Karen's wager

Motto: Christ is so cool. He's born, I get presents. He dies, I get candy.

So, it has begun. It’s not even the end of November and the Christmas shopping frenzy started. People, who have nothing in common with religion, love, tolerance or forgiveness, stampede for a shorter queue to pay for the tens of bottles of wine, pig’s legs, turkey wings, sausages, cakes, microwaves, washing machines, plasma TV sets, Durex vibrator rings and hundreds of useless items. It is confirmed: Christmas became the symbol of useless consumerism.

I was with my amazing 3 year old daughter, Karen, in a supermarket surrounded by chocolate Santas and kitsch nativity scenes, when she once again gave me a reality check. As I let her munch on the head of a milk chocolate Santa, she asked me who Santa was.

Busy to find the isle that sold multiple electrical sockets to hold on my new Christmas lights installation I replied not paying full attention to my words:

‘Ahem, well, Santa is…someone who brings you presents once a year, on Christmas’.
‘What is Chlistmas?’
‘Well, Christmas is a special day for certain people, who believe that Christ was born that day.’
‘Chlist? What is Chlist?’

As I couldn’t hold back a wide smile, I hugged her tightly whispering in her ear: ‘Oh, baby love, you won’t make it easier on me being your mom, eh? Well, some people believe Christ (how can I tell her this, it sounds so absurd) was, ahem, the son of God, born from a virgin woman, called Mary. That He died and resurrected three days later’.
‘Vilgin? Maly? God? What is God?’

As millions of ideas rushed to my head, and before I decided if I should share with her my own ideas about god, deities and religions, or give her a non-biased and full-option version, hoping she will make a fully informed choice of her own later on, I looked at her angelic face as she was waiting with precocious curiosity for my answer, that was hanging on the tip of my lips. OK, Diana, take a deep breath. She is only 3, sure, amazingly intelligent, but still 3.

As Blaise Pascal did once, I gave her a coin and told her to toss it: heads would be the short version of “God exists story”, tail would be the “God doesn’t”. The seconds it took the coin to reach the ground seemed like an eternity, because whatever followed after the touch down would have become a point of no return.

I was born in a communist country where atheism was a state religion. No doubt, religion pretty much like political appurtenance is an inherited custom that is handed over like a rite of passage from parents to their children. After the 1989 revolution, in an attempt to spite communism, to reject the neo-communists and to feel like we are belonging somewhere in Europe, many people turned once more towards God and Church. According to a recent census, Romanians are 86.7% Christian Orthodox, 4.7% Roman Catholic and the rest an insignificant mixture of Muslims, Jews, Armenians, and Lutherans etc. Apparently, an entire population of communist atheists went as low as 0.1%. What happened? They had an over night revelation and became all religious people?

In 1772, Baron d'Holbach came up with an interesting idea that "all children are born atheists; they have no idea of God." Similarly, George H. Smith (1979) suggested that: "The man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would also include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved, but who is still unaware of those issues. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist." Smith coined the term implicit atheism to refer to "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it" and explicit atheism to refer to the more common definition of conscious disbelief.

Now, if we think of God as an innate concept (theistic innatism) and we start from the premises that we are born with it within us, thus immanent and innate, sure we can claim we belong to one religion or another. Socrates proposed this idea that we are born knowledgeable but, due to the birth trauma, we forget everything and all we have to do is just remember what we previously knew. Hence he came up with the maieutikos approach, in which he eases, like a midwife, the truth out of us.

But what becomes then of the tabula rasa theory that we are born like a freshly wiped blackboard? In this case, God and religion are not innate concepts and they are handed over from parent to child, who unwillingly and involuntarily becomes one or another, according to what the parent is. Wouldn’t be more proper or honest to offer the child the possibility of option, of free choice? Why don’t we offer a full palette of religious dogmas, Darwin’s evolutionist theory, God creation theory, the preaching of Buddha, Jesus or Mohammad and let them choose their path the same way they come of age, at 16? Why do we force the children to study religion in school? As a parent, I understand the need to affiliation our children encounter and an agnostic child in a deeply religious country would have been ostracized. Thanks God (funny eh, what would an agnostic thank to?), in Romania- a laic state-, Christianity is not a state religion, religion is not a mandatory subject in school, and no one will tell my little girl that her mother would go to Hell just because she divorced. I dismiss any religion that would make my child feel bad about who she is or about the choices she makes, other than as a fully informed, intellectual and rational human being.

