Easter - A Quiz

In the Sunday Times today there is a quiz about Easter so you can test yourself and see how much you really know. There is an accompanying article about the quiz findings and I dare anyone not to at least raise a smile at the penultimate paragraph.

I've been trying, in the light of my visit from the Jehovah Witnesses on Friday, to try and remember when it was that I turned my back on organised religion and developed an atheistic streak. I suppose the obvious answer is during my teenage years, it's then that we often choose certain paths to follow and whilst we may change our minds at a later stage very often those choices stay with us.

I have a copy of the Holy Bible in the front of which is an inscription which says that it was presented to me for 100 attendances at the Ferndown Crusaders, it is dated 16th May 1973 - almost three months to the day after my thirteenth birthday. The Crusaders were a religious based group for teenagers and younger people, exclusively boys I seem to recall, and it was like a Sunday school but without the affiliations to a specific church. To have made 100 attendances by that date seems to indicate I must have started attending when I was 10 years old and I must have been asked if I wanted to attend by a school friend because although both my parents are Christians neither of them are church goers. I do know that at some point between my thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays my closest friend lost his mother to cancer and I wonder whether this was the catalyst for my moving away from religion - the alternative to this death being the trigger, and I don't mean this to be flippant, is John Lennon.

Lennon's first two solo albums were a big deal for me around that time and I can remember during the summer of 1974, when I worked in the canteen at Max Factor, that I would play them nearly every night after I finished work. The stand out tracks were the obvious ones: Mother, Working Class Hero and Love from the first album and Jealous Guy from Imagine - I even wrote all the lyrics to Jealous Guy on the back of one of my table waiting order pads. The other track that struck a chord with me was God.

God is a Concept

by which we measure our pain

I'll say it again

God is a Concept

by which we measure our pain

I don't believe in magic

I don't believe in I-ching

I don't believe in Bible

I don't believe in Tarot

I don't believe in Hitler

I don't believe in Jesus

I don't believe in Kennedy

I don't believe in Buddha

I don't believe in Mantra

I don't believe in Gita

I don't believe in Yoga

I don't believe in Kings

I don't believe in Elvis

I don't believe in Zimmerman

I don't believe in Beatles

I just believe in me

Yoko and me

...and that's reality

Just as Joe Strummer lyrics to White Man In Hammersmith Palais would turn me onto politics and social issues in 1978 so I think Lennon's tongue in cheek lyrics had an impact on me in 1974. I suppose I could be accused of the ultimate in dumbing down, turning my back on religion on the basis of a four minute song written by somebody who sang about having no possessions whilst living in a big house and driving a Rolls Royce. But it was the catalyst. Something touched a nerve, something made me think that believing without questioning was wrong. Ironically just as Lennon was listing all the things he didn't believe in I was choosing to believe in him - my choice of false prophet no doubt!

I was a typical sceptical teenager, I wasn't saying 'religion is wrong' I was saying 'why do you think that religion is unquestionably right?' How can you go to church and thank your God for his bounty whilst there are millions who are just surviving, not really living, just existing. The believer could then turn to me the non-believer and say, "Well just imagine how crap things would be if there wasn't a God."

My maternal Grandmother said that she saw a change in me shortly after another friend had lost his father to cancer, I wasn't aware of that at the time but then I suppose that other people are often the first to spot such changes. I think it was probably a mix n match of various things, I know that the teachings of the bible didn't seem to make much sense in the light of two parents of close friends dying, I also couldn't get my head round the idea that the good went to heaven and the bad went to hell - also if God was all powerful and all seeing why did these things happen. People, grown-ups, saying that although somebody was dead they were now in a better place didn't make sense either - if the after life was the better place why is Herod portrayed as such a bad guy, surely killing people wasn't so bad after all!

Religion wasn't a big deal in our household, so it wasn't as though I was rebelling against my parents way of life. Although my maternal Grandmother was a very devout Christian by any standards she accepted that I was different and never tried to influence me, I think that was partly due to my Grandfathers firm belief, as I've posted before, that you should respect religion and politics and not harangue people about them.

That's not to say I don't find aspects of religions fascinating and intriguing. Churches, Cathedrals, Abbeys, religious music, religious iconography - I find them all intriguing and worthy of attention but not from deeply religious standpoint - they are spiritual in the sense of appealing to my inner spirit rather than being seen as recognition of a greater force at work.

The fact that I am writing this today, on the second most important day of the Christian calendar reveals some of my contradictions, of the mind games that are at play and probably some of the hypocrisy I feel. As I get older I wonder whether or not I should belong to one group of beliefs, is saying no just a form of abdicating my responsibilities. Have I reached the stage where it's my atheism that I am questioning rather than the existence of God and his representatives on earth. When I, inadvertently, got up early this morning I went to Christchurch Priory. I felt that I wanted to be there and I can't explain why.

Watching the BBC/HBO production of The Passion over the past week has made me realise two things, firstly I didn't realise Pontus Pilate had such a strong Northern Ireland accent (sorry I couldn't resist it), but secondly and more seriously that despite all of our superficial humanity, humility, love, goodwill and caring attitudes Lennon was right. In the end it's not about a greater good or even a greater God, it's about us as individuals. About knowing right from wrong, about the difference between trust and betrayal, the difference between honour and deceit, the difference between knowing the truth from lies. I don't want to give the credit for those things to somebody else, okay those teachings thirty five years ago may have laid the foundation, my upbringing in a loving household was probably a greater source of inspiration but as far as I'm concerned I've only got one life and I want to make the best of it because of my choices, whether they turn out to be correct or not.

Well that's my Easter message over with, excuse the babbling.