God Collar

I have recently been reading God Collar by Marcus Brigstocke. He is exploring his atheism, and why he cannot believe. The odd thing is that I agree with almost everything he says, but I just come to a different conclusion.

I thought it might be interesting to look at his arguments, and see where we might differ, and where we might agree. I realise that reducing 20 pages of carefully though out argument to a half sentence is unfair, and a few sentences of response is also not completely fair. But it might give you an insight into his discussions - and encourage you to buy the book to read more!

1. The church is crap. I tend to agree with this, and I think that, if Christianity is as shown by the church, it is crap. I think that Christianity is more than what is shown by the church.

2. Christians are crap. Yes, a whole lot of Christians are arrogant, stupid, idiots. A whole lot of the ones that are in the public eye are there because they are idiots. Yes, I know a lot of Christians who are not idiots, but they tend to be just getting on with their lives and not making a fuss. But a lot of those Marcus names are idiots.

3. Where are you looking for God? Some people say "praise God" for some success - however small - and "That is a result of sin/nature/the devil" when things - however big - go wrong. So God saves one person from a natural disaster, and praising God for them is appropriate, without asking why he inflicted the disaster in the first place. Looking for God in small goodnesses, and ignoring him in the big badnesses is wrong and deceitful. If God is in charge, he is in charge of the bad and the good - if he is not responsible for the bad stuff, he is not responsible for anything.

So what is my take on this? Well, natural disasters happen, and they cause pain and suffering. Occasionally, some people are saved from them - often by good fortune, and the work of talented and dedicated rescue workers. Where is God? Well I think he has a different sort of involvement, to inspire and drive people, to encourage them to do good things, to work in rescue services and, in some cases, to deal with the many deaths that they are involved with. It gives a sense of perspective to people which enables them to do good work. Looking for a "god of the gaps" - whatever the nature of the gaps - is always asking for trouble.

4. The God Delusion. This book is not a good read. It distorts the scientific method, it is actually a bad advert for atheism. It is a good advert for the truth that extremism is not limited to traditional faith groups.

5. Sexism in faith. The thing is, most of the great religious books are products of their time, and so reflecting the fundamental misogyny of those times. It is dangerous to judge them by the standards of today, as such - I will look at this more below.

The real problem is that so many people today reflect this misogyny in faith groups - like the church. The problem is that the sexism in the church today is not fundamentally misogynist, it is theological too - based on theologies of people who were sexist at the least, and misogynist at the worst. What I mean by this is that, for example, someone opposing women bishops may not themselves be women hating, but they are accepting of a theology that is. Because the church system is, at root, very controlling, they cannot revisit their theological position without a whole lot of their world being turned upside down.

6. Rules. Are the biblical rules still relevant? Should the scriptures have a sell-by date on them? The Bible is a strange book in may ways. However, what it is not is a full set of instructions and examples on how to live your life. To take a random character and say "this is a person you should be like", or "this is a person you should not be like" is mistaken. The stories are there to be read as a whole set of people trying to find and understand God. Every one of them got it wrong at least some of the time. Some of them got it right occasionally. The point is to read them all, and understand that these people are trying to experience God.

So Joshua believed that Gods way involved killing off the people around him, in multiple acts of genocide. I believe he was sincere, and he was impacted by the culture around him - lets be clear, killing off a whole groups of people was not unknown - but he was wrong, and he failed to do it. However, in his attempts to seek God, I suspect he found God, just a little. And not in the genocide.

Are the rules still relevant? Yes, if you understand the context in which they were given. The detailed rules in the early books were, partly reflecting the situation of the people they were given too. We need the whole lot because we need to understand the context in order to understand what is appropriate today.

7. What was Jesus all about? The picture that Marcus points of the Jesus he reads about is much closer to the Jesus I read about than the versions I often head about. Jesus was a radical, a socialist, a disturber of the peace. And Jesus would have totally been into Radiohead. He didn't come to bring "Such a pretty house, and such a pretty garden".

8. A God shaped hole? Marcus does admit to having something of a hole in him - the famous "God-shaped hole". I do wonder if the hole is really the part of us that wants to ask questions, to explore to find out more. It is the part of us that should never be satisfied with simplistic answers, but always wants to question more, to find more. To acknowledge and accept the existence of a deity is one way of giving that yearning a new place to go, a new set of questions to explore. Filling it with a god who just stifles questions is tragic.

9. Children and the questions they ask. Children ask such fantastic questions. So often, in terms of faith, we shut them down because we don't know the answers, and that can be a disturbing place to be. We also trivialise the Christian stories into naive kids stories. Oh look, Noah and the ark - lets play a game where we pretend to be the animals. Or lest play a game where we play the hundreds and thousands of people who were drowned. Of course, these were bad people, so that's OK.

The truth is that some of the Bible is not intended to be historical. I am not wanting to fall into the trap Marcus identifies as saying "oh, that's just a metaphor" - it isn't, but some of Genesis is more kin to poetry than history. And the biblical writers did not write to the same level of historical accuracy as we would expect today. that is not to say that they lied, just that their methods and techniques were different. As in the sciences, techniques develop with time - there will come a point where our approaches will be considered primitive. We cannot use modern day assumptions about what was being written - it is far more appropriate to the biblical material to understand and interpret it for what it is, than to expect it to be like a scientific textbook.

10 Death. The great mystery. Actually, the core problem that Marcus sees with this is the promise of things beyond death taking a focus away from life. Faith as a comfort to the dying and the bereaved is, I believe, a good and valid use of it. Faith as a justification for suicide attacks is wrong and mistaken.

I do not believe that we are given any real indicators as to what lies in wait for us after we die. The Bible at least is primarily focused on doing the right things in this life, and in trusting God for everything else. It is not about working for heaven - it is about working for now, and accepting that there is a whole lot of stuff that we cannot understand never mind control.


I doubt whether I have covered everything that he has written about. As I said, I have tried to summarise his arguments into single sentences. While I agree with a lot of what he says, I come from a different starting point. I believe there is something more than science can encompass, something of a spiritual nature that is greater than us. I doubt whether I have it all right, but I keep an open mind, and I keep asking questions. I, like Marcus I think, am still seeking truth.

That is real faith.