God Collar Read online

  About the Book

  ‘There's probably no God... but I wish there was. I've got some things I need to ask him.’

  Marcus Brigstocke is a husband, a father and an award-winning comedian. He's also an atheist... Or at least he thinks he is. He wishes he wasn't. But he probably is. He knows that God probably doesn't exist because he read it on the side of a bus, and that's one of the ways you can know things.

  Here, in God Collar, Marcus sets out on a journey through faith in the hope of filling his ‘God-shaped hole’ (this is not his arsehole – he is not suggesting his bottom looks like God). Exploring his own issues surrounding faith – his lack of it, his need for it, other people's exploitation of it and what good purposes it might serve if he could get hold of it – he examines the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, Judaism, Islam, Humanism and Buddhism, but none of them seem able to fill the gap. What good is God if some of his keenest followers abuse children, blow each other up and refuse to dance to ‘YMCA’? Can God and Marcus ever be friends when they have so little in common? What's a reluctant atheist to do?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1: There’s probably no God

  Chapter 2: A bus ride to Hell …

  Chapter 3: Are you there, God? It’s me, Marcus

  Chapter 4: Nothing bad happened …

  Chapter 5: Believe in us … Oh the humanity

  Chapter 6: Where to look for God …

  Chapter 7: Who’s who … Who believes what?

  Chapter 8: God Delusion – the modern atheist

  Chapter 9: Why not, then?

  Chapter 10: Rules

  Chapter 11: Jesus Christ!

  Chapter 12: My God-shaped hole

  Chapter 13: I believe that children are the future

  Chapter 14: A traditional church wedding or The Darling Buds of Maybe Not …

  Chapter 15: Saying Goodbye

  Postscript: Capital G

  About the Author

  Copyright

  GOD COLLAR

  Marcus Brigstocke

  This book is dedicated with love to my friend James.

  Wherever it was you went, this is for you –

  I’m sorry it has no spies or soldiers in it …

  Acknowledgements

  There are a great many people I need to thank for helping me to create this book. To my beautiful family – Sophie, Alfie and Emily – thank you for being so loving, so wonderful and so very patient while I disappeared into this project.

  Thank you to the many comedians and friends I have debated and discussed ideas of faith with late into the night – Andre Vincent, Carrie Quinlan and Robin Ince in particular. Sincere thanks to the very brilliant Nick Doody who helped me hammer out the ideas for the original stand-up tour of God Collar. Carey Marx, Alun Cochrane and Richard Lett who maintained a spirited and lengthy defence of alcohol and narcotics in the Alps. Mitch Benn, Daniel Kitson, Simon Evans, Andrew Maxwell, Rufus Hound, Josh Howie, Tim Minchin, James and Siobhan Bachman, Bill Hicks and Tim Vine (who wrote one of the funniest jokes about God I’ve ever heard).

  To all the people I know who appear in the pages of God Collar – my parents, my in-laws, my wonderful brother Henry, my friends, safari guides, vicars, atheists and Jesus – thank you and I hope you understand …

  Thank you to Joe Norris, Danny Julian, Flo Collins and all at OTK for touring my show with me. Thank you to Sam Buntrock who directed God Collar, and who clarified and simplified it where he could and encouraged me where I wouldn’t let him.

  Sincere thanks to Jo Cole who knows where I’m supposed to be when, what I’m supposed to be doing for whom and what to say to whoever it is I’m meant to have done something for but haven’t quite yet.

  Needless to say there are many writers whose extraordinary insight and clarity have inspired and informed me. Thank you Professor Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Alexander Waugh, David Eagleman, A.C. Grayling, Jonathan Sacks, Philip Pullman and Karen Armstrong – may each of you find in yourselves the spirit of Christian forgiveness for my many-layered misunderstanding of your works.

  Thank you to my friends at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival where thought, enquiry, debate, hilarity, humility, pride and freedom of expression ping off every tent pole in a field in Wales, and where I am delighted to launch this book. Peter Florence, Andy Fryers, Paul Blezzard, Hannah Lort-Phillips and the Hay family, you have lifted my aspirations.

  Thank you to Malcolm Grimstone and Andy Bird without whom I’d be madder, sadder and ever so much more alone.

