Australian Atheists Forum

Me? Black, or "The Irreverent Mr Black" if you're being formal. The name comes from a bad joke about an old song done by Johnny Cash, among others.



Some of my ancestors busied themselves getting around rugged, hilly countryside, annoying the English. In another part of the world, the English busied themselves annoying some of my other ancestors, to the point they thought they'd got 'em all.

Of course I write. I've had all the writer jobs: deckhand, cleaner, musician, and so on.

I've had, and discarded, a few ideological, political, and religious orientations before settling into the one which is most likely my final form: feminist, leftist, anarchist, climate-death-expecting, pro-first-Australians, atheist.

No atheist like an ex-believer, is there? Well, I was en route to being a pentecostal minister, so count me among the very atheist atheists.

For me, being atheist is being convinced by everything so far that gods and supernatural phenomena almost certainly don't exist.

I don't rule out the possibility of Things Beyond Our Realm: it's just that my standard of "incontrivertable proof" is mighty high.

And, no, the "proof" somebody might be about to offer isn't convincing, probably isn't new, and probably requires belief to work.

My intolerance for bullshit means my views are probably here to stay. After roughly seventy years on this orbiting dirtball, I'm difficult to surprise.

Posts may contain painful puns, and the *very* occasional useful insight.

Some say I am the Goat Of Old Tom Joad.

When I'm not sitting there, disbelieving (which is a lot of the time, because disbelief doesn't take much time), I read, listen to music, spend time with Partner and Dog, and try to keep my corner of the earth green and relatively eco-appropriate.

The Slow Break

This was originally written for a magazine on unbelief. It arrived with them shortly before the magazine stopped publishing. I have kept it around, refining it and sometimes adding bits.


NOTE: Believe if you want. I don't, and that's me.

According to that almost-interminable franchise of fantasy films, "one does not simply walk into Mordor". While I can't vouch for traffic conditions in that particular imaginary realm, I am fairly certain one does not simply walk out of the kingdom of God.

There wasn't a precise moment at which I, or an observer, could say "At this point, belief ceased". The death certificate for my faith has a year entry, but the day and month aren't clear.

***
In ministry school, as a late convert, I was a keen learner. When my quest for knowledge outpaced our most senior instructor, he used improvised means to preserve structure and discipline. Well, okay, he lied, telling me a word I used was derived from the Ancient Greek for "penis", that I had disrespected him, and should apologise.

I was the worst sort of fan of this teacher: I hung on every word he said, and my inadvertent offence took me aback. When study time came, I hit the reference books, keen to follow the breadcrumb of logic my hero had left.

After much reading and a few futile searches, I was firmly convinced Teacher had contrived the situation. He was fond of "breaking" students, to "render them more open to the works of the Spirit".

Let's just say I found out other things post-college, which gave me more reason to despise the man, and move on, shedding a little faith in religious scholarship.

***
In my local church, as a student minister, I was recruited, despite my reluctance, into the music team. The music leader wanted a drummer/percussionist.

One of the church leaders, an elder by name and also by number of years on the clock, definitely didn't want drums. He started making noises about his six-figure will...

Those who know the "special" status that Pentecostals attach to their musicians, will be surprised to hear there was no laying-on of hands when the drummer's shoulder was inflamed.

The unpleasant business with the church newsletter (how dare I imply that Nice Mr Christ was impolite?) came along at about the same time as I ran into the wall of holy spirit magic at minister school.

I would have had to (in my words at least) compel the holy spirit to appear among the congregation by leading the music session in a certain way.

I decided I didn't want to claim a god so puny I could boss it around. In any case, I'd seen what we could do with the Secret U2 Delay Pedal Trick and a bit of repeating a phrase. If there wasn't more to the worship magic than that, they could keep it.

I decided to leave college, and randomly selected another church. ("Seeking God's will" was the euphemism employed.)

I left behind a lot of my belief in church hierarchies.

***
My next church, at which I played the role of "astonished bystander", was very spontaneous and spiritual, rather than ordered. It wasn't so much a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, as the loudest honking Old-Testament sheep's horn getting the blessed anointing oil.

