The God I don’t believe in

Some pastoral disasters, along with many reactions to authority, have an interesting a whiff of Sylvia Plath’s “daddy, daddy you bastard, I’m through” about them. Our images of father figures certainly play out in our images of God, for good or ill. Like the Policeman in the sky, the Omnicompetent Fat Controller the Atheists rightly reject, “Almighty Gawd,” is a long way away from the God and Father of our lord Jesus Christ — more like Blake's nightmare vision of Nobodaddy — manipulative, angry, vengeful, controlling. Nobodaddy deals in Certainty not Clarity, Ideology not Mystery, Status not Reality, Politics not Truth, Control not Trust. He is less than half the truth. He uses words as weapons, not the creative impulse to make the world.

Cue a poem by Martin Bell:

Instruction for my Godson
(To William Redgrove)

God help me, I’m supposed to see you’re told
All about God the Father. So my beard mutters:
There are always two Fathers, one Good and one Bad.
You can always tell the Bad One, he’s always around.
Particularly first thing in the morning,
Scruffy and screaming for a razor-blade,
Wondering who to eat up for his breakfast —
He won’t eat you however much he shouts.
I’m not trying to sell you bad old Nobadaddy,
Learn to shrug off his sessions on his throne
Farting thunderbolts and belching clouds.

The Good One has a different way with Clouds; he watches.
He knows fifty-seven ways at least of looking at them,
He addresses them politely, and his looking
Can hold them still in the sky.

Martin Bell