  Thank you to my wonderful and talented friends who I toured Spamalot with while I wrote much of this. Your gentle enquiries as to how ‘the book’ was going meant a great deal to me. Graham, Todd, Robin, Simon L, Samuel, David, Kit, Tim, Philip, Paul, Jodie, Amy, Rachael, PJ, Claire, Chris, Simon B, Dean, the band and the crew. Thank you to Hayley for ‘onion rings’ and the motivation to write the next line.

  Thank you to my agents at United – Simon Trewin, Hannah Begbie, Olivia Homan, Arthur Carrington and Kitty Laing.

  Thank you to all at Transworld for your faith in me and for your hard work – Madeline Toy, Mari Roberts and Larry Finlay.

  Grovelling, huge and immensely grateful thanks to my editor Sarah Emsley for your calm patience, understanding and encouragement.

  To all who have read this, thank you and if you know where God is, please tell him I was asking after Him …

  1

  There’s probably no God

  THERE COULD BE ONE BUT I’M PRETTY WELL CONVINCED there probably isn’t. Certainly some people seem very insistent there is a God and that the consequences of suggesting to the contrary will be painful and very lengthy but if anything this makes me less inclined to believe there is a God; or if there is one then He’s probably not my sort of chap. It’s possible that there was a God and He’s hiding or has grown bored with us. Maybe He’s sulking or just plain forgetful, perhaps He’s dead or He’s gone on a really long holiday. There are infinite possibilities as to where God might have got to if he exists at all but it seems to me He probably doesn’t. The God I’m fairly sure there probably isn’t is the same God that many people are absolutely convinced there is. There might be another God entirely that none of us has considered but the God I am almost totally persuaded doesn’t exist is the one described variously as bearded, bathed in light, lives up in Heaven, has a staff of angels, created Heaven and Earth, destroyer, judge, receiver of prayers and half-hearted hymnal dirges, prefers Jews to any of the other tribes, Jesus’ dad, He who dictated Al Qur’an to Mohammed in a cave, the fella with the booming voice, one third of the Holy Trinity, Jehovah, Allah, Almighty Father, Yahweh, the God they call Love, He whose name is jealous – the God of Abraham. The God of the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims. He probably doesn’t exist. At least, I hope He doesn’t …

  I am an atheist … well, I think I am; or I was. I might be a lapsed atheist, having a crisis of whatever the opposite of faith is – facts? I’m having a crisis of facts. My atheism is quite wobbly at present. I haven’t watched a David Attenborough documentary for months and I don’t have a pop science book on the go. These seem to be the modern standard for non-believers and I’m failing in my irreligious observance. Forgive me, Secularism, for I have sinned, it’s been six months since my last confession. I’ve had thoughts of a spiritual nature and I recorded Masterchef over the Professor Brian Cox documentary … I’d like to be comfortable with my atheism. It would be good for me and probably a relief for my family if the absence of a God in my life made me feel happy, but it doesn’t.

  My best friend died a few years
ago and it broke my heart. The sudden and tragic loss of James, who was in his thirties, shifted a lot of my thinking and changed the way I felt about the world. It didn’t stop me being an atheist – in some ways it galvanized the suspicion that we are alone in the universe and there is no plan – but it made me think a lot. I’m a dad and a husband and I try to be funny for a living. I feel sad and frustrated quite often. I miss my friend and I wonder where he is.

  I had a God given to me when I was little. A family heirloom handed down through the generations without much thought as to His relevance or value. I’d have taken my God to The Antiques Roadshow and sold him if I’d had any strong feeling about Him being worth something. I’d be curious to see the face of a believer as they were told to insure God for only two to three hundred pounds. It wasn’t really my God in any case, it was just borrowed. I also had an uncomfortably prickly teddy that I was given at around the same time and felt much the same way about. I kept God and my teddy until I grew out of them both and became embarrassed to be seen snuggled up with either of the prickly little buggers. I lost God and the bear at some stage between seven and eleven years old, I think. I didn’t put them in the bin or anything like that, I just left them behind somewhere and I’m very literally damned if I can remember what happened to them. I found the bear when my parents moved house about ten years ago but there was no trace of God at all. The movers might have had Him …

