For many readers this may come as a shock. I am an unbeliever. I don’t believe in any gods. Kitten is sort of religious though. And it seems weird to many but here is the thing? Religion is not that important to her and it is not important to me.

I am from a very tiny and non-vocal group of atheists who come from an ex-Hindu background. We don’t get much representation among the Dawkins of the world and our issues are often sacrificed. There are terrible issues in India due to the culture and activity of Hindu fundies that often goes unopposed.

But it puzzles me to see Stephen Fry being taken to task over comments he made about his beliefs.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo

I sort of agree with him. In fact I agree with him. As an atheist we are often told we are immoral because we do not pray or accept anything “bigger and better than us”. Or because we don’t do as we are told.

We are capable of judging every creature out there. We can tell a dog that it has been naughty because it has chewed up all the cushions. Once stung by a wasp or a bee, our response to any insect with a yellow and black marking is one of fear due to our judgement of that first sting.

We routinely sit down and judge and analyse the actions of mythological entities. Modern day ones, be it the modern heroes of celebrity or our latest book. Do many of us not shrug our shoulders at the antics of Christian Grey or indeed root for Ron, Harry and Hermione’s victory over Tom Riddle? So if we are to assume a god exists why are we not allowed to judge him? Is the idea of putting a god on trial so ludicrous?

There are terrible things in the world. Many of us never get to experience them. Many of us endure simple terrors. Our only experience of the depths of human suffering come through our news. And this may not even be that far away.

Let’s look at Rotherham. Oh let’s ignore the media forces on one side trying to blame multi-culturalism, immigrants and Islam and on the other side blaming the police (personally? I think it was an unwillingness to actually make bridges between the communities that allowed such a gang to survive in the gap. The Pakistani community didn’t trust the police and the Police didn’t trust the Pakistani community and in the end a tonne of children got hurt. Religion had little to do with this so much as not getting that multi-culturalism is about dialogue not fearing repercussions for investigating a gang of Asians). But back to the point I was trying to make? These young girls had committed no sin. They still were raped and suffered at the hands of predators. The same applies to the victims of Gary Glitter, Stuart Hall and Jimmy Saville. The same to all those kids abused by the Catholic Church. There are things that are terrible close to home too.

You don’t have to live in rural India (I live some 40 Km out of the nearest city) to see the stigma and effect of poverty. You can see some of it at home.

The truth is? We atheists don’t blame any gods. Stephen Fry is being highly rhetorical when he speaks of a trial of an imaginary being. We may as well hold Pestilence and Famine and War in the Hague for being mass murderers (Death doesn’t really kill people…) for all the common sense that makes.

IF there was an over arching power that controlled the world much like a Sims game and we could speak to him we would ask him why he basically behaves like a sadistic player in the game. Imagine those poor tortured sims who had loved ones drowned when they were forced to swim in pools with no ladders, imagine what they would ask their torturer?

So we wonder what we would ask? Why appear on toast when there are people who desperately need things from money to stave away starvation to a few more minutes with those they love. How does this entity pick which sports team will win? Clearly both sides are praying to him.

Bone cancer is just one of the many myriad questions that this thought experiment throws up. And I have seen cases of Onchocerca volvulus which lives in people’s eyes.

And while we joke about the sadism of torturing the digital tamagotchi that are the Sims, if we did it to real creatures we would be quite justified in being labelled as selfish evil maniacs.

There is no problem of suffering in Atheism. We evolved to survive and often survive at the cost of other animals. Through our development we have alleviated the suffering of others. There are some we can help, there are some we cannot. So the once deadly suffering of an infected appendix can be fixed with a surgery. But we still cannot fix a broken heart. There are some pains that just cannot be fixed and must be endured. There is no god of broken hearts. There is no cupid. And while we like to think that relationships happen without sticks and stones and lumps and bumps we know that cupid’s arrow is more like communication and a little sacrifice.

Or maybe he doesn’t even exist, and so suffering is simply suffering and has no explanation and doesn’t contradict the universe or its ‘maker’ because it has no maker and because the universe isn’t good or just, it’s simply blank, uncaring, unfeeling matter.

Which is pretty much how it really is. We however are not. We are alive and sentient and sapient. We can understand each other’s suffering. We can see someone cry and feel for them. We can feel their pain and their fears.

When a quarter of a million people were killed by the Asian tsunami in December 2014, there was little outcry against religion from the families of the victims. For the most part, they drew succour from their faith. They may not fully understand why God lets tsunamis happen, but they believe that in the end the universe is just and evil will not finally triumph.

One notes quite cynically that the people who drew succour from their faith were the ones who were still alive. Thank you powerful being for saving me, never mind the 250,000 people who died. They clearly weren’t praying as hard.

Or you know. They died because of a geological event of enormous magnitude set up a deadly wave.

Stephen Fry believes that this isn’t an injustice because there is no controlling intelligence that sets up this “cull of humans”. We do think there are great and grave injustices out there but this isn’t one of them. This is a tragedy. Geology and Physics crushing Biology.

