Happy Holidays ...

... and all that jazz.

Enjoy yourselves with family and friends. Party hard, but responsibly, eh?

In the meantime, a little food for thought, to which I say "hear, hear!":

The happy heathens
By Chris Selley

When the 2001 census-takers descended upon London, Ont., they found 83,680 people who described their religious beliefs as agnostic, atheist, humanist, non-existent or some “other response” such as “Darwinism.” (The census didn’t specify the number of smart-asses.) Assuming the numbers hold nearly a decade later, that makes roughly one in five Londoners pretty much godless. They outnumber Muslims by a factor of seven, Jews by a factor of 45. They’re everywhere, these people.

And they’re miserable. Or so Ian Hunter, professor emeritus at London’s University of Western Ontario, seems to think. “By and large,” he wrote in Tuesday’s National Post, “the appeal of agnosticism … is that it gives the illusion of a safe harbour in a roiling sea when, in fact, it … leaves the voyager without a compass (for Christians, the Bible); without a guide (for Christians, Jesus Christ); without a destination (for Christians, heaven); and without a hope (for Christians, resurrection).”

Blimey. If that’s the agnostics, imagine the despair of the atheists!

Mr. Hunter is hardly the first to propose that non-believers are aimless, woebegone wretches — to argue, implicitly at least, that because nominal belief in God, heaven and resurrection were very highly correlated with happiness among Western people for centuries, therefore belief in God, heaven and resurrection must be preconditions for happiness. Replace the word “happiness” with “misery” and note that the argument is equally valid; and hopefully you’ll see the problem.

Normally, these columns don’t rile me up. I don’t believe in God, but that’s neither a source of pride nor an essential component of my world view. I never believed in God, nor was I ever asked to, so I never rejected religion — which, from my observation, seems to be key to how one approaches this discussion. There will be more and more shrugging people like me in future, and presumably fewer and fewer purple-faced people like the Christian apostate Christopher Hitchens, whom I admire tremendously but whose war against religion is tiresome beyond belief.

My idea of hell is being forced to watch Mr. Hitchens square off against a religious opponent — perhaps his brother Peter — in an attempt to decide once and for all which side killed more people. The Third Reich! The Thirty Years’ War! The Khmer Rouge! The Crusades! Stalin! The Taiping Rebellion! My conception of a merciful God would briefly show himself and throw a coconut cream pie in each of their faces.

What bothered me about Mr. Hunter’s column, I think, was the lumping together of militant atheists, agnostics and people like me to whom it’s simply never occurred to believe in God. “Caught between the believer and the militant atheist are the people who, not quite sure what to believe, take comfort in a kind of sentimental agnosticism,” he writes. “The journey, they will say, is more important than the destination.”

Frankly the idea that the journey is less important than the destination — whether it be heaven or rapid cremation of one’s entire being — strikes me as fundamentalist and creepy. But I’m sure that’s just the godlessness talking. More importantly, does he really believe that everyone between these binary extremes — happy believers and evangelical atheists — is really “caught”? Are Mr. Hitchens and Richard Dawkins perched on one shoulder preaching licentiousness and rape, à la Animal House, and the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury on the other, preaching sweetness and light?

Mr. Hunter, a former professor at the University of Western Ontario, has spent infinitely more time on the streets of London, Ont., than I have. I wonder: Does he really believe 20% of the people he encounters there are forlorn, bereft of hope, spiritually adrift? Surely that’s what he’s implying. How could one have no compass, no guide, no destination and no hope and be anything other than borderline suicidal? Isn’t it possible that a good portion of them are genuinely happy in their modern, squishy “spirituality,” or their militant atheism, or whatever it is I ascribe to? (I hesitate to call myself an atheist these days because people like Mr. Hunter and Mr. Hitchens have conspired to turn it into a de facto religion.)

I have no problem acknowledging religion’s civilizing tendencies, inconsistent as they are. When I enter a church for a wedding or a baptism, I feel no angst but rather joy at sharing in the freely chosen rituals of good friends (though I do reserve the right to needle them about their hypocrisies at the after-parties). Perhaps people such as Mr. Hunter might be happier if they adopted the same frame of mind when they venture hesitantly out into the godless world. Clearly everyone out there isn’t miserable. Having acknowledged that, they might find it easier to reclaim religion from the forces of political correctness, which they believe have puréed it into an unpalatable mush.