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Petrol pumps, Christianity, Richard Dawkins

This month I finally got round to reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I was starting to feel like I’d read it already, having read various interviews and extracts, a trap you have to be careful not to fall into when something is so immediately influential. There’s never any substitute for going directly to the source.

I’d got it into my head – mainly from a misleading piece by Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times, I now realise - that it was a bullying book, infuriating and even arrogant in its certainty. Even one of the positive quotes from reviewers in the paperback edition warns you that it ‘will make you hopping mad’.

Hopping mad? I thought it was a hoot. It made me laugh out loud, and not because I share Dawkins’s outright hostility towards religion, just because he’s funny regardless of whether you agree with him or not. It’s obviously intended to be funny too – Dawkins dedicated it to his friend Douglas Adams, and occasionally sounds like he’s trying to imitate his style. There’s a lightness of touch, a good-natured tone to the whole book that I hadn’t expected. He doesn’t want to intimidate people into agreeing with him, as many religious people do. He’s happy to argue, and even to be convinced he is wrong, as long as it’s an honest, intelligent argument based on facts and logic. He certainly doesn’t have an overwhelming ‘faith’ in Darwinism, as Liddle suggested. Faith has nothing to do with it. Dawkins bases his argument on available facts. If more come along that contradict it, I feel sure he would admit his mistakes and change tack,

That said, I can now see why Dawkins’s relentless logic and painstaking research might make some people angry even if they agree with him. What he does, effectively, is dismiss religious people as deluded and stupid. He does this eloquently, convincingly and with enough good humour to stop it looking gratuitously cruel, but it’s still a bit like watching the smartest kid in the class publicly humiliating someone less clever than him, not by bullying as such but simply by not being embarrassed to point out the other kid’s shortcomings. It feels condescending, even if Dawkins’s point is that he’s morally justified in pointing out the kid’s stupidity because it is making everyone else stupid too, and harming the whole class.

I have no problem with that when he’s talking about vile people like the American fundamentalist Pat Robertson, or the kind of Islamic fascists who tried to blow up my local airport recently. But then I think of some of my nice Muslim neighbours, or some of the Christians in my family – good, humble, generous folk who wouldn’t wish hellfire or damnation on anyone – and Dawkins’s dismissive language is harder to swallow. Agreeing with him is one thing. Thinking of your relatives as idiots is another. Dawkins might think this is a cop-out, but I still prefer Richard Holloway, a kinder, more moderate sort of writer (who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a couple of times, as well as interviewing for a magazine). Dawkins praises Richard in his book, interestingly – although not without smugly pointing out that Richard, a former Bishop of Edinburgh, calls himself a ‘recovering Christian’. Whatever. At least I can buy my dad Richard Holloway’s latest book and not feel like I’m throwing years of well-intentioned and generally very sound moral guidance back in his face.

It was Richard Holloway, along with another former Bishop, David Jenkins, who helped me ‘recover’ from my Christian youth. I managed to believe all sorts of nonsense when I was a child - without much encouragement - including that all gay people would go to hell and, for a short while, that I might be the reincarnation of Jesus. I was 12 and insecure, what can I say? Later on I just wanted to be a pop star instead, but not before a dark period when, having decided I was far too pathetic and selfish a person to be Jesus, I must be the second coming of Satan instead. Yes, what an ego. I felt a bit better about this after reading Neil Tennant saying that, as a child, he’d wanted to be the Pope, and only gave up on the idea after realising he wouldn’t be allowed to wank. For the record, my parents, moderate Protestants both, didn’t inspire any of this insanity. I was just quite an extreme child.

Religion never quite leaves you. I remember being quite shocked at how daring and subversive I was being when I first understood that Jesus probably didn’t really come back from the dead. I must have thought, deep down, that Jesus would punish me, even after I’d decided he couldn’t possibly do this because he was dead, and tended to forgive people anyway. Even now I can feel distant echoes of that when reading a book like The God Delusion – a feeling of ‘I can’t believe he just said that!’ when Dawkins has said something that’s actually perfectly reasonable.

All this, years later, has fed into two songs on The Regional Variations. One is The Balance Company, which imagines what guardian angels would be like if they had the same doubts about their job as everyone else (top ten, here we come!). The other one is A Petrol Pump in the Cradle of Christianity, loosely based on a holiday I went on a couple of years back in Dumfries and Galloway. Whithorn is a real place, known as Scotland’s ‘cradle of Christianity’ because it’s the site of the first Christian church ever built in Scotland (by Saint Ninian, having travelled there from Rome shortly before 400AD). Hilariously, shortly after seeing a sign saying ‘welcome to the cradle of Christianity’ or similar, we saw a church that had been converted into a petrol station. And, as the song says, ‘it was so disrespectful I laughed until my sides hurt.’ It seemed like a neat but not too in-your-face symbol for both the decline of Christianity and its abuse - oil is now one of the biggest causes of religious conflict in the world, after all, a problem the current American government is making even worse. (And so, in one line, Swimmer One say all we feel qualified to say about the Middle East. You’ll hear no air-punching ‘war is bad’ stadium rock gestures from us; we’d be rubbish at them anyway.)

The lines ‘this is where I am now, a black sheep of the family. I spit and use bad words and then dare you to forgive me’ are obviously based on my own childhood. The line that starts and ends the song, ‘Look out from here at the wild, wild sea and you can feel humble or see endless possibilities’ is my attempt to describe a choice that’s touched on in The God Delusion. You look at the ocean stretching into the distance and you can feel humbled by the beauty and the power of nature into feeling there must be some great power at work in the universe that we can never understand. Or you can feel excited that people might actually understand it one day. Richard Dawkins would choose option two, obviously. If you’re a scientist, he’d argue, the choice is a no-brainer. Maybe I just have too much religious baggage, or maybe I’m just not ready to dismiss huge numbers of people as deluded - I’m uncomfortable with the apparent arrogance of it, even if he’s right - but I’m promoting neither, just offering both choices up. (That’s the ultimate songwriter’s copout, isn’t it: ‘I’m not suggesting answers, just asking questions’ - isn’t that annoying sometimes?)

You can read whatever you like into all the odd, ambient sounds in the background on this song - are they signals from somewhere, or just noise? The key line in the song for me is ‘We will try to outlive you or at least reach the beach.’ It’s a song about hoping, John Lennon-style, that people learn to live without religion – or, at least, the violent, destructive religions that dominate the world now – but admitting that it’s not going to happen in the near future, so we might as well just go to the beach.

I’ve always loved beaches. They fill me with a very strange mix of tranquillity (all that sand, and gentle lapping waves, and vast amounts of sky) and existential terror (it’s like staring into the face of infinity, looking out at the sea, even if the rational part of you knows that Ireland or somewhere is just over the horizon). Those mixed emotions fitted Hamish’s music well, I thought, since it sounds uplifting but slightly scary at the same time. An extra layer of lyrical threat is added by the fact that, with those sea levels ominously rising up, and sometimes sweeping people away in vast numbers, a beach is obviously not the best place to hang around if you want to survive. So it’s also a song about living for the moment, knowing the moment might be all you have (a very non-religious sentiment, that). It’s very deliberately the last track on the album – you finish in the same place that you started, with someone waiting for the flood. Very Biblical.

Andrew

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