It's easy to be an atheist...

This was an accusation levelled at me by a 'believer' recently (you know who you are!!! :) ), that it was easy to be an atheist, but faith required work.

Well, perhaps faith does require work - though if that's the case you have to wonder how solid your conviction can be? - but it isn't easy being an atheist. You have a certainty hanging over your head, that it's all going to be over very, very soon, and that nothing you've done actually means anything, cosmically speaking. I've never heard it put better than this piece, by Neil Gaiman, in 'American Gods':

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his perfect copper-plate handwriting.
That is the tale; the rest is detail.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we've heard it all before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in day out, immune to each others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.

Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still you will eat.

There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them will cut us too deeply. Look, here is a good man, good by his own light and the light of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go to the showers - many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes, when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews: there will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. And they are wrong. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy as the Earth is cleaned of its pests.

Leave him: he cuts too deep. He is too close to us, and it hurts.

Women and men, the old and the young of them: there are so many of them, and so many of their stories are tragedies with griefs too deep to be contained, but holding here and there tiny joys, snatched from the darkness like flowers, picked by a fallen traveller from the side of a cliff.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that, it seems so simple.

Life is exactly what you make it, and what you make of it: morality is shifting tide of social concordance, there is no cosmic right or wrong, just acceptable and unacceptable, and then an end. Memories, names, a few lines to wear away on a stone somewhere, and then nothing.

That's the ease of atheism. I'd like to believe...