(Seriously - you've got to hear one of those shofar thingies blown in the middle of a typical Pentie chorus. A shofar can be off-key in any key you care to name.)

Some very weird things were said during sermons - things that didn't conform to any biblical translation and were clearly twisted to conform with the Quirky Focus of whichever speaker we had. Flags, liquefied green barley, you name it: this was the X-Files of pentecostalism.

After being personally dragooned into coming on-stage so a faith-healer (then just recently returned from exile over a sex scandal) could "cure" me of a condition I never had in the first place, I left.

The God of miracles was obviously very biddable, and anointed only slippery characters.

***
Having burned my fingers with that Holy Spirit wildfire, I sought a bit of formality.

An old friend was attending a very businesslike and successful pentecostal church in the area, so I tagged along.

This establishment was seeding enterprises, branching out with political candidacies, and had pro-quality audio-visual equipment. Surely God was blessing this mob more than the little tin-pot churches I'd been to previously.

Oh, there was structure! Poor people, especially those who LOOKED that way, were strategically diverted and discouraged. Those with influence, and money, were courted and made part of the family.

I didn't have much of either, but the passive part of faith kept me in the pews. I bristled a bit when one of the hierarchy's political darlings stood in the pulpit and declared that "abortion on demand is part of the Australian Labor Party's platform", knowing that it wasn't so, and has not been, even to this day, but I kept my cool.

Came ANZAC Day, and the politically-tinged jingoism got to be a bit much. I was shifting uneasily in my seat.

The old friend I'd followed to that church was not at all like me when it came to politics. He was a veteran of certain ex-colonial wars in Africa (on the colonial side), while I'd been punished at school for protesting against involvement in Vietnam.

Regardless of the differences between Veteran Friend and me, the stuff coming from the stage managed to offend both of us.

He leaned forward and whispered "If you were to feel sick about now and had to ask me to drive you home, I'd be glad."

We both left that place for the last time. It was my last church, and I don't remember it fondly.

***
Like the Sergeant-Major in that Monty Python sketch, "Right! Sergeant Major, marching up and down the square. Left, right, left. Left…", I carried on alone.

That little blurb from the New Testament about "two or more" is there for a reason. The god-meme must need social interaction to reinforce itself.

I tried. Oh, I tried. While I can't pinpoint the time that presence-of-god feeling ceased to happen, and when I stopped bothering to kid myself I believed, it would be fair to say that the faith didn't last long after church.

There's a longer version of all this, and so much more, that's slowly turning into a book. For the sake of giving you teasers rather than spoilers, I'll just say that I'd have to be mad to get religious, and that I nearly fed all of myself into the fire, trying to keep it blazing, only to find out it was me on my own all along.

Insert a corrected version of that hoary old thing about pairs of footsteps if you want.

This wasn't "the end of faith". It was "the beginning of life".

In the years that followed, I've been learning, getting to feel better about myself and life in general, and even discovered that social involvement can be relaxing when it's not god-crazed.

I'm getting better as I go, and that faith healer is due no credit whatsoever.

Hi Mr Black,
Seems we are similar vintage. It’s a shame my name isn’t “White”. We could team up.
As I said, we do have some common beliefs and concerns about Christian practices.
I’m unusual in being a Catholic who has ventured into Pentecostal type churches. Just to observe and learn. I’m also unusual in being a Catholic interested in evangelism. I find it very hard to get any other Catholics enthused about it. Priests or lay people.
Cheers Barry

I could go into theological differences, Barry, but I won't. It's a lot like Dungeons 'n' Dragons rules: the conversation can become quite heated, while at the same time remaining awfully dull.

There's a whole bunch of forks in the path to fairyland: Calvinism/Arminianism, cessationist/continuationist, and others.

I'm only concerned about xtian practices when people are in some way hurt or disadvantaged.

As far as the beliefs go, it's kind of like baked bean eating: as long as it's done away from others and the resultant effluvia are not inflicted on the unwilling, there's probably no harm in it.

Here's the story of how I found life, reading a Good Book.

Life On, And Off, Mars

It started, as things often do, with an ending.

The black dog that's followed me around most of my life is a venturesome beast, and has been known to invite me to the edge of existence when I'm not necessarily well-equipped to resist.

