THOUGHTS

(My so-called life)

Opinions, Racism, and God

Prologue...

I am not going to lead you into how you should feel about this document, or how it may affect you.
I'm going to simply ask one thing. If you do me no other favours in your life, please at least do me the favour of reading this entire document before forming your conclusions. If there is anything you don't understand, read it again. If something still is not clear, it is probably a lapse of my explanation. Email me, get me to clarify it (and update this document).
Just do not read the first few lines and think "Nah, I don't go with this".
You see, I am not asking you to agree. I am not asking you to believe what I believe. I am simply laying my thoughts out for examination, for consideration. Maybe somebody out there will have the answer to some of my points? Or maybe my writings will cause you to reconsider your perspective.

In answer to several emails I have received, you can read a clarification of exactly what I mean here.

That's all. Now back to your scheduled programming... :-)

Preamble...

This was originally included in the site disclaimer as an elaboration of opinions and the democratic right to express such opinions, protected by the UN declaration of Human Rights. However it was getting a bit wordy and more on-topic of the expressing of opinions (thus, less about a disclaimer!), so it was moved to here as a seperate 'thought'.

Chances are, a number of my readers may be insulted, upset, or just annoyed by the opinions expressed in this article. That's okay. Everybody has their own ideas about the world and we all perceive reality slightly differently.
First, bear in mind that article 19 of the human rights states:

• Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Secondly, I welcome comment and feedback on this, as much as I welcome it on any other part of my site. Email me. Email me patiently. I tend to chuck rants in the spam-bin, but a reasoned response will be read.

I have debated long and hard in various newsgroups. While it is my personal opinion that people who 'speak to Jesus' (or God) don't have both oars in the water, I maintain that I will be perfectly willing to become a happy and contented Christian (Muslin, whatever...), devoted to following God and his instruction, if they can suitably convince me that their perception of God is correct, and that He exists, and that their religion is correct. Can you prove it?
I'm not talking about beliefs. It is said around a fifth of Americans 'believe' they have been abducted by aliens. It is said that crop circles are made by visitors from beyond the solar system. Neither stands up to scientific scrutiny. You either believe it or you don't.
The same applies to religion.
And I don't want to hear the usual spiel that it is arrogant and/or a sin to question God. The Christian God gave us free will. Thus, he should have expected us to question him, what him being infallible and all.
It is said that God made all of existance in six days. Even if that is totally off the mark and it took forty billion days, one omnipotent dude making all of existance is a pretty damned impressive feat. So I'd have thought that convincing me of his existance would be a right piece of cake. But, maybe it has already happened. More on this at the end...

Anyway, you agree? You disagree? You think I'm smoking the weed? Email me. Let me know what you think...

Amble...

Friday 20th July, 2001

I do not support the pro-Aryan way of view. I do not support the persecution of the Jewish people. I do not consider that it is right to disparage a person purely because of a different amount of melanin in their skin. I do not see that a 'belief' in God automatically makes you right, nor that a systematic rewriting of history can hide mistakes and make it all better.

The answer to a flawed argument such as the Creationist view that Darvin is wrong and the Earth is merely 6000 years old (give or take a few years), or that black people are inferior because they are not white, is not to simply suppress their views. By doing so, we are making ourselves no better than those who we wish to suppress.
Rather, we use our current knowledge and understanding of the world to create a better argument. For example, to answer the two suggestions above:

1. They say the earth and all the universe is ~6000 years old. A figure arrived at by some process such as adding up the ages of everybody in the bible.
    
   Carbon dating? Fossils? Geology? The speed of light and supernova explosions? Distant galaxies? Background (cosmic) radiation?
   They are just some of the things that can be used to prove the planet is older than 6000 years old. There are plenty of other ways, and the methods of understanding are well known. Because science succumbs to peer review. Now, don't get me wrong, science is not infallible. It can, and quite often is, wrong. It is subject to human wishes and desires and there is the tendency to 'bend' observations to fit beliefs and established concepts. However this is certainly true of all of human endevours. How often have you commented that somebody "only seems to hear what they want to hear"?
   With this in mind, science is open. The peer review is an error-correction mechanism. You can come up with any crazy half-assed theory you like in the name of science, but unless you are willing to subject it to scrutiny and attempts to disprove it, then it counts for nothing. And if it cannot be conclusively disproven, then it gains momentum.
   We cannot say "This rock is exactly forty seven million, three hundred and twelve thousand and eighteen years old". We were not there when it was formed. We have not traced it's entire existence. But methods of dating will give us a 'ballpark figure' with an accuracy bar. Methods of dating that have been examined and tried and tested. While the methods cannot be conclusively proven to be correct, they have not been disproven. Thus, we can say "This rock is between ten and fifteen million years old"
   
