To Believe or Not to Believe, that is the Question

by Madeleine Kando

When I was growing up I believed in Santa. I always hoped that I would catch this sweet, jovial fellow in the act of coming down the chimney with a large bag slung over his big shoulder. He would wink at me, say ‘ho, ho, ho’, put lots and lots of presents under the tree and climb back up on his way to another family’s chimney. I don’t remember when exactly I lost the faith.

Maybe it was after I saw my father sneak downstairs on Christmas eve with lots of boxes in his arms. Or maybe it happened after we moved to another house that didn’t have a chimney. It was around that time too that I stopped believing in God. Before I stopped believing, I was a much nicer person on Sundays than during the week. That’s when we had to go to confession. But I did have this chronic little voice in my head saying: ‘You better not do this or that, God is watching you.’

I think my loss of faith, both in Santa and in God, have similar roots. I mean you can believe in something very strongly: you can believe very strongly that little fairies exist in your bedroom, but if you actually never ever see one? Even after many many years? Well, wouldn’t your belief get tested to the limit?

And so it went with my faith in God. I never actually saw proof that he was up there, amongst the clouds. So, eventually I stopped believing in him. It didn’t help much that a lot of other stuff took priority over my belief in God. Things like trying to survive adolescence, falling in love, cramming for my finals.. you name it. God sort of faded away, like a distant memory.

Now some people might argue that there IS proof that God exists, even if he doesn’t ever show up for dinner. It goes like this: God is perfect. Part of being perfect is that you also exist. So, if God is perfect then he MUST exist. Because if he didn’t exist he wouldn’t be perfect.

Well, you cannot argue with that, can you? Except that it is not a very convincing argument. The same could be said about unicorns (they are perfect too), but everybody knows that unicorns don’t exist.

Another argument for the existence of God is that, without God life would be meaningless. I don’t agree with that at all. Believing in God might give meaning to some people’s life. My love for my family, my work, my health, that’s what gives meaning to MY life.

And what about the ‘morals’ issue? ‘Believing in God makes people moral.’ Well, excuse me for disagreeing on that one too. If you only believe that stealing is wrong because God says so, and not because YOU believe it’s wrong, then there IS something wrong with your values.

I won’t go into my adult reasons for not believing in God. That would open up a whole new can of worms. Not the least of which is the amount of suffering that religion has caused on this earth.

It’s a bit scary not to believe in anything. It means you are all alone out there. Nobody to pick up the pieces when you turn to dust. And who knows, when I am ready to make the big step into the beyond, I might change my mind completely. But talking about believing in God is so taboo and it shouldn’t be. I can imagine a ‘post-religion’ society where people will look back on our time and say: ‘They were making such a big deal out of religion. Didn’t they have anything more important to fight about?’ leave comment here

Note: Some of the ideas in this essay were inspired by ‘The Atheism Tapes’, a series of televised interviews produced for the BBC by Jonathan Miller.