A creative writing exercise on my life thus far.

I started as a sperm in one of my father's testes; shortly afterwards, I made my way through my mother's cervix (after some predictably dull and lacking foreplay) to an ovum.

After a period of nine months' gestation, I was born unto the world in a bloody, stinking mess on March 22nd, 1989, in the Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton. I'm not sure whether I cried or was smacked by the doctor, but I was presented to my pained mother - who had just loosed a nine-pound infant from her nether regions.

I was grumpy as a child: I suffered from severe eczema on my face and bottom; I cried often, and the first thing I learned to say - aside from the stumbled 'mamma' and dadda' - was a snippet from the Home and Away theme song.

I wore a 'duck-a-duck' coat (with the hood of a duck), and I did a 'thing' with my eyes - I used to try to look up into my skull (God knows how that's cute).

I started at pre-school at four, and moved on to primary at five - at which time I met my still-best friend, Adam. I don't remember prinary school much - just the playfights, detentions, and childish to-and-fro bullying (I was a naughty, unsettled child, but I also brimmed over with academic excitement) - but I recall my first teacher, Mrs Lutrario, thought I'd need extra tuition outside of school hours - the bitch!

At age eleven, I moved to high school in Brighton - which is quite funny, seeing how I was a tall child for my age - away from Adam. I made a few oddball friends almost immediately - it makes me sigh to ponder their importance to me and how much I still cherish having known them.

I went to a college; ducked out. I went to another; did blandly. I studied journalism; didn't follow it through. But now I'm here, in parochial, pokey old Chichester, and I'm certain of my ambitions: I want to teach English language.

My future is uncertain, but I hope it's a happy one; and I hope that I'm delerious with drugs or some other form of mental stimulus when I die - hopefully happily, surrounded by my appreciative, mournful, and yet comically ambivalent, family.

On the proposed Qur'an book burning by Pastor Terry Jones.

Well, first let me begin by stating the obvious: emotions have run way too high with this story (it's also quite sad that people are commemorating the 9th (yes: the 9th) anniversary of 9/11). It was to be expected that most Muslims - even moderate ones - would find this proposed act at least distasteful, if not downright despicable and unpardonable. That Americans, and people in American life, generally, have played to the emotions of the public on this story is more disgusting than the act proposed by Terry Jones itself.

America is one of the few countries on this planet with a written constitution that guarantees its citizens inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whilst most of these rights were trampled upon or wholly discarded during the Bush years, Americans still have the two most important rights that no Islamic state tolerates or affords: freedom of expression, and freedom of speech.

If this guy wants to burn the Qur'an, I personally don't have a problem with it. I understand that it will have repercussions with devout and small-minded Muslims all over the world, but to vouch to hope to prevent the act from taking place entirely is despicable. If people want to burn flags and other such articles (usually what they believe to be either symbols of idolatry or items of blasphemy), then let them. What no one seems to be saying is that it's unacceptable for Muslims worldwide, generally, to take this course of action. If this isn't a sign that Muslims can't solubly be integrated into western society, then I don't know what is. Whilst that comment might sound fascist, Islam is a clear and present danger to everything western socities hold dear. If you don't believe me, then recall in 1989 when Salman Rushdie was threatened with death by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for writing a book on a contentious part of the Qur'an known as 'the Satanic Verses' in which Mohammed condones polytheism (Muslims generally believe he was being posessed by the Devil in this part of the Qur'an). Tell the same to the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh and his associates: he was murderded in 2oo4 for making a short film about Islam and the abuse of women practised by its adherents; his Norwegian counterpart was shot and left for dead, and his Japanese associate was killed in a scene of bloody religious retribution.

Whilst Pastor Jones might be right about the danger of Islamification, let us not forget the disgusting tree from which Islam sprouted: both Islam and Christianity (not to forget Mormonism) are Abrahamic religions, sourced from the Torah, with all its bloody pages and disgraceful content (both are almost exclusively plagiarised from it - a claim I can back up with verse after verse). So burn your books; burn your flags; put up your effigies: just don't stop me from putting into action the freedoms that my country, with all its flaws and curruptions, guarantees me.

New jokes.

A friend of mine works part-time cleaning sewers - he works every Monday and Tuesday. I recently asked him how the job was going. 'You know,' he said, 'different shit, same day'.

I've not got brain damage; I had an extreme form of Christianity inculcated in me as a young boy.


What did the humorous chicken say? You know you love my yolks!


What did the Swedish chicken say? Another yolk? You must be yolking!


I've a friend who's obsessed with collecting fake breasts. His flatmate is very messy. I find, to get back at her, he gives tit for tat.