    
   The jury is still out on Darwin's evolution theory, though many people accept a vague approximation of it. You can see evolution in action in a biology lab with simple experiments involving moulds. It'll show how the better adapted moulds survive and the lesser adapted fail. Thus, evolution has favoured one and abandoned the other.
   We run into more problems when we ask questions like "Can mould sprout eyes so it can see?". You might think, why not? But does mould even have the ability to 'sprout' an eye? And what would we consider to be an eye? Can you imagine a speck of mould with a bloody great human-type eye hanging off of it?
   Most people, however, are peturbed at the idea that we 'evolved' from monkeys. Or, as Desmond Morris put it, that we are domesticated apes. Another spanner in the works is that we have determined several variations in the evolution of mankind, such as cro-magnon and neanderthal, but we have never found 'the missing link' between us and monkeys. We can certainly stretch our imaginations far enough to understand exactly what the missing link should be (we all know that picture that starts with a monkey and progresses stage by stage until we reach mankind - recently spoofed in a cereal advert, and used to good effect in a Fatboy Slim video). But, alas, the missing link has not been found.
   Consider this.
   When transplants were made from the 'animal kingdom' to humans, we didn't whip bits out of monkeys. We whipped bits out of pigs. Maybe this is because it was cheaper to keep pigs nearby (but then, why not whip a heart from a cow and a liver from a horse?). Or maybe it is because genetically, size-wise, and blood-wise, we are more closely related to the pig than the monkey. Maybe we did not evolve from monkey, but in effect the domesticated pig is our closest animal relation?
   Wouldn't that piss the Danish off?
    
   
2. Blacks are lesser people, demoted to the status of slaves. They are unruly, uncultured, banana eaters... blah, blah, blah...
   Well, there is a genetic difference in black people, certainly. Their skin is black (well, brown). Or, in some cases, a sort of half-black (well, brown, again) colour.
   But then, there are genetic differences just a great within the stereotypical square-jawed Ayran bloke. Different hair colours, different eye colours, sexuality, vision impairment, mental impairment, fat or thin, tall or short. Sometimes nature spits a genetic anomoly such as webbed feet or six fingers or other oddities. It is known that the drug Thalidomide assisted in screwing up the genetic processes in humans.
   So what does it come down to?
   Can you imagine a world where we took the piss out of people with dark coloured hair?
   Where a brunette was a second-class person and destined to do nothing independant, but to be the slave of a blonde man? To fight for, and eventually gain, freedom. To then no longer be a slave but still be thought of as a second-class person, lesser than the blondes?
   It sounds silly doesn't it?
   Show me the difference.
   Big penis, short penis, brunette, blonde, dyslexic, photographic memory, white skin, black skin. These are all products of our genetic constitution, and all arose due to evolution responding in some way to our environment. We can argue the minor points until we are blue in the face (ie, is there a 'gay gene'?), but the bigger things are already known.
    
   We are not demoting the black (wo)man because (s)he is a lesser person. Screw what the bible says, or any other 'old literature' that 'proves the point'. We are not demoting a black person because they evolved differently to us and sorta fell out of the jungle a thousand years ago.
   We are demoting ourselves.

• The so-called fallacy of equal rights for woman
• The laws that favour men (as in that rape case, if she didn't say No she meant Yes)
• Christian Science (forget medicine, we can cure all illness with prayer)

Read the bible, some time.
It is...

• Homophobic
• Genderist (indeed, astoundingly anti-female)
• Racist
• Full of horrendous gore and bloodshed in the old testament; followed by Jesus trying to 'make it better'.

I believe in a God (or Goddess?). My God is Mother Nature. It doesn't smite people. It doesn't answer prayers. It is just 'there', a collective entity that encompasses all of life.
I dabble in pagan and wiccan beliefs because they, and their history (up until the sixties when Gerald Gardner turned it into an orgy-fest - trust me, all the Wiccans I know of do not run around fields at midnight with nothing on and screw each others brains out as some sort of ritual) interest me. I don't believe incense and candles can make things happen, it's just a different form of prayer, surely?

It is a sad fact that devoutly religious people tend to be unbalanced. This is not due to any major failing on their part, but rather that they have structured their beliefs, and the reason for their life, on this 'thing' which cannot be proven. Old texts and a bunch (well, hundreds of thousands) of Churches is pretty much the state of Catholocism. Or Church of England. Or Methodist. Or....
In fact, the religions with Jesus and God and Moses et al are little more than an old book, a church, and a congregation within that church who have placed their life's purpose on the words written in that old book.

