God and the machine

No sooner had I got on the bus today - or, at least, before it had pulled away from the next stop down the hill - than the engine died. The driver pulled over to the kerb and tried, with no initial success, to start it up again, while the passengers - the bus was packed and the temperature high - tried, with no initial success, not to sweat. They then, if they were thinking along the same lines as I was, thought about how they were probably going to miss their trains, how they were probably going to be late for work and how they probably ought to phone their work and say so.

Some may have been unmoved by the prospect of being late. Some may have worried about it and some may have taken it more seriously. Some may have taken it seriously enough to say a token please God under their breath. But one woman said it openly, and repeatedly. Over and over again. Sat right next to where I was standing, with Danielle Steel's Zoya on her lap in lieu of a bible, she was repeating, like a sinner, loud enough for me to hear:

God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.

But God would not let it start. Which was a problem, as it became clear that his supplicant was not going to stop until the Lord repented of his folly. The driver turned the key, the engine would not start and the prayer would neither cease, nor slow, nor alter.

God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.
God, please let the bus start.

I have a certain aversion to religion, which I would like to think derived as much from reason as it does from an upbringing within the bosom of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. I have a particular aversion to public religion, and to religion being propounded on the bus. This aversion was reinforced by an experience last year in which, travelling back home on the bus from Walthamstow, I was preached at on the upper deck by two men who were kind enough to concede that the victims of the tsunami may not have suffered their fate as punishment for their sins. I even have a certain aversion to people muttering prayers on the bus when it is hot and sticky and I have already had to get up far too early and they will not shut up.

I nearly said so, lacking common sense as I often do. I nearly said, "lady" - a form I have recently adopted, as it enables me to avoid calling anybody 'Miss' who is a 'Madam', and at the same time avoid calling anybody 'Madam' at all - "will you, in the name of the God in whom you believe and I do not, please shut up? But before you do, can you please, if you will, explain to me why you think God is interested in whether the engine of the 176 bus in East Dulwich starts right now or never starts again? And, further, why God is not every bit as culpable for allowing the engine to stop in the first place, as he would be responsible for graciously allowing it to start?"

"Indeed, Madam" (I imagined myself continuing) "is it not precisely that hypocrisy, in which all good things are ascribed to God and all bad things to Man, that rationalists like myself have every reason to find intolerable in religion? Is it not echoed in the way in which religious people are always able to inform us accurately of God's Will when it comes to politics or personal morality, yet when it comes to cancer, or the death of children, or disasters, tell us that there is no comprehending the mind or the will or the purposes of God? So, this being not only so but self-evidently so, do you think that, for all these reasons but most especially because you are getting on my nerves, you could please shut up?"

I said, as it happens, none of these things. One reason for this was that I am not entirely devoid of common sense, or not, at any rate, at all times. Another was that I reflected that it could, at least, be viewed as a variation on Pascal's Wager: Oh God, if there is a God, start the bus. (One could continue: "if there is a bus", but that would raise more questions that would have been suitable for a quarter to eight in the morning.)

One might as well pray, goes the argument, for no harm can be done by not doing so. Except, as Pascal probably failed to reflect, that if you do so out loud, it may get on the nerves of the atheist standing next to you. Moreover, recalling Pascal's Wager reminded me in turn of Slaughterhouse-Five, which I have read from start to finish perhaps a dozen times. Perhaps more often, even, than the average Christian on the bus has read the bible front to back.

There is a passage which refers to one of the character Kilgore Trout's many unsuccessful science fiction novels - in this instance, The Big Board, which:

....was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and commodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth.

The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo--to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers' arms.

The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl.

It worked. Olive oil went up.

So why not pray? It might even work....and while I was thinking along these lines, I almost forgot about the prayer, audible and irritating though it was.

I let it go. As it happens, so did God, who directed his Mighty Hand to turn the engine over and start us back on the road to Denmark Hill station and the 7.59 to London Victoria. Thank you God, whispered the woman, and went back to her book, and left my weary ears alone. Deo Gratias. I almost said thank you to God myself.