I did not make the world and know relatively little about its nature and workings, writes John Waters
Because the Catholic Church is by its nature authoritarian, and the Irish church especially so, every word uttered about God is interpreted within an established model of thought which is difficult to circumnavigate. We see God as a kind of establishment presence, a forbidding force demanding obedience, respect and adoration.
Thus, any attempt to invoke His name invites a backlash from those who have set their caps against either God or the possibility of God, by which I mean not just atheists and agnostics but also those who believe in God but just don't like Him very much. It is assumed that, by invoking God, you are trying to persuade people to re-submit themselves to an authority they have either dismissed or repudiated.
Catholic clerics invariably suggest that faith in God must be unconditional and unquestioning. But I often think that such notions of faith, religion or spirituality are counter-productive. Catholicism teaches us to think in terms of our duties towards God, forgetting that what defines our relationship with Him is the knowledge of what He can do for us that we cannot do for ourselves. His most vital role in the lives of human beings is in relieving them of the responsibility to take on the role of God themselves. The important thing is not whether I am sufficiently devout or happy with my piety, but my awareness of the fact that I myself am not God.
I did not make the world and know relatively little about its nature and workings. If I cease to believe in God, I am immediately burdened with a responsibility to explain and control, to make the world fall into line with my thinking. Having declared God dead or non-existent, a vacancy appears on the throne of power, and I am impelled to fill it. Only the constant consciousness that the world is mainly outside my control absolves me from this burden.
And so, if God does not exist, I have an urgent need, in my own interest, to invent him. In the knowledge of God I sleep tightly at night, like a child who knows his parents are asleep in the next room. Without Him, I lie awake planning how I might manage the world tomorrow. This is the point I was trying to make a fortnight ago when I wrote about the relationship between declining faith and the growing abuse of alcohol.
Some readers wrote in to take issue with what they imagined I meant. They appeared to assume my point to be essentially along the lines of the old-school religious objections to alcohol - mainly grounded in the alleged sinfulness of abuse, and the consequent absence of piety to be expected in the abuser. These are secondary, if not irrelevant factors, except that in the fundamentalist disapproval of excessive consumption there may well be a logic concerning the fundamental problem presented by drugs and alcohol, buried under centuries of false piety and pseudo-moralism.
This fundamental problem is that drugs and alcohol enable me to feel, falsely and temporarily, that my becoming God may not be such a preposterous idea after all. By dulling my sense of personal impotence, they lull me into a feeling of omnipotence, which remains for as long as the drug is working and available. A human being whose existence is driven by such substances is a potential danger to himself and the world, not just in the more obvious ways, but in the sense that he becomes immune to the idea that he is just a minor DNA variation on the first forms of life to emerge from the swamp.
One reader, a Mr Joseph O'Connor, of Dalkey, wrote that "to suggest that religious people are by definition not capable of alcohol abuse \ obviously absurd". It may be, but I did not suggest it.
The connection between religion and faith is in my experience like the connection between banks and money: having an account does not make you rich. He went on: "One of the most deeply religious people I have known was a devout Catholic priest whose love of the spirit extended to several bottles of it a day."
I don't doubt that this priest was indeed a devout Catholic. Nevertheless, he couldn't possibly have had a true belief in God, because someone who truly believes in God will have no use for crutches. I have known many priests who successfully did battle with the bottle, and all of them were prepared to acknowledge that, prior to coming to grips with their dependency, their faith in God, for all their ostensible devotion, had been illusory.
It is interesting that the Pope, speaking recently in Cracow, spelt out the problem of evil in precisely the terms in which I attempted to present the alcohol problem. Identifying the core malfunction in human society as mankind's attempts to usurp God's role as the creator of life, he condemned man's attempts to "establish the limit of death".
But by confining his remarks to abortion, euthanasia and the cloning of human cells, the Pope possibly short-circuited his own message, causing it to be read as a repetition of the standard Catholic ideology. The insight transcends all such matters, however important.
Every attempt to assert that mankind is self-sufficient has disastrous consequences, mainly for mankind. Man is not God, and never will be, and our best hope of peace, either personally or collectively, resides in acknowledging this reality.