Tony Wood: Dearest Alice, you must consider me a terrible failure. You ask what meaning my life "as an atheist in a capitalist society" could possibly have. Well, I quite agree about the general meaningless of my life. In fact, I think the same malaise is besetting all us godless types in this age of believers. I am having a crisis of faith.
Islam built the Alhambra, the mosques of Istanbul, Samarkand, Finsbury Park. Buddhism turned obesity into a positive aesthetic quality. Judaism has bequeathed to mankind a rich trove of mother-in-law jokes, great violinists and bagels. Christianity not only gave us the Inquisition, witch-burnings, exorcisms – the medieval equivalent of ITV's Saturday schedule – but also threw in Gothic cathedrals and Baroque altarpieces. (Naturally, the less said about the confounded Work Ethic the better.)
But what has atheism ever done for us? Scientific rationalism? Pah. Voltairean satire? Pshaw. A dogged insistence on the concrete, material conditions of the world we presently live in, as opposed to one we might inhabit later on the groundless assumption there is an afterlife? Ptish. No, my non-existent soul needs something more, some consolation for the years of boredom and grubby toil that seem to be my lot. Thus I have started to think it should be my task to come up with a lasting, resonant atheist iconography that can be put into practice in buildings, paintings and yes, why not, dashboard ornaments. Any tips?
Alice Waugh: Good old witch burning – such a shame they stopped doing that. In fact, the Church hasn't directly killed anyone for years and years! Whereas it seems that, in countries where religion has been repressed, the state has felt no compunction in massacring or starving its people by the thousand. You might almost think that they were following in the footsteps of the Church – which itself has moved on and set up charities and things.
So how about picture postcards of the Chinese in Tibet or little statues of Pol Pot to remind you of the joys of militant atheism? You could have a "Burn a Buddhist" kit (matches not included) or a board game based on Stalin's purges. As the high priestess of vitriolic unbelieving, I think Polly Toynbee deserves her own nodding rear windscreen dolly, rather like the Churchill dog. If that's too much to stomach, you could of course look to the antithesis of spiritualism and get yourself a Posh 'n' Becks meditation kit containing The Little Book of Calm, two Gucci candles and a Burberry incense burner.
But I shall have to make a Dreadful Confession. There are some who might say that I was not a practising Catholic in the true spirit of the word. I have attended Church only twice this year, I have never yet felt the urge to don a white dress and marry myself to, or at least sign a pre-nup with Jesus. Therefore unable to consume the body of Christ, proper Catholics might well doubt my ability to ease your tormented soul.
Tony: I am stunned by your confession. Though I should say, I have always been impressed by the idea that you could commit all manner of misdemeanours and then abdicate all moral responsibility for them simply by relaying them to a child-molester in a box. Now there's another problem with atheism: no one to boast to.
Alice: I am touched. I shall put on a shell suit (akin to sackcloth and ashes, surely?), ascend the stairs to your office on my knees and wail. I have no idea whether you're into small children but you don't work in a box, so I could denounce myself publicly. As a penance, I suggest a reworking of some old classics, such as: "Hail Sartre; Being or Nothingness – the Choice is with Thee."
On a more serious note, I'm all for public debate and discussion about what needs to change. Paedophile priests are unacceptable, likewise, the Pope's failure to sanction contraception given the AIDS crisis. Would you call in Saatchi & Saatchi?
Tony: I'm not sure PR is the answer. I think the Church needs to get back to basics, and concentrate on what made it so rich and powerful in the first place. Charitable works are all very well, but nothing brings people into the fold like good old-fashioned fear.
Alice: Hmmm. The flaws I see in Catholicism – over-eager accumulation of wealth; corruption; inability to acknowledge past mistakes and correct them – are problems caused by men and mirrored in the secular world. I find it difficult to attach my flag to the Catholic mast because of these failures but I cannot renege on what lies at the root of the religion.
Your view of the Catholic Church is refreshingly medieval but I think that atheist dogmatism is today more blinkered and unyielding than anything that religion can offer. Catholicism does not preclude rational thought and indeed the Jesuits demand that you should actively question all their teachings. Most people who belong to any religion are willing to accept that other paths exist. Your lot, on the other hand, take divergence of belief as an insult and are tireless to the point of harassment in their efforts to convert others. I know many who damned John Paul II's last bull on women without reading it, taking the British media's reporting on trust, yet they dismiss anyone who chooses to believe in God as ill-informed and bigoted.
Yes, I fear you may be some way down the slippery path to fundamentalism.
Tony: I will prove you wrong by agreeing with you: a rigid, obsessive focus on what's wrong with everyone else's ideas has been a recurrent problem with atheism. In fact, I think atheism's major failing is that it has not embraced its own principles of relentless inquiry.
Catholicism, you say, demands that people question all its teachings (though how this squares with papal infallibility I don't know). Doubt is indeed an important part of faith – otherwise it wouldn't be faith, it would be sensible spread-betting. The purpose of organized religion, though, is to explain and systematize what people cannot otherwise make sense of – to attribute the bewildering complexity of the world to the doings of some single transcendent consciousness. Some people find this comforting and/or convincing; in my view, it actually prevents a series of the most interesting questions from going any further, blocking off inquiry at precisely the point where it should keep going. Church doctrine has struggled to keep up with the achievements of science (evolution, physics, genetics, astronomy) not simply out of inertia or bloody-mindedness, but because every scientific discovery pushes at the door of mysteries the Church puts down to God. Atheism by contrast should be about answering every question with another question; about pushing that door further open, if you will, rather than painting it a different colour (though I do like red).
