There's always free cheddar in a mousetrap, baby . . .

Several years ago my assistant and I were talking during a slow afternoon at work. I have completely forgotten whatever it was we were discussing, and it's totally irrelevant anyway, but I remember saying at one point something like, "Well, that's why I'm a Pagan."

She kind of smiled and said, "You don't believe in enough to be a Pagan."

She was right, of course.

The bald truth is I do not believe in a God or gods. Nor do I believe in sprites, faeries, angels, devils, spirits, ghosts or an eternal soul. Lucifer and Gabriel, and all the rest, are, to me, fictions created to help keep unruly children, or congregations, in line. In fact, in my opinion, all of the entities I named, and all their angelic and demonic brethren, were invented by someone to either help explain natural phenomenon or legitimize, and/or enforce, their right to control or exploit others, or all of the above.

By the same token, I do not believe in any form of afterlife. If there is no undying part of me (soul), then there can be no heaven or hell in which it will spend eternity. At the moment of my death my being, what is usually called my soul, will begin to dissipate. All the various biological systems will bring their duties to a conclusion, and when, finally, the last few synapses deep in my brain have fired for the last time (perhaps flashing a scent or sound or scene across the dissolving fragments of me) the memory image will fade, and then I will completely and utterly cease to exist. And when the last person dies that had any memory of me, I will, for all intents and purposes, have never existed.

The one or two times I have tried to explain my vision of reality, the usual comment has been something along the lines of, "Oh, but that must be so frightening. So lonely." Let me assure you, it is not in the least frightening. Granted, there is a certain amount of a longing for a grand finalé, with all the loose ends firmly tied, and music by Leonard Bernstein, but it just isn't in the cards, so to speak. On the other hand, I know that when I finally do approach death as a short term goal, I will not, like so many millions of poor exploited souls, be terrified of having to spend eternity being tortured beyond the limits of reason. There will be no damnation. No decent into Hell. It will be a great disappointment to Sister Rose, and a couple others. One of which I might have married.

But on yet another hand, there will also not be any joyful reunions with my father, mother, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins or any others who died long before we had figured out what we really meant to each other and why. I have been near death a few times, and while I had very intensely real seeming dreams at the time, I did not see me as they worked on me and there was definitely no light to go to. Once I was intensely working with a group of people trying to solve a problem at work, and once the dream had to do with sailing and I remember I didn't like the boat.

The usual explanation of my non-conforming dreams has been, " well, you weren't near enough." Let me assure you, if I had been any nearer this post would be that long sought after link to the afterlife and screwing up my belief system. When a bleeding ulcer I had decided to kick into high gear my hemoglobin and hematocrit was 4 and 14 when I was admitted. The usual ranges for men are 13.8 to 17.2 and 40.7 to 50.3 respectively. They told me in ICU that my numbers were incompatible with life. After six units of blood that night I climbed all the way to almost 8 and twenty something.

I tend to think that the people who have had those out-of-body, near death dreams are the ones who because of cultural training, religious belief, and desire expect to have exactly those kind of dreams, and in that moment of extreme crisis something triggers the dream that will most likely help them through the moment. Since I do not have those expectations, my brain sends me sailing.

Perhaps it's just as well that there isn't an afterlife, because if the Home Owner's Association Types who seem to think they are in charge of how the place will be run are in fact right, well then I would probably not want to be there anyway. I'm certain they would outlaw several of the activities I consider essential to paradise. Not to mention the fully stocked drinks cabinet.

I first started developing this view of the universe when I was nine years old. Coincidentally, that is the same age the ironically named Christopher Hitchens (author of god is not Great) says he first saw the flaws in conventional religious thought. It was, also coincidentally, his teacher who first brought his doubts into focus. Perhaps not as coincidentally, it is also when I attended St Elizabeth's.

