London's Atheist Buses

London buses next year will carry a poster. It will say 'There's probably no god; stop worrying and enjoy your life' or something along those lines. Richard Dawkins seems happy, since, apparently, people of faith don't think and this will make them.

Good grief.

I'd quite like to see the sort of phrase that would have made David Hume and Blaise Pascal smile on those trashy bendy buses. And, as a member of a church who'd be proud of a multilingual, brilliant pope who can think in Latin and who invokes the injunction 'credo ut intelligam' quite often, I'd be happy for people to think. Catholicism's logic (and most of the women attached to the church) are but two of the reasons to be attracted to it, along with the prospect of a monopsonist god who could turn water into wine and die for love.

That's the thing, isn't it? You may or may not have faith, reader. It's none of my business. I know awful believers and deeply loving agnostics and atheists. My brother, god bless him, is one of the latter. I have a social theory of catholicism, but as someone who aspires to citizenship the only time I will deploy it is when the more vulgar bigots turn up and make me. Life is worth enjoying and love, hope and faith are radical, cardinal things. I'd suggest to you that you read Michael Burleigh's Sacred Causes alongside the shrill, deeply sub-Malesherbes aversions of The God Delusion, but ultimately, I don't care. Go and find some relaxation in someone's arms and come back later, frankly.

If those London buses raise a smile and make you think in the recession, may good luck come your way. Just don't expect me, and the Jews, and the Muslims, and those who get some sort of comfort from Protestantism, to agree with you. And watch out for those Greek types.

Don't turn up at this blog littering my comments box with statements about magic unicorns or spaghetti monsters. I've known people who were tortured by the Soviets for their belief; who pleaded for God to find them in concentration camps, and people who reaffirmed with radical courage that their lives belonged to their faith whilst standing at Ephesus.

And I've known women of radical courage whom I love as life itself wracked with pain refuse to cry out to God for unbelief, and loved them all the more for it. And had lovers who were atheists and women of beauty who could still stand beside me at church and love.

I've known people who refused to murder at My Lai, and who would have died for the love Christ meant to them. I've known gay people who stood at the Vatican and rejected God and who are still decent people shaped by my church, and women whose lives were lifted and transformed by their saints. Magic unicorns don't do that. Show some respect for people better or cleverer than you or I.

And smile at those buses. They convey priests as well, y'know. It seems quite a cheery idea, after all.

UPDATE: I am developing a bizarre affection for the confused anticatholic Member of the European Parliament, Mary Honeyball, or rather for her blog. She is of course over the moon about these buses, which have made her look up from the Da Vinci code and the history of Maria Monk and suchlike, for a while.

In her honour, and because she'll have to find her way back to London to pick up a reappointment note from the party hacks who assemble the list that nominates members of the european parliament to their jobs, here is a video. It is of the Magic Roundabout. In it, the mad pink cow Ermintrude decides that she is a bus--but decries the shabby service her nationalised colleagues offer, before heading off for the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand.

How appropriate.