In a world of competing certainties, what chance is there that the voice of uncertainty can be heard. The certain create such clamour. The uncertain lack the stridency to cut through.
I know. In my life I’ve gone all the way from slight belief to vague hope to a general lack of conviction.
Don’t think it hasn’t been a struggle. I recall the dark nights when my light faith was challenged.
“God.” I cried out, “The blowfly. Why?” But God didn’t answer.
I remember the long years of hope. “Look at it all. It has to mean something!” I would exclaim, inarticulate with wonder.
And then came the long descent to my current state of bewilderment. “You can’t all have the one true faith, you know.”
Yet such plaintive cries from the soul find little place in today’s religious roster.
We’ve got saints and miracles and jihad and God as real estate broker. We’ve got Darwin and the fossil record and earthworms in parliament. What place in this for the doubtful?
It is hard for us. The believer invokes their God and their book, can cite chapter and verse, and bear witness to their faith. The unbeliever has all the horrors perpetrated in God’s name, the barminess and smarminess of the TV evangelists, and Darwin. I have no faith, and can’t remember the names of the dinosaurs. I think it’s time now for the Undecideds to declare themselves and hold firm to their doubts. In the name of God war has been unleashed and peoples expunged. In the name of science we’ve had the Holocaust, the Atom Bomb and global warming. The Undecideds have had little or no impact upon the world. We would never have enough conviction to declare war. We certainly don’t believe in anything strongly enough to die for it. We make no effort to influence public policy or tell others what they should do. But just as the others have their slogans and their catchphrases we need to find ours and we need to shout loudly from the rooftops, “Live and Let Live!” Yes, it’s not as powerful as “Death to the Infidel”, but it leads to a nicer neighbourhood.
The more I write, the stronger my sense of my absolute fundamental uncertainty becomes. Whether it’s the Big Bang or God, I’m pretty much relying on the words of others. I have so little tangible information to go on that for all I know, the world really is supported on the back of an infinite column of turtles.
I’m already bristling at the term the ‘Undecideds’, even though I have been popularizing its use through the previous paragraphs. It pigeon holes and I believe stigmatizes a wide range of the dubious.
The Undecideds are indeed a broad church. There’s the Nilgnostics. They believe passionately that there is no after life but they really hope they’re wrong.
The Postacostals. These are mainly young people in their early thirties who can no longer see any difference between their evangelistic pastor and their mortgage broker.
The Maybecentalists don’t believe in God as in a big old man with a beard but they think there might well be a kind of creator sort of thing out there somewhere.
The Ignofarians don’t know and don’t care and the Talibanals think there’s quite enough going on down here on Earth for us to deal with, thank you very much.
The largest single group is the Dunnolites, who are not sure but like the ritual, the stained glass and the singing and so turn up whenever sporting commitments allow.
For too long we of little faith have been silent. I say it’s time we stood up and showed how little we stand for.