Religion does funny things to a young mind.
Raised in a Catholic family whose mother had experienced the heartbreak of a stillborn baby, the five-year-old me was certain that my brother Terence was now floating for eternity in a hazy, God-free netherworld called Limbo. Not heaven, but not hell either. Not quite anything really, because the wee thing had not had the benefit of baptism, the all-important passport to heaven; but neither was he carrying the stain of mortal sin upon his soul, a failing which would have doomed him to hell.
From as early as I can remember, I was surrounded by images and statues that re-enacted the strange stories of my parents’ faith. They included crucifixes of all sizes - one hanging from the neck of my favourite aunt, a nun; others the length of a car, glued like Spiderman to the wall above the church altar; pictures of the Stations of the Cross; picture books filled with non-threatening, pastel-hued images of a near-blonde Jesus walking along the shores of Galilee; pictures on the wall at home of the Virgin and Child, always with splashes of gold around them and a bright halo encircling their heads (each perfectly proportioned, as if to suggest his was somehow tethered to his earthly form and would surely increase its orbit as his body grew); and images of the Virgin riding an invisible elevator into heaven, having been spared the troublesome pangs of human death.
Then there were the beatific plaster statues of the saints that greeted you at the entrance of almost every church. Ours in the small town of Wellsford had a particularly spellbinding one of the Virgin Mary. Wrapped in a sky blue and sinless white cloak, she smiled down upon the faithful from her cloud-shaped pedestal with a look that seemed to say, “I see the depravity within you, but I still love you.”
I loved her right back. In my early teenage years I even formulated a plan to offer the church money so I could own her. I’ve never told this to anyone before and if you repeat it I’ll pray to Sigmund Freud’s spirit to haunt you till you die.
Actually I won’t. Somewhere in my late teens two things happened that changed things forever. First, I discovered sex. Let me tell you - assuming you need telling at all - that in a hormone-soaked competition between religion and sex, only a hopeless optimist would bet on religion and its related belief in spirits.
The second thing was, I moved away from home and began asking questions to which I was unable to find satisfactory answers. So it was that I gradually came to the view stated by the French mathematician Laplace when asked by Napoleon where God fitted into his work: “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.” I would have arrived there far sooner but for the nagging fear, so familiar to any Catholic and, no doubt, others raised in different religions, that my mere questioning was a sure-fire guarantee of the special hell that God had prepared for apostates.
And, possibly, iconoclasts too.
Oxford Languages defines iconoclast as someone who attacks or criticises cherished beliefs or institutions. The word is a portmanteau - a welding of icon (from the Greek eikon or “image”) with the Greek klastes, or “breaker”.
The first iconoclasts did actually go around breaking religious icons on the grounds that they were false idols. Numerous religions today still maintain this belief, which has led to such criminal acts as the Taliban’s 2001 dynamiting of the wondrous Buddhas of Bamiyan.
Most modern iconoclasts, however, are more inclined to do their work via pen and paper. Two who I admire greatly are Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, for their clarity of thought and - equally - for their courage under fire. Both received death threats for stating the case for atheism (and, it must be said, making some pretty disparaging comments about religion). When Hitchens was dying from cancer in 2010 and 2011, more than one nutjob expressed glee at his forthcoming demise and certain eternal damnation. Dawkins is frequently accused of Islamophobia for attacking such things - officially sanctioned and practiced in various Islamic states - as throwing gays off tall buildings, stoning women to death for adultery, female genital mutilation, honour killing, refusing to educate young girls, and issuing fatwas against novelists and cartoonists who dare to write or draw the wrong novels or cartoons.
Then again, being vilified as an iconoclast surely comes with the territory. Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat in 1955 Alabama as city ordinances dictated, was spat on by angry Whites and also lost her job. A Seattle museum recently removed all references to JK Rowling from its Harry Potter exhibition, a response to her outspoken views on transgender issues. Sinead O’Connor may have caused immeasurable damage to her career when she tore up a photo of the Pope on live television in protest against widespread child abuse by Catholic priests. It says a lot about the world that she paid for speaking up while countless priests were being quietly shuffled to new parishes to continue their abuse.
Then there are the literal iconoclasts, starting with Moses who had the golden calf that his unfaithful people created melted down, pulverised, mixed with water and turned into a concoction that he forced them to drink in order to separate the faithful (who survived) from the unfaithful (who didn’t). Muhammad got in on the act in 630 when he smashed up pagan idols in Mecca. In 695, the Muslim Caliph Abd al-Malik broke ties with Christian Emperor Justinian II over the latter’s decision to place images of Christ on one side of his empire’s gold coins.
So it has gone on since, and don’t get too smug if you’re a non-believer. Following the Russian Revolution, the newly installed government encouraged the widespread destruction of religious imagery, as did the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution. You don’t need a religious badge to belong to the cultural smash-and-burn brigade; any variety of righteous fervour will do.
As for me, I’m now what a therapist once described as a recovering Catholic. I walk around with a haunting certainty that I’m either in trouble or about to be, which at times is crippling. I ascribe it at least in part to my religious upbringing, but who can say for sure? As religions go, the version my parents espoused was relatively benign. There was no punishment for “losing the faith”, and my eight siblings, many of whom are devout believers, accord me the same love and respect they pay to those who share their beliefs.
That’s my reminder that much as I find religions of all kinds problematic, religion itself is distinct from those who practice it. Like the rest of humanity, believers run the spectrum from the most splendid of human beings to the most despicable. I’m lucky to have been born into a family that seems to lean towards the fairer end of the spectrum, at least on our good days. If nothing else, we’re living proof that delusional believers and hell-bound pagans really can get along just fine.
Bits and specious
The practice of putting gendered pronouns before names is to be supported. But squeezing it into discursive writing can lead to silliness. Witness this passage in which the preferred pronoun appears twice, creating a sentence that is both clunky and unnecessarily wordy: “Kim (she/her) is an Australian writer completing her MA in Creative Writing.” (I changed the name and country for obvious reasons.)
In response to last week’s newsletter on the word theory, reader Martin Garrood has suggested that the words thesis and hypothesis may also bear investigation. He goes on to wonder whether a third word, hyperthesis, could be useful as a kind of antonym to hypothesis. To which I say, why not?
RIP Robbie Robertson, one of the greatest musicians and songwriters to grace the face of the planet. He and his cohorts in The Band (left to right, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, Robertson and Levon Helm) had the courage and the chops to swim against the tide in the late 1960s and create music that drew on traditions that went way back - all while every other band seemed to vying for who was the hippest and most groundbreaking. They inspired Eric Clapton to quit Cream and branch out in a new direction, they gave Bob Dylan the best backing band anyone could hope for, and in Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Levon Helm, they may have been the most spoilt-for-choice band in history for great vocalists. Robertson was the glue that held The Band together and the one who wrote most of their songs. He continued making music right till the end, as well as films and video clips about what he was up to. They don’t come much better.
Quote of the week
Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.
Mark Zuckerberg