If God proved he existed, I still wouldn’t believe in him

Martin Rowson just doesn’t buy the ideology that comes with God. Even a personal appearance by the Almighty wouldn’t do the trick, he says

The syphilitic atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose career in philosophy came to a sudden halt when he couldn’t stop himself cuddling a carthorse outside St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, believed the death of God was an enormity from which mankind could only recover by willing itself to stand in God’s place. I don’t quite see it like that.

Despite the best efforts of warring religions to stake a claim to a universalist monopoly, each one of them has always been part of a teeming multitude of rival ideologies, which include the kind of atheism I believe in and the kind Richard Dawkins subscribes to. In the frequently mad marketplace of ideologies, an ecology operates, so religions come and go, mutate, adapt or become extinct.

I’ve come to believe in the rightness of my ideology for all sorts of different reasons.