First of all, I try to make it my business not to comment unfavourably on the doings of other countries, (especially the US, which, like the UK in the eighteenth century, is fair game for attack by liberal democrats planet-wide) but I could not let this go by without comment;
A chap named Ken Ham (Ham! Ha, ha, ha, the one in the Bible who. . .read your Bible, Ham was Noah’s last born and, well. . .ha ha ha!)
Anyhow. . .this chap Ken Ham (Australian born,so from crown territory so more or less fair game from another born on crown territory to have a go at) has (with a lot of help from his friends and relations, all who are what you would call Fundamentalist, ie they believe that the Bible is true, I mean, every word. To put their philosophy into a soundbite; ‘God says it, I believe it, that settles it’ backed up with lots of capital) created a Creation Museum, which is dedicated to telling the Bible story with lots of pictures and moving parts, right from Adam and Eve to today. (It would be a bit harder to go where they Bible is leading, ie Armageddon, as we’re not there yet, and guessing is not biblical. Seriously.)
Of course, the dinosaurs are playing alongside the children, and Adam names the creatures and well, you know.
And God created life in six days, around about six thousand years back.
This is how serious these people are. They have put together a museum with working parts, which cost bloody millions, ($27 million or in real money, almost £14 million) to prove to the world that science show that the bible (and therefore, they) have got it right.
The days when they could auto-de-fe anyone who dared question god’s words is gone, and the idea of if you don’t believe you get the eternal worms and flames job doesn’t have the same hold that it once had on the minds of the more cynical and better educated young of today, so they have to use science and reason to get their point over.
That biblegod created everything in six days, and fall happened, and the flood, and the tower of Babel and the whole kit and caboodle, just as it says in the book itself (Bible means book, like gospel means good news.)
Only they don’t call the great architect or the unmoved mover biblegod, they call him god and he is so involved in us that he created us out of mud and put us together and then created a tree and told our ancestors not to eat the fruit growing in it it or else we would die, and when we chose for ourselves (remember, we had no idea what death and suffering was, he didn’t even give us a taste of what it would be if we didn’t tow the line, and why the heck did he plant the tree if he knew what would happen if we ate of the fruit of it?) he punished us.
This god who measures universes in light years and makes independent living creatures less than a thousandth of a millimetre across picked on us human beings and, by default, sends us to hell for something our ancestors did in all innocence, and our only way to get away is to believe that he sent himself as his son to die bloodily for us, and then he cleared off and pulled the ladder up behind him and gave us no objective evidence of the truth of the bible.
I mean, putting aside the pettiness, the humanity, of such a god (think grumpy old man, who hates children, is suspicious of women, is slightly unhinged, has no idea about the running of the world, DNA or even the shape of the earth, and who wants to be worshipped, sitting in his tent and moaning about how young people are disrespectful, and there you have the model for the invention of biblegod, though it was probably more of a group effort, a group of grumpy old men, you get the idea.) just think of how unreal the whole thing is.
There is absolutely no way an involved god created us, for there would be an objective, undeniable sign of him.
Science is proving that if there is a god (and again I am leaning towards atheism) he is nowhere is sight, an absentee landlord, certainly not bothered or interested in what we get up to.
NOW that is reason and logic how it should be engaged.
I was a Christian for many years, and everything done for me by my fellow believers was done in god’s name but by THEM, certainly not by god.
As Bertrand Russell put it, if god existed, I would have found him after fifty years of searching. I searched about half that time and did not find him, and that’s another reason why I cut the whole myth and fantasy adrift and struck out alone and it’s been two years and it’s still the best move I made ever.
Now, don’t think I am mocking these people. They are serious about it, and mocking them is the worst thing you can do. What us Freethinkers/Atheists whatever, should do is do our best to compete with them.
Of course, there are hundreds of books that are based on the use of reason to make any involved god obsolete, from John Locke to Christopher Hitchens, but this torrent of words cannot compete with moving models and pictures. Human beings are very, very visually motived.( I’m not. Facial expressions especially mean nothing to me, and those emocion things, meant to express feelings, are just yellow balls to me, but I can catch nuances in writing and the spoken word, but that’s just a genetic mutation in me, a connection missing or whatever.) So I am proposing a Reason Museum, which competes, directly, with Ham and his Answers in Genesis lot, which demonstrates, with animations, how Darwinian Evolution explains how things were put together, and how god is not necessary for the creation of everything.
Of course, I haven’t got the money, or the backing, I’m just me, shouting into the emptiness of the blogosphere, but I’m sure if enough Freethinkers get together they could put together something along these lines, and announce it with all the razzmatazz Ham and his pack have used to get their idea notice.
But there are real museums, showing real history, in most large towns.
I suppose we could always round up our young and see to it they visit these places (reason knows the Manchester Museum was one of my favourite places as a kid, Bolton has it’s own small Museum, stocked with living fossils, fish who go back to the real era of the dinosaurs, and you have not lived til you have seen the Natural History Museum in London.)
My point? The only way we can defeat these Theists is to beat them at their own game, and to open Reason Museums in every possible location across the world.
With maybe a big central one next to the Creation Museum itself.
Otherwise, young minds might be turned to the idea that the bible has the truth.
A young student, visiting the Creation Museum, was overheard to remark;
“I don’t know if it’s true, but it would be nice.”
Now if only we could get our young to be so sentimental about the REAL truth of science and reason. . .
Over to those of you with capital and backing. . .
HONESTLY, I MEAN, HONESTLY. . .
OUT-OF-DATE PHILOSOPHY?
I was making my way through the rough edged back street of Town, what I call the real Manchester, where they cook up the best veg curry on the planet, with rice and naan bread, all for less than a fiver, and where the true eccentricity of the real-life Mancunian is proudly on display, without having to pander to fake ideas of fashion and acceptability.