Recently, I bought a suit. Quite coincidentally, I knew my two friends' suit sizes. 'Shall I buy you each a suit?' I asked them. 'No thanks,' they each replied. 'Suit yourselves, then,' I said.

New jokes.

I know a psychiatrist whose handwriting is so bad he gets his mental patients to do it for him.

I once knew a successful golfer who grew sick of constantly golfing at two under par. He said that his golfing history was hanging over him like an albatross.

One time, a colleague asked me to make her a cup of tea. ‘Sugar lump?’ I asked her. Not long after that I was disciplined for sexual harassment.

Watching paint dry is like watching golf warm up.

What do you call a band with no ambition? Number 1 in the charts.

I know an ex-bouncer who’s as hard as rusted nails.

I employ a woman to fold leaflets. A new apprentice asked me what to do with a stack of the finished leaflets. ‘Put it in the folder,’ I told him. Shortly after that, I had to sack him.

I know a joke writer who wrote a joke so long that he had to print it on five hundred feet of paper. In trying to read it, he was crushed to death. The last laugh was on him.

A friend of mine who works as a Polish impersonator recently lost his job… to a Polish man.

I went into a bakery today. I said to the baker: 'you're a doughnut-maker, aren't you?' She replied: 'no: I'm a baker'. I said: 'no: you're a doughnut-maker!' 'No!' she replied. 'I'm a baker. Okay?' 'Well,' I said, 'you can sugar-coat it any way you want to!'

I've gotta get outta here (an original song).

A handful of humour.

I know a band called 'Elastic' - all the members wobble and stretch whilst playing.

Amex - yuppy business solutions since 1850.

I know a rain dancer who complains that the weather forecasts are never accurate.

I know a man with a quiet wit: he can make us laugh without opening his mouth.

I input data - people say I've great output.

Jesus was happy once he was taken down - he was no longer so cross. (This is a pathetic joke with a poor punchline - please punch me in the face if you see me.)

I went up to a girl and asked her if she found me in any way attractive. 'Yes: when you leave the room,' she said.

I went up to a tattooed girl today and told her I liked her tats.... She slapped me. 

On collective nouns.

Collective nouns: flock, flight, murder; a rape of shrews; a genocide of baboons; a harem of chimpanzee genitalia.

My question: do we need them? They tell us nothing of number. Surely 'seagulls' or 'five seagulls' is better than 'a flight of seagulls'?

They're puffed-up and pointless, and serve to make stupid people look intelligent and/or knowledgeable - depending on how many of these inanities they can spout.

I think they should be got rid of - they're a waste of effort, ink, paper, thought, and time; and they're probably stopping us from dreaming up more useful words - words like 'Sundayflim' (the bad feeling you get on a Sunday morning), or 'Wafflesport' (the art of talking bullshit competitively).

What do you think, dear reader?

New e-mail addresses.

I've a new e-mail address: CAPITALLETTERS@yahoo.co.uk. If you can't reach me on that, try: SARCASTICBASTARD@fuckyoumail.co.uk.

Thanks.

Uh-oh! Here come more jokes! (Squeeze!)

Do you ever think it's a conspiracy that there are so many conspiracies...?

I'm thinking of making a film of Good Morning, Vietnam ilk called 'Good Morning, Auschwitz'.

I've forgotten whether I've got amnesia....

I've a yogi who's very hairy. His name is 'Yogi Bear'.

Everything's calmer after karma.

My sister plays with a dodo. It's funny, you know: I thought they went extinct years ago.

Apparently, someone in America is moving House - from NBC to HBO.

My seventy-three year old friend recently got into comedy. He was awarded the 'best oldcomer of the year' award.

The chlamydia department at my hospital is hard to find.

What do you call the top of Coldean? Warmdean.

What do you call a man carrying a plank of wood on his head whilst walking towards the sea? Seawards.

What do you call the same man walking into the sea? Drift wood.

I was once awarded a certificate of attendance but I couldn't be there to claim it.

Osaka's gay netball team is called 'Osaka'.

I offered to buy a shit used car for £10,000. The salesman asked me whether I was short-sighted. 'Yes,' I said. 'They're a prescription.'

There's a Catholic and a protestant school in my town at which the Catholics are protestant-leaning, and the protestants are Catholic-leaning (but both still want to kill the Jews).

There's a chlamydia unit at my hospital which recently lost a ton of paperwork - it's lost because it's undetectable.

I've an artist friend who's overdrawn.

Whenever I walk to work, I read the Metro. Whenever I get the train, I read Walking magazine.

My dad's into hairdye - he likes 'A Touch of Grey'. I find the product a bit ambiguous, though: there's a lot of grey area (especially around the ears).

More bloody jokes....

Several nuns walk into a bar. 'You've got to be joking,' the barman says. 'This joke's really pissed.'

