Nobody panic 

A cynic’s guide to unbelief

When I was a little girl, my parents would scold me with scripture. ‘Sita,’ my mother would say, ‘where there is love, nothing is too much trouble and there is always time,’ which was her way of telling me to stop whining. If my brother and I would fight, she would say: ‘So powerful is the light of unity, that it can illuminate the whole Earth,’ as though our altercation over the TV remote was the reason for ethnic tensions in Kosovo. My father was the same, always on about justice and mercy and truth. The Most Great Sin in our house was backbiting and gossip. ‘Thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others,’ he would say, ‘and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbour.’ Needless to say, my breaking news – that Jessie Stevens told me Marjory Klimt was pregnant to Scotty Graft and her parents were making her drop out of school – was not welcome at our dinner table.