When Clive Aruede’s twelve-year-old daughter asked him “What is science?” he couldn’t have known quite how much it would change his life. But when I meet him in a gloomy bar in Borough, Clive pinpoints this innocent question as the beginning of a long and arduous journey towards atheism.
The phrase he uses is that he “came out”, which implies that he had been hiding ‘in the closet’ – that he felt the beliefs or lifestyle of an atheist would be seen as objectionable to wider society. But being an atheist in the UK is hardly controversial. In the 2011 Census around 14 million people – a quarter of the UK’s population – claimed to have ‘no religion’. But for Clive this didn’t matter, because Clive is black.
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