Why are nuns unhappy? Because they're all married to Christ, and he's really fucking dull - there's only so much 'meek' shit a person can put up with.

Why was Winston Churchill angry when he couldn't get an erection? Because viagra was something up with which he couldn't put.

A barman walks into a bar. 'Right,' he says. 'Send in the Three Stooges.'

A barman walks into a bar. He then opens the bar: open for business (and for shit jokes).

A barman walks into a bar. 'Oh, shit,' he says. 'We've all heard this one before.'

Several lesbians walk into a bar. (I can't finish this one due to political correctness.)

I once tried to survey terminally ill patients. Most of them told me not to put them in boxes. I said: 'don't worry: that's the undertaker's job'.

Every month, I buy a new bicycle.... I've really got into a bit of a cycle.

What do tennis players use to serve up their dinner? Serving spoons.

Why was the tennis player thrown out of the restaurant? He was making a racket.

Why was the tennis player arrested? He was operating a racket.

I've had masturbation traning - it comes in handy.

Why did the man covered in Vaseline get away? He was a slippery character.

People who play Halo Reach are hard to reach.

I've got a friend who hates limescale: he thinks it's scum.

What do cows think of milk? They think it's udderly brilliant.

Hitler walks into a bar. In anger, he tries to shoot the bar - after all, he isn't Charlie Chaplin.

How many Jews does it take to solve a problem? About 6 million - if you gas them all.

Why did the horse cross the road? 'Cause it thought it was a zebra.

A priest walks into a bar: 'I'll have a red wine and a brandy, please. Don't worry: the child's with me.'

I once met two team-players who couldn't perform 'cause they didn't have teams.

I went to Guay recently. I wanted to go to Paraguay but my holiday company offered me the real thing.

How do you solve a problem like Maria? Shoot her in the face.

What do you call ten men trying to get erections? Stiff competition.

New Jokes.

Why did the auditor cross the road? To improve road-crossing efficiency.

Why did the auditor cross the road? To make sure the chicken was crossing correctly.

Why did the banana cross the road? It was really long.

Why did Lady Gaga die from an epileptic fit at home? Because she couldn't reach her telephone.

I was once branded a racist for asking about knickers in a lingerie store.

What was wrong with the police survey? It came up with mostly cons.

What was wrong with the data on fjords? It contained massive gaps.

Why did the Spaniard fall asleep in the Ford? It was a Ford Siesta.

I once did a silent gig for advanced music students.

What did the pained pirate say? 'Ooooohh! Aaarghhhhhh!'

I know a man whose right leg is shorter than his left. I asked him how he was the other day. He told me he was all right.

What's pink, black, and blue? A gay bloke who's just been beaten up.

Lincoln the racist.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.” - Abraham Lincoln.

Our most pressing concern should be....

Flugufrelsarinn (a lá Kronos Quartet).

Take it to another level, baby.

My love for you goes beyond
the male form:
you liberate me.
The expression of our love: physical.
I felt this way before now;
I still do.

Talk of sex preference
serves to cheapen our love:
it's not what genitalia the
other possesses;
it's love -
pure and simple.

Fumbled embraces,
sensual words with butterfly wings.
You elevate me.
With great levity,
you open me to new horizons.

With fiery tongues, fiery eyes,
we bridge the gap between us.
No carnal pleasures do we indulge in.

I use my hands to use my heart;
use my lips to plumb the depths 
of the endless ocean within you.

It's not a case of gay or straight.
Love is not bound by preference
or prejudice.

With every second, quell the hurt,
boost the transcendence.
We dive into each other,
and get lost somewhere inside.

A Review of Jackie Kay's Trumpet.

Jackie Kay’s ‘Trumpet’ tells the story of Glaswegian jazz musician, Joss Moody: a talented trumpeter who led a curious double life.

            The story begins with his death (circa 1997), and recollections made by his wife, Millicent. Immediately, the reader is presented with a worrisome Millie fretting over her being ceaselessly hounded by the local press of Torr. The reader isn’t immediately told why she is being hounded, although the likelihood is that it regards the fact that Joss was a brilliant musician.

            As the story progresses, Millie recounts how she first came upon Joss in the early 50s: she was intrigued by his style, his way, his looks, and his manner. After several brief encounters – one of which occurs in a blood donors’ hall - Millie picks up the courage to ask him out. They court for three months, often going to jazz clubs in Glasgow, and Joss always does no more than peck Millie on the cheek before walking home alone.

            One date, however, holds something different in store; Millie invites Joss up, and Joss accepts. They kiss, but Joss becomes reticent. In a delicate moment, Joss reveals something very private: he takes off his shirt and two t-shirts and reveals a layer of bandages wrapped around his chest. After delicately removing them, the first of two small, firm breasts is revealed to Millie: Joss is a woman, after all.

