The Three Great Unmentionables #1 - Religion

Staggering hung-over through the musky folds of the internet brought me, for once, to a pure and happy place this morning.

Karen Armstrong - a religious scholar who I won’t pretend to have known about before my accidental (or perhaps divinely intervened) divergence from alternating between pages of football gossip and blue-tinted voyeurism, has articulated brilliantly what I have always felt but never had the brain cells to say about that flaming potato, religion.

Far from seeing God-stuff as force for evil simply because it’s been misappropriated over our bloody history to aid various political objectives, Armstrong views it as having the potential to help achieve global harmony. She’s called for a ‘Charter for Compassion’ to be drafted up between all the world’s major religions – a document that keeps at its centre what her study has shown her to be the ‘golden rule’ or the principle that underpins all religious teachings, from the chilled out vibes of The Buddha to the seriously out-of-fashion orders of Allah to our own beardy, Bush-bothering JC.

Weirdly the principle – ‘don’t do unto others anything you wouldn’t want done unto you’ – is something my dear old Mum used to drop surreptitiously around the edges of my Lego sessions and generally proffer as good guidance through life. Clearly this means She harbours the combined wisdom of all mankind’s prophets from Confucius onwards, and that maybe I should do a little less eye-rolling when she speaks and little more sitting cross-legged in attentive silence with candles.

In any case, I find Armstrong’s view of religion a lot more palatable and interesting than the Nu-Atheists currently sneering at religion from the sides of buses. For me there was always something uncomfortably smug about the Atheist Bus Campaign which saw the message ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ scrawled across the body of Number 32s all over Europe.

It’s not the idea of atheists being allowed to say their piece that bothers me but the line they went with – ‘stop worrying and enjoy your life’ – like Richard Dawkins and his followers hop, skip and jump through their care free existences tipping their bowler hats at bemused strangers and out-whistling the song-birds all because they’ve decided there’s no God.

Frankly, I think religion is self-made whether you worship Satan, yoga, the music of Marvin Gaye or the whisper of Autumn leaves cradled in the wind – whatever gives people meaning and some inner-peace through this sometimes weary toil.

But what Armstrong points out is that in the case of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism and Buddhism – proper, big religions – ‘belief’ isn’t a state you can be in or a possession you can have, it’s an action you have to perform. Reminds me of the start of that Massive Attack song where she harks: ‘Love, love is a verb / Love is a doing word’. Religion teaches that divinity and enlightenment – or the ‘light’ that atheists snigger at – is reached through actions and discipline, and the central endeavour to these actions and disciplines is the concept of compassion – putting others first. It is in this dethroning of the self from the centre of our own worlds, religion teaches, that divinity is achieved. And we all know how fucking difficult that can be.

The problem with religion then isn’t that it ‘causes war’ or breeds intolerance but that people can’t be arsed to learn about or follow it properly – if they did, things’d be hunky-dory. A bit like Communism, if only the pesky aspects of human nature – greed, selfishness, malice – didn’t blinker us all then religion would have a lot of the answers we need.

My personal ambivalence on the subject stems from an early childhood in which, when troubled, I would lie awake at night and whisper to what school, my Mum and Sunday mornings had told me was an all-loving, ever-listening God - a best friend. From the portal that was my duvet, flanked in soft, cuddly versions of things that would eat me in real life, I would order my thoughts and pray; for situations at school to be resolved and the survival of my parents and sisters and a nightmare-less sleep and all the other things that preoccupy a young mind.

Now of course I never contact God unless I’m exasperated or accidently trodden-on, but I do remember the comfort of faith and so hate the dogmatic over-simplification that characterises many people’s attitudes to religion. When scriptures are followed, rather than manipulated or preached, you usually end up with a good person trying to do good things, and no – you don’t need religion to be a moral or decent person, but then why object to people who let it help them out?

Ultimately of course defending or finding a place for religion in our modern world is a task too great for my mediocre intellect or probably even that of Richard Darkins or Karen Armstrong. No, best as ever to leave life’s greatest conundrums to life’s wisest TV show: The Simpsons. And which character is happiest in that..?

Diddly.