Tag Archives: Death

Premonitions

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Have your ever had visions or premonitions? When I say visions I don’t mean an outward manifestation of a supernatural being or ghost. These things don’t exist so you can’t see them out there, hovering about in the real world. You can however ‘see’ them in your head, as the earliest Christians envisioned the risen Jesus. This doesn’t mean they’re actually in your head, just that you perceive them to be. If they’re vivid enough, you can be fooled into thinking they have a physical presence out in reality. But they don’t; they don’t physically manifest. There is nothing supernatural about them. Visions are a phenomenon of the mind only, occurring under certain, often traumatic, conditions.

Premonitions are a little different. They are the spontaneous appearance in your mind of an event that has yet to happen. Like visions, these are not supernatural occurrences, but the product of the mind. I’ve had a few in my time:

  • Back in my fanatical Christian days, I saw the exact circumstances, that led to the conversion of some college friends. This was months before I’d gone to college and I hadn’t even met the friends in question. I wrote about it here.
  • While on a plane in severe difficulties, I saw a clear picture of  landing safely in Miami. I told my young daughter who was with me that we needn’t worry – the plane’s other passengers were in a state of high panic – that our time hadn’t yet come. (I thought I’d written about this previously too but can’t locate it here).
  • Years ago I saw myself talking to a soul mate in a bar on a cruise ship. This was in the days when I didn’t take – and didn’t want to take – holidays of any sort and long before I had any intention of coming out. Holidaying on a ship was never on my horizons, and, as far as I was concerned, never would be. Yet, strangely I knew to trust that the premonition would one day materialise in reality. Dennis and I have now been together 8 years and frequent bars on cruise ships with alarming regularity.

Here’s what I think happens when premonitions like this occur, at least the ones in my head and probably in the heads of others who experience them. The brain has a set of data about any given scenario. It gathers this data from a wide range of sources: our life experience, others’ experiences, stories, our preoccupations and so on. Added to this data is what is usually more than a little wishful thinking, together with subconscious impulses. The brain then creates a likely or even probable scenario for itself which gives us a momentary but realistic glimpse of what could lie in the future. as for their ‘fulfilment’, there’s also a degree of self-fulfilling prophecy involved, plus the convenient forgetting of those glimpses that don’t ever materialise in the real world.

Nonetheless, the premonitions the brain does create can be vivid and realistic. They’re not illogical or inconsistent in the way dreams can be. As a result, they are pretty convincing.

Which is why, despite her age (95) and how ill she was this summer, I wasn’t persuaded my mother was dying.

A couple of years ago, in what I regard as a premonition, I saw the circumstances of my mum’s death. They were not the same as those she endured during the summer. Rather, she falls asleep in a chair, one she’s only just started using, and when I* go in the room later she has gone.

Perhaps I’ll be proved wrong. Maybe there’s too much wishful thinking in this scenario; I want my mum to take her leave gently and peacefully.

We shall see.

I’ve also had a glimpse of my own demise, but that’s a story for another day.

*Or perhaps it’s my sister; I saw this through my own eyes but it’s more likely it’ll be my sister, who lives nearer, that will find my mum. Whichever, that’s not me in the picture above. I could only hope to be as handsome. Thanks AI.

How A Non-Believer Faces Death

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My mother became seriously ill back in May. As she was 95 this was a real concern and of course my sister and I immediately thought that this must be the beginning of the end for our mother.

My mum had packed an overnight bag and phoned for an ambulance herself after she started haemorrhaging. After waiting in A&E for several hours she was eventually misdiagnosed as having an infection. High doses of powerful antibiotics were then pumped into her intravenously for the next ten days, the back of her hands a mass of angry bruises from all the cannula inserted into them.

It wasn’t until after ten days that a doctor – she saw a different one every day – decided that as the antibiotics seemed only to be making her worse, she might not have an infection at all. He sent her for an internal scan which revealed she had suffered an internal rupture that had caused the haemorrhaging. The rupture had however begun to heal itself and consequently, though she was very ill from the effects of the antibiotics, she was discharged. It looked very much like she had been sent home to die.