            Millie, however, is deeply in love with Joss: she loves his music, his looks, his way; they marry in a fit of passion, and keep Joss’s secret secret from everyone they encounter thereafter. Soon into the marriage, though, relationship pains start to show: Millie wants a baby. Joss is deeply conflicted about not being able to give Millie a child, and in one fit of rage hits her. They compromise, however, and adopt a young boy, renaming him ‘Colman’.

            Following Millie’s recollections, Colman goes to the mortuary to see Joss’s dead body. The coroner is confused by the Report of Death: where ‘male’ was written, there is now ‘female’. After unwrapping the bandages, his confusion is lifted: Joss is female. When Colman arrives, he’s confronted by the coroner – who stumbles over his words, before saying, finally, that his father is, in fact, a woman. Colman thinks he’s playing a cruel joke and grabs him by his collar, shaking him. After Colman calms down, he’s shown the body. In disbelief, he feels shocked, betrayed; he storms out of the morgue and leaves immediately for his London home.

            In the next chapter, Colman goes over his past. The language he uses is quite coarse, with some Scottish colloquialisms. He seems short, and often doesn’t carry thoughts on for very long. His dialogue is full of warm reminisces which are cut short by the venom he now feels for his father; he feels alienated and alien, and he feels his father is equally shapeless and unknowable. In his confusion and hate, he consults a journalist named Sophie Stones. He wants to write a book about the life of his father, and he’s been promised an £8,000 advance.

            After the headlines disappear, Millie feels slightly more secure, but, by now, she’s heard about dozens of book proposals and is utterly torn up by them. She wonders who could be in on them – which of her ‘friends’ have betrayed her. She rules out certain people, like ex-band members. She knows Colman is in on one, though, and she feels deeply hurt by it.

            At certain points in the book, Millie goes over Colman’s youth. The family was happy, but Colman seemed much closer to Joss. Millie would often lose control with young Colman after one of his many long sulks and hit him. Joss would be the intermediary and help soothe Millie, telling her that it wasn’t Colman’s fault. Millie couldn’t understand why her attitude towards Colman could oscillate so often between strong feelings of love and hate.

            As the story progresses, we hear testimonies – some unrelated to the book proposal – from some of Joss’s friends and associates. One very touching testimony comes from ‘Big Red’ – a drummer in the ‘Joss Moody Trio’. He tells how some fans would often question Joss’s general character – unsure of his slightly high-pitched voice and laugh, and his effeminate, ‘pudding’ face. Many times, Big Red would hit anyone who questioned Joss’s character (but he’d always apologise by dusting them off and buying them a glass of scotch).

When Big Red is contacted by Sophie Stones, he divulges some information but he goes cold when he becomes privy to the purpose of the call – he could never betray Joss. ‘It’s all about the music,’ he says. The past is the past; he couldn’t care less if Joss turned out to be a woman – it doesn’t change a thing. His language is much more coarse than Colman’s, with many colloquialisms, but it’s somehow quite endearing and full of character – whereas Colman’s seems devoid of feeling.

One scene following this beautifully contrasts with Millie’s feelings of being betrayed: Sophie contacts an ex-cleaner of the Moody family named Maggie. Maggie invites Sophie in, and decides that she’ll help after contemplating the fact that Colman is involved in the book proposal. She tells Sophie a few things, often coming across in a harsh way – one time she says that their house was often filthy, without knowing why. Towards the end of their conversation Maggie says that she once found a letter of Joss’s signed ‘Josephine’ (Joss’s actual name is ‘Josephine Moore’) but was never suspicious. Sophie leaves, leaving £500 on Maggie’s coffee table. She doesn’t wave to Maggie as she leaves (a trait that she repeats throughout the book). Maggie tries hiding the money in different places; the guilt soon starts to show.

Colman gets in contact with Joss’s mother, Edith Moore (97). He’s never met her, and she has no idea that Joss is dead – or that she became a he (albeit an artificial ‘he’). He can’t pluck up the courage to tell her the truth so he says that he’s a ‘friend’ of Joss. Edith treats Colman to lunch and supper, and presents him with a suitcase full of letters that Joss had sent her throughout his life. Colman soon begins to have doubts about the book.

Meanwhile, Sophie is interviewing a school friend of Joss named May Hart. At the end of their conversation, Sophie tells May that Josephine took up the identity of a man later in life. May can’t believe it, but Sophie hands her a picture of Joss redolent in a blue suit, playing his trumpet. She eyes it for what seems an eternity and begins to cry because of the beauty of it. Sophie, however, puts it down to ‘betrayal’ – which will fit in nicely with her perversion-oriented book; after all her words about the book potentially ‘helping people’ we can see clearly that it’s intended to appeal to the 90s subculture of sleaze.

