A Very Small Atheist Does the Holy Land

“You know, I think the least workable argument for the existence of God is the ontological argument,” spouts my spawn from the back seat. (He has abandoned all the kids’ books on various religions I bought him in favour of The God Delusion, which he borrowed from his grandparents, and has now read several times.)

“Mm,” I say. I’m still grappling with our all-too-21st century manual car and endeavouring to remember how to do a hill start.

The last manual car I drove, 18 months or so ago, required rocks under the back wheels to achieve this feat. But my tried and tested technique of revving the absolute fuck out of the vehicle then letting the handbrake off only once I’m confident the car won’t roll back is producing an alarming combination of squealing, fishtailing and, often, a stall to boot. Jerusalem, let it hereby be said, is a city of hills. “What one’s that again?”

“It’s that God being the most perfect being in the world,” my son continues. “God has to exist, otherwise he – or she — would have to be imperfect. Of course, an achievement — say, the creation of the universe — becomes even greater if there’s a handicap… ”

The lights change. I squeal, fishtail, zoom up the hill, finish releasing the handbrake, change up into second and seamlessly hit fourth.

Clunk.

Fuck.

Stalled.

Fuck, fuckity fuck, fuckity fuck fuck FUCK.

I reapply the handbrake and relocate first gear.

Will this bastard high-tech car even start in gear? Please tell me I don’t have to enter the special anti-theft code and go from scratch!

Still, no one’s hit me. No one’s even hooting. Wow. Probably too shell-shocked by avoiding rear-ending me to hoot.

“… And the biggest handicap one can think of is non-existence,” my spawn continues, undeterred.

I start to get that feeling I did at university, when I was in one-on-one tutorials with one of the world’s experts on Wittgenstein. About Wittgenstein.

‘So, Theodora,’ drawls the Wittgenstein expert in my head, as I sit crucified on the sofa, wishing there was someone, anyone, in there with me to say something, anything… ‘Does the chair feel pain?…’ The clock ticks… ‘Ummm….’ my seventeen-year-old self begins…

“Think about it,” continues my son, excruciatingly, unbearably… “If one doesn’t exist an achievement like the creation of the world is all the greater…”

The car starts! Easy off the clutch! I can DO this! I can TOTALLY do this! Wait for the biting point… People are starting to hoot…

Only NOW? Lonely Planet has been really quite unkind about Israeli driving, I think. These folk are FAR, FAR better and nicer than London drivers. (Later, I look up what Lonely Planet has to say about my home town: “To drive in London is to learn the true meaning of road rage,” it begins.)

“I can’t really think about this now,” I say. “I need to concentrate.”

“This is a crap car, isn’t it?” Zac says, with touching faith. “It keeps lurching all over the place.”

“Actually,” I say. “I think the problem may be quite the reverse. This is really rather a good car. And the only decent cars I’ve ever driven are automatics.”

“Yeah,” he says, with eleven-year-old wisdom based on his first driving lesson from the Bedouin. “Clutches ARE really difficult, aren’t they?”

Zac’s newly articulated, if not newfound, atheism first reared its head at the Western (Wailing) Wall, the last remaining piece of the last Jewish temple in Jerusalem, where observant Jews still go to pray and others post prayers from overseas.

I hand him a disposable yarmulke to cover his head before he enters the men’s section.

“No,” he says. “I don’t want to do this!”

“What?” I say. “Why?!”

“It’s OK,” says an observant Jew in a yarmulke, who is guarding the entrance, smiling benignly down at Zac. “We ALL believe in the same God. Up above! We just wear this to prove that God is above us…”

Zac looks at me, helplessly. He doesn’t believe in any God, but he’s not going to get into it with this guy.

“Because God is above ALL of us,” continues the guy.

“No,” Zac hisses to me. “I just don’t feel comfortable with it.”

“OK,” I say, salvaging what I can from this. “You stay here. I’ll go to the women’s section.”

I leave him standing uncomfortably as yarmulke-man smiles God’s ineffable love at him.

Personally, I think he’d have been more comfortable at the Wall.

“What was the problem?” I ask, bewildered.

“It felt disrespectful,” he says.

This, I can get. As a lapsed Catholic, I felt very uncomfortable the first time I visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place where Jesus was (allegedly) laid, and witnessed pilgrims laying hands, foreheads, candles, crosses on the stone that Jesus’ body (allegedly) sanctified.

That is, in case you’re not a lapsed Catholic yourself, the “I-could-be-struck-by-lightning-because-I-no-longer believe” type of uncomfortable. AKA the “you-stay-I’ll-go-outside-and-get-some-air” type of uncomfortable.

