My Experience of Religion

My experience of religion began in 1947 when I started at a primary school in Sussex. It was as much a part of life as the very rain, but quite early on I perceived a yawning disparity between religious teaching and everyday life. This I have managed to convey in my short story SAINT JAMES THE LESS where the reader has to step into the shoes of a highly intelligent nine-year-old. My father always made a fuss about swearing (q.v. below) and my parents were obsessed with excretion rituals that seemed to be ordained by religious dogma. I was told NOT TO PLAY with "common little boys" and forbidden to associate with some children in our street. We were a cut above these people.

In 1953 three classmates of Lewes Grammar School dared me to commit trivial pranks that included saying to a schoolgirl "I want to shag you" which was absurd as saying "let me kittiwake you". For that and similar smutty remarks I was effectively expelled and flung into permanent disgrace. I feared swearing by accident and so developed a speech impediment and also a lifelong fear of human relationships that still persists whenever I am with Christian people or have dealings with the police, for every good reason as such people are generally "human land mines". Though I was popular at Red Hill Remedial School (q.v.) the good work done by the staff was immediately undone after I was sacked from my job at the Inland Revenue - the Sisyphean adding-up of salaries - for being too slow. My father forced me to attend Sunday school and that caused mounting strife in teenage years. As he became a town council "bigwig" he paraded his piety and attended church services without fail. He made an issue of the fact that as a boy he had been a choirboy and I had forgotten hymns and prayers (because Red Hill School was one of just 3 schools exempt from the 1944 Compulsory worship obligation).

20 years ago the London "Times" carried out a survey on the religious beliefs of adults. Nearly all respondents stated that they felt as children that religion was something nasty imposed on them by adults and they dropped religion as soon as they left school. I did NOT see fit to photocopy that report or send it to my father but I would heartily agree with its contents and findings. Religion is essentially spiritual blackmail imposed by the ruling elite on the population as a means of social control. Mainstream religions are locked in the past and have no idea how to contain wrongdoings now rife because of modern technology, such as internet paedophile pornography. In Christ's day Biblical Israel was a tiny country half the size of Wales with perhaps the present population of Fife and Jerusalem no bigger than Dunfermline.

Christianity is downright soppy and at primary school I underwent gross input overload when forced to sing hymns at assembly. I was always in trouble for being unable to sing. It was a besetting moral failing to be unable to sing yet I was never given credit for such demanding scholastic feats as my self-taught German or overcoming FEARS by persistence with a soldering iron to make model railway track. Christians rant on and on about LOVE and forgiveness whilst I was never forgiven for the Lewes pranks or indeed for acts of self affirmation like my self taught German. All this is mirrored in chapters of "The High Road to Bickulphstow" which I will gladly provide.

MARX attacked religion as "the opiate of the people" whilst FREUD did likewise in his treatises on mental illnesses. I had understood all this at Red Hill School and took it to heart as "gospel truth" alongside facts about the geography of distant countries. Conflict with my parents was inevitable but as I grew older I realised that there had to be some general consensus on how to behave which was entirely independent of any institutionalised religion (q.v. The Hither Green Row, below and what has flowed from it). Now I have speculated what might have happened if my Alan Wright has been a dissident Victorian vicar who had thought out his Contributionism and put it into practice to gain a worldwide following so when I came across it at Red Hill School it was as logical as the Metric System which I unilaterally adopted in 1958. HAD someone with the moral stature of Fox or Wesley invented such a rational code of behaviour, would it have been understood accepted and practiced by the pullulating multitudes of less intelligent people so as to give rise to a worldwide consensus on how to behave uncontaminated by any religious dogma and a general worldwide practice of self improvement so that generations later the moral and intellectual powers of nearly all people approached that of Alan Wright's loyal disciples? More than ever the world needs a universal rational code of behaviour that can deal with the opportunities for wrongdoing hat arise from modern society. Can Contributionism be that Code of Behaviour and my abiding legacy to mankind?

