limbs properly set after accidents, the mothers who didn’t die in childbirth because scientists worked out why this often happened. The germ theory of disease has led to all kinds of cures and therapies and, with the help of AI, may eventually lead to a cure for most diseases.

To give the natural philosophers time to produce such logical thinking and rationality, their basic subsistence had to be taken care of. They tended not to be drawn from the ranks of hand-to mouth small farmers or the city poor, but were often clergy, with plenty of time on their hands. In the same way, the Enlightenment sprung into existence within fairly prosperous western nations enjoying a relatively strong rule of law, despite the lurking presence of religious institutions, and spread worldwide from there. The massive advances in human well-being we have seen were enabled by applying Enlightenment values and the scientific method to societies in general, particularly within the best of the liberal democracies of that era. If the human race allows this process to carry on, we can look forward to a further general elevation away from the traditional miseries of human life – the four apocalyptic horsemen of famine, war, disease and death. Then, people might continue in ever-greater numbers to consider how it is possible to live completely without religious consolation. In a future where the ancient religions finally wither on the vine, those of us who are free of the shackles of the religions must be alert to the expanded potential for influencing moral thinking and conduct in our societies.

It is plain that where the influence of religions has receded over the last two hundred years, the assertion of human rights for all has taken its place. These rights are no longer just for kings or certain sacred members of a religious community, but for all. This secular and Humanist achievement has been nothing short of revolutionary on an historic scale and it continues to influence geopolitics around the globe. The work is far from over though. At the time of writing, these rights are under threat in many countries, including those that once led the world in championing them. Besides the obvious religion-bound countries that rejected human rights in the first place, authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Turkey, Hungary, Russia and Israel are currently despoiling the great work of the activists of the past. Most disturbing of all is the deep jeopardy in which the USA has placed itself. These regimes and societies are all driven and supported by sizeable religious lobbies. Then again, even in the places where the rights of all have been asserted, and the theory itself is safer, they may not yet have been consistently applied to all groups.

There is much left to do then, but the future is on our side. Despite all the bad news and setbacks of recent times, the statistics still bear this out and we see an onward march in most places in the world towards ever greater social goods and human rights. The secular and humanist movements offer a deeply significant and far superior moral mission, should you choose to accept it. Those who take the serious step recommended here, the step of unfaith, are on the right side of history.

That famous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones steps out into the abyss to find his step caught by a stone bridge painted to look like the chasm before him is pretty cool. But it’s not entirley a leap of faith that he’s taking. He has a map. Similarly, for anyone from the West, or any part of the world colonised by Christian nations in the past, the step of faith is only to some extent a step into the unknown. In fact it is underwritten by twenty centuries of cultural contexts, conventions, ideologies, doctrines, churches, cathedrals, Sunday schools and, in the UK at least, compulsory Christian instruction in state and private schools. These give us a pretty concrete expectation that something will catch our tread when we take the plunge into one of the Christian religions. We might not know exactly what it will feel like, or how it will play out in our lives, but we know something will be there to receive our initial step. Whether it will hold our weight for long is another question.

The step of unfaith in contrast has been much more difficult for people to take. The Atheists of the past often had to shield themselves from the extreme violence of believers, hiding within a confession of Deism or some disengaged form of pantheism that, as in the case of Spinoza and Einstein, simply took the material universe as ‘god’ and left it at that. This allowed them to go about their business labelled only as sectarians, deviants or at worst heretics and to avoid the often-fatal appellation of infidel. For many in the world, this is still a very present reality.

Coming out of a faith situation does leave you wondering what might take your firm step on the other side. You can perhaps see other respectable people over there but maybe you don’t know anyone to inform you personally. We ask, will the footing yield or hold at times of distress? Will there be enough meaning there to guard us from the wolves of despair or even a general sense of futility or ennui? The chapter here entitled ‘The trouble with Atheism though…’ offered us some solutions to these problems. It is undeniable though that the process requires bravery, especially if you are stepping out of the faith community alone. You won’t be alone for long, but riding out that early time takes determination.

Thankfully, there is a growing body of written work to draw on, as well of course as the long traditions of literature and modern music written by people of no faith. I’ve been outlining some of these as we’ve gone along. The ground upon which the step of unfaith lands is already illuminated by reason, if we care to view it. If it were not, religion would still be universal. As a specific intellectual position however, Atheism will not readily be seen in the cultural artefacts of the past. Our cultures have so far largely resisted the positive affirmation of this beautiful godless vision in the structures and monuments of its built environment. At least it means that there are as yet no significant churches to it – very probably a good move. The most exciting thing about this step you are taking is precisely in its relative rarity, though that is changing. As a new part of this future-faced modern movement you will be partaking in a moment that few really understand and fewer can adequately articulate. If contributing to the real-world situation interests you, your input will be valued by a community, hand in hand, that holds a worldview which is currently spreading its glorious secular wings across the world. If you prefer a quiet life on the other hand, no-one will be knocking on your door demanding funds of money or energy.

Taking the step of unfaith, finally divorcing Jesus, means we will also transcend one more barrier: the one that language itself erects against our escape. The very idea of unfaith is entangled into the complex of meanings that the word ‘faith’ takes in our culture. This complex drives prejudice against unfaith since it is bound to the concept of trust, especially in relation to marriage and significant others. We need to be clear about this, for our own sakes. Just as the word ‘infidel’ does not refer to marital or other infidelity, ‘unfaith’ in our usage here relates only to the noun ‘the faith’ that indicates a religious system. It does not in any respect mean being unfaithful, disloyal or untrustworthy to people who rely on us. But we can go further with this. The great paradox is that to be truly faithful to a partner you need to be doing it for their sake alone and not because some religion has instructed you to. If it is only your faith that is making you ‘faithful’ in the marital sense, then complacent partners need to beware. Similarly, if ‘fidelity’ is taken to mean complete correspondence with the truth, then only the infidel can say that he or she has tested the faith to that extent.

The step of unfaith is only the next step in the great journey and one that in fact allows us to shed that negative term entirely. Although the temples to ignorance are still rising, we are the true faithful now, as our chapter on morality here shows. We are faithful in love to ourselves first and are thus really able to extend that trust and love to others. As ever, love is the key, and this is true whatever side of the wall we are on. Be faithful to yourself and take the step. I’ll see you on the other side of the wall.

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[i] Romer, p. 57.