I was
brought up to be a good Roman Catholic. I
was baptised and confirmed. I was a
dedicated church goer as a child. I
never missed church on Sunday unless serious illness or some other similar
circumstance made attendance impossible.
I
was taught that only Roman Catholics would go to heaven when they died. All other Christian churches were heretical,
and their followers were condemned by early Popes to eternal damnation when
they died. And the Pope was
infallible. All other religions, Muslim,
Hindoo, and Buddhist were false religions whose followers were similarly
condemned to hellfire and incapable of ever enjoying salvation.
I
felt I was privileged to be a member of one of the oldest and most powerful of
the Christian churches. We called the
modern American ones such as the Seventh Day Adventists, the Southern Baptists,
and the Mormons “Sideways Churches.” It
felt wonderful to be so superior and one of the elite believers.
I
never attended any religious service in one of the heretical churches, save
very rarely for one of the ceremonial ones of weddings and funerals. I certainly never risked my eternal salvation
by crossing the threshold of a mosque or temple. No amount of soap or water would have washed
off the dirtiness I was sure.
I
completed my primary and some of my secondary schooling at the Abbey School,
Mount Saint Benedict, in Tunapuna in Trinidad and Tobago between 1955, when I
was nine years old, and 1964. I was an
indifferent student, always in the bottom half of my class. I hated sports and any organised school
activity. My main interest was in
running wild in the forests surrounding the school, and in the library.
In
my first year, I informed Bro Vincent, the Sports Master, after my first cricket
match, that I would never again play the game.
My introduction to it had been miserable. He told me that he would ban me from the
swimming pool if I did not play the next weekend. When I was banned from the pool, I announced
that I would no longer play football for my House. I was banned from the Saturday matinee movies.
In
retaliation, I made myself a long bow and cut reed arrows. I spent many a happy Saturday afternoon in
concealment on the hilltop above the cricket field firing arrows at the
fielders below. For this I was ordered
to attend the Headmaster to receive six strokes of the rod on my backside. This happened nearly every Monday for at
least five years. When I complained to
Fr Bernard that I had never been caught doing anything wrong to deserve the
flogging, he replied, “Then, take the strokes, Don, for all the things you
have done that you never got caught doing.”
I
taught myself early to speed read. I
learned the name of the skill only after President JF Kennedy was inaugurated,
and his ability to get through hundreds of pages of briefings before breakfast
was described. By the age of twelve I
was assisting in the school library. By
about the age of fifteen, when Fr Augustine was the official Librarian, he made
me his Assistant and gave me my own key.
I was free to let myself in and out as I chose, within school
rules. By this time, I was relieved of
any obligation to join in school sports.
With
such access, I read nearly every one of the tens of thousands of books on the
shelves. I devoured the forbidden books in
a locked cabinet behind the curtain on a top shelf, such as the unexpurgated Canterbury’s
Tales. I got most of the way through the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. I remember I
started on this when I needed to learn about sex. I began with the relevant article in the “P”
volume and moved on to “V”. Each article
ended in a list of cross-references. I
made notes of them and read them too. I
was particularly taken by the multi-layered transparencies that illustrated the
scientific articles. By the time I left the
school at seventeen, I had read much of each of the many volumes. I have always preferred to master the theory
before I try the practical.
My
early experience of church and religion was without complaint. The High School was run by Benedictine
Monks. The many cruelties we experienced
from them were not excessive. Few if any
of us were permanently scarred by them.
We
were not, so far as I know, sexually abused by the Monks. The only homosexual practices we heard of
were between a very few of the boys. Supposedly,
these were always foreign boys, never West Indian ones.
The
physical punishments the Monks imposed on us, making us spend a half hour on
our bare knees, on the yard’s gravelled surface, in the blazing sun, for some
minor infraction of discipline, for example, did not scar us so much as prepare
us for life’s injustices.
We
knew or imagined stories about the life histories of the Monks. They were mainly European Dutch survivors of
the Nazi Holocaust of the Second World War, in which most of our fathers had
served in one army or the other. There
were stories circulating that some of them had been slave labourers in the
factories of the Ruhr Valley in Germany.
