A walk home in the dark and why I thank god I'm an atheist.
In all honesty I am one
of the least spiritual people I know. I'm not just an atheist, I'm a
extreme realist. I'm an 'it was carbon-monoxide poisoning', 'weather
balloon' or 'shared delusion' kind of person. Well maybe not the last
one. It's hard to get any kind of empirical evidence on shared
delusions. Getting to the point I do not believe in anything supernatural.
Not even Dean and Sam. My faith is in science alone, my addiction is
empirical evidence and my doubt it raised at any mentions of angels,
daemons, or Dan Brown.
I have often been asked
where do your draw the line? How can you be sure? Well of course you
can never be totally sure but
I find using Occam’s razor works pretty well. The simplest solution
is often the correct one. There is nothing simple about a belief in
the supernatural! Take faith in guardian angels for example. It
raises more questions than it answers. Who are they? How do they
exist? Why can't I see them? How do they fly? Why can they see
people's souls? Do people have souls? How come my shoes get a soul
each, and I can't even be certain I have one?
These
a very important questions!
A
slight disclaimer, I am not saying there is definitely nothing
spiritual about this world. Au contraire, I am happy to accept that
spiritual feelings are very real. Followers of different faiths often do
feel a very strong bond with the god(s) they believe in. Beyond that
however, I have doubts. I know many people have no such issues, and
I'm cool with that. You can believe it. I just don't. My brain has
difficulty processing the consequences of ghouls and gods and so I do
not, maybe even can not,
believe.
Until
the lights go out.
I
live in a quiet, sleepy village where, in order to minimise
disturbances to the residents respite (and to hide the criminal
activity of the local slitheen), the street lights turn off come
half an hour past midnight (it should be at midnight precise. Again,
these sort of mistakes never happen in fiction...). When the lights
are out, that glowing, warm barrier between our modern life and our
ancestors fears vanishes.
The
hills, so green and familiar by day, lumber closer next to the inky
sky. They look more like hunched back of a sleeping giant then the
slopes I've oft slid down after the snow. Close-mouthed buildings
glower at me as I walk past, their intangible eyes lingering on the
back of the intruder. After all, where there is no light, humans have no
business to be.
Even
walking past the picket-fenced territories of men, with their
garden-gnomes and petunias, something feels wrong.
There
are footsteps close by. Some primordial part of me notices. Then I
start to hear an ominous thudding in my ears. I pick up my pace. So
do the the footsteps. A hollow howl sounds somewhere, but where I
cannot tell. As the ominous thudding increases I become all to aware
of my disinterest in sport and sedentary life style.
A
sensation coils around my mind and sparks at my skin. I'm actually
scared.
I'm
afraid.
My
mind, my ever faithful companion, starts to offer a wondrous, hideous
display of the fates that come to humans silly enough to walk alone
in the dark. It offers glimpses of newspaper headlines: 'Ginger Teen
found Mauled to Death in KM.'. Each death it offers up is more
intricate a painful than the last, and I really start to wish I
wasn't as aware of old ghost stories as I am. Would I be killed by an
ancient foe? Or just the every day evil of my fellow man?
But
I am not unarmed. I scramble deeper into my brain and I find my
favourite weapon still in it's sheath. Drawing out the Razor of
Occam, I (metaphorically mind) clinch it with all my strength and
furiously wield it at my surroundings.
The
footsteps? My own echo.
The
thudding? My blood in my ears.
The
howling? The wind in the hills.
With
each label I feel calmer. That's what humans do. Label stuff. The unknown is
terrifying so we label it. Science is the art of labelling. We
categorise and name. According to some beliefs, the first thing
humans did was to name. And with the names came peace. I knew them.
The roads, the hills, the twists, the turns. I knew them.
And
then I looked up.
And
I knew what I would see. The stars. The beautiful, cold, twinkling
stars. I don't care if you believe they're fireflies stuck on a blue
sticky thing, or the spirits of dead kings, or great balls of gas
burning billions and billions of miles away: they are beautiful.
And
that's the thing really. The safe lights and barriers that keep us
feeling secure are great. But sometimes you need to turn them off and
accept the fear, push past it and find the beauty. Sometimes it's
what keep you safe that stops you from looking up.
And
as I clutched Occam's Razor, the smallest, quietest, theistic corner
of my mind whispered a prayer of thanks. Thank god I'm an atheist.
