Apparently, John Lennon's atheist-marxist anthem "Imagine" is the nation's favourite song. Why? I suppose because it does what many people today would like religion to do - easy answers, cosy cliches and a catchy tune. It gives a very good superficial impression of being profound, and makes people feel good inside, whilst at the same time it is too radical as a manifesto for anyone to be seriously expected to do anything about it themselves. It used to be one of my favourites too, when I was at a predominantly Christian school and still thought of myself as part of a radical minority. But now I think it's just irredeemably banal. Nothing to kill or to die for... nothing to get out of bed for, more like. It's the kind of naive wishful thinking that every thoughtful eighteen-year-old thinks they're the first person to come up with. Religion is regularly explained as/ accused of being a source of comfort for those who cannot bring themselves to face up to the reality of widespread and arbitrary suffering - but it's no wonder that religion isn't up to much nowadays, when even atheism has descended to that level.
In a similar vein, Amnesty recently launched a campaign called "Unsubscribe". The idea was that one could visit a website and "unsubscribe" from torture and human rights abuses. Now, I heard about this campaign because I'm an Amnesty member and support their work, but I didn't visit the website. The reality of suffering is unpleasant but, unlike unwanted marketing, there is no opt-out. You can't resign your membership of the human race. World peace, contrary to the assumption of all Miss World contestants and most world leaders, cannot be ordered on-line to arrive in time for Christmas.
One of the arguments for (at least the monotheist) religions being a comforting delusion is that the state of the world is incompatible with the existence of any almighty and benevolent deity. Surely any believer must be wilfully ignorant of the realities. Some even say that it may have been understandable in past centuries, but it is impossible to believe in a benevolent god having witnessed the events of modern times - two world wars, the holocaust, the millions killed in the USSR, Cambodia, Africa... The whole gamut of man's inhumanity to man over the course of the twentieth century. Well, let's get something straight. War, famine and cruelty are not new. What is new is that we're so suprised by them.
When most of the world's major religions were born, and in most of the times and places where religion is or has been predominant, life has been hard. For most of history, when crops failed people died. Infectious disease was rife. Violence was a way of life. And religion was not a comfort. Perhaps sometimes it made things more explicable, but usually only by piling blame on top of existing misfortune. More often, it has been stressed that the will of God is inscrutable. A favourite theme of mediaeval art was the arbitrariness of death, which comes unannounced and is no respecter of persons.
For most people in history, and for most of the world's population today, death was terrifying because it was so close. For us, unfamiliar with death, it is more than terrifying. It is unspeakable, almost unimaginable. Death is in bad taste. I recently attended the funeral of an elderly gentleman who had passed away peacefully - and I was shocked by the way the crematorium sought to make death neat and palatable. The coffin arrived, already closed, and was placed not in the centre but on a conveyor belt to one side, as if the ceremony was just a pause in the process of tidying-away. After a few, fairly cheerful, hymns, the priest committed the body 'to be cremated' - no mention of flames. And then a prudish curtain, moving with smooth motorised propriety, concealed the coffin from sight and another loud hymn blocked from the mourners' minds and ears the distasteful physical fact of the cremation.
Don't get me wrong - a funeral is for the living more than the dead, and it was clear that the family found the service very appropriate, which is the most important thing. The deceased (how tastless it would have been for me to write 'the dead man'!) had been over ninety, and had I suppose been on the conveyor-belt to his grave for some time. Weeping and wailing and rending of garments would not have been appropriate for what was, after all, the best kind of end any of us can hope for. But I cannot imagine how that crematorium would have coped with the death of a young person, or with a suicide, or even with a surviving widow. Unexpected death is so relatively rare now that we do not know how to react - there is no etiquette for it.
Once upon a time, death and the dead were our constant companions. In graveyards, and even more in the cairns and necropolis sites of the pre-literate world, there is a sense that the dead are an important part of the community and the commemoration of the dead a vital part of what made the naked ape into a human and the group into a society. Just a century ago, every lady who passed by in a black gown and bonnet was a public reminder of the devastation that a death can wreak. Modern death is a private matter - the families take their dead away in a smart little urn and perhaps, if they so wish, leave a little plaque in weather-resistant plastic with a personal message ('reunited' is a particular favourite in this supposedly secular age). "Stop all the clocks" is a favourite poem at funerals, but in practice it is no longer considered the done thing to inflict the atrocity of your bereavement on those who are not directly concerned.
I couldn't help contrasting the restrained, respectable treatment of an actual death (in a Christian family, by the way) with the only requiem mass I've been to - not for an individual but for All Souls. This time, the (empty) coffin was at the centre. And what a coffin! Draped in black velvet and attended by four tall candlesticks - the Catholic church showing that it can do goth chic as well as the Satanists, and did it first. The words of the requiem spoke of torment, of terror, of pleading. This is not the comfort of a cosy afterlife, the tidy compensation for injustices in life, the tying off of loose ends. This is the comfort of stopping all the clocks, of spending an hour looking death in the face and not being ashamed of your grief. Perhaps something similar is offered by the two minutes silence on armistice day - a time when we cannot politely avert our eyes from death.
Whether or not the idea of the afterlife is a comforting one depends on your own viewpoint. But life after death was certainly a very relevant question when one might at any time be a week away from finding out the answer. Although the death rate has remained steadfastly at 100%, death in our own time and place has become much less prevalent and visible. What was once one of Christianity's great selling points is now more of a liability - the vagueness with which the afterlife is described, and its general implausability, are fundamental weaknesses when life is pretty good and most people find it hard even to believe in their own death.
But whilst most of us are pretty ambivalent about immortality, an increasing number long to taste mortality. Sir Edmund Hillary, who died this week, is not remembered for any great achievement in extending or improving our mortal span, but for risking his own life in a delightfully insane demonstration of human willpower and endurance. Whether it's mountain-climbing, parachute jumping, swimming with sharks or spending a week in the jungle, risk for the sheer sake of it is now a popular past-time. There is something fundamental, uniting, even peculiarly life-affirming about mortality. When the prophets wanted to find god, they too went up the mountain, away from everything that humans have made, to confront what made them human. Perhaps what religion can still offer us is not a superfluous life after death, but a reminder of the vulnerability and thankfulness of fragile human life.