Their guilt at surviving when most of their family members had been
murdered by the Nazis was the cause, we told each other, of their reputed
self-torture. Some of our parents had
been Prisoners of War who survived brutal internment in camps in France,
Belgium, and other countries.
On
one occasion, when a Monk teacher stretched to reach a high point on the
blackboard, specks of red appeared on the back of his white cassock. There were gasps of horror. We agreed it was blood from his self-flagellation
with a barbed wire whip the night before.
Only years later did we learn that it was red ink from a pen flicked by
a boy in the front row. Such incidents
heightened our awareness of the horrors some of them had endured to survive and
come out to teach us in Trinidad.
My
first loss of faith occurred when I was seven years old. It was shortly before Christmas. I was arguing with my little friends whether
Santa Claus existed. I was horrified to
learn that they did not believe in Santa.
They insisted that our parents bought the presents. I indignantly rose in defence of Santa. I resisted all attempts to convince me he was
imaginary.
When
I got confirmation later that day that Santa was not real, I was
devastated. My whole world view was
hollowed out. I had never experienced
such betrayal before. I immediately knew
that I would never again believe anything my mother told me. It seemed obvious to me that she could not be
trusted to be truthful about anything important. These instantaneous judgments have followed
me all my life, much to my loss.
This
stage of my religious career lasted I suppose until I was about nineteen years
of age. At the age of eighteen I became
a student in the United Kingdom. I
arrived there to study law in the summer of 1964. First, I completed my O-Levels and A-Levels
before enrolling as a student barrister at the Inner Temple.
I
spent my first four years in the UK boarding at an international student hostel
at 23 Lansdown Road in Notting Hill Gate owned and run by the Pushkin Society. There were always between thirty and forty
students of all ages and genders boarding there. For the first time, I was exposed to persons
of different religions, nationalities, and backgrounds. The hostel was a hotbed of animated
discussion on every topic among the young and not so young occupants.
I
came to live at this hostel as a callow, uneducated, religious believer, who
had never in my 18 years in Trinidad had an intellectual conversation. To be able to join in the discussions, I read
everything I could put my hands on. I
gobbled up books on sociology, psychology, philosophy, ancient history,
comparative religion, archaeology, economics, zoology, botany, genetics, and
any other subject that came to hand. I
sucked it all up.
At
that time in Notting Hill, one could purchase a Penguin Classic paperback for
six pence in one of the many second-hand bookshops. One could also exchange two books for one at
no extra charge. A Penguin paperback
seldom took more than a day to devour. I
recall it was not unusual for me to acquire a dozen books at a time. A bottle of Algerian red wine cost less than
a shilling. A pound of ground coffee
cost about the same.
During
all this time, and for about the first six months, I attended a Roman Catholic
Church every Sunday in Notting Hill. The
diversity at the hostel began to make me aware that people of other religions
could be good people. Could it be that
contrary to the teaching of my church, their souls might arrive in heaven?
There
was an older student, Aziz Baluche, who was a native of Baluchistan. He was a Sufi Muslim of about seventy years, who
had earned his doctorate in classical Spanish guitar at a university in Cadiz
before the Spanish Civil War. He was an
accomplished Sitar player and an impressive scholar. Curiously, he earned his living reading
astrological charts and playing the Sitar professionally.
Aziz
was also a law student, a member of my Inn.
He taught that we were all different, with our own cultures and beliefs,
none more superior than the other. I came
to consider him as near to a saint as anyone could get. I used to say that he was the most truly
Christian person I had ever known.
For
the first two or three years at the student hostel, one of the residents was a
Professor Douglas Kennedy. He was
originally a US national from Detroit who had fallen in love with Paris during
his march from the beaches of Normandy to Germany as a young man in 1944. After the War, he went to university in the
US. He got his first degree in geology on
the GI Bill and completed his education in France. He became in time a noted archaeologist,
specializing in Hittite in cuneiform. By
the time we younger students became acquainted with him, he was a professor at
the Sorbonne University in Paris. We
were all impressed that while his English was that of the gutters of Detroit
his French was pure and elegant.