The antibiotics it turned out had damaged her stomach and intestine and had seriously impaired her kidney function. Her own doctor took her off all medication to give my mother’s body a chance to heal itself. It seemed an unlikely prospect given her age and condition. By this time my mother was tired and weary of the whole process and prepared herself to die. She willed it on, in fact, unable to cope with the pain and the failure of her digestive system. When I visited her, she spoke a lot about wanting life to be over.

She was realistic about the life she had had, feeling that overall it had been good – though it was not without problems and heartache – and said she would have liked it to continue a little while longer. She was ready though to embrace oblivion and willed herself not to wake up each time she fell asleep. She made peace with her death, which to some extent helped my sister and me come to terms with it too. All the same, I couldn’t believe this was the end of my mum, a significant and loving presence in my life for all of my 71 years.

I tell you all this to emphasise just how a non-believer faces their extinction. Not with pleas to a God who isn’t there but realistically, unsentimentally, stoically. I could only admire my mother’s bravery and hope I’ll show the same courage when my time comes. The old saw that there are no atheists in fox holes is just that: a meaningless and vaguely offensive cliché.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

My mother didn’t die. After a few agonising weeks she began slowly to recover; very slowly. Her doctor’s gamble and her own deep-set determination allowed her to turn a corner. She began to eat again; an extremely limited diet and a trial and error process that often made her ill again, but gradually she began to put on weight again. Eventually she became mobile again; limited to be sure, but a start. She began to take an interest in the world again and to watch TV. She said though that she was worried abut recovering because she couldn’t face going through the process of dying all over again.

I stayed with her for 3½ weeks last month so my sister who lives nearer her could take a holiday. My mother began to make her own breakfast and lunch again and to take small walks outside. The steely resolve that had prepared her for death and also helped her recover, now set her on a course of regaining her independence again. This is where she is at now, making progress still, pushing herself to do more. How much time she has left, no-one knows. Of course it’s likely to be short, given her age, but it will be a gift however long, however brief. And I suspect she won’t have to go through the process of dying again. But more on that next time.

In the Beginning, our End

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For God so loved the world that when the first humans couldn’t resist the temptation he deliberately put in front of them, he abandoned them, sending them, and every other creature that occupied the Earth, into terminal decline. He loved the world so much that because of this one transgression he introduced death into his not-so-perfect creation. And he didn’t care. He let them and their descendants all the way down to the present day waste away, miserably and painfully, until they were finally extinguished.

He had to adjust other parts of his creation to assist in this process. He changed the purpose of microbes and viruses so that overnight they became the agents by which he could wipe out the humans he loved so much. God knows what the original point of these creatures was, but he adapted and evolved them with his special magic to suit his new, all-loving purposes. He rapidly evolved still others – flies, larvae, scavengers and still more microbes – so that they became waste disposal systems. Without them, the corpses of all the humans and animals he’d condemned to die would lie around forever, cluttering up the Earth.

This is how the Bible tells it anyway (with a bit of extrapolation from me), the linchpin on which rests not only Judaism but Christianity too. Yes, I know it’s an allegory – though there are still many today who take it literally – but either way, it’s a terrible story. Even without an understanding of evolution, not to mention human psychology, it makes absolutely no sense.

The priest or whoever wrote it (it certainly wasn’t Moses) didn’t have special insight into the mind of God (guess why) nor did he know anything about any archetypal human couple. (He wasn’t there, see.) Instead, he saw the sorry state of the world, including how he and his fellow tribesmen lived short, brutish lives that after only about 40 years (if they were lucky) ended in a miserable death. It seemed irreconcilable with his deity who he felt sure must have created a perfect world. How could he not have? Disease, death and decay could only be the fault of humans. They couldn’t possibly be his perfect God’s doing. So he wrote his myth but still couldn’t exonerate YHWH – his neglect and callousness, not to mention the necessity to evolve microbes and the like to carry out his final solution for his so loved creation. He doesn’t come out of it well; he’s ‘loving’ but having unfairly tempted his creation, he takes offence when they ‘disobey’ and condemns them all, including those not yet born, to a short brutish life ending in a miserable extinction. That’s how much he loved the world.

The original author or someone after him tacked the Adam and Eve story onto an existing one about the creation of the Earth and from then on, up to modern times, his myth was accepted as the truth about our origins (and ‘fallen state’). How do we know this? Because this is how myths are created. They are early attempts to explain life, the universe and death, usually set in the distant past and involving the imaginary gods of the culture that produced them. They were never written, inspired or passed down by deities that have never existed; they’re explanatory stories made up by humans, all of them now redundant.