  I spent a few awkward years as a teenager being Godless, then a new God was given to me by some good friends who were worried about me when I was in my late teens and early twenties. We became close for a little while, God and I, but like so many relationships at that tender age we lost contact with each other and we haven’t spoken since. I didn’t start seeing other Gods or anything slutty like that, it just fizzled out. We had different interests, I was a goth, God liked 1980s pop. I was without God for a long while and that seemed OK. I didn’t miss Him, He didn’t smite me, it was all right. Then I started to wonder whatever had happened to the God I’d known as a youngster? I began to notice other people’s beliefs and I became interested by what they were saying about their God. Some of it angered and confused me. Do they believe in the God I was at school with? He’s changed, or if He hasn’t then it turns out I didn’t know Him nearly as well as I’d thought. It’s a bit like seeing the photo of the murderer the police are searching for on the news and realizing he used to share a locker with you at secondary school. ‘Bloody hell! I’m not sure but I think that’s the God I grew up with who just sent thousands of very heavily armed children into Iraq!’

  I’m not sure what I believe at present. I know I feel strongly about religion and its ideologies and communities. I am suspicious of religion’s past and nervous for its future but in terms of knowing what God is for or against, whether he’s kind or unkind, or if there’s even a shred of evidence to support the idea of His ever having existed, I’m not nearly as certain as I was two years ago. This book is about embracing that uncertainty and searching for something without really having the first clue as to what it is. This particular theological haystack might well prove to have a needle or two in it but until I’ve pricked my finger I won’t know if that’s what I was searching for in the first place. I need to find out if rummaging through the hay to see if that’s where God’s lurking is anything more than a waste of time given that I think there’s probably no God in there, or in Heaven or anywhere else.

  If you’re confused then, for goodness’ sake, don’t expect me to lead you anywhere: I’m as lost as you are. My aim is not to tell anyone what to believe. I don’t know myself, so it would be an exercise in breathtaking arrogance to suggest I might have any answers for anyone else. I’m a comedian, I’m not an academic, though I do have a BTEC in performing arts so don’t dismiss me entirely. I’m in search of a thing that feels like it might be missing. I make no claim other than genuine curiosity as to my suitability and qualifications to guide myself or anyone else on an ambitious spiritual quest. At the first sign of danger I’m likely to cower behind the safe rocks of sarcasm and derision. Where there are forks in the road I’ll sit and ponder, take one path, change my mind, try the other, then go back a few steps and see if there’s an easier way round. I am to theological exploration as Eddy ‘the Eagle’ Edwards was to ski-jumping – massively under-prepared, dangerously over-confident and highly likely to fall on my arse to the amusement of the crowd. I’m doing it anyway, and if you’re inclined to explore the feeling of precarious uncertainty with me, then I’d be glad of your company.

  The truth, as I see it, is that I would rather stay in a place of confusion amongst similar restless souls shuffling about in the hope there might be a sign pointing in one direction or another, than leap aboard whichever bandwagon looks like it’s got some momentum behind it and a confident driver. We might find God. We should probably have a plan for that in case we startle Him and He goes for us. I don’t mind if we don’t find Him. I’d be just as happy to discover that whatever road this is that I’m on, I’m not walking it alone.

  2

  A bus ride to Hell …

  WE KNOW THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD BECAUSE IT WAS written on the side of a bus. That’s one of the ways you can know things. You can read books, watch telly, see if there are still any libraries to look something up in, Google it, tweet it, ask your mother or wait until a bus comes by with ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ written on the side of it. If it’s written on the side of a bus, you can probably trust it. Unless it says where the bus is supposed to be going, then you should treat the message with some caution. Buses are not like trains. Bus drivers have free will. Buses are large, usually red and often move about in packs, occasionally at high speed, so writing on the side of one takes time and effort. This is why you so rarely see a Banksy artwork sprayed on the side of a bus – they pull away without warning and the incredibly famous anonymous graffitist would probably tear his stencil, a particularly nasty injury in the graffiti-ing world. I work on the basis that if a person has gone to all the trouble of writing a thing on the side of the bus, you’d be a fool not to consider it.