Dodgy metaphors aside, I should say that my own atheism has never been about denying other people's needs, real and imagined. I simply doubt whether an unelected bunch of elderly men who've never had sex and like to wear women's clothes – and I don't mean the House of Lords – should be entrusted with anyone's needs, fears or secrets. And I fail to see how stifling our curiosity with reference to events of two thousand or more years ago, as interpreted by monks several hundred years ago, is going to help anyone overcome anything in the present.
Alice: I have spent a fair amount of time trying to establish the extent of the Pontiff's power. I was informed by a reliable source that the Pope is not infallible unless he makes ex-cathedra statements, which are supposed to pass directly from God's mouth into his own and out again without being tainted on the way. These become part of the catechism and are irrevocable. Apparently, the "bad" popes have never made any, possibly because God stopped them from doing so. On hearing this I went directly to the Vatican website, hoping to find a useful list of the ex cathedras. Unfortunately, the site continually redirected me to the Arts section, which means that I now know a lot more about the Sistine Chapel but also proved in part your argument that the Church wishes to be enigmatic.
The Church should not interfere with government; I stand with the atheists on this point. For the Vatican to subscribe to the doctrine of free will, its leaders must agree to separate society from the individual. Even laying aside the hundreds of historians turning in their graves, however, I must take issue with your dismissal of past events. The central tenet of Christianity, the message that we can all redeem ourselves, is a joyful one and has not changed, just as human behaviour and interaction have not fundamentally changed in that time no matter what technological advancements have been made. Nor has the aim of religion in general; to commune with God or gods through prayer and leading a "good life". Whether it is of any significance now depends on whether you believe it is important to be good. I do, even though I don't expect a very amusing afterlife.
If you answer every question with another question, where do you stop? At some stage you have to take a stance. It's so easy to refuse to make a judgement on various unsavoury practices, to cry cultural relativism and expunge your moral responsibility. This is the only area where I agree with Benedict XVI; I don't care if I injure someone's cultural sensibilities when I condemn, for example, female genital mutilation. As it is a traditional practice, governments around the world have ignored it. Nothing that I can ask will change the fact that it exists and is wrong; isn't it better to try to fight it? Likewise, some scientific issues must be approached with reference to ethics. The Church is firmly against cloning and genetic modification and so, after thinking about it, am I. The fact that it makes my skin crawl has very little to do with it; in the final analysis I believe that once you start fiddling with people's chemical make-up you take away their humanity. I would prefer not to live on a planet designed by manga artists.
But leaving aside, if you will, questions of metaphysics, Good and Evil, answer me this: how could I ever abandon the institution that inspired "The Vatican Rag"?
Tony: It's late, but my suggestion that every question should be answered with another question was not a plea for limitless relativism, or for us all to abandon any sense of moral responsibility. What I meant was rather that moral stances have a tendency to crystallize into dogmatism, into moralizing sermons, unless they are constantly probed and put into doubt. It's only when you can test your convictions that you know their real meaning, and strength.
By contrast, the Catholic and other Churches have for centuries specialized in shutting down discussion. Even when they adopt unreprehensible positions, they still generally prefer to do so in the form of bulls, edicts, homilies rather than, say, democratic resolutions or votes. The basic point underneath all this, of course, is that whatever your personal, ethical relationship to the Pontiff and his cardinals, as a social institution the Church has always been about control rather than freedom, about limiting people's perspectives rather than opening them up, and about shoring up the existing order. The need for all of these things is very much a worldly affair, and faith of the kind you've been arguing for doesn't, unfortunately, much enter into it. After all, if everyone was as resolute in their beliefs and as virtuous as you, what need would there be for a hierarchical, transnational, retrograde, sexist, homophobic organization to tell people how to behave? A horrible thought: maybe it's heathens like me who keep the ****ers in business.
As for your assertion that "human behaviour and interaction have not fundamentally changed" since the days of Christ, I'm of a different conviction. And exhibit A must surely be this argument itself, which, conducted over vast distances through the ether and alcoholic vapours, has definitely gone on far longer than a face-to-face barney would have done in His day and age. Which brings to mind another Tom Lehrer song that aptly describes our combined efforts – "The Masochism Tango"...
Alice: I would have a lot more respect for your argument if you didn't keep on about democracy, my dear. If you look around the world at where "democratic votes" have got us recently, it tends to be into a situation of doom, gloom and disaster.
In the case of the Vatican, people are tending now to respond to overbearing bossiness with acts of civil disobedience; at least the Church, unlike our own dear elected Blair, does not any longer try to lock them up in response.
Other than that, I think it's time to concede defeat on a number of points. I am, after all, an idealist – I have been arguing for the way things should be. I think the best of Catholicism is to be found where it gives the only social support available. The way things stand, however, I think I'll be burning in Hell right alongside you.