Colman leaves Sophie asleep at a Glasgow hotel, leaving her a note, and visits Millie – alone. As Millie goes to meet him at the harbour bus station, a bird flies close to her head, ‘scatting in the wind’. What’s the message of the book? It seems to be that love – romantic or platonic – can overcome the harshest of realisations, no matter how shocking or peculiar they might be. Jackie’s novel is tender and delicate, the characters are powerful, the layout is telling (the chapters are named as if part of a book draft), and the language is fierce and uncompromising.  

Written by Robert Head.

An alternative review (http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/trumpet.html):

The protagonist of Jackie Kay's first novel, Trumpet, is dead before the story begins. He is Joss Moody, a black Scottish jazz trumpeter, who has left a wife in deep mourning, and an adopted son, the defiantly ordinary and untalented Colman, in deep shock. For the posthumous medical report has revealed Joss Moody, his tall and handsome father, revered in the jazz world, to be a woman. Joss's widow, Millie, holes up in a Scottish fishing village in a house she and her husband shared, reeling from the press coverage of her marriage and overwhelmed by grief. Colman meanwhile, raging against what he perceives as his father's duplicity and perversion, colludes with tabloid journalist Sophie Stones in a facile and sensationalist rewriting of Moody's history. Trumpet is, in itself, the other side, or sides, of the story it is told in a multitude of voices. There is Millie, whose faintly sepia-toned reminiscences conjure the romance and charisma of Moody; Colman, whose narrative strains with expletives and inarticulate anger; Big Red McCall, his fiercely loyal drummer; the doctor, registrar and funeral director who all literally and figuratively expose Moody; and a host of neighbours and other minor characters, all struggling to balance their memories and perceptions of Moody with the lurid revelations. The skill of the novel is that these disparate voices are given weight and import, and that the reactions of the various characters, although they encompass disgust and prurient curiosity, are never predictable. Even such a minor character as the confused registrar, who in a lesser novel might just be used as a plot-driving mechanism, responds to Millie's feelings as widow with delicacy and deference. 

Millie observes that Joss spoke of his female self in the third person: the female self was his third person, an alternative self. But as Trumpet unravels, it becomes apparent that Moody wasn't alone in exploring and creating alternative selves. Millie is a faithful, conventional and deeply loving wife, who, in colluding with Moody's reconstruction of his sexual identity, led what in some respects was a bizarrely unconventional life. The very milieu that Moody inhabited was mocked by the young Colman as a construct: the jazzmen, with their way-out names and boozy lifestyles, trying to recapture the world of long-dead Dukes and Counts. But Colman himself, the brutal realist, always refers to his father as "he", in his angriest moments never quite angry enough to give up on his "Daddy". Whether Moody has lived a fiction or created an alternative reality in becoming a man is the riddle at the heart of this subtle and humane novel, which Colman must explore to have any hope of resolution.

Review written by Helena Smith.

Buy Trumpet on Amazon: Trumpet: A Novel

Similarities shared between humans and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees).

On the Devil.

Do we really still have such a notion in our modern age? Haven't we progressed past nonsense of this sort? Apparently not. I was watching 'Big Questions' on BBC1 this morning, and the second question brought up was 'is the Devil real?' Being a Christian audience, a large number did profress a belief in 'a' Devil - although in differing degrees of madness.

What immediately came to me was the question: why would an omnipotent, all-wise, all-benificent god create a devil? Out of boredom? Out of hate? Out of incompetency? The Devil exists only because of religion - and only in certain cultures (although most have concepts of demons, spirits and djinns).

One man - an exorcist - kept harking on about his experiences. I had an inkling from the first that he was deeply ignorant of psychology and science, and he claimed that certain amazing things happened when he expelled demons from poor subjects (such as a shack blowing down in Nairobi and illnesses being miraculously defeated).

Straight away, I thought: why do all these subjects seem to be Christian? Why are only Christians ever the subjects of demonism and exorcism? Well, naturally because they're Christian - and they've read the mad book that's preached from every pulpit in Africa. Only this book hypothesises the existence of ghosts, unicorns, witches, demons, Satan, and exorcism. Christian dogma inculcates feelings of shame, sin, inferiority and unworthiness in its subjects - and it encourages them to be deeply ignorant of anything that might contradict their beliefs (from science to other cultural beliefs). It wouldn't surprise me if religious belief actually tends to increase mental illness - mental disorders stemming from sexual neuroses, extreme physical abuse, extreme pressure and fear, and extreme belief in things that are literally nonsensical and horrifying (like hell fire). 