In which Howard visits Heaven and talks to Jesus

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I recently finished reading My Descent Into Death and the Message of Love Which brought Me Back by Howard Storm, in which he recounts events surrounding his serious illness in the 1980s. This, he is convinced, caused his death after which some very dark beings, who at first he mistook for deranged medical staff, attempted to drag him off to a very sinister place. Fortuitously, Jesus and his angels were on hand to intervene and rescued hell-bound Howard.

Perhaps in my Evangelical days I would’ve lapped up stuff like this, but not now. A Christian friend – the same one who lent me the book I wrote about here – bought me. I promised I’d read it but what a struggle it was.

Once rescued by Jesus, Howard felt divested of his ego and overcome by love. He underwent a life review and was ever so gently ticked off for all the times he was less than kind. Instead of enjoying this state of bliss, however, Howard took the opportunity to bombard Jesus and the angels with banal questions, which given Howard’s comatose state they had time to answer at great length over many hours (which is how long it takes to read about them.)

When he came round and discovered he wasn’t actually as dead as he thought he was, Howard was a changed man. Once back on his feet, he joined a succession of churches so he could share his experience. When they didn’t fully appreciate how he’d really spent time with actual Jesus, he trained for the ministry himself. He has been a pastor now for several decades, regaling people with the tale of his encounter with fantasy heavenly beings.

Undoubtedly, Storm’s experience was powerfully real to him, so much so it changed his life on his return to reality. As I read My Descent Into Death, however, I couldn’t help but feel I’d heard it all before: in Paul’s account of his imaginary visits to heaven and his encounters with a resurrected Jesus. These were probably not Near Death Experiences (NDEs) – though who’s to say – but, like Storm’s, brain-induced hallucinations.

As scientist Britt Hartley explains in the video sent by koseighty a while back, we now have a much greater understanding of NDEs; they are culturally determined hallucinations induced by the brain as it begins its shutdown. Hartley is clear that under stress the brain is more than capable of creating reassuring visions for itself.

But like Howard Storm’s, Paul’s ‘revelations’ are more than a mere sighting of Jesus. Paul too has a long discourse with the heavenly being conjured up by and in his own brain. He imagines Jesus explains to him how salvation works (in a mighty complicated way) in the same way Howard does. I’m sure this discourse, like Howard’s, did not take place during the visions but were worked out later, over time, as Paul, and Howard, interpreted what the inner-visions ‘must’ have meant.

Oddly though, given they both encountered the same character, it’s difficult to reconcile the messages each was given by him. Storm’s is of a mushy universal love, devoid of the demands and convoluted theology of Paul’s Jesus. Strange that the Jesus Christ who is, according to Hebrews 13:8, the same yesterday, today and forever, has modified and softened his message in the two thousand years between Paul’s and Howard’s revelations. It couldn’t be because Howard’s is the result of his conditioning by a modern American culture that sees Jesus as a shiny, white-robed figure surrounded by angels who dispenses nothing but all-embracing love and happy-clappiness, could it? It surely could.

 

The Great Eternal Life Scam

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Heathens like me, and you dear reader, are gambling how we’ll spend eternity by rejecting Jesus. We’re turning down everlasting life to live in the mire of our own sin. Or so we’re told by evangelicals and other religious zealots.

So convinced am I that the claims of Christianity are wrong in every respect that I know I’m not gambling anything. Like everyone else who has ever lived, I will not survive my death. This is the nature of death – extinction, obliteration, oblivion. It is absurd to believe it is anything other when we know it is not.

I would not be averse to existence, particularly my own, continuing after death. I’d definitely go for it if that were available; I like being around, all sentient and self-aware and such. This is the sentiment to which Christianity appeals; most people do not want to think their existence is finite and that this often challenging life is really all there is. But life patently does not continue post mortem, except in works of fiction: fantasy, science fiction, the gospels.

Everlasting life is not the only promise Christianity makes, of course. There’s the whole ‘getting right with God’ shtick, forgiveness of sins and Life in all its fullness. Eternal life is the big one though, Christianity’s most miraculous, death-defying special offer.

