Bondi Bloodshed Proves It: God Won’t Save Us – Only Nature Can

"Surely you have glimpsed the true glory of the world? The ones where the water is like molten gold and the silence so profound it becomes music that prickles at your skin."

I am a godless man. I am an apolitical man. 

And I see these facts less as choice than necessity.

We all live in fear, in an increasingly alien world. We are lonely ghosts at the bottom of a deep sea, wandering through tangled kelp forests of ideologies and dogma, just trying to see. And knowing that behind each gently waving frond might be the open maw of a monster. 

Too often, that monster is us.

I live in a country defined by conflict. People have always spilled blood into this soil: in the name of religion, of kings and queens, and of land itself. But long before this, before the Romans were turned back from the North, before Christian monks arrived from Ireland to indoctrinate, before monarchs fought endlessly for claim, people lived in relative peace.

For centuries we existed as roving bands of heterogeneous tribes. Conflict existed, of course, as it does among all animals, but it was local and primal, born of survival rather than ideology. It was not evil, wanton slaughter in the name of fiction. 

And what these tribes left behind, in their standing stones, their intricate carvings, and their ornate jewellery, suggests they had leisure to care about beauty. They lived in a world where food and shelter were abundant enough, and conflict minimal. They could concern themselves with pleasure, art, meaning, and place. 

And if this is not still the abiding dream of humanity, then what is?

We can’t go back to tribal communities, but we can consider some of their values. We can ignore conflicts that don’t concern us. We can stop feeling threatened by people who believe differently. We can look inward and ask what we can actually control. 

The world is fucked. We were never meant to exist in such vast numbers. We are an apex predator run wild. The solution is not more division, not arguments about right and wrong in parts of the world you’ll never see. All you can do is look after your world, the one that exists in the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. 

In a world of monsters, you can only know yourself.

Call me nihilistic. Call me naïve. Call me selfish.

But in a world of people you can’t understand, what is there to do but withdraw? I’ve never understood politics or religion. I cannot understand how intelligent beings put faith in something so far beyond their control, and so unerringly corrupt. 

But I get it. I have the luck of being surrounded mostly by trees and hills and silence. There is no gunfire here, no children’s bodies in the dirt.

Yet still, when I read your comments about freedom and fairness, I struggle to understand why you think your opinion matters or you play a role. These systems of religion and politics exist to control you. They are stories told so you’ll stay in line, so you can function in a tribe of strangers swollen beyond all natural purpose. Jesus was just a charismatic man who was good at PR. God did not create man; the earth did. 

Likely our true destiny is to destroy ourselves, to build the technology that replaces us. All we truly have left is the space between our ears. Why fill it with hatred or tortured thoughts about things you can never affect? Fill it with dreams, imagination, and passion for something you can control.

Humans are no more obligated to one another than cats are to dogs. 

Unless you are a devout follower of faith, or unless your direct family has been collateral, this is not your war. There is no news here other than old news: religion kills. 

There is no understanding what happened at Bondi. There is only more conflict in trying to. 

I went to a mate’s funeral this week. He was a father of three in his mid-forties. An anaesthetist. Exceptionally sharp, with a roving wit. A lover of climbing, biking, sailing, skiing, and all things Scottish landscape. He had a savant-like ability to identify any photograph taken in Scotland, no matter how vague or obscure. A smir of a loch, the brow of a hill, a glimpse of a misted glen – he could tell you where it was. True love. 

At the funeral, held in a church – though he was not religious – I sat on a pew along the side, facing across the congregation. Facing his wife and three children under twelve. Behind them stood stained glass windows twenty feet tall, panels of blues, reds, yellows, greens, oranges and purples, all depicting the goodness of Jesus Christ. 

But Jesus was nowhere to be found. Nothing in the Bible saved Neil, nor softened the end.

You hear clichés at funerals, never had a bad word to say, etc, etc. But for Neil they were true. He never criticised anyone. He was funny without ever being cruel; knowledgeable without arrogance or imposition. He listened well. He loved.

And still he died. Still three children must grow up wondering why he isn’t there. Why the good die while those who hate and destroy keep living.

So what should they do with their lives? Dwell on this unfairness? Ruminate on the conflicts and evil of others they will never understand or control? 

Or do what they can for themselves and those they love? 

Go outside. Appreciate the natural world in all its indifference to us. Worship that.

I’m not here to condescend anyone for believing in something. Some people need faith. Maybe if I weren’t such a godless fuck I’d feel more fulfilled. But I find it perplexing here to read these dogmatic comments from people who surf. 

Because surely you have glimpsed the true glory of the world? You’ve seen it in the sea. You’ve felt it in those quiet moments that you think of now. The ones where you are alone, and the water is like molten gold, and the silence so profound it becomes music that prickles at your skin. 

You realise that you are not that important, not that clever, not that much of anything really. And this realisation frees you. That’s what life is. The earth as your church. Salvation isn’t found in the twisted creeds of humanity, but in the natural world, as it was and is, and never will be again. 

Appreciate it while you can.