Douglas
Kennedy was at the time supposedly one of only four English-speaking persons
fluent in Hittite. He spent his summers
in London where he conducted research in the British Museum on the clay tablets
that various archaeologists had brought back to Britain from the Middle
East. Every night, he sat at a small round
table in his relatively spacious room at the hostel, pouring over photographs
of the cuneiform inscriptions on the tablets that he was studying. He told us he was writing a book on
transportation by means of the donkey across the Arabian Peninsula three
thousand years before the current era. We
were impressed. He taught us to enjoy
French press coffee. This he drank all
night long, pausing only for an occasional glass of red wine. The coffee and wine were like honey to bees
for us young students.
We
students spent many a long evening in his room discussing what interests all
young people: sex, religion, and politics.
We learned that you could order your own blend of coffee by the pound at
the neighbourhood coffee shop. Kenyan
beans were the cheapest at the time, while Columbian and Jamaican beans were
the most expensive. We learned to
distinguish the flavours of the preferred Arabica blend from the more boring
Robusta. Now, I only use Haitian, Costa
Rican, or Dominican Republic ground coffee.
I
learned to prefer cheap red wine over cheap white wine. I learned to tease the French girls by
turning a bottle of red wine in front of the gas heater, explaining when asked
that I was trying to bring it up to Algerian room temperature. Besides the wine, coffee, and the girls, one
reason for hanging out in Douglas’ room was that he could afford to insert a
fresh shilling in the gas meter all night long whenever the gas ran out. Our rooms were small, dark, and cold by
comparison, particularly on the long winter nights.
At
night, we young students sat about arguing on his floor, smoking cheap tobacco,
and drinking wine and coffee. Kennedy,
as an older person, a noted academic, and a huge intellect, occasionally lifted
his head from his photographs and notes to settle a heated discussion. He was intensely sceptical about everything,
especially on politics, economics, and other social issues. The student life in the Notting Hill of the
late 1960s was intoxicating. We
youngsters took away from these early years of academic and intellectual
stimulation life-long attitudes that we would never lose.
There
came a point when I walked out of the church.
And I never went back. The
immediate cause was the sight of a fat, slovenly, red-nosed, Irish priest
preaching hell and damnation. The
hypocrisy of his evidently glutenous lifestyle, and its contradiction with the
subject of his sermon turned my stomach.
I could not help it. It was an
instantaneous reaction. And, permanent.
This
happened before my nineteenth birthday in the summer of 1965. It struck me that everything I had so
confidently previously believed about faith and religion was a total
fiction. The shock and hurt of the
realization drove me to frantic depression.
It was the loss of Santa Clause all over again, but worse. Only the wine, three packets of cigarettes a
day, and the arms and the guitar-playing of a wonderful French lady, a student
of industrial arts living at the hostel, kept me sane.
In
addition to the reading and arguing, we foreign students explored the Natural
Science Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. We bought the cheapest tickets to be allowed
to sit on the steps and in the passageways of the theatres. We saw the plays of Sophocles and of
Shakespeare. We walked all the way to
the West End instead of taking the public transport we could as students hardly
afford. I read everything
anthropological I could lay my hands on, from The Descent of Man to The Naked
Ape. I read the biographies of Galileo,
and Copernicus. I learned how the
Christians persecuted the early astronomers, demanding belief on pain of death that
the Earth was flat, and the Sun orbited the Earth, not the other way round.
For
my A-Level studies in English History, I chose the Reformation. Newly liberated from any notion of the truth
of Christian teaching, I was particularly interested in the period. It was this course of study that first
exposed me to the long history of cruelty and murder visited by the Christians
and other religions on each other. I
learned how over the centuries one denomination massacred another in the name
of faith.
I
was appalled at the stories of the Christians and Muslims killing each other over
religion. I learned how the Muslims
spread from their heartland of Arabia through North Africa and southern Europe,
killing off the pagans they met along the way.
It seems they sometimes preserved the Jews and the Christians as fellow “people
of the Book”. What a revolting book! My disgust with everything to do with faith
and religion grew, until I became nauseous whenever I recalled my previous religious
beliefs and practices.
