The Fat Bald Guy

We’re in the car, driving home from my in-laws house when my eleven-year-old daughter asks, “Do I have to believe in God?”

“Not unless you want to,” answers my wife.

“Why do you ask?” I say.

“Because at science camp Brandy prayed to God before we ate and before we went to sleep. She goes to church.”

“That’s nice,” my wife says, “but religion doesn’t make you a better person.”

“Brandy thinks it does; she said I’m going to hell because we don’t go to church.”

I ask my daughter if she thinks hell exists; she’s not sure, though Brandy claims it’s an awful place, full of murderers and child molesters, and people who lock children in closets. My daughter wants to know if I believe in God.

“Not really,” I say.

“Do you believe in hell?”

“No.”

“So,” she asks, “what do you think happens when we die?”

I tell her I have no idea and that nobody else does, either. As far as I know, heaven was created to give people hope and reduce the fear of death, while hell was created to frighten people into behaving themselves.

My daughter says, “I like that fat, bald guy, what’s his name?”

“Do you mean Buddha?” my wife asks.

“Yeah, that’s him, Buddha. He seems cool.”

I think of the smiling Buddha figurine on my desk at work, and then I think of all the territory in the world disputed because of religious differences; I think of the partition of India and all the people killed because they suddenly found themselves living on the wrong side of an arbitrary border; of Arabs and Jews fighting over Jerusalem; of Crusaders marching out of Europe to battle Muslims; I can’t help but recall the evil perpetrated by Catholic priests.

My parents were Catholic (though my father lapsed early on and never looked back), and my mother did her best to pass those traditions down to my brother and me, in the same way the faith had been passed to her. I remember squirming in the pew, uncomfortable in my Sunday attire, too young to understand the meaning of it all -- the solemn authority of the priest, the readings from the bible, and the strange ritual of kneeling to take the Eucharist. “Body of Christ. Body of Christ. Body of Christ.” I remember homilies about sin, original and otherwise, of punishment and guilt, and of course, the devil and the burning fires of hell. I tried one year of parochial school, wore the uniform, had my knuckles rapped on by a nun; I remember being sentenced to stand in a corner for some infraction or another, my nose pressed to the wall while Sister Catherine or Margaret or whatever her name was told my classmates what God had in mind for sinners like me.

When we get home I find my copy of God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and flip through the pages in search of a passage about belief that I highlighted. Here it is: “And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.”

There’s the rub for me: believing in something as wildly contradictory as the Bible, or the fanciful idea that a benevolent, loving God watches over and protects all his children. If that’s the case, God is doing a crappy job -- his children transgress with regularity, and some of the most powerful of them appear hell bent on destroying the planet on which their survival depends. His good book is chock full of admonitions to murder, plunder and subdue. You would think a concerned God would give the wayward children a nudge and ask them to stop misbehaving.

No thanks. I’ll take my chances on the secular side, and I’m happy to let my children find their own way to whatever faith works for them. I go into my daughter’s room after she is asleep, stand by her bed studying her face; no trace of sin to be found.