'We are f****d up creatures' How famous Scottish Bishop gave up on God

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

RICHARD Holloway is furious at the thought of heaven. The mere notion of an afterlife disgusts him, confounds him, terrorises him.
When Holloway dies, he wants the blank quietude of nothingness. No gods, no angels, no life everlasting.
It's a rather surprising position for the former head – or primus – of the Scottish Episcopal Church, one of the leading clerical positions in the land. But then everything about Holloway is contradictory.
He embraces the messiness of human life. That's why he abandoned his faith and the church, after all.
Today, he's preparing for death, armed not with the surety of religion and the comfort of faith, but alone as a man of 91 who knows there's not much time left.
He faces the inevitable with remarkable equanimity. While many lifelong non-believers turn fearfully to God as death approaches, Holloway has gone in the opposite direction.
Ever the contrarian, you suspect that if God does exist and Holloway reluctantly finds himself among the heavenly choir, he'll spend eternity disputing with the supreme being.
At his home, near Edinburgh's aptly-named Holy Corner, Holloway is explaining that once his new book is published next month, he'll lay down his pen. It's called, fittingly, Last Words.
'I've written many books,' he says. 'I'm an old man. I can't have much longer.
'But I'm still intrigued by the universe, why we're here, where we came from. I spent my life wrestling with these questions – usually from a religious angle – but I've reached a stage in life where I'm no longer convinced by any of that.'
The memoir charts Holloway's life from his impoverished childhood to becoming one of Britain's best-known clergymen. In the 1990s, he stirred controversy in conservative circles with his defence of minorities, and liberal views on drugs. Holloway once said he'd tried cannabis.
He would eventually feel compelled to leave the church, as he wrestled with his faith. Holloway even faced a heresy trial.
Today, he calls himself an 'agnostic'. His publisher calls him 'Scotland's original turbulent priest'. It's a fair comment when it comes to his life as one of Scotland's few public intellectuals, but in private he's a pussycat – bookish and prone to giggling, a loving husband, devoted dad and besotted grandad.
In an age of superficiality, which values ignorance above knowledge, Holloway runs wonderfully against the grain. He launches into philosophical debate within moments of meeting you, and is ruthlessly honest about his own failings. He is, above all, kind.
He may no longer believe that Jesus is the son of God, but there are few who try as hard as Holloway to live by the teachings of Christ. With the world in a constant state of hate, and cruelty seemingly everywhere, Holloway's refrain is simply: 'Love thy neighbour.'
He's a man of God, who lost his faith, yet still adheres to the philosophy of Jesus. How perfectly – messily – human.
(Image: Getty Images)
Existence
ONE of Holloway's great themes – he's written 20 books – is the question, famously posed by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz: 'Why is there something, rather than nothing?'
It's his starting point when asked about his journey from faith to loss of faith. 'We humans, unlike animals who accept their existence, developed questioning intellects. With our life comes the question: where did it come from? So we invented answers.'
That's where it all goes wrong, he believes. The answers that religions offer clash with each other, 'provoking disagreements and sometimes violence – because one of the characteristics of religion is that they keep falling out with the each other.
'Looking back, I just don't know the answer – except that while you're here be decent and reasonable, care for your neighbour, love one another, then say goodbye. That's where I'm at.'
He pauses, and adds: 'But something else happened to me. One characteristic of most religions is that they tell us very confidently that when we die something of us goes on forever. The thought of that actually appalls me now.
'If I wake up on the other side after I die and I'm ushered into some form of eternal lie, I'm going to be very unhappy. The thought of going on and on – even if I meet all my dead relatives and dear friends – makes me seriously fed up.
'When it's over, I want it over. I don't want to go on forever. That would be eternal boredom. After a lifetime of religion, that's the position I've reached. I hope I've the grace to die well, but I'm going to be seriously pissed off if I wake up on the other side. Here I am, facing the end. I'll be sad to leave, but I want an ending. I believe in endings. I've had a long, interesting life, I've done some good, some bad but, please, don't make me start all over again.'
Holloway remains horrified at humanity's capacity for cruelty. The 'invention of hell' is, he feels, the great symbol of our appetite for sadism. 'The unending torment,' he says, talking of the burning and boiling set aside for sinners. 'Where does that poison come from?' He sees belief in hell as a 'terrible disease'.
Although much of Holloway's life runs contrary to the spirit of these times, his spiritual journey very much accords with recent social changes. 'One of the things that's happened in my life,' he says, 'is the fading of religion. It's melting away like snow on a hot day in Scotland. The same is true in Europe.
'It still prospers in America, but not happily. The invention of religion, while it brought some good into the world, brought an awful lot of evil as well.'
The problem is that religion is 'intrinsically competitive'. Churches teach their followers that 'ours is the right religion, therefore yours must be wrong'. He sighs: 'Looking back, it's all a lot of nonsense.'
Rather than seeking dogmatic certainty, Holloway believes we should ask ourselves: 'Why are we here? Where did it all come from? What can I do while I'm here?'
Conflict
INSTEAD, religions turn people against each other. 'Look at the Middle East. Much of what's happening is due to rival religions knocking hell out of each other. I'm grateful for much of what religion has brought us – art and music – but it brought lethal competitiveness into human existence and I mourn that in my old age. I've had enough of the conflict and the beating up.
