Fluffy God

I have to come clean. I don't believe in Fluffy-God.

I did. Once or twice, when the sky was cloudless and I didn't know very much. I was about ten, I think. Or thirty.

I have been following up on some of the inspirational people who Tweet at me. And I have come to believe in a Collective Unconsciousness.

I have found lovely mums with big hair and big hearts revelling in the Beatitudes who strive to be pure in heart and deserve to make it.

I have found skinny, bald prophets who have found emptiness through wanting nothing, and I am happy for them.

I describe, you understand, I do not criticise.

It makes me think: thinking does me good.

I started thinking when my friends began dying off. I was younger then, and embarrassingly selfish. How dare they leave me? Fluffy God got a good kicking, let me tell you. And when my family started dying off too - well, I ordered him to pack his bags and leave.

That's when I discovered another embarrassing thing about myself... . I'm not cut out To Be An Atheist. So what now?

I wish I knew. I'll have to think some more about THAT.

One chill day, fifty kilometres from Umtata, I watched a scrawny child fill a plastic bottle with filthy river water to sell by the roadside. I just watched. She haunts me sometimes, this little girl dressed in rags. I ask myself, 'Why didn't I try to do something? There are many things I could have tried to do, but I couldn't move.

I couldn't take it in. That's the truth of it.

This little one, wasn't part of my world, she didn't fit, she couldn't be happening. This is what Collective Unconsciousness does to religious people. Fluffy God doesn't allow this. IT CAN'T BE HAPPENING.

True God, I think, and I think there is one, opens our eyes to the suffering of others, and whispers, 'Go on, TRY...' He doesn't need religious institutions, or religious people. She just IS.