When one doubts one's beliefs, one begins to think either one is being 'tempted' by the Devil, or one is questioning ultimate religious truths. Inevitably, mental disorders arise. So the root and the 'cure' of these particular disorders is religion: religion inspires madness, and makes people think that priests are best equipped to remove these blights. It is self-feeding and depends on the ignorance of its subjects. The 'cure' is nothing more than instilling more shame; making subjects try not to doubt the madness but have 'faith'. This abuse happens in children and adults - and children in some African countries are routinely labelled witches and are subjected to the most cruel and unthinkable treatments.

The Devil is a notion because of religion, and religions wouldn't have such power without the concept. Religion perpetuates belief in the Devil, and relies on such belief. Religion does evil, but somehow thinks of the Devil as being somehow exterior. It never thinks to look at the inner potential - for both good and evil - of humans. Religion excises blame and puts it in some other dimension from which it can't harm it. Religion is the main force of evil and confusion in this world, and it does nought but obfuscate and destroy minds.


Relevant texts:

The God Delusion
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time 

Top ten creationist arguments.

Why religion almost certainly is the root of all evil.

Religion is unchanging. From the first muddled sources (i.e. the four sources of the Torah), pages were cobbled together (some 800 years after the life of Moses in 700-800 BC) and were expounded to reveal ultimate truths about the universe. Because dogma cannot change, religions cannot progress - and rarely make exceptions. Institutions struggle to keep up with modern findings, and certain individuals hold a monopoly on their supposed 'truths'. These individuals thus hold all the power and their followers are at their mercy - monetarily, educationally, and spiritually.

The truth is 'revealed' to certain empowered individuals; thus, what they say goes unchallenged amongst their followers, and everything they surmise is almost universally uncritically examined.

As I've said before, religion exists because of two human aspects: fear and vanity. We are helpless creatures adrift in a changing and unpredictable world, and so we like to think that there must be some divine purpose for our being here - after all, we are different from all the 'other' animals.

Religious people hold dear to the idea of virtue - that doing certain things is divinely ordained and acceptable. However, some religious practices contravene ideas of contemporary morality. For instance, some Christians are reticent to fund healthcare research, and often go as far as refusing themselves or their immediate family members medical treatment. Some Christians believe that disease and disability is a purification for sin and that, somehow, innocent children deserve to be riddled with cancers, bone disorders, chronic infections and other disorders; that the maimed have been maimed for a reason; that HIV is a punishment for homosexuality. (Christians and Jews believe that we 'inherit' the sins of our forefathers, and thus we remain forever tainted.*)

By allowing themselves to believe that all this suffering is part of a divine 'plan', they allow themselves to tolerate suffering that no conscientious person could. Not only do they tolerate it: sometimes they actively seek to encourage or enhance it. And this isn't confined merely to health: religious people in general tend to have issues with gender, race and sex equality, socialistic policy, the teaching of science, the expounding of certain knowledge, sex education, race mixing, inter-race marriage, gay rights, women's rights, and all manner of other things.

Religion is a force for evil because it retards moral and scientific progress. It hankers after dead traditions, dubious history, ridiculous notions; it panders to the darker side of human nature. It's a force of arrogance and convinces people not only that their god is the 'right' god, but that somehow they are different from other forms of life and thus can trample on anything they consider to be beneath them.

Religious people assume that god is needed for moral purposes. 'Without a god,' they ask, 'where would we get our morality?' Well, not from scripture, I can tell you. The very fact that we pick and choose chapter and verse suggests that we have certain ways of distinguishing moral categories that are apart from religion. We don't acknowledge parts of scripture that tell us to kill our children if they're disobedient, to stone homosexuals to death, or to stone rape victims to death if they don't scream loudly enough. Why not? Because we know it's wrong. We have a sense of what's moral and we pick and choose scripture to justify our moral inclinations. If you still feel that scripture does hold some moral worth even though you're inclined towards atheism or agnosticism, ask yourself why. There are far better moral examples, most of whom declared no belief in a personal god - and most of whom were far more moral and humble than Jesus; such people as Socrates, Plato, Confucius, Lao-Tzu, and the Buddha - all of these examples actually predate Christianity by up to 600 years.

The truth is that morality existed long before religion and is an evolved process. Morality doesn't come from religion; religion comes from morality. Early agriculturalists - living some 10,000 years BC - knew that to be successful, it was best if they didn't kill each other. Most of them were related - probably cousins - and conceded it was pretty wise if they didn't go around killing whoever they pleased: that would tend to undermine the whole agricultural community thing. So, they didn't kill each other; rather than doing this, they tended to be compassionate and discriminate against greed and violence (which aren't good for small communities). Compassionate behaviour aids the development of societies; greed never rules the day, although it does exist in small amounts in all species (although greedy subjects are often shunned after repeatedly exhibiting greedy behaviour).