'I just wish we could say to one another 'this is how I see it? How do you see it? Oh, that's interesting, well let's be kind to each other while we're here'. It should be as simple as that. You're not here forever. While you are, love your neighbour as yourself. What else do you need?'
Holloway deploys the Latin phrase 'odium theologicum' – 'theological hatred' – to explain what he thinks ails religion. 'Religions which at heart express compassion, all end up hating each other as they think they're right. If we loved our neighbour, that would be enough – wouldn't it?'
He insists that he didn't reject religion. 'It left me.' Why? 'Because humans are questioning creatures. If you ask where the universe came from, and the answer is 'God created it', then the next question must be 'where did God come from?'.
'In theology, they say 'God just is that which is'. But to that I still have to ask the question, 'if God is the uncreated, infallible, omnipotent one, then why did he come up with such a shitty universe? Why did it make such a messy job of the universe?'
After all these years, Holloway is now what he calls 'a compassionate agnostic'. Just to add to the complexity of the man, though, he still sometimes attends church as he enjoys the sense of community. 'I just don't like over-confident sermons telling me what the universe is up to.'
Christianity, he says, 'still holds many lessons for me'. He separates the teachings of Jesus from the 'doctrinal system that it evolved'.
He compares religious doctrine to political ideology. Born in 1933 – 'when Hitler became Chancellor' – Holloway lived through the Second World War, and saw what competing ideologies could do.
He wants to 'milk what's best' from religion – the love and charity – and leave the extremism behind. 'Religion brought a lot of evil and strife into the world,' he says. Holloway prefers 'living with questions, rather than answers'.
Given he clearly lives by the teachings of Jesus, how does he view Christ? As a philosopher rather than supernatural figure? 'As a spiritual artist,' Holloway replies. Jesus was a man with 'imaginative insights into the nature of the universe'.
Says Holloway: 'He was a storyteller, he taught in parables, he didn't teach doctrine. His most profound parable was the Good Samaritan.'
The story isn't just about helping strangers in need. In Jesus's time, Samaritans weren't popular. So the parable warns against factionalism. It depicts the outsider as kind and decent. Imagine a movie today in which an immigrant who crosses the Channel in a small boat is portrayed as heroic.
'The essence of Jesus's parables is: beware what religion can do to your compassion for fellow humans,' says Holloway. 'It can lead you to persecute them, to believe it gives you the right to kill those who disagree with you.'
Heretic
WHEN Holloway was a vicar in Oxford, outside his church stood Martyrs' Memorial commemorating the execution of Protestant 'heretics'.
'Imagine the insecure hatred that would lead you to put people on piles of wood and burn them to death. The insecurity which prompts that kind of hatred is what I dislike about religion. It prompts you to hate your neighbour unless they bow to the gods you've invented.'
Jesus, however, taught only 'radical compassion'. Christ wanted others to be 'lovers not haters of mankind. That's what Jesus brought into the world. His stories are about the confusion of the human intellect. The resolution always lies in accepting your neighbour even though your neighbour disagrees with you. It's a simple yet radical message. But we're such flawed creatures we find loving simplicity hard to live with'.
Atheism, for Holloway, is just another form of ideological control. 'The warning is in the last three letters 'I, S, M'. Isms always seem intrinsically totalitarian. I've explained the universe and that's it, and if you disagree with me then I'll either ex-communicate you, bump you off, or burn you in a fire.
'The more confident your religious position, the more likely it'll give you permission to persecute those who disagree with you. I'd rather have loving puzzlement than absolute belief. Beliefs kill each other.'
There is, Holloway says, 'a fundamental insecurity about humans, because in us the universe has started thinking about itself. My wee cat doesn't think about 'catness', but in us something happened: we ask questions about the universe.'
He adds: 'Humans are thrown into this universe, unsure where we came from, and we seek explanations, we invent isms. Isms fall out with each other. I've reached the stage where I suspect all isms.'
The only 'ism' he'd like to see is 'one that laughs and loves. The things that destroyed humanity in my lifetime were all isms. I'm wary of isms, especially religious isms'.
It was hatred of minorities which was the final straw for Holloway when it came to breaking with the church. In 1998, as primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, he attended what's known as the Lambeth Conference. It sees all Anglican bishops – the Episcopal Church is part of the Anglican Communion – gather every 10 years to debate church matters.
The 1998 event, says Holloway, 'ended up a hate-fest against gay people'. That year, bishops voted that 'homosexual practice' was 'incompatible with scripture'.
Holloway drove back to Scotland and spent time wandering the Pentland hills in religious turmoil. 'I realised I couldn't cope with this kind of organised religion any more as it was telling me that gay men would burn in hell. Some of the people who taught me most about compassionate Christianity were gay – very often frightened because their religion told them they'd be punished eternally. The uncertainty and danger they lived with made them compassionate.'
Roaming the Scottish hills helped him come up with what would be his most famous – or in some eyes notorious – book: Godless Morality, subtitled Keeping Religion Out Of Ethics. 'I argued that if you bring religion into morality it becomes hateful. Religion is a human construct.'
Holloway says of those who hate others: 'I will oppose you even unto death.'
(Image: Richard at his ordination as Bishop of Edinburgh)
Sadness