“But…” I say. “But you didn’t have a problem going up to Temple Mount to see the Dome of the Rock, or wandering around the Church of the Sepulchre. And you’ve put on sarongs to go to Hindu ceremonies in Bali. You’ve worn trousers and long sleeves for mosques, taken your shoes off in mosques and for Buddhist temples too… What’s so different here?”

“It’s just…” he says, and he’s struggling to articulate. “This is a very, very holy place. This is where God created the earth. Where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. Where Mohammed ascended to heaven. It’s a very, very holy place to three religions. And it doesn’t feel right.”

I figure, later, that it may be that Judaism is new to him. And, also, that he knows enough to know how old it is.

This place has been sacred for thousands of years. It’s written in blood – rivers of blood — and in the stones. In a way, you can feel it. It is, as the Romans would have it, numinous.

You can’t kill so many people over one small spot of land and not have something left from their souls. Or essences. Or however one can frame this as an atheist (I’ll ask my son).

Now, I had high ambitions for unschooling the Holy Land. You don’t get much more educational than Israel and Palestine.

Zac was going to read the Bible. Well, he was going to read Genesis, Mark and a couple of Psalms. Well, I wanted him to read Genesis, Mark and a couple of Psalms.

“Let’s get the King James version,” I say. “It’s some of the most beautiful English…”

“No,” he says firmly. Both his grandpa and I have tried him on the King James version of the Bible with what one might optimistically term ‘mixed results’. “I’ll read the plain English version.”

“OK,” I say. I slip one psalm past him in the King James version.

“Alright,” he says sulkily. “We sat down and wept. Second exile. Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon. I get it, OK?”

We start on Genesis.

“This is boring,” he says.

“Bwahahahaha!” I say. (I went to convent school. You can insert your own joke here.) “You think THIS is boring? Try Numbers. Or Deuteronomy. Genesis is as interesting as the Old Testament gets…”

I didn’t realise how LONG Genesis was, I have to say.

And reading it with Zac is like having Richard Dawkins in the sodding room. “There!” he says. “You see! Look at God setting humans up to fail!… Created woman second? That’s TOTALLY sexist… And OF COURSE it’s all her fault…”

We get to the bit where Noah is passed out drunk and naked and something untoward occurs, and Canaan is sentenced to slavery for him and all his descendants.

“But what did Canaan DO?” he asked (along with aeons of biblical scholars throughout the ages).

At which point I remember quite how much incest and slavery there is in the Old Testament (perhaps not coincidentally, some of it is contemporary with the pharaohs).

“I don’t know,” I say, in the tradition of RE teachers through the ages. “Maybe we leave this here?!”

Surely Bethlehem, the town where little baby Jesus was born (and I can no longer write those words without thinking of Kath and Kim’s “little baby cheeses”), will inspire him with the magic of walking in the footsteps of Jesus?

Not least because he sleeps through the first few kilometres of it, a depressing ribbon of refugee camp services and cheap stone cladding, like any Palestinian township anywhere in the Middle East.

I wake him up on Manger Square, in front of the Church of the Nativity, where the little baby cheeses (try it in a broad Australian accent) were allegedly born.

And we progress into the “grotto” below, lined with pilgrims who may well have spent their life savings to be here, in the precise spot where either Jesus was born or, more likely, some hard-as-nails third century Palestinian tour guide decided to tell Saint Helena that he had been (“and that’ll be five bags of gold, thank you very much, lady!”), we both are silenced by the guilt of not sharing faith.

This is, for some, a highlight of their lives. They are crying. Holding each other. Tapping various items against the sacred stone. It makes the buffalo sacrifices we witnessed in Indonesia seem frankly rather matter-of-fact.

I begin to realise why Muslims keep the infidel out of Mecca. So they can get on with this sort of thing without being observed. Not that keeping infidels out of Israel/Palestine has ever proven a helpful longterm strategy.

“You know,” Zac says, once we’re a safe distance both from the church and from our lovely Palestinian Christian hosts (being an atheist in Bethlehem involves a lot of whispering in corners). “Jesus was Jewish, and most likely a Jewish revolutionary, too. He definitely wasn’t a Christian. That was all Paul. And none of the gospels were written until, like a hundred years after he died. Which, incidentally, was definitely not in 0 C.E..”

“Oh,” I say, not blenching at the PC use of C.E. for A.D.. “When was he born, then?”

“7 B.C.E.,” he says, conclusively. He’s clearly learned something.