Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London Theres probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. The word that offends against realism here is enjoy. Im sorryenjoy your life? Enjoy yourlife? Im not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment isoneemotion Only sometimes, when youre being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to whats happening to you where youll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, youll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion This really is a bizarre category error.But not necessarily an innocent one The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you werent being worried by us believer Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. Whats so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose youre that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. Youve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and youll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it wont rescue you. Or suppose youre that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rats nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now youre back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that youve fucked up big time. Always before youve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isnt true, now you know you havent the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour youll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it wont ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame.So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that theres probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if its true, is that anyone who isnt enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; youre all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: theres no help coming But lets be clear about the emotional logic of the buss message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing cruel optimism fifteen hundred years ago, and its still cruel.