Those doing the gambling are not atheists or sceptics. It’s Christians themselves doing that, succumbing to the false, utterly worthless promise of life after death. Those fully committed to Christianity spend their lives enslaved to its cultish demands, desperately trying to convince others they should surrender to its preposterous claims.

I value this life too much to squander any more of it on such nonsense. Yes, I did once, but I saw the light and stepped into it. Life is what you make it and needs to be lived before you die. There is zero chance you’ll be able to once it’s over.

Burst the bubble, those of you trapped within it. Your one and only life awaits you here on Earth. The clock is ticking.

The Great Resurrection Scam

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Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.  For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.

1 Thessalonians 4:13-17 (circa AD 49-51)

Paul said that because Jesus died and rose from the dead others would too. How does this follow?

He also claimed that all a person had to do to be sure of a spiritual resurrection was to believe that Jesus had already risen (1 Corinthians 15:20, AD 53-54), How did he know this? Almost certainly it came to him in one of his visions and his subsequent ‘revelations’ (‘the Lord’s word’ as he puts it in the letter to the Thessalonian sect).

Possibly, though less likely, he learnt it from the Christians he persecuted prior to his conversion. If so, where did they get the idea from? That the cult members in Thessalonica had to ask Paul what would happen to those who had passed away suggests this wasn’t a significant concern prior to this point. Paul and other early believers thought the Messiah/Son of Man was going to appear within their lifetimes (‘we who are still alive’ etc). It was only when cultists started dying off in noticeable numbers, and the Lord remained a no-show, that it started to become an issue. Paul had to make something up. And make it up he did.

Beyond The Grave

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A few years ago, a friend of mine was working in his front garden when he spotted what he was sure were a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses further down the street. He aimed to back inside before they reached his house, from where he could safely ignore them. But he timed it badly and before he knew it, the JWs were upon him.

My friend was under some stress at the time so when they asked him, ‘Wouldn’t you like to live forever?‘ he responded with, ‘Good God, no. This life’s bad enough. Why would I want it to go on forever?’ This took the wind out of their sail though didn’t divert them from their sales pitch for very long.

I’ve been in the same state of mind myself, and maybe you have, when life was so difficult I spent far too much time contemplating whether being dead might not be a better option. Thankfully, I couldn’t really contemplate doing anything about it, and was aware of the effect it would have on my loved ones if I did, but nonetheless I spent too much time considering – desiring even – my own non-existence.

I was pretty sure this was what awaited after death. I hadn’t, by this stage of my life, the conviction of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and mainstream Christians that a better life, one that would last forever, lay beyond this one. Instead, I made radical changes to my life in the here and now, to lift myself out of the slough of despond in which I found myself.

I love life now. It isn’t without its difficulties, not least the physical problems that come with older age, but I enjoy it to the full (apart from supermarket shopping). Having found my pearl of great price, I hope life will last for many years yet. I can’t guarantee it will, of course, so I make the most of every moment, surrounded by people I love and who love me.

Would I like my life to go on forever? Certainly, but I know it won’t. There is simply no evidence life continues after death. Assurances that it does in religious texts is no evidence at all. Even if it were, the type of eternal life suggested by the Bible, worshipping a needy, despotic God for evermore, is not the way I’d like to spend eternity.

Ask Christians how they know they will and the best that can come up with is that the Bible tells them so or that Jesus promises they will (which amounts to the same thing.) Ask them where this everlasting life will be lived and you’ll get one of two answers: in heaven or here on a restored Earth, once Jesus ‘returns’. The earliest writings in the New Testament support the here-on-Earth scenario. The later ones – perhaps because their authors had begun to realise Jesus wasn’t coming back any time soon – start, like John 14:2, to hint at a celestial existence.

No Christian – no non-believer either – has survived death to face eternal bliss or eternal damnation. Some will tell you that rising from the dead happens in an ethereal way immediately following death. The soul (or whatever) is resurrected either to be reunited with God outside of time and space or thrown to the demons in hell. The biblically savvy, like the JWs, will tell you the resurrection will not occur until Jesus’ return at some point in the future. Significantly, both expectations occur off-stage: the first in a undemonstrable plane of existence, the second in a future that never arrives. Both are wishful thinking, scenarios dreamt up by those frightened of their own non-existence.

