I am not a believer

You'll know, if you know me, that I was raised Catholic and am now atheist. I do bang on about it a bit. Sorry. The propensity to believe in things which are not true, or to ignore things that are true, is something I find profoundly frightening.

I am now going to commit the social crime of telling you about a dream I had.

When I was a kid - somewhere in my early teens, I think - I had a nightmare. I woke up covered in sweat. I've never forgotten it. In my dream, I was sitting with my family and other faceless people watching the TV. There was some kind of political procession or parade being shown. One of the people in the parade was a teenage boy who was balancing on rotating blades - those things you see on the front of tractors, like giant lawnmower blades. As each blade moved forward, he'd step back onto the next one, like an acrobat. The tractor juddered and the boy fell into the blades, but everyone else in the parade pretended it wasn't happening, and so did everyone in the room with me.

Anyway, that was the worst nightmare I ever had. I may possibly have had it because that was around the time I read about Lenin and the famine in the Volga valley. What I got from it was that this man, who I think had set out with good intentions, had ignored the reality of the famine because it undermined his ideology, and in doing so, he made a terrible situation much worse, and people who could have been helped and saved, instead died horribly.

So from my early teens I had this scent in my nostrils, the bad smell of choosing to believe what you want to be true, rather than dealing with messy reality. It never seems to end well, even when, sometimes, the lies seem to be told with the best intentions.

I found that there were things I was wrong about. Lots of things. So I learnt that no matter how little I wanted to listen to the other side of an argument, I had to listen to it. I had to be brutally honest with myself and lay out my own reasoning and examine it and test it.

I find the alternative to this - to blindly accept things, even when they seem to contradict reality - I find this nothing short of terrifying. I am sure that this is not the way we should be heading. And yet, it is. People I believed to be progressive, who were proud of the fact they had shrugged off religion, now attack the very idea of asking questions, of thinking critically, of saying that messy reality matters. And honestly, I do not think that this can end well.