Turning down a Free lunch

This is going to be a difficult blog to write without a) sounding like an aching great bellend or b) insulting anyone, but I really don’t want to do either. So here we go.

Today in my pigeon hole I got a Free 09 booklet from the Inter Collegiate Christian Union. I think it was a copy of St Mark’s Gospel, but as will become apparent, I don’t really know my bible.

Basically, Free 09 is a week long…advert? Promotion? For Christianity. According to the flier, ‘Free is a week of events organised by Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union to provide an opportunity to examine the claims of Christianity’. To me, that sounds like the most biased trial ever. Like letting Berlusconi investigate his own corruption charges. If it was done in concert with say, the Atheist Society, then that would be a proper examination of Christianity’s claims. But it’s not, and so it is safe to say the jury’s verdict will be foregone.

The only time I was tempted by the whole shebang was the promise of a Free meal – which is incidentally the only tangible benefit from going to one of these events.

A little hand written note in the front addressed to me contained the peachy line:

‘I don’t know how much you have thought about God and stuff’.

I think about stuff often, but God…never. I’m not going to get into reasons why I don’t –the how and the who and the why doesn’t really matter but suffice it say I don’t believe in God.

I felt really bad for whoever had taken the time to sit down and hand write a note to me, partly because I will inevitably take no notice, but also because all that time, effort and money (its quite a posh, well produced little thing) that went into disseminating this Christian propaganda could have gone towards say, sending aid to  Gaza, or combating AIDS in Africa etc. Don’t give a free lunch to agnostic students, give it to the homeless, surely? Because that would have been a more constructive thing to do, ultimately have had a greater impact on the world.

But what I really, really resent the fact though, that somehow I am not a fulfilled being unless I believe in an imaginary friend. At best that is pretty smug, at worst disgustingly passive aggressive, when it comes down to it. Kind of like at school when a group of kids tease another kid by pretending they know a secret the lone kid doesn’t.

That is a pretty appropriate analogy, because this booklet had basically been given The Da Vinci Code make over. Like it’s all a big, centuries old secret that you are being let into. I want you to imagine that these lines are spoken by a movie voice over man:

‘A sinister plot’

                    ‘A real life murder mystery’

  ‘A secret they’ve tried to silence’

Coming soon to a cinema near you?

The difference of course, between the bunch of teasing school kids is that the Christians believe they know something. They believe they are right. The thing about belief is that it is the same as thinking really. It just sounds more concrete. But a belief is just as prone to being bullshit as a thought is. I concede to you that everything I have to say is my opinion. I only wish Christians did the same.

And I’m going to stop myself right there, because I am not going to get all Dawkins on you, because I think he is a smug, self righteous sod when all is said and done. Let people do what they want, let people believe in who and what they want, and so long as it doesn’t hurt others then that is dandy. Just don’t foist your beliefs onto anyone else. But I refuse to be passive aggressively coerced into praying – like the booklet suggests – ‘Lord God, I’m sorry that I’ve been trying to live my life without you’. My life is just fine, actually how dare you suggest otherwise?  

So basically, my outlook is a humanist one: live and let live. I don’t need to go to church or read the bible or believe in God to be a happy, fulfilled person, and neither do you – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Contrary to what the booklet in my pidge says, God cannot offer you ‘Freedom from death’. Nothing can. Yeah I get that it is a metaphor for heaven and what not. You can’t escape death, so live life to the full now. If you never know when or where the end will come, then that is a reason to be a good person, that is the reason to live a happy life.