Christmas can be a challenging time for the thinking atheist, especially when he or she was once upon a time, before growing up, a happy little Christian enjoying Christmases that ding-donged merrily on high. Let me illustrate this theme with a story that (unusually for this column) is partially true.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Sydney is a wicked, wicked city, bristling with temptations. And on one recent Sunday in Sydney's throbbingly cosmopolitan Kings Cross-Darlinghurst region I was tempted by a powerful temptation. It was almost as powerful, in its very different way, as those great temptresses of the Bible (the hellion Jezebel and the conniving Delilah the most famous of them) who left weak, fleshly men catastrophically unhinged.
I found myself lurking near a premises, its doors alluringly open for business, wherein I knew there were delirious, unspeakable pleasures to be had. The premises seemed to beckon to me and to croon seductive, shockingly explicit sweet nothings in my weak and impressionable ear. I yearned to cross the building's all-but-irresistible threshold and to go into the velvety gloom within.
My feet had just began to yield to the premises' repellent magnetism (for like Oscar Wilde I am able to resist everything but temptation) when, as if by divine intervention, members of my family (who had been scouring Darlinghurst to make the agonising First World choice of which one of several dozen cafes would be best for a brunch featuring smashed avocado and smoked salmon) swooped down upon me and swept me away with them. Little did they know they had pulled me back from the brink of shameful degradation.
The readers: "Phew! That was close, Ian. We were really worried for you there for a minute. Those Darlinghurst brothel-casinos are shameless the way they openly flaunt their sinful shopfronts."
The columnist, resuming his narrative: No, no, misguided readers. The premises discussed in my partially truthful story was not a House of Bad Repute but St John's Anglican Church at 120 Darlinghurst Road. Let me explain.
Yes, my tempter was a building. One is used to the idea of temptations being almost always temptations of the flesh but of course there are temptations of the intellect and of the emotions and on this Sunday morning St John's Anglican Church in Darlinghurst was pushing those sorts of buttons.
Once upon a time (for all of my childhood and into my early 20s) I was a happy, grazing Anglican. Then my mind, grown up now and umpiring my life, showed me that what had seemed to be my Christianity was really only churchianity, a love of church buildings, of Anglicanism's lovely hymns, of almost everything about Christianity except for, rather importantly, all the lovely nonsense (including belief in the existence of God) that sincere Christians believe in.
On this Sunday morning in Darlinghurst my family peregrinations (protracted by having to make an agonising choice over which of many cafés to go to for a superior brunch for six from which Jesus would have miraculously fed 5000) took me back and forth in front of beautiful sandstone St John's beckoningly open door, beckoning believers in for that sabbath's worship and hymn singing.
All this time St John's seductively lovely church bells (so mellow and melodious) played the tunes of great hymns whose words I began singing in my cherubic pre-pubescence and have never forgotten.
A chronic hankering to go to church, to St John's church, then and there, racked my unhappily atheistic mind.
It is awful being a thinking atheist. I miss my unthinking Anglicanism so much. And of course it is when Christmas looms that heartfelt Christian nostalgias and sentimentalities are at their most powerful. It is the time of the year when the thinking atheist is most prone to knocking on his Mind's door and going in, cap-in-hand, and asking "Please, please Your Levelheadedness, can I stop being an atheist now and go back to believing in all that sweet supernatural balderdash?"
But, hatchet-faced, she (for a thinking atheist's mind is adamantly female) never gives her assent to something so intellectually masturbatory.
On the pavement outside St John's on that recent Sunday morning the dear old sandstone church, counting down to that morning's service, its mellow bells bonging like supernatural engines building up steam, seemed to me a kind of spaceship getting ready to lift off. I knew that if I boarded it I would be whisked away forever (I knew the Anglicans would never give me back) to the lush, delusional, but oh-so-emotionally-comfortable planet Belief, leaving behind this bleak planet Atheism.
But, just as I was about to board this momentous, faith-reclaiming flight, fate and chance intervened, whisking me away to where I yielded instead to Darlinghurst's lesser, unspiritual, edible temptations of upmarket brunch.
Almost the worst thing about being an atheist is that there no longer seems any point in praying for anything.
But there is so much, right now, that one wishes one could kneel and effectively pray for; for an end to the fires and the drought, for a clean and speedy impeachment of Donald Trump before as commander-in-chief he tweets us into nuclear Armageddon, for Scott Morrison to be abducted by aliens or at least for him to give up politics and return to his true calling (the crass commercial advertising of meaningless baubles), for Julian Assange to be brought home before the raving-mad Americans can imprison him for life, for the humiliating defeat of the ACT Liberals at the next elections and for the longed-for Brotherhood of Man to get a wriggle-on in arriving.