NEARER MY GOD TO THEE

An atheist's demise.

Randy Common was a troubled soul. For a start he’d suffered from having that name for as long as he could remember, probably since the day during the second world war when he’d been conceived in the middle of a Luftwaffe raid and gone on to be born at the precise moment when a stray pigeon had accidentally smashed through the blackout curtain of his mother’s bedroom as she lay there shrieking that her son would certainly be a b*****d and nothing but a b*****d, the way he was hurting her even before he took his first gulp of air.

He’d been brought up as a good Christian lad, taught the Lord’s Prayer before he started school and spent the first two decades of his life in mortal fear of an eternity with Satan in his sulphurous Hell before he worked it out that there was no such place.

And that made him angry.

There were things he might have done which he hadn’t dared do because of that interminable agony in Hell they had taught him about and made him scared stiff of encountering at the end of his days. And not just his parents: his teachers at school had been pretty firm on the subject, too. Some of them, particularly those tasked with teaching him about God and love and Heaven and Hell had been so sincere in their convictions that the least sign of disbelief amongst their pupils had forced them to resort to corporal punishment.

There was Josie Jones, for instance. Hadn’t she been a pretty little thing who had grown in her teens into an even prettier big thing? And she’d have let him: she’d told him. Clever as a brainbox she said she always knew when it was safe to do “it”, and he had a furtive knowledge as to what “it” might have been, though in truth it was only sketchy and filled with inaccuracies and misconceptions. She’d eventually given up any hope of seducing him and had gone out with Simon Taffin and, to her everlasting shame, become pregnant when she was still fifteen, which had resulted in her incarceration somewhere or other, he’d been told in a madhouse but surely not then, in the fifties?

But he had known as Josie had whispered her insanity into his ears, things like I like you, Randy, and I know that you like me, and wouldn’t it be good for us to share that love you-know how? A consultation with his inner spirit had led him to decline the offer, and he’d taken an alternative route, one that he prayed may have less of an impact on mortal sin and a meeting with endless sulphurous flames, in his bedroom, locked door, on his own.

Then, aged almost twenty, he got to see a different kind of light. It was all because of Jenny Summers. Jenny had looked gorgeous, smelt gorgeous, and when he dared to reach out to her, had felt gorgeous and one thing had led to another as it might when a lad’s nearly twenty, and after he lost control in a big way, to cut out the personal bits, he had said,

“If that means I’m going to spend eternity in Hell, then it was worth it,”

and she had replied in a surprised voice,

“you don’t still believe in that nonsense, do you?”

and he had said,

“I suppose so.”

Then she had gone on to explain how there couldn’t possibly be any such being as God or his son or his holy spirit, that the story of the creation was crass nonsense, couldn’t he see that? I mean, all women being able to trace their ancestry back to one man’s rib? It didn’t make any sort of sense…

“My father says it’s all down to money,” she added, “a really good way of getting the masses to contribute their meagre wealth to churches out of fear that if they didn’t there’s the bogeyman Satan waiting in the wings to burn them until the end of time...”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” he muttered, and went on to think about it a great deal after that.

He’d had a good grounding in churchly things and he knew parts of the Bible almost off by heart, and he mulled over them, and the more he mulled over them the more he saw how ludicrous they were. Even the baby in the manger bit, which made his mother go all gooey-eyed and which was responsible for the best presents of the year.

“I mean, a virgin birth,” he muttered to himself. “I’ve been told a fistful of lies and expected to believe them,” he concluded.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” he told his father over a pint of really good and really strong ale in the pub down the road. “It’s all there to enslave folks like you and me, to make us believe in something that couldn’t possibly exist, and it makes me feel rotten that I thought it was all true.

“You can just go and wash your mouth out!” his father, having been subject to really strong ale and thus in fine voice, shouted.

Randy left home shortly after that. It became impossible to share his life with two parents who suddenly loathed him because he had a mind of his own, though truth to tell a goodly part of it belonged to Jenny Summers who made herself available any time he wanted her, as long as he brought the rubbers. She wasn’t going to even kiss him without the security of knowing he had some of those.

Time passed, Jenny went the way of many first loves and when he was twenty-five he married Brenda.

He had an eye for the ladies, and Brenda was as gorgeous as Jenny had been, and as bright, and as absolutely lovely, but he almost lost her when he suggested that getting married in church might not be the best way of starting married life together. But despite his lack of any kind of faith by then he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so they got married in church.

“I don’t see you in the congregation,” said the vicar.

“I don’t actually believe,” he said slowly,

“What a blasphemy!” almost shouted the vicar, “and unless you tell me that you believe you won’t be getting married in my church, and think how Brenda would feel about that.”

There was no other way.

“I believe,” he muttered, crossing his fingers behind his back.

His life with Brenda was life with an angel, though not one of the Bible angels who all seemed to be men, but a fairy-story angel who was, to all intents and purposes, female and perfect.

They raised a family (one of each, which was what they both said they’d wanted), their children grew up and flew the nest and, it seemed, before either of them could say Jack Robinson they had a set of grandchildren to adore.

It was when the Internet came along, and with it a whole spectrum of social media, that Randy was able to put his thoughts into words and meet (in a virtual sort of way) like-minded people. And most of the like-minded people, like himself, had spent a life time racked by a simmering anger that they’d been misled as children, fooled into a belief that time had taught them was arrant nonsense. Randy typed reams of reasoned arguments and got loads of people agreeing with him and repeating his measured words and forming a virtual club with him as a virtual leader.

He was very much like a preacher. He had the same tenacity as a devout preacher might have, but his God was logic and common sense. There was no human frailty that he couldn’t lay at the doors of this or that religion. Wars, poverty, suicide, crime, all would cease to exist if God did. And he was like that until the day he died.

Whereupon he had the shock of his life.

“So we meet at last, my son,” boomed God in his Heaven as he pointed one geriatric and very holy finger in the direction of a door marked HELL, and shook his bearded head sadly.

© Peter Rogerson 04.05.18

Reviews

[Great Aunt Astri]

Hi. The concept of Hell did not come until the Middle Ages (in Britain) when it was used, as you describe in your story, to frighten people into 'good behaviour'. I don't think Jesus himself talked about Hell, did he? There is that passage about the sheep and goats, but I don't think Jesus meant that the goats were going to go to Hell. Personally I do not believe there is a Hell. I believe that, if we do not achieve Heaven after this life, then we have another life (reincarnation). Fortunately I live in a country in which different beliefs are accepted. There are many ways of having a belief in God. But I enjoyed your story

[Peter Rogerson]

Thanks for your contribution. Personally, I see no evidence of any deity at all, but who's to say my opinions are anything but as prejudiced as the local Bishop's?