The two basic alternative explanations for the existence of the universe are that it has a maker, namely God, or that essentially it came from nothing. Scientists still have no real idea how something can come from nothing, but let’s assume for the sake of the argument that it did come from nothing. If the universe came from nothing, if there is no God, then matter is all that exists. If matter is all that exists, then human beings are simply accidental by-products of evolution.

Sigh. Evolution does not work that way. We aren’t “accidental by products”. We are clearly a highly effective survival strategy that survived. Everyone is so hell bent on claws and speed and wings that they forget that humans had two advantages. Endurance to run almost any animal to exhaustion and the tools to kill at range. In one fell swoop we made the deadliest claw and became fast enough to kill most things. Sure we can’t catch Cheetahs but you can’t outrun a thrown spear or an arrow.

We are at the apex of a millennia of tool users. Not accidents.

This is why someone like Professor Stephen Hawking can say “the human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet”, or another atheist, this time philosopher Carl Becker, can claim we are “little more than a chance deposit on the surface of the world carelessly thrown up between two ice ages by the same forces that rust iron and ripen corn”. This notion, which is very widespread among scientists, that we are reducible to our chemicals, leaves little or no room for belief in an overarching moral law or for that matter in free will.

If there is an overarching moral law, the people who follow it certainly aren’t those who blindly follow the alleged edicts of any god. Just Chemical Scum? We don’t operate by magic and fairy dust! The entire science of biochemistry is dedicated to understanding life’s chemistry. We are intelligent chemistry.

That means that every emotion you have ever had is due to a chemical change within you. The fear you feel when you watch a scary movie. The love you feel when your partner walks in the door. The hunger you feel when you see something tasty. Pleasure, Pain, Lust, Anger… they all are part of how our brain works and that is via chemistry. Molecules and Atoms.

And you may think this is “terrible” but would you rather be made out of magic? A black box where you insert food and get Shakespeare? Or do you think that the chemistry in our brains can create both the worst depravities of the world like the Nazis or ISIL on one hand but can produce such sublime art such as Van Gogh and such searing prose as Shakespeare. No I prefer to believe the latter as we can understand the human mind and it isn’t some magic box that eats pie and produces UKIP but one that can be understood because it works on a natural principle.

And I am loathe to listen to any group of people whose claim to morality once included defences of atrocities. Be it the ownership of slaves among the Abrahamic faiths or the Caste System of Hinduism.

Francis Crick, the co-discover of the double helix, has said: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Yes. This is true. The world is filled with unfortunate people with head injuries whose lives are a cruel reminder of this fact. That our entire personality is due to the shape, structure and function of our brains and that errors in that have devastating consequences.

It is why we can stop a seizure. As I said, would you rather we gave you Valproate or Phenytoin to stop a seizure than pray to the gods of Epilepsy and sacrifice a chicken?

Fry discussed love with Gay Byrne, but if Crick, and the likes of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, who also deny the existence of free will, are correct, then love is simply a chemical reaction in our brain and nothing more. It is certainly not freely chosen or freely given.

And an atomic bomb is merely the decay of atoms.

And so what if love is a chemical reaction? A Van Gogh is just a bunch of chemistry on canvas designed to reflect different wavelengths of a small spectrum of light. So what’s so impressive about them? Why do we queue to see the Mona Lisa which is just a bunch of paint.

The dialogue here is meant to evoke a test tube reaction as mine is designed to evoke a B&Q paint department.

Those of us who believe in God believe we are created in his image and likeness and that he has given us the gift of free will.

I would then point out that we are capable of being just as cruel and capricious as him then. We created our gods in our image.

But Stephen Fry seems to want it both ways. Like Hawking and Crick and Dawkins, he does not believe in God, but unlike them he still affords himself the luxury of believing in free will. Fry needs to explain why he is right and his fellow atheists are wrong.

The existence of a god is not necessary for free will. At no point does the idea that we can make decisions freely ever require the existence of any god.

Similarly, Fry affords himself the luxury of denying the existence of God while holding on to belief in an overarching, objective moral law against which the actions of others, including even God (if he exists), can be judged. But matter cannot produce a moral law. It cannot produce ‘justice’. If matter and its emanations are all there is, than morality and justice are human inventions and nothing more. We invented them, like we ‘invented’ belief in God.

A moral law developed by the analysis of actions and the ensuing human cost. Many religious people believe that an atheist is like being a sociopath. That we don’t have rules and regulations and law that we follow. On the contrary, we have to think about why a law exists and why it should. And make sure it is for the maximum benefit of all rather than the few.

Law exists as a way to help humans get along with each other and socialise. Let some kids play with each other. Without rules they just fight and cry. It is the rules of games that enables them to play. And that is similar to how we create rules to allow our society to function. We look at rules and laws and how they affect all.

Remember these same “divine rules” were quite okay with the ownership of slaves and genocide. Until we humans said “no”, the divine rules were used to justify inhumane practices.

I am afraid what people fear is not our moral law, but that our moral law may supersede and rule out the ones proscribed by religious belief.

We can be good without a god. One doesn’t need to believe in any gods to be good. Morality isn’t linked to belief.