A walk home in the dark and why I thank god I'm an atheist.

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.