Religion rejects any contradictory evidence, and most religious institutions tend to come around to the truth much later on. Only in the 1990s did the Vatican finally concede that Galileo was right about the Earth orbiting the Sun - some 300 years after his death and some 20 years after we entered the space-age! In our day, the Vatican still rejects evolution - although certain figures - especially Pope John Paul II - have accepted that it is no longer to be considered a 'theory' in any sense of the word.

What is the solution to all the problems that ail us in the 21st century? Well, firstly, religion (along with all other forms of superstition) needs to go out of the window - not in whole; just in government and the public sphere. We cannot continue living in such ignorance of science and the scientific method when our very lives depend on it. Light bulbs and agriculture don't work on prayer - and neither do generators, televisions, or medicines (not to mention nuclear bombs). We don't need any deity, and we don't need religious institutions. Believers will persist, but literal readings of scripture can't.

Scripture is nonsensical and self-contradictory, but that's only because it's not meant to be taken literally. We all know that Joshua didn't destroy the walls of Jericho just by blowing a horn; we all know that none of the Jesus miracles happened; we all know that the Earth wasn't created in six days - or any of that other guff. These are all, obviously, myths and can only be taken as deep metaphors. Early Jews and Christians underwent deep spiritual changes but didn't have the language capacity to explain them away. Thus, all they could do was somehow aggrandize these experiences to show how magnificent their awakenings were. Also, these early tribespeople were mostly illiterate, and of course knew nothing of science, history, geography, cultures outside the middle-east, Europe and central Asia - and a host of other things. The Bible cannot be taken literally or as historical fact - most of it never happened and never could have happened.

Religion is slowly dying all over the world: it cannot win. The only way religion will prevail is if, somehow, religious war obliterates all human life on this planet. What's the solution? Reason isn't small-mindedness. We should be open-minded, but not open-minded to the point where our brains jellify and come out of our ears. We should be skeptical of everything, and shouldn't concede anything to any institution because we feel that it either pleases people or is relatively benign. Intolerance shouldn't be tolerated, and the truth should always win over human emotion and wishful thinking. Science and ignorance do not combine; if we allow them to, this combustible mixture will surely blow up in our faces. It's time to put religion to bed for good and wake up from our childish reveries - the future is knocking at the door, and bigger, grander things await us than superstition and fear. God is a luxury we can no longer afford - at least not an external god. But if that's not 'god', then what is? Maybe all notions of god have finally died - and for the best. Language change alone cannot keep up with theological interpretation. Our ideas have progressed, and are progressing, sufficiently to let go of god. God is dead, and things have never looked brighter.

*The usual riposte to this is that Jesus overturned Original Sin by dying on the cross. However, certain questions follow. Jesus was born to a virgin - Mary - who was descended from Adam, and thus must've inherited Original Sin. If this is so, then Jesus is also a fallen being. However, Catholics got around this by postulating in 1852 the Immaculate Conception - that, aside from Jesus, Mary is the only person ever to be born without Original Sin. Like most Catholic doctrine, this is made-up; conjured out of thin air to get around dead-ends. Ironically, this creates more confusion and prompts us to ask the question: why would God make such an unnecessary theological pretzel? Why make humans fallen in the first place? The idea of Original Sin reduces human dignity and prompts believers to ponder the benificence and wisdom of their supposedly wonderful deity - deserving of ridicule and gall rather than genuflection and praise.

FSM lives!

Dismantling Intelligent Design.

Intelligent design. What is this irksome little imposter dressed up in science clothing? Is it, as the propagators of the ‘theory’ suggest, a controversy worth teaching? Or, rather, is it merely a controversy only within their minds? The latter tends to be more true, but the simple truth is that ID advocates want to inflate its status merely by postulating a controversy where none exists.

Intelligent Design rests on two things: ignorance and refusal. By keeping the public – i.e. the American public – in the dark about science, they serve to keep the public distrustful of science. Generally, ID advocates refuse to acknowledge the fact that natural things giving off the apparent illusion of design are not the end products of design, but rather of slow, incremental evolution.

Intelligent Design isn’t a ‘theory’ – the very association of the phrase ‘ID’ with ‘theory’ serves to discredit the word. There are two ways of typically defining a theory:

1. Something that serves to explain a phenomenon or a set of phenomena through evidence and experiment;  
2. A simple postulation about something couched in nothing but speculation.