My
abhorrence of everything to do with faith in God grew as I learned of the sheer
ignorance of the early church, the cruelties of the Inquisition, and the mass
murder of the Amerindians. Religious
faith is the main cause, over the length of human history, of war, torture, murder,
and mayhem. I concluded that the root of
all evil is religion. I resolved for the
rest of my life to do everything I could to oppose this evil dominion over the
human mind and spirit. In my early
twenties I became what I still am, a militant atheist.
Legal
practice, The Valley, Anguilla, 1989 (Penny Slinger)
I
did not know it at the time, but my personality type is apparently
obsessive-compulsive. I suppose I am additionally
on the autistic spectrum, certainly on the Asperger’s Syndrome scale. I learned I was an obsessive-compulsive in a
psychological course for judges organised by the Eastern Caribbean Supreme
Court in about the year 1999. As part of
this course, we had to fill out a questionnaire concerning our preferences and
predilections. At the end, we scored
ourselves.
The
advice given us judges by the two lady professors from the University
conducting the course was ominous. The
one personality-type you did not want to be if you were to be a good judge was
the obsessive-compulsive type.
Apparently, the tendency for these sufferers is to make up your mind
about the case you were trying when you are only half-way through the trial and
have not yet heard all the evidence.
The
professors explained that obsessive-compulsives have one advantage. Coming to a decision is never a problem. We do not spend days struggling to make our
minds up. We make our decision and act
on it. It is the perfect personality for
a general of the army who must send men into battle to die.
I
recall the Chief Justice sitting next to me peeping at the score I gave myself
and whispering that I was not to worry at the results, as he was even higher on
the obsessive-compulsive scale than I was.
He did not show me his score, so he may only have been trying to reassure
me.
Courtroom No 2, Kingstown, Saint
Vincent, 1999 (Aileen Smith)
In
the years that followed my adolescent conversion to atheism, my confidence in the
truth of this conviction only grew. The
more I read of the horrors inflicted by Christian leaders on their flocks, the
more opposed to Christianity, and by extension to all faiths, grew.
It
became apparent to me that the principal reason most men join any priesthood is
their demented need to get into the pants of their young charges. Men, I concluded, are driven by one or more
of only three forces. There is the need
for sexual release, perhaps more powerful even than hunger. There is the need to acquire wealth, a motive
that has helped church leaders by tithing and donations to become rich as
Croesus. Then, there is the need for
power. With total control over the minds
of their flocks, ministers of religion can extract cash, impose their sexual
urges on the credulous boys and girls in their custody, and exercise unlimited
power over their lives and fortunes. Most
popes, bishops, priests, pastors, reverends, mullahs, muftis, pundits, and
Buddhist monks are predators. Jim Jones
was a perfectly developed example of a true man of faith.
It
is not only male clerics who are monsters.
Reading of the evils of the Magdalene Sisters towards the girls of the
Magdalene Laundries of Ireland during a period of two and a half centuries is
stomach churning. Women may enjoy a
nurturing character not shared generally by men. But faith can twist them into evil beings in
the same way as men.
Acting Justice of the Court of Appeal, 2012 (Nat Hodge)
God,
I am sure, has reserved the deepest and hottest part of Hell for members of the
clergy of every faith and denomination.
The Christian variety, guilty of inflicting more harm, suffering, and
pain than any of the others, I consign to spend all eternity in the deepest
frozen pit of the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Inferno.
And,
what if, I am sometimes asked, when I die, I should come to judgment and meet
God? What will I do? First, I will ask Him to explain what He was
thinking of. If He is indeed so
all-powerful, all-seeing, all-pervasive, and all-merciful, what did He mean by
allowing polio, smallpox, leprosy, measles, HIV, dengue, and the other
haemorrhagic fevers, from bringing untold suffering, misery, and death to us
humans over tens of thousands of years?
What kind of a loving and merciful god is He, that to gain His favour we
must prostrate ourselves on the ground and grovel before Him?
I
still do not understand what abject ignorance causes so many of the credulous among
us, in the middle of a pandemic and a hurricane, to praise His mercy and love with
excessive religiosity even as our families and friends fall victim to acts of
god.
I
tell you that if I ever meet this evil, sadistic, and megalomaniac god, I plan
on giving Him a good slapping up.
