Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk12 December 2007
A very personal revelation
I remember clearly the moment I became an atheist. I was 10 years old when I suddenly realised that there was no good reason to believe in god or Jesus. That realisation has been a strength to me ever since.
It was all because of an argument. One sunny day, a friend and I were walking home from primary school. For some reason, now lost in time, we were arguing about whether Jesus was ‘real’. I was stoutly defending the historical truth of the Christ story while he was saying that it was all ‘made up’.
Not that I was what you would call ‘religious’. My family were not believers. My mother survived the allied bombing of Hamburg, and you don’t come out of that both sane and religious. I had, though, absorbed the unconscious, unthinking social conventions of believing that god was up there somewhere, that Jesus was real and that Christmas was great.
And what child doesn’t like the Christmas story? Children have a natural enjoyment of fantasy. That’s why they so love Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, Winnie the Pooh, The Narnia Chronicles and even the Teletubbies. It’s also why it is so easy to indoctrinate them into religion. They have a natural willingness to accept and believe, however improbable or impossible the story. I was no different.
My friend and I parted company at a fork in the road - he towards his house, I towards mine - and at that instant I felt a powerful realisation that I had no basis whatever for saying what I had been saying. That I had no evidence. That I didn’t really, deep down believe it. And in the same moment I understood that the whole Christ myth was insupportable and merely a fairy story.
By the time I reached home I was an atheist. I shrugged off god and Jesus faster and with less trauma than when I discovered the truth about Santa. I was growing up.
Since that day, I have read a great deal about faith, and about Jesus. And everything I read, whatever side of the argument it took, has simply confirmed that I was right to stop believing. The evidence for the historical existence of Jesus is flaky and meagre, to say the least. (We possibly know that some kind of self-proclaimed christos, or saviour, was around at the time. And about all we know of him is that he was a ‘troublemaker’, was executed, and was one of many - perhaps hundreds or even thousands - who fitted that description.) The evidence for him being divine, or the son of god, is non-existent. There is no evidence of miracles. No direct documentation of what he said. All that was left to later fabricators, like Paul.
That revelation at the age of 10 has stood me in good stead ever since. Whenever I am confronted with a story or belief - whether it’s Jesus, UFOs, crop circles, conspiracy theories or leprechauns - I have a simple response. Show me the evidence.
