I Don't Believe in God, But I Believe in The Gods
It’s not if we believe in gods that matters, it’s which ones
Welcome to You Are a Story, where I write about the many blessings and curses of being ‘homo narrans’, the storytelling animal. I explore ways to live better lives and write better stories, via memoir and insights from neuroscience and psychology. Please consider joining our community! Paid subscribers gain access to all weekly essays, the archive and community chat. Full subscribers additionally gain access to my popular ‘Science of Storytelling Live!’ online masterclasses, on fiction, non-fiction and technique. Full subscribers also receive a personally dedicated, signed copy of my latest book.
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Will Storr’s new book, A STORY IS A DEAL, is available now
Every day has a pattern, and so does every week and every year. A life has a pattern. A body changes in predictable ways across the decades, as does the self that inhabits it: we stabilise emotionally as we age, and our curiosity and sociability fades. These patterns are the rhythms against which we act out our stories. They are reassuring, like the background ticking of a clock. They are levellers: they apply to us all. They conspire to build the sense that there’s a cosmic order to our existence, some grand mechanism sitting just behind the movie screen of our perception that keeps everything moving in the way it’s supposed to, all of history unfurling correctly and as planned.
Like every life, every story has a pattern. Most successful novels, plays and films have a structure that, if the creator has done their job well, becomes effectively invisible. The reader or viewer is conscious only of the drama, as they’re carried from one scene to the next, up peaks and down troughs and around dramatic reversals, each moment seeming so inevitable and true that you forget it’s all been carefully designed and agonised over beforehand by a writer, a true designer god, who ensures everything moves along in the way it’s supposed to. It can hardly be surprising, then, if we sometimes secretly suspect our lives, that resemble novels and films in so many ways, must also have an author.
Fewer Westerners than ever believe in a traditional religious God – about half of Britons and a third of Americans are ‘Nones’, people of no religion. And yet spiritual thinking remains ubiquitous in the West. It’s there in our belief that everything happens for ”a reason” and the stubborn survival of the star signs and the secular remix of prayer they call ‘manifesting’ and in our romantic conviction that there’s someone out there for everyone. It’s there, too, when the next annoying thing happens, and we reflexively look up at the sky and say “oh come on!” I have a bin beside my desk, a large-mouthed thing made of thin wood, bamboo maybe, and when I throw something in it, I almost always miss. It’s unbelievable – by which I mean, I literally cannot believe there’s no greater meaning to my failure. The bin is right there. It is a big hole, raised shin-height off the ground that has been designed specifically for things to go into. I look at the big hole. I toss an apple core directly at its centre. It ricochets off the rim and somersaults, in a wide, extravagant arc, through the air and bumps to a land on the carpet. Sometimes – I swear to you – it bounces off nothing at all, as if the bin has some invisible forcefield surrounding it.
Who am I pleading with, when I plead at the empty air in my office to come on?