What began in the very early days with eating the paint off my wardrobe, as I'd heard there was lead in it that would kill me, had morphed, twisted and grown, along with its host – me.

Oh, the things I haven't done, and the half-arsed things I have done, all inspired by the notion that not-this-life might be an improvement over this life.

Seeing I'm not being embarrassed at the moment, we'll just include the bicycle slalom into oncoming traffic, a few of my motorcycle prangs, and that time Trash the Kelpie convinced me that gun-muzzle is not a good last meal.

* * *

Resistance isn't always futile: 2005's series of vivid suicide-inspiring dreams fuelled by a toxic workplace got more and more insistent, suggesting a wide range of methods and locations, until the morning I woke from a dream about jumping off the top of Grand Central shopping centre in town, and turned on the radio to hear that somebody had made the long trip down the day before.

The news article glosses it over a lot. As I heard it, the poor woman was a “work experience trainee” at a certain coffee store well known to Hillsong fans, and had been told she was being let go, which may have led to her unemployment payments being cut.

I quit the job, but the damage was done. I was dying slowly.

* * *

From that time on, the Reaper just hung round. Even on good days, that dusty black spectre was there, mildly hinting or blatantly acting like the unwanted pop-up menu on a web page, telling me Shit Had To Stop.

Even when I was resisting well, it was a drain, and the will to continue was seeping out of me. Some decisions I made were little suicides in themselves: quitting various groups or relationships, letting my health go, allowing the pain of my back injury to rage untreated, and, let's face it, getting heavier and better equipped for a heartie.

By the winter of 2014, I was down to a walking range of about a kilometre a day.

Then, the car malfunctioned! It was in the worst of all possible ways for me – the driver door lock actuator gave out. Imagine quite an amount of awkward cripple, trying to get in and out of a small Korean sedan by wriggling across to the passenger seat. (Yes, I know the trick with the key now – nothing like a little wisdom come late to the party!)

The car is needed in case Herself has a medical emergency, and for ferrying her to and from appointments. We can't have it laid up for more than a day.

Fortunately our mechanic is very dedicated to customer satisfaction. He said he could do the job that day, but I'd need to leave the car and wait on a phone call.

Now, I don't like to waste money on cabs, and the mechanic was within walking range of a shopping centre. I decided to spend the taxi fare on a book, which I could take time reading while waiting on the car.

The book I selected was Andy Weir's The Martian. I couldn't put it back after I read the first paragraph.

I'm pretty much fucked.

That's my considered opinion.

Fucked.

Six days into what should be the greatest two months of my life, and it's turned into a nightmare.

Oh, goody. Somebody else who's fucked, said I. I settled down on a quiet bench down a side street, and read. And read.

The main character in Weir's book, a botanist/engineer called Mark Watney, has a sardonic turn of wit, which I quite like.

I won't spoilerise things for you, because it's a helluva good book, and the film does it maybe 30 percent of the justice due. The big attractions for me, though, were the insight into one bloke's struggle, alone, with the big, bad shit of life/death, and the way Watney could look at what looked like inevitable doom, and do the sums on it.

Eu-bloody-reka! Doom is a puzzle to be solved.

It really didn't matter to me whether Watney got off Mars alive or not. The point was, he could live, or die trying. So could I.

* * *

So it was, that on Mars I found a way to live on Earth.

Working stuff out has kept things going, and I think things have improved for both me, individually, and my household in general.

I can't claim credit for how we replaced the Fee-Arse Poodle when she went under the daisies. I was just lucky enough to fall in love with a website rescue dog whose real-life self insists on long walks: the 25-plus Kgs of weight loss would be a source of pride if it was my responsibility, but some stuff can only be attributed to Acts of Dog.

The Martian approach is helping me work through lots of old stuff which has bedevilled me, and to make sense of it. Time, distance, and some players being off the oxygen users' roster, also help.

Did Watney say it in the book? I can't recall, but I definitely remember it from the movie: “I'm going to science the shit out of it!”

It doesn't matter a lot to me how I leave the planet, either. The thing is, it's going to be a helluva trip.