  You can learn a lot from the side of a bus. I learned that if a startled-looking woman made of plastic rubs a special type of cream into her startled plastic face, it should be taken as proof that she’s ‘worth it’. Worth what exactly? I’m not certain; whatever she’s worth, I’m sure she’s earned her place on the side of a bus. Last spring I learned that it was ‘Creme Egg season’. Creme Eggs are highly seasonal on account of the Creme bird only laying one egg per year somewhere near a till. She performs this ritual just before Easter (a religious holiday in which we remember the agonizing cross-based death and resurrection of Jesus Christ by telling children that a secretive bunny rabbit shits eggs all over the garden. It’s one of the central messages of the life of Christ). Thanks to a bus, I learned that I probably ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’. (I walked into the bus.) I learned that I could get ‘Cash for Gold’ which, without wishing to be obtuse, is the very least I’d expect for gold. Thanks to bus messages I know there is a website that compares the websites that compare the websites of comparable insurance companies, and I know there’s ‘Probably no God’.

  The story of the bus campaign began in 2009 when Ariane Sherine wrote a piece for the Guardian newspaper about some Christian adverts running on London buses. The advertisements featured the address of a website which stated that non-Christians would burn in hell for all eternity. This information isn’t new, it’s been accepted as a threatening fact by Christians for a long time. This was an explicit reminder to anyone who had forgotten that all non-Christians would burn in Hell for ever – that’s an awful lot of burnt souls. One presumes they mean everyone who isn’t Christian as well as a few people who are essentially Christian, but due to an unfortunate miscommunication have chosen to be the wrong type of Christian. Historically there seem to have been some divisions and the odd spot of tension regarding wh
ich type of Christian one is supposed to be.

  The list of candidates for the fires of Hell would include lots and lots of children. Sons and daughters of people born in places where the teachings of Christ have not been received. Those non-Christian children will burn in Hell for ever. Them and all of us who, for whatever reason, are put off joining in with such kindly and sweet-natured people, with the love of Christ in their hearts and a pious smile on their faces, gently and lovingly spreading fear, violence, judgement and retribution. We will burn in Hell for all eternity. Ariane Sherine will burn in hellfire for all eternity and probably slightly longer too if the staff in Hell can organize the roster for overtime. Ariane wasn’t keen on the idea of hellfire, for herself or anyone else, and felt that this was a rather nasty thought to be driving about on the sides of buses. So she set her mind to coming up with something more benign. She suggested that people reading her article could, if they wished, each donate £5 to a fund that would be spent on a more reassuring counter-advert. The simple aim was to cheer people up after all the unpleasant talk of burning children, which, let’s face it, can make you a little bit glum.

  Political blogger Jon Worth had read Ariane’s article and liked her proposal very much. He took the idea a step further by setting up a pledgebank page so people could donate money to the campaign. Eight hundred and seventy-seven people soon pledged £5 each. A very promising start indeed and suggestive of an enthusiasm for the atheist community to have a public face. I’m not totally sure that atheists can be described as being a community. I don’t even know if there’s a collective noun for a group of atheists. A smug? A damnation? A rationality? Things really got moving when scientist and famous secular rationalist Richard Dawkins generously agreed to match all donations made to the site. He’s a brilliant scientist and exceptionally bright so he quickly and sensibly revised this offer and set a cap on it of £5,500. For a man descended from an ape, he’s no fool. The mention of the campaign on Professor Dawkins’s website soon set the naturally selected, evolved monkey-cage of atheists a-buzz. Dawkins’s website is a hub for the lonely secularist seeking the spiritless joy of communion and mutual approval of other non-believers, and it has many thousands of visitors who soon picked up on the fundraising effort. The hope had been that they might be able to raise as much as £5,500 but in fact the immoral and Godless dug deep into their hell-bound pockets and found amongst the lint, sweet wrappers and despair a grand total of just over £150,000. A lot of people, it seemed, wanted to make an affirming statement on behalf of the life we know we have and reject the idea of living for the next one. This rejection of God and of the teachings of His son Christ would represent a whole lot of eternal burning for God to see to. I hope he’s got plenty of firelighters. The unexpectedly large number of donations was enough to pay for the campaign to run not only on London buses but all across the UK, with adverts also on the London Underground and an animated version on two screens in Oxford Street. For those fortunate enough not to know, Oxford Street is somewhat akin to Dante’s vision of hell, only with more carrier bags and tourists.