The offer of everlasting life is one of the New Testament’s most pernicious lies. The idea is not to be found in the Jewish scriptures that make up the Christian Old Testament. It is a later development, dreamt up by extremists who convinced themselves, on the basis of a few visions, that God would ensure their continued survival, just as he had Jesus’s.

If this isn’t how the promise of living forever came about, then what is the evidence there is an existence beyond death? Empty assurances by first and second century cultists are not it.

  • Show me someone other than Jesus – whose ‘resurrection’ is metaphorical at best – who has risen from the dead.
  • Show me evidence that ordinary human Christians have already gone on to eternal life.
  • Show me, if you don’t subscribe to this view of immortality, the souls who rest with God awaiting a future resurrection (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Revelation 6:9-11).
  • Show me just one human, Christian or otherwise, who has gone on beyond death.
  • Prove that the promise of eternal life is real.

What Happens Before We Die (according to me)

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Did you ever go to a party when you were a child and your parent told you it was time to leave before you were ready? That’s how I feel about death. I’m enjoying the party too much to want to leave. Although my ‘parent’ hasn’t told me it’s time to go just yet, I know they will before I want to. I can’t see me ever being ready really, though perhaps whatever cruelty nature visits upon my body and mind in years to come will change my mind about that. But as things stand, despite my fibromyalgia (a constant painful companion) and the levels of anxiety I allow myself to feel over trivial matters, I really have too much to live for. My partner Dennis and the adventures we have together; my family with my lovely grandchildren; my friends with whom I spend many good times; the many, many simple pleasures of life; everything I still want to do and try.

So, as the days, months and years roll by at an alarming rate – there’s definitely more of life behind me than there is front of me – it’s these things that matter in my life. 

All of this might suggest I’m afraid of dying. While I doubt the process of dying will be much fun, having so much to live for – enjoying the now – dispels, perversely, the fear of death itself. I’ll face it when I get to it, raging, I hope, against the dying of light, throwing a shameful tantrum because the party will go on without me. I’ll die, though, in the knowledge I actually got to it when so many didn’t. I’ll have enjoyed it too, for the most part, with a only a few bad times, fewer regrets and many more memories.

As Christians often tell those of us who are delusion-free, I am without hope. Of course I have hope – in continued days and achievable happiness – but none that there’s existence beyond death. I am confident there isn’t. Consciousness is completely dependent on the brain; when my brain dies, so do I. That will be that. The fantasy promoted by the New Testament, that there’ll be eternal life in a new body, is nothing but hopeless wishful thinking, that in spite of overwhelming evidence we go on. There is instead serenity and purpose in accepting the reality of death. It’s part of the deal, after all.

So let’s all eat, drink and be merry, as Ecclesiastes says. Enjoy life and help others, where we can, to enjoy theirs.

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Dennis and I will be on one of our adventures when next I’m due to post. While I’ll set WordPress to publish it, I can guarantee it won’t. If I can do it manually (depends on whether I have a signal) I will. Otherwise I will see you on my return.

What Happens When We Die (According to the Bible)

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Street preacher Dale McAlpine was busy regaling the shoppers of my home town yesterday with the good news that they’re all sinners destined for hell. The God who created them will, Dale assured them, face an eternity of torture unless they turn to Jesus.

Dale didn’t have many (any) takers for this wonderful good news. One brave person, a young woman, asked him why, if people are resurrected, the cemeteries remain resolutely full. Good point! Dale, armed with his megaphone and hectoring ignorance, responded that it is the soul that survives death and is taken up to Heaven to live eternally with God. For those without Jesus, their souls will be consigned to hell where they will burn for eternity.

How unbiblical is that? The Bible does not teach that believers will go to live forever with God in heaven. Eternity in Heaven is not on offer. The New Testament writers anticipated the arrival of Heaven – God’s new Kingdom – on Earth. When it did, they believed, the dead would be resurrected: the saints to everlasting life in new spiritual bodies on a regenerated Earth (Revelation 21:1-4), the rest to eternal damnation.