My father singled me out and favouritised my sister who became "Confirmed" in a showy ceremony whilst he remarked about colleagues' sons who were said to be paragons of virtue and I had besetting flaws. He held very Right-wing views, diametrically opposed to mine and maintained that Compulsory Worship should be enforced on children along with national service for boys. There is a very strange paradox about the religious instruction I received. from Canon Norwood at Red Hill School and I refer readers to my essay Canon Norwood's Legacy which explains this paradox.

On Nov 5th 1967 I had ridden from London to pass my old school and then to Tenterden, a town in Kent, and so back towards London where I paused at the National Trust showpiece Bodiam Castle to photograph it. The scooter refused to start and I pushed it wearily some 10 km to Robertsbridge, a wayside station on the Hastings to London line. There I recovered in a pub and the barman told me to run for the ten to eight train to London. I assumed that there would be a later train - MOST RASH because some trains did NOT stop at wayside stations - and enjoyed further snacks. I boarded a train at ten to mine and on the way the guard was emotional about some minor calamity at a place called Hither Green and then train would not go to Cannon Street but Victoria instead. When I reached my digs a resident said that there had been a major accident on the Hastings line and I flatly disbelieved him saying that I had just come from that direction. The following morning I learned that the 7.43 from Hastings that I should have caught had piled up at Hither Green with heavy loss of life.

I recovered the scooter the following Saturday and ride it to my parents' house at Seaford just half an hour's ride away. My parents had believed that I had been a victim of the crash when the stationmaster reported the scooter parked outside. My father then insisted that GOD had contrived for me to miss the doomed train and I was to REPENT and go to church regularly, go to the toilet regularly, go to BED no later than nine and stop associating with "Socialists". He earnestly believed in what I call "Thomas-the-Tank-Engine Christianity" which I define as Christian dogma in the language of the books about toy engines with silly faces. So did my mother who could NOT understand the everyday English of the London quality papers still less the content of my university essays or short stories. Apart from 1981-84 this was forced at me till I stopped seeing them in 1996 with great acrimonies and demands that I should cross the country to visit them. In teenage years I was sickened by the soppiness of the Christian religions especially Catholicism. In primary school years I was told that the Catholics were opposed to the lawful king and tried to blow up Parliament - I understandably confused Mary Tudor with the wife of King George the Fifth and I was told about the Martyrs of Lewes put to death in 1555 for being Protestants but got the date wrong as 1935 when King George the Fifth died. Catholic boys at successive schools sneaked on classmates and paraded their piety and I am uneasy in their company. Now after Catholics have burdened me with a CRIMINAL RECORD after they severely damaged my fine home I flatly refuse to have dealings with them or any other people who parade their beliefs.

As a result of the "Hither Green Row" I was impelled to write "The Socrates of Charford" where fictional schoolpal Alan Wright misses the doomed train, has the same row with his parents and his pregnant girlfriend declares "It's a mad god who derails trains to prove that he owns this world". Christians insist that GOD is omniscient, omnipotent and LOVING but God did NOT intervene to stop the train crash. In 1967 Baroness Wootton pleaded for a Secular Code of Conduct as acceptable and understandable as the rules of arithmetic. I have risen to the challenge and the outcome is "Alan Wright's Contributionism" which amounts to a religion as it embodies a concept of God but that is so far removed from mainstream religions as to be arrant heresy and thus to be suppressed as it makes organised religion "as obsolete as half-crowns". I can provide accounts of Contributionism's cardinal tenets and "theology" alongside Socrates of Charford stories written through Alan’s voice which explicitly illustrate how he is forced to act in moral dilemmas that could NOT happen in Biblical times. In my still burgeoning output of stories about moral dilemmas I may have the basis of a moral revolution and a way forwards for Mankind to resolve conflicts and advance to the level of spiritual maturity I call MOELWYNHOOD after Alan's middle name - where the universal goal for everybody on earth is to live an exemplary life - the ultimate beauty.

I anxiously await constructive feedback.

David Seagrave 13.4.2007