Addressing the Simple Questions.

Three of the commonest questions people ask with regard to the more speculative aspects of life are:

Do you believe in God?

Do you believe in life after death?

Do you believe in fairies?

I groan inwardly when people ask these questions of me, not least because I don’t generally subscribe to the process of ‘belief’ in principle. But there’s another reason.

The vast majority of people who ask them – in my experience at least – take as their starting point a culturally-conditioned presumption as to the fundamental nature of the phenomenon in question. They’re tram line questions to which the questioner has applied no thought to either deeper spiritual possibilities or the complexities of existential enquiry. To put it simply, therefore, there can be no possibility of giving either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as an answer (even if I did subscribe to belief, which I don’t.)

So what do I do? Well, being the sort who doesn’t like to walk away from a question, I try to answer it giving due regard to the various aspects of possibility and speculation appropriate to the subject, and using as much logic as can be managed in the circumstances. And my final word is nearly always ‘I don’t know.’ Or it might be ‘And so I suspect that…’

And then I walk away and wonder why I bothered. Mostly.

*  *  *

If the current crop of truly scary and depression-inducing prospects works out well, and if I can then re-train my mind to start living in the light again, I might do a more comprehensive mini-series on the questions raised above. (Just for the sake of getting it on the record, you understand.) But we’ll see.