Because of this, they defend it strongly. They have a 'belief' in God, and a fundamental mistake in their belief is that it is correct. Thus, they simply cannot really incorporate new concepts and ideas without demeaning their previous concepts, in essence telling themselves that they were wrong. Which goes some way to explain why there exist people who maintain the world is around 6 millennia old and Darvin is simply wrong. It says so in the bible.
The Roman Catholic church has officially accepted the earth is very old indeed. Part of the assistance if their acceptance was in that time and the perception of time was very different in the days of the bible. Or should we all believe Moses actually lived to be a few hundred years old?

However, this does not prevent intolerable injustice from being commited in the name of God. From the crusades to the witchhunts. From Northern Ireland to Bosnia-Herzogovina. It is possible to say that there are existing reasons for the bloodshed (like the Brits get the hell out of Eire), but given half a chance it falls back to differences in belief. It's an easier target, maybe?
Proven no better than in the ethnic cleansing that took place in former Yugoslavia.

So this brings us back to my point that maybe I already do believe in God. Show me where God has said the Catholics are correct. Show me a better reason for the Church of England, than one of England's kings wanting to divorce his wife. Maybe the omnipotent one recognises that it isn't a belief in him (or her) that is required, nor even a belief in the organised religion, but instead what is required is simply an acceptance that maybe this didn't all come about purely by chance, that there are 'laws' governing the universe. And, above all, the following of a moral code. A proper moral code, unlike those who bless the weapons of war they are about to use and who take a preacher to the war camp with them, somehow confused into believing that their killing and maiming is sanctioned, both in the mother country, the world at large, and in heaven and so the commandment against murder somehow doesn't apply. And, of course, the commandment against false testimony is overruled by the military and the politicians explaining the war to the media, purely to subvert the truth and turn the war into a righteous thing. And worst of all, that of being untrue when you refer to the war as not a war, but an armed conflict, a contention, an engagement, an intervention. Any Politically Correct name that the public can understand, without admitting it is a war, and thus bringing into account certain laws and privileges both during, and to the survivors of, the war.
For what it is worth, I think warfare would be very different if the leaders of the country were the first ones into battle. But no. They are protected behind their battlements, shrouded in secrecy in the name of National Security. What the hell do they care, when terms like "acceptable losses" already exist.

I believe in a God-like entity.
I believe that black people are just the same as white people.
I believe the organised religions are wrong.

And, most of all, I believe that the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought are things to be guarded, to be treasured, to always be cherished.
Because, remember, while you might feel I should be silenced and not allowed to promote my view of the world, who's to say that in a totalitarian society, your views won't be considered as alien and subversive as mine? I rather doubt that you will be in much of a position to determine what is acceptable and what is not.

In the salem witch-trails, so-called witches were accused by neighbours, by people who didn't like them, and by any 'evidence' that happened to be to hand. Tests were devised. Chuck the witch into water. If she dies, she wasn't a witch. If she survives, she is. Give her a little bit of torture and then get her to sign a 'voluntary' confession. While she's at it, she can name other witches in the locality, who can then be 'tried'.
It sounds heinous, doesn't it?
In 1947 the committee known as "House Committee on Un-American Activities" held hearings on supposedly Communist influences in the movie industry which, torture aside, went like a modern re-enactment of the Salam witch-trials. It reached it's maddest climax in February 1950, when Joseph Mccarthy made wild accusations of mass communist infiltration in the American military and government, accusing many with nothing in the way of evidence.

So, most of all, I believe that we need to recognise and understand all of this if we are to continue to progress as a civilisation. Religion does have a place in our society, and indeed even in our lives. Racism, twisting of the truth, and outright lies do not have any place in any society that likes to think of itself as 'modern', as 'progressive', as the way to go.

Many parts of the world are shrouded in darkness, where having an idea is tantamount to lèse majesté. Where people are routinely killed for having a different belief to those who happen to be holding the weapons.
Democracy and freedom can work, side by side.
But not in its current incarnation.
Because we, the democratic populace, are simply practicing a more laid back version of the dark ages.

Appendation, 8th October 2001:

It is deeply ironic, and even more disturbing, that I wrote this in July of 2001; and in September... Well, we all know what happened, and we know the suspected reasons why. Maybe this is a call to us to consider this issue NOW, not tomorrow; lest there be no tomorrow.