The Last Word
'Girls, there are no atheists in foxholes,' a form mistress
of my cousin used to say, in what I
imagine was a Jean Brodieish voice, at a Presbyterian school in New Zealand in the dark 1960s. Even then, when family church going was
largely a thing of the past, vestiges of
instruction lurked in the classroom.
Many decades later, the shells are whistling over the heads of the baby
boomers. My cousin, as the great Italian Communist Antonio
Gramsci is said to have done, has returned to the faith of her childhood.
But we are not
interested in people who, as the reaper enters the room, make some small
adjustment, plump for Rome instead of Canterbury, Allah instead of Christ, Catholicism instead of Communism. The evidence of the polls is clear and
consistent. 65% of respondents answered
'No' to the question 'Are you religious?' when asked by Yougov in March this
year. An ICM poll in 2006 put it at 63%
and it was 65% among young people surveyed by the Department of Education in
2004. The lowest figure for people
claiming to have no religion whatsoever,
the British Social attitudes survey, still puts it at over fifty
percent.
In 2007 ipsos Mori, with terrifying directness, asked
respondents to agree or disagree with the statement. 'This life is the only one
we have and death is the end of our personal existence.' Even put like that, 41% of us stuck to our irreligious guns.
Given these figures, it's reasonable to assume that most of
us, these days, die what used to be called 'the philosopher's death'. That is, we are all card-carrying
Stoics. But are we? The very term 'philosophers death,' suggests
it's hard, a state of mind arrived at by long thought, difficult to maintain in the face of our
instincts.
Sitting by the beds of our lifelong companions in
doubt, who would begrudge them a little
back-sliding at the end? After all, it
is they who are entering the tunnel, not us.
Who is to say that the light they see is only the side-effect of the
morphine? Or even that they are in a
tunnel at all. They may be climbing a
tree or crossing a sea or riding a
jewelled turtle's back or the back of a shining sheep. The decline in formal religion has had the
paradoxical effect of opening up infinite possibilities for the details of
the death-bed get out clause. We are not
people who convert from one branch of belief to another. We are
people who believe in nothing,
but that's not the problem.
The problem has been described by Iranian writer Jalal al Ahmad, talking about the
'Weststruck' man, who ' not only believes in nothing, he does not actively
disbelieve in anything.' The problem is
that the 65% of us who have no religion
are not actually atheists. To use Al
Ahmad's term, we are time-servers. But
time runs out.
All our lives we are happy believing nothing, then suddenly at the end we feel an urgent
need to believe in something, or as G.K. Chesterton sagely predicted, ANYTHING.
If you think you will be different, you had better get ready to make it plain. Otherwise some well-meaning friend or
relative, anxious for your soul, will
sign you up to this or that celestial cause afer you're gone.
Who in their right
mind, would believe that story about Gramsci?
Yet it's out there for whoever wants to sully to his memory, admittedly
only on a Hypermedia page with a health warning attached. But the strange symbiosis of Catholicism and
Communism makes it not totally
implausible... if it was anyone but the stoutly secular Gramsci.
Charles Darwin was accused of death-bed conversion by a nosy neighbour, appositely named Lady Hope, who told an
American Baptist newspaper that the scientist had said he was 'eagerly
savouring the heavenly anticipation of bliss,' as she sat at his bedside. Darwin's son refuted the story, declaring
that Hope was never anywhere near the room where his father died. But the legend persists – mainly in America
of course, where bold hunters chase the
biggest game. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, beware. Diligent gardeners of the inquisition always
find the seeds of belief, holy
detectives spot salvation's smoking
gun.
Seventeen hundred years ago, Constantine The Great set the
model for the death-bed conversion, though it should be noted he had accepted the truth of Christianity decades earlier. The clever Christians promised him a lovely heaven, but Constantine knew that actually living a
Christian life wouldn't be as much fun
as staying a pagan,so he put it off until just before he drew his last
breath.
My cynicism is
crude. I apologise to followers of the
saintly emperor. I am only reacting to
the equally ruthless tactics of the opposition whenever they see a chance to
claim that someone has recanted the
wisdom of a lifetime. To be fair,
some famous sceptics have left the door
of posthumous misrepresentation wide open.
Oscar Wilde's love of
display and artifice has been an obstacle to anyone wishing to defend him from
the charge that 'he went over Rome,'
when he was dying in Paris. We can only feebly plead his love of
mischief.
Jean Paul Sartre, disciple of the deicidal Nietzsche,
wobbled dangerously close to embracing Judaism in his last interviews, having
already weakened himself with an earlier
period of slavish devotion to the cult of Stalin. The
briefest investigation of the great existentialist, however, makes it plain
that his interest in messianic religion
arose from a feeling that he himself was the one we've all been waiting
for.
Another French titan, Voltaire, showed similar endearing pretentions when a
priest implored him to renounce Satan and turn to God before he died: 'Now is
no time to be making new enemies,'
Voltaire replied.
Do you, good sceptic, think you have the strength to face
the philosopher's death, to make an enemy of both God AND Satan?
Or are you of the opinion that Yoda's happy departure, in
THE RETURN OF THE JEDI, rested in the sure and certain hope that his essence
would be absorbed back into The Force?
No comments:
Post a Comment