༺ Thesium ༻

Can you tell me more about when you stopped going to church?

Oh yeah, that was amazing. See the whole family went on holiday, I think it was somewhere in Wales. Anyway, we had to go to church even during holiday see, and when we got somewhere there would always be this driving around to find the right kind of church and what the times of masses were. What I remember is sitting in the back of the car, there’s seven people crammed in there mind, and feeling really rotten about this finding a bloody church. All I wanted to do was play and explore and stuff right?! So the first thing I remember is the needle between my older brothers and my mam. I think the oldest must’ve objected, I don’t remember, but it was mam’s response that is the core of this. I remember she suddenly raised her voice and said “Well NONE of you HAVE to go if you REALLY don’t want to!” She was absolutely furious.

That must’ve had quite an effect. What happened?

Well I remember turning to my nearest brother and we both had this look of insane glee. We just couldn’t believe it! There was this suppressed silence until we got to the campsite and then there was just this explosion of joy. We ran off squeeling with elation.

When I was much younger I was really into the religious thing for a while. I remember having this intense feeling of oneness with Jesus and this sense of universal love for everything. All the stuff that happened in school with that lot, all the nuns and priests and teachers, nothing really terrible, it was just this sense of the dislocation between the words and the actions you know?

So a cognitive dissonance would you say?

That’s right, exactly, yes, a cognitive dissonance. There was on the one hand the beauty of the rhetoric about love and forgiveness and eternal life and everything, and on the other was this constant coercion. You know, a ‘rules are rules’ attitude all the time. Getting a leather strap across your hand if the crime was bad enough. Stuff like wearing a shirt with patterns on when they had to be plain. Shit like that.

So was that the cause of the friction then, the rules?

No, not really, it went way deeper than that. There was this one time when one of our teachers, a nun, had said that evil wasn’t created by God. That really bothered me. It was the one time I really studied the bible after that. Before the next lesson with the Sister I found a passage in Luke that supported my argument. My hand went up and I let her have it. That was my main way of rebelling you see, by apparently following the rules in such a way as to show them to be absurd. It made it harder for them to punish you if they couldn’t put their finger on what was wrong. Anyway, I said “It says in Luke 6:43 ‘No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.’ And in Genesis 1 it says ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty..’ so God must’ve created everything here, including evil!”

So what did she say?

Oh the usual bluster and “just have faith” and “you’re too young to understand such things”. I think it was her who didn’t understand such things. Apparently there is a branch of Theology called Theodicy, which is all about this problem of evil. She was an Irish country girl sent off to a nunnery and I don’t think she had the slightest idea about what made us tick, there in a foreign country, England, during the first flush of punk rock. Anyway, around about then I was realising that the story they had about things just didn’t hold water.

I was very fired up to find my own way at that point, so I started researching everything I could find. The first stuff I found was from the Hindu tradition, so for a while I was reading all about far out, hippified versions of trippy, mystical stuff. It was really cool! Somewhere deep down I was trying to resolve this conflict between religion and science, between the Good and the True, between my parents and my brothers.