Tony Philpott - Faithless: A Journey Out of Religion with Stops for Light Refreshment along the Way

I n missile silos from Omaha to Leningrad fingers were poised over launch buttons. American bombers were flying provocatively close to Soviet borders, Russian submarines were running threatening forays into American waters and in Havana, a bearded despot was ranting bellicose threats of annihilation at all and sundry.

It was Friday, October 26, 1962, and the world was about to end.

In St Columbas boys primary school in Crumlin the gravity of the situation was evident. Teachers left classrooms unattended as they went to the staff room to hear the latest news on the radio. Lessons were essentially abandoned as we were told to read quietly from our history books.

Fifty-two working-class nine-year-old boys do not read quietly when left unattended. They revert to their natural feral state and begin stabbing each other with whatever sharp object comes to hand compass points were a favourite weapon, the nearest arse the favourite target. But on this morning there was a silence in our teacherless classroom it was a silence brought about by the previous evening, an evening when parents spoke quietly and went to vigils in crowded churches and prayed fervently for the cancellation of Armageddon. There was a ground fog forming, the sky was grey, the pavement was grey, men and women in grey coats walked past our house and merged into the thickening mist that deadened the sound of their footfall. I saw my parents leave the house and join this procession. I watched from the window as they walked down Leighlin Road towards St Bernadettes church. It was almost dark, and overhead long, thin ripples of cloud stretched across the sky like a furrowed brow.

When they returned, their clothes dampened by the mist and smelling of the coal smoke that gutted from a thousand Crumlin chimneys, there was tea and Marietta biscuits with thick smears of butter. But there was also a silence; it was as if they had carried the dead air inside with them. My father turned on the radio. An announcer was giving updates in clipped emotionless BBC English but my mother wouldnt let me listen and I was sent to bed.

From my bedroom I had heard snatches of their whispered conversation fall-out, radiation, mushroom clouds words that had suddenly entered their vocabulary. I learned that if the missiles were launched Crumlin would be reduced to a radioactive wasteland. I knew that with over 80,000 people living without the most rudimentary public amenities Crumlin was already a wasteland only now it would glow in the dark.

These events had impressed the silence on the classroom the following morning: no shouting, no flesh wounds, just a sense that something was wrong. And when a dour-faced Father Cullen entered our classroom we all knew something was indeed wrong, terribly wrong.

Sin, he began without preamble, brings tears to the eyes of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And sins against the sixth commandment cause her to turn her face away in grief.

All of us boys knew that the sixth commandment covered sins of a sexual nature, but we were given to wonder why given the fact that we were all about to be nuked the grim cleric seemed to be somewhat off-topic.

Boys who show too great an interest in their parts offend the mother of God. Boys who gain pleasure from their parts will go to Hell if that vile sin is unconfessed.

This was not good news. I had only just discovered my parts and found them to be terribly interesting indeed.

The pleasure gained is a dirty pleasure, and God puts a mark on all boys who engage in this act, warned the good father.

And this mark you speak of, where exactly would it be? On the forehead, nose, ears? I remember wondering.

You see, I had just acquired a small whitish mole dead centre in my forehead its still there all these years later. Could this be the mark? The Mark of the Masturbator?

Father Cullen droned on, frequently repeating himself and never allowing a sentence to close without mention of the parts. Here and there he did digress to excoriate the silver-screen kisses of stars and starlets, reserving particular ire for the perils of Saturday night dances where, he reliably informed us, frenzied young men and women lost all self-control as they came under the spell of the new jive-dancing. Even in Crumlin, he told us, young people were surrendering their souls to a music that was composed by Satan himself.

Having extended his diatribe to include many additional evils, his wandering admonitions finally ended with a prayer that was an appeal to the Virgin Mary to help us withdraw from our sinful compulsions and to substitute visits to our sexual self-service centres with visits to Dublins many holy wells.

Not a snowballs.

While the grim cleric had a maniacal interest in preventing dancing on Saturday night, and masturbation on any night, young boys, my self very much included, had an equally maniacal interest in this marvellously available means of home entertainment.

But thats not the point.

The point is that on that October day, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was just hours away, when at any moment doom-tipped missiles, already primed and ready to launch, would fall on their targets and wipe us all off the face of the earth, Father Cullens only concern was a preemptive strike against sins of the flesh.

I left school that day less concerned about whether a Russian nuke was going to obliterate Crumlin and more concerned about that little mole in the centre of my forehead. It was a small, white blemish, but if I continued using my parts to entertain myself, would it become bigger, perhaps swell into some knob-like protuberance that marked me as a disciple of Onan?

If I were to pick a moment when my journey to atheism began, it was that Friday. The first two mustard seeds of doubt had been planted, and a pair of tiny, childish questions arose in me. If God was all-powerful then why didnt he just smite the Russians? After all, he was well known for his smiting abilities, having smoted the Midianites, the Samalakites and a whole host of other ites during the earlier part of his career. The other doubt wrapped itself around the thought that if God was paying attention to what I did with my parts then he was certainly taking his eye off the ball as far as the Soviets were concerned. Both these seeds dropped on fertile ground as I began to wonder if God had his priorities in order.

As it happened, the following day, the Russians turned their missile-laden ships around and left Cuban waters. To paraphrase President Kennedy, We were eyeball to eyeball in a nuclear staring match and the other guy just blinked.

The world wasnt vaporised on that Saturday. My mother was relieved shed just bought a roast for Sunday dinner.