“I don’t believe in God, but I miss him….” wrote Julian Barnes in his book ‘Nothing to be frightened of’.

I heard this quote on the radio this afternoon and it really struck a chord with me. People talk about the ‘God shaped hole’, but this sentence to me perfectly summed up the whole idea. I don’t believe in God, but I still feel the hole sometimes.

In ‘Aubade’ by Philip Larkin, he talks about his terror of death, and the fear of ‘nothingness’:

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.

Pretty bleak isn’t it? But then he was apparently terrified of dying, of ceasing to exist. Later in the poem he says:

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

It’s that one line that gets me – ‘created to pretend we never die’ – because ultimately isn’t that what religion is? I would quite like to believe that I am never going to really die, however much of a pretence that might be.

I don’t believe in God, yet sometimes I feel the absence of what to me God represents – a faith in something bigger than me, a sense of purpose, a set of ‘rules’ and beliefs to guide me and to inform the decisions I make. Most of all I suppose God, and religion generally, offer reassurance, a comfort that this isn’t it.

I miss having that solid faith in something more. No one wants to believe do they that this is all there is?

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A couple of weeks ago, as part of the run up to the TV programme ‘Make Bradford British’, I was asked to consider the following question:

‘The Prime Minister says that state multiculturalism has failed. Can Britain thrive as a multicultural society, or has diversity created a Britain that no longer has an identity – what is Britain’s current national identity and what makes us British?’

Blimey. I wasn’t sure where to begin. It’s a bit different from talking about personalised notebooks and dating dilemmas isn’t it? Still, I like a challenge, so I gave it a go. Do you think Britain can thrive as a multicultural society? What does being British mean to you? Do let me know…

I think I have a rather naïve view of the realities of a multicultural and multi-faith Britain.

Growing up in a small West Country town, that was about as homogenous as they come, I was never exposed to any of the issues surrounding multiculturalism, and never felt the need to question the identity of my country, or how it might be affected by increasing diversity. View Post

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Do you believe in God? Or angels? Or technology? Or yourself?

According to a recent survey, around 17% of the UK population have no doubt about God’s existence. Another 18% are sure the whole idea is nonsense. That leaves an awful lot of people in the middle, the people who think perhaps there is something, that we can’t just be doing all this alone, unsupervised by something or someone bigger and more powerful, but unable to put their fingers on exactly what that might be. View Post

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