Evolution isn’t a theory; it’s a scientific fact – a ‘type 1’ theory. There is so much evidence that it’s almost staggering: fossil records, population distribution data, anthropological and archaeological data, genetic distribution data – and all of this come upon independently, in many locations, all across the planet.

The only tenet of ID is ‘irreducible complexity’. All this means is the refusal to accept that something, like an eye, for example, could come about by chance over millions of years. Certain things, say ID advocates, are too complex to have come about by chance; they must have been divinely worked. Intelligent Design, however, overlooks one thing: when looked at carefully, life seems to be a hotchpotch of mediocrity. The human eye, for example, has two massive flaws: light has to travel through blood vessels dangling above the retina before it’s processed, and the human eye has a massive blind spot. What this means is that the human brain has to artificially ‘fill in’ the blanks – in effect, part of the visual image we see isn’t actually there at all.

It’s rather telling that octopodes have no such problems. What does this mean? Are we to take it that if there is a deity, or several, then it, or they, value octopode eyes over human eyes? We are left with one of four immediate possibilities:

1. There is no deity or deities;
2. There is a deity, or several, and it or they prefer octopodes over humans;
3. There is a deity, or several, and it or they are incompetent;
4. There is a deity, or several, and it or they don't care about human beings at all.

I haven't yet finished with the science, but I feel it's time to progress to more esoteric matters. This is usually the point at which I become foamy at the mouth because of the self-assertive arrogance of the Christian right. They assume that their god is the one true god, and therefore base their so-called 'theory' on a bronze-age, immoral, self-contradictory, laughable piece of literature called the Bible. This is apparently the book from which they derive their morality and sense of the world. At this point, I have to ask myself: really? Have they read this book? Surely we haven't been reading the same Bible.

Religion is based on two things: fear and vanity - and the one usually comes from the other. After developing self-consciousness some 200,000 years ago, we suddenly became awed by the world - and very frightened. Suddenly, we were plunged into an unsafe world full of rain and lightning and thunder and forest fires and predators scowling away in the night. We needed something to hold onto - something to give us security and meaning; we needed something that wasn't there.

The earliest religions were all forms of animism - in this worldview, everything - from a rock, to a tree, to a cloud - took on a 'spirit'. Nature was revered and worshipped, and everything seemed deeply mystical and holy. The first religions pertaining to deity worship were overwhelmed with female deities. This coincided with the agricultural revolution that occurred some 10,000 years BC. When hunter-gatherers first started settling into agricultural communities, they depended on harvests for their livelihoods. Some knew to measure the seasons by the stars, and others didn’t. All, however, saw the Earth (insofar as they could meekly perceive it) as being female: rain entered the soil (like sperm) and after a period of gestation, the seeds sprouted and grew into crops.

Religions were dominated by female worship until communities really started to develop. Often, they would expunge their resources or take note that their resources were quite scarce, so they would rove into foreign lands in search of wood, minerals, water and food. Of course, sometimes they came upon foreign peoples who had entirely different gods. Naturally, conflict often ensued because of the tribal nature of these early settlers. After a few millennia, all religions tended to be pre-occupied with the worship of male deities that more represented the warrior nature of their societies or civilisations – although some still retained some female deities.

These polytheisms naturally progressed into monotheisms – the first of which was Judaism. From Judaism, Christianity and - later - Islam emerged. These religions retained their tribal motifs, and their subjects learned to look at people of other faith backgrounds as being somehow 'other' and not a part of their god's people.

What strikes me about religion is the short-sightedness and self-centredness of its subjects. They all assume that there is a deity and that this deity takes the form of a human. This is so, naturally, because humans are self-conscious beings seeking meaning in a world that cares not for the needs of any individual species. It's quite conceivable that if, for example, rabbits were to suddenly develop self-consciousness they would design gods in rabbit form, and each other species would do the same with respect to their physiognomies.

By postulating the existence of a god or gods, people only serve to compound the issue. The First Cause argument shoots itself in the foot: something capable of designing complex things must be complex in itself - probably more complex than its creations. Such a being couldn't have just come about by chance, surely. Therefore, such a being - i.e. God - would've had to be created. But who created the creator? And who created the creator of the creator? A usual riposte is to speculate that God has always existed. But if God has always existed, then the universe has surely always existed. And if the universe has always existed, one doesn't need to bring a deity into the equation.

By bringing in an intermediary - i.e. a god - one serves to complicate the matter - whereas evolution solves the problem in a simple and elegant way. Something cannot have existed anterior to the big bang. Also, a deity can't reside within the limitations of the universe because then such a deity would be part of the creation (and thus cannot be creator). So, Intelligent Design has no basis in reality and is as dead as the First Cause argument and the god of the Old Testament. Evolution solves all of these problems; a deity merely serves to create confusion where none exists.

Some of my new songs.