11 - The Sudden Death of God

 God, along with my faith to the dogmas of the Greek Orthodox Church, the official body of the Christian religion for proselytising and catechising on the gospels in the country I grew up, I rejected without much deliberation and well before I acquainted myself with the works of Marx, Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, et al.  The renunciation of God and religion was a relatively simple logical step taken easily and spontaneously in the first phase of adolescence.

Venial sins of childhood, adult vices, atrocities by one people or state to another, seemed to be occurring unnoticeably and unpunished by that invisible god we were indoctrinated in his existence from birth. He was clearly a weak and impotent observer, whether we prayed and asked for forgiveness for ourselves or intercession for others or not. I was hearing about wars and disasters, deaths of as innocent as a young child can be, of the ‘virtuous’ and ‘sinners’ alike regardless of faith, in the same cauldrons of history and life. Injustice, misery, poverty, death existed and appeared in each direction we turned our heads and senses. Grim spectacles of peoples struggle for dear life that moved me as a child and sometimes made me cry. God’s hand and intervention to correct the wrongs and fix this world were nowhere to be seen. Was it, perhaps, because God Himself created ex nihilis this crooked world ‘in His image and likeness’, as we were told? That much was obvious; real and indisputable for a child who was sensing and feeling the world and begun to think rationally.

After all, despite my spiritual immaturity, it need not much thinking before reaching the conclusion that even if there was a being which created our world, surely this being is not equipped with the qualities my church at least had attributed to it: of the omnipotent, the all-good and merciful, the omniscient being. The grandeur of nature and the universe, its phenomena puzzling and often beyond our powers to explain, the complexity and reach of the human brain and its functions perplexing, the inconceivability of human consciousness and how it mysteriously emerges from within, all of those were there to awe and inspire and motivate us to search deeper for better understanding. Decades later, I would stand with the same awe and bewilderment in the face of phenomena that far exceeded my grasp, the hitherto knowledge still insufficient. In spite of the limited understanding of much of the world surrounding us, contradictions and logical fallacies surrounding theology, the philology about the existence of God and the creation of nature and man, the frivolous bypassing and disregard by the agents of religion of attempts for rational and scientific explanation of the seemingly inexplicable, the discarding and excommunication of scientific approaches that contradicted the religious dogmas, seemed incompatible with the human being, its conscience and existence, my existence, and would have nullified its purpose on this earth. Religion was becoming a burden that had to be bypassed, at least for the sake of progress and consummation of a unique life.

I ceased expecting punishment from the hand of God for those who blasphemed, those who wronged, or even those who committed blatant evil acts (no matter what the moral thresholds of our society were, regardless of the period and geography we live). Against evil by all accounts acts nothing more than resistance, rebellion and retribution from the people themselves and their societies should be expected, in this very world and this very life.

One night, I stopped praying and crossing myself, as I used to do before going to sleep until the last grades of elementary school. The fears of God and divine punishment and from the loss of eternal life in heaven disappeared overnight. God’s spirit that (we were told) would be revealed from his saints’ icons and vulgar adornment of the modern Orthodox churches, through incomprehensible Byzantinisms, nonsensical parables and vacuous hymns, and the sermons of theologians at school, were lost behind the noise of too many words, too many incoherent phrases in ungainly ceremonies, and the myths of incredulous miracles. In short, religion turned into a great fairy tale and made no more sense to me. On the other hand, the high moral ground, the ‘Good’ from an ambiguous love and the humility of Christianity as proclaimed by the Church, was not only in blatant contradiction with the practice of many of its agents (relatively insignificant in a broader context, since priests are endowed by the same ‘human nature’,  Heidegger's Dasein, as any layman mortal), but also in daily confrontation with reality and every attempt to rationally justify it –at least that part of reality that concerned me and which I was experiencing as I was growing up. I came to believe that Christian love and humility were of no practical use and not applicable to our daily lives.

Fear of death is perhaps the main reason that historically brought (and still does) us mortals under the wings of a religion and its promises of future life. The spectre of death came and went fleetingly and superficially in my teenage thoughts; it still stood far away in a distant future. The afterlife, the paradise a sinless soul would conquer and enjoy in an eternal, as my religion promised based on an arbitrarily drafted protocol for as long as I kept faith and remained devout, the preparation for the ominous and imminent Second Coming (where each one of us would take a stand and judged by God), in short, the main attractions and baits of my religion (and most religions for that matter), although they troubled me for a short period as a child, in the end, despite scanty concerns about the void that would follow a finite and short life, they looked to me like a foolish bet on the present and given life and at its expense, an irksome obstruction to joy and freedom. At best, they are hypotheses de facto unprovable and which one either blindly accepts or bravely rejects.

And the mind was wondering how the particular religion into which I was baptized, grew up and was nurtured with, one of several in our world, how this religion is concerned with those ‘innocent and ignorant’, who lived and died before the Christian God was revealed to humanity in one of its historical junctions, with people of other geographies and faiths on the planet. There was no clear answer, nor, of course, any proof of after life and heaven and the like. Could then be that promise, one granted under arbitrarily predetermined ad hoc conditions, was at the end an old ruse serving the ruling classes and cliques of interests and, after all, we are in this world on our own?

The medieval dogmas recited incessantly by theologians and priests until the very end of high school, I did reject outright by the end of year one. Fairy tales and stories of the Old and New Testaments, tirelessly analysed by our teacher of ‘Religious Affairs’ for the uncanny hidden symbolisms, so that they could be assimilated by ‘common sense’ and a mind that insists on rationalising, the constant repetition in classes, liturgies, religious celebrations, occupied a place in memory that could otherwise be employed in a more useful and productive manner. I consider my early scepticism towards everything theological, and the eventual rejection of my religion and its dogmas, as a first personal revolt of the spirit and mind against the mainstream. Abandoning God and adopting atheism was a credence hidden from teachers and family until the end of school. Both grandmas retained their faith unshakably; the church comforting to them as they neared the end of their lives. I did not criticize them, neither did I want to tarnish a faith that kept a hope that there might be something somewhere where their souls would rest after death.

Yielding under the pressure of future post-school ambitions, I had to demonstrate, even in sterile subjects such as religion, a rudimentary conscientiousness, even if I feigned, even if I was coerced – for the sake of ‘showing some interest’ and the grades, as Mother urged, at the expense of a temporary, although always desirable and welcome personal freedom from the shackles of a tedium. The grades in those courses, as well as several inconsequential others taught at school, were a small perhaps factors, but ‘it would count’, as Mother, constantly stressed out about my future, repeatedly reminded me. It would be a stone, no matter how little, for building a ‘better’ future, albeit still vague and foggy. The prayer to Holy Father God in morning school assemblies, which I often picked by the headteacher to recite, the mandatory attendance of masses in church on Sundays in school years and the great feasts of Orthodoxy, the arduous memorising of nonsensical and incomprehensible religious texts, continued throughout my teenage years. I had to compromise, temporarily. My rebellion against the divine and the ultimate rejection of God manifested itself conspicuously after the end of school, in the small revolutions of our student days, in the denial of everything divine and supernatural through a stubborn life-long atheism. God will never gain me back.