For the Love of Christ

A grand piece from The Guardian's Juie Burchill:

Once, of course, I was a teenage atheist; and it brings me no shame to say that, but it certainly makes me smile. I grew up, and stopped being an atheist, in my 20s, in the 1980s. But it was only when my parents died, within a year of each other at the turn of the century, that I became religious. I'm going to be a bit un-Christian here, but nothing makes me hoot, mock and retch like people who bleat that they stopped believing in God when their parents died. Don't get me wrong – if a parent buries a child and rails against God, I can see why. But to lose one's faith because of the death of a parent? That's what old people do, the swine, they die on you! And don't tell me about loving your parents – I loved mine just fine. I am an only child who, well into her early 20s, simply assumed that when the surviving parent kicked the bucket, I would quite cold-bloodedly top myself because life would be simply incomprehensible without them. But when my father died in 1999 and my mother in 2000, I stood in the same church twice in two years and felt the same sense of what I can best describe as joy as I watched the two coffins move away from me. While all around me wept, I was filled with the absolute certainty that they were on their way to a better place...

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