Paul has some vague ideas about what will happen to those who die before the general resurrection – he thinks their souls will be kept safe ‘in Christ’ (whatever that mean but doesn’t suggest they will be living it up in Heaven. Rather, he describes them in 1 Thessalonians 4:14-15 and 1 Corinthians 15:20 as being ‘asleep’. Many Christian ‘thinkers’ really take exception to this idea, though Paul says this intermediate state won’t last for long; the Kingdom on Earth was imminent. He believed it would arrive while most of those he was writing to were still alive (1 Thessalonians 4:17; 1 Corinthians 15: 51-52).

It’s all tosh, of course. Paul had absolutely no idea what happens to people after death. He invented everything he said about it, from the independent existence of sleeping souls to Jesus arriving on the clouds to resurrect the dead in new spiritual bodies. These bizarre ideas come from a fevered brain convinced it had seen a dead person alive again and thought it had once taken a trip to the third heaven (whatever that is).

How do we know Paul invented it all? Because of the aspects of his teaching that should by now be history: the arrival of God’s Kingdom on Earth, the resurrection of the dead and Christians being supplied with new spiritual bodies ( while the rest of us roast in hell.) None of these things happened when he said they would, or indeed at all. We know it too because we are aware both instinctively and empirically that there is no continuation after death. When the body ceases to function so too does the ‘self’, which can be generated only by a living brain. We have no ‘soul’ that goes on alone after death and which will one day be clothed in a new sparkly body.

Here’s my challenge then to those who believe and propagate such nonsense; the Dales, the evangelicals, the fundies and the oxymoronic intellectual Christians of this world: provide evidence of one individual who has survived death in the way Paul said they would. Show us one believer who has been resurrected or whose soul is currently sleeps in Christ or who now lives in Heaven. The only proviso is that this must be a real person who is 100% human; not a mythical demi-God, not a character in a story, not someone for whom the evidence of a resurrection is extremely poor. Not, in short, Jesus. Where is the evidence anyone else has experienced a resurrection or embarked on their eternal life in heaven? Billions of believers have died since Paul created his fantasy. Surely there must be someone…

Suffer, Little Children

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I recently wrote the post below for The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser and thought that if you missed it, you might like to read it here. 

I was reading Gary Marston’s latest post on Escaping Christian Fundamentalism God Is So Good! He Allowed Ten Thousand Children to Starve to Death Today.

Gary has his very own Christian troll (All atheist/agnostic bloggers have them) called Swordmanjr, who leapt to God’s defence, the mighty Creator Of All Things needing fallible, flawed human beings to do this for him. Swordmanjr accused Gary of scapegoating God who, apparently, is not really responsible for suffering, nor indeed anything horrible.

I guess God could be being scapegoated if it wasn’t for the fact, his Son, God Incarnate according to some, tells us he cares for human beings much more than he cares for sparrows (which is, admittedly, not much at all), that he is concerned to the extent that he numbers each and every hair on individuals’ heads (Matthew 10:29-30). This must be before he allows so many of them to die of starvation and in natural disasters.

The evidence is that God does not care. He doesn’t care if you’re a child born into poverty who then dies a slow, miserable, painful death through malnutrition. He doesn’t care if you’re caught up in a natural disaster like the recent earthquake in Turkey (which, according to some Christian nutjob, was God’s response to Sam Smith’s performance at the Grammies) in which your entire community and you yourself are wiped out. He doesn’t care if you die of a nasty virus, which ultimately he’s responsible for, as millions including Christians did during the pandemic. He doesn’t care that you die, when, or how horribly. He – just – doesn’t – care, period.

Jesus, as he was about so much, was plain wrong about his Father’s caring. The real world does not and will not match up with this early Christian fantasy.

Believers who leap to God’s defence invariably do it by launching vitriolic ad hominem attacks on non-theists who dare to criticise his shoddy performance. In doing so, they demonstrate yet another of Christianity’s disconnects; it’s promise that it makes new creatures of people, filled with love and compassion (2 Corinthians 5:17).

‘By their fruits shall ye know them,’ proclaims Jesus in Matthew 7:15-20. If the Christians who lurk around atheist blogs are anything to go by, those fruits are often pretty rotten: vitriol, spite, hatred… ‘evil’ Jesus calls it. These Christians frequently end their comments with a threat: one day the atheist will stand before God’s judgement throne and then they’ll be sorry: hell awaits!

God is not there in this kind of behaviour. He’s not there when humans suffer and die, frequently horribly. He’s not there in the Bible verses that promise he is there in such circumstances. God is not there.