A friend of mine found it hard to believe me when I told him I was an agnostic, almost looking at me with mercy and sympathy, (as in forgive her Father for she doesn’t know what she is doing) saying ‘I know for a fact that you believe in God. You simply must’.
Must I? Why one must believe in a concept that is required to accept but not grasp or comprehend but to blindly and irrationally submit to? To feel that we are belonging necessarily? How many of the people that label themselves as Christians or Muslims really believe in God and behave according to their own religious percepts? Why agnostics and atheists are still outcast and marginalized as once the gays or women were? Why is not there an agnostic pride, pretty much like a gay pride? Why the atheists are not coming out of the closet? Why are we afraid of being ostracized?

Why in the 21st century, religion is still such a highly flammable and sensitive issue? Wouldn’t be better, like Richard Dawkins proposes in his book, to think of John Lennon’s song and try to imagine “a world with no religion”? How perfect and superb would be then a world with “no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers', no Northern Ireland 'troubles', no 'honor killings', no televangelists, no Taliban, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it”.

Karen Armstrong writes that "during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word 'atheist' was still reserved exclusively for polemic ... The term 'atheist' was an insult. Nobody would have dreamed of calling himself an atheist”. Let me reiterate that: 16th and 17th century.

The way I see it and I tried to explain it, is that agnosticism is a sign of a healthy mind. You know what is said “when you talk to God, is called prayer; if God talks back to you, is called schizophrenia”. It is the mind over matter and an agnostic is not necessarily someone who should be looked down upon, as being unable to perceive or transcend some deity concept, but someone who makes appeal to reason and intellect in order to understand the surrounding world.

It is said that an atheist or an agnostic cannot hold moral standards and are usually more inclined to have wider or more libertine views on abortion, monogamy, euthanasia, drug usage or family values. This assessment is totally wrong because it starts from the erroneous premises that religion is the only one that leads toward a moral behavior. Morals usually define the goodness or badness of human action and character and are an intrinsic side of the human construction. People have or don’t have morals independently of their religious inclination. An atheist can be a fulfilled moral person the same way a religious person can have no morals whatsoever.

A Good Samaritan is urged to perform acts of random kindness because it is said it does good for the health (helper’s high, diminishes stress, the benefits return, happy thoughts, affiliative connection). Is this why we ultimately become good doers, because it reduces stress? Where is the selfless act in it?

When my friend bluntly asked me ‘So, why aren’t you an atheist then and why you consider yourself an agnostic?” Because there is a difference, and although I am not linguistic expert I like to be very careful with the words I choose when I make statements or assumptions. Let me delimit here what is the difference between an agnostic and an atheist and why I am one and not the other. As I previously stated, I strive to achieved a state of freedom with everything this entails (renouncing to: any affiliation; joining any political party no matter how dear to me are the liberal doctrines; joining any religious group). Atheism became more like a dogma, a religion within itself and atheists seem too vehement for my moderate taste. Moreover, as an agnostic, I don’t totally reject the idea that there might be a higher power out there. Agnosticism entails the supposed unattainability of knowledge for or against the existence of gods.

With this avalanche of thoughts that were rushing through my mind, I was looking at the coin flipping in the air, psychologically preparing myself for what was to come. Karen picked up the round piece of metal and stretched her soft, sweet and pink palm showing me what fate has decided for her. After she handed me over the coin, she abandoned herself to the short attention span, specific to her age, and started running toward the toys isle, as she spotted something no religious chitchat can stand up to: a giant pink teddy bear. As I was looking at her, rummaging through the pile of soft toys, undecided whether she should go for a blue hair Barbie doll or a green turtle, I opened my fist and looked at the coin. All in due time, all in due time…(2008)