For Mr Hitchens it was his teacher's insistence that the Beauty of Nature was God's gift to mankind, and his realization that mankind considered certain beneficial aspects of nature as beautiful that caused an awakening, as it were. Somehow he realized that the universe had not been created to fit us, we had evolved to fit the universe. That is, of course, an enormous simplification of his observation, but it is true to the essential argument in its way. For him the dichotomy between the two views, along with many others, eventually caused him to realize that God was a construct of man, and not as he had been taught, the ultimate reality.

For me it was the emptiness. I began to notice that during the service when my family went to our church, during the Mass at the beginning of the school day at St Elizabeth's, and during my youthful attempts at prayer there was a hollowness, an emptiness to them. The closest I can come to describing the sensation is it was like talking to a dead person. No matter what you say or how hard you try to communicate and perhaps say what they meant to your life, there is nothing. No response. No twitch to indicate they heard. No glimmer of even a past awareness. It is like trying to connect with a brick. There is not only no reply, there is no one listening. For me God had that same, complete nothingness.

Over the next few years my upbringing, and beliefs, were fairly typical for a boy in a little, rustbelt farm town, but slowly, incrementally things started not adding up. Again, like Mr Hitchens I started trying to make connections that refused to even come close to connecting. If God was omniscient why did I have to pray to tell him how I felt? If He was all loving and made us in His image why did I have hemophilia, and more importantly, why did Bobby get his face blown off? If He was omnipotent why was there a Devil? If He made everything, what made Him? If He was omnipresent, why didn't I feel His presence? And most puzzling of all to me was why was I a sinner and damned because of something Adam and Eve did? My parents didn't punish me for the things my brother did, so why was I being punished by God for things done by people so long ago not even my great grandfather had known them?

Those, and a thousand others, were the rather simplistic questions that came to me. Now I know that they are fairly standard almost to the point of being clichés, but they are also questions that have never been satisfactorily answered. As a boy I was told that it was all part of God's Will and unknowable to mortals, and one must just have faith. It was one thing to believe a knee hemorrhage would eventually stop and I would get better, and quite another to believe that all the suffering and senseless death I saw on the news and in the hospital was part of some kind of divine plan. In the first place, we knew, 'believed' if you insist, that my knee bleed was the result of some weak vessel walls and an inherited chemical malfunction; and even though the science of the time couldn't explain it, it would eventually be figured out. That is a far cry from saying it was just the malicious whim of some omnipotent being that couldn't be bothered with explaining itself, and I was supposed to be eternally grateful it hadn't done something even worse.

Anyway, one Scout Sunday when my troop was piously arranged in the first several rows of pews of one of the local churches it crystalized. This was all meaningless. There was no God. All of this was just an attempt to explain the universe, and justify the rules we lived by. The only immediate effect of this cathartic moment was that I stopped saying 'under God' during the Pledge of Allegiance. For the 1950s that was, however, a pretty risky move. I felt pretty safe though because I had found out that President Eisenhower had added the phrase just recently, and up until then we had been able to pledge our allegiance in a purely secular way.

Where Mr Hitchens and I part company is our attitude toward (please notice the absence of an 's') those who believe and the beliefs. He cannot resist making a snide or snarky comment, or showing his contempt for those who believe, and while I have little respect for priests and preachers and the like, I understand why people need or hope for a god to make sense of it all. We want to have a purpose. We need a reason for our existence. In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams wrote that the most fiendish, most terrible, soul destroying punishment that had ever been devised was the Total Perspective Vortex. All it did was show you for an instant just exactly where you stood in relation to the universe. We can't handle that, and what better way of avoiding having to acknowledge our true importance than by believing we live in a universe that has been especially created for us.

For the next twenty some years I studied different religions as I became aware of them. I read their holy books, and tried to understand the theology, but there always came a point when the teachings contradicted the overwhelming reality we are presented with. This universe was made for me, or I was made for the universe. Either way the universe should be explained by the theology. Saying that was because I was caught up in the profane world, and the teachings were about the sacred is for me just another way of saying you must believe in spite of reality. I cannot do that. I can only believe because of the reality.