Down one street was a shop where you could purchase imported DVD’s, and, spurred on by the notion of purchasing something a bit out-of-the-ordinary, not exactly Hollywood fayre (although over here, Hollywood films are imported fayre) when I noticed what kind of place it was.
Windows blanked out, with a large paper sign with
‘OVER EIGHTEENS ONLY’
And just in case you hadn’t got it, there was a short corridor with (honestly) a blue light providing the only illumination.
Well, there was a young family walking by, and the kid, a little girl of about seven, in the manner of free-thinking kids across the planet, was drawn to the open doorway. Her Dad actually drew her away while covering her face up for a second, with the admonishment;
“Don’t look in there, darling.”
The kid was curious why, but the distance between me and them (plus the fact my hearing is going) smothered her words, and any response from her Dad.
And that got me thinking; Of course, don’t think for one second I am in any manner, shape or form, in approval with teaching little kids about porn via full frontal-get-the-heck-out-of-here-exposure, but I wonder if the Dad would have been so reluctant to explain about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to his child of tender years.
My own Dad, whose love I never doubted, even when it temporarily was cut off from me due to the drink, taught me many odd things, mostly around morbid stuff, anecdotes from tales of murder and the effects of disasters. (I remember specially one time he pointed out a man hosing down the road and explained that he was washing away the blood from a road accident. I was only around the little girl’s age.) By the time I’d started big school (at eleven) I could recite the horrors of the Gresford colliery disaster (where they couldn’t get to the men so sealed them in) and the Ibrox park disaster (when a barrier gave and killed several people as they tumbled over one another leaving the match.) And yet he never once discussed the facts of life, leaving it to my Mother (‘women’s talk’ he labelled it.) And I could never even mention stomach pains being due to my period.
Maybe a lot of Dads are like that towards their little girls, but he (and I’m sure, to a lesser extent, a lot of parents are the same) was not so squeamish when describing the effects of war and disaster on human beings. (Yet he was a humanist, and always believed that given the right insensitive, human beings would go to the good, even though he was an old cynic and used to say, in a bitter tone,
‘Man, the superior animal,’
whenever news of some genocide filtered through into our living room via the radio or telly news.)
And, given the way war films are watched, and enjoyed, by kids today. where sex is tiptoed around, things have not altered beyond recognition.
I am going to get to my point eventually; And it’s in the form of a question;
Why is it embarrassing to watch even a passionate kissing scene with your parents, yet watching scenes of limbs flying and heads being blown off is not so bad?
Don’t you think we have our priorities the slightest bit skewed, and the only way we can get back on track, and not reproduce a lot of sex-obsessed violent kids is to be a bit more balanced in our teaching of what is right and wrong.
Or is it all right to buy kids war toys and not, with the same thoughtless innocence, teach them that gentle love making is fifty times better than pulling a gun on someone?
Here endeth the (Atheist) lesson.
A BASIC ATHEIST MORALITY
All right, how many of you are sick of hearing something along the lines of;
“There has to be god, ’cause without god there’d be no morals.”
In other words, us Atheist/Freethinker types, who used reason and logic to discover the truth THERE IS NO GOD, SO DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT, are incapable of being useful, non-sociapathic, social beings.
Well, I’m sure that a lot of Theistic believers would like to reckon that, but (at last, I know) I’ve got an answer for them, and that answer can provide the basics of a god-free morality.
It’s what I call Hobbesan reciprocation, and it was invented in the days of the Civil War (Parliament v. Royalty, back in the 1650’s.) Now, those anarchic days, when the world lost it’s meaning, and age-old ways of doing thing were made obsolete, were, in eyes of many thinking men, final proof that if a god existed, he did not give a tinker’s cuss what happened to his people, and from those days were born the Ranters, Fifth Monarchists and (my favourites) the Levellers (anyone know where you can get a sea green ribbon, like an AIDS awareness badge, to pin to my coat?)
A lot of thinking men came to the conclusion that the bible was just another way of looking at the reason for the world and it’s creation, and wasn’t that special, and a lot became despondent and suicidal. The Puritan government enforced strict belief in biblical mores to stop the thinkers from thinking out of the box too much but some allowed their thoughts to wander and arrive at a certain place that would now be called Atheism.
Now, we come to Thomas Hobbes and his god-free moral code which goes;
“Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.”
Say you got a car (I’m updating it, of course) and you drove how you like, knocking pensioners and toddlers out of the road, well, you have a right to do so.
But then people have the right to do the same back.
That’s right. Next time you left the car at home and walked, there would be nothing to stop mowing you down, or your kid or granny or whoever.
Doing exactly what you want not so appealing now, is it?
Call me an old misanthrope, but according to my experience, given the choice, people would stride about, knocking people into the mud without a care. But maybe, if they knew others had the right to do unto them, maybe they would stop and think, ‘no, I won’t.’
I know it’s only the basics (reason, all those years the fear of hell kept my thoughts corralled, now they’re free and this is all new and wonderful to me.) And there is a lot to add to it.
I suppose you can add a layer of altruism to it, you might watch people starving in a refugee camp, but then people have the right to watch you starving, take all your food and possessions, so it’s more sensible to see the other chap has enough, after all, as the old saying goes; (Your Mum or someone must have said it when you were still a kid as an early attempt as reasoning when you hit someone smaller and weaker)
“How would you like someone to do that to you?”
Simple but brilliant and there is no need or reason to include a Deity in any manner, shape or form.
BEST LAUGH OF THE DAY (?)
I am definitely slowing up (down?).
It generally takes me nine minutes to walk from Waterstone’s book shop on Deansgate, Manchester, to the bus station on Shudehill, for my bus home (no matter what the weather). Today, it took me seventeen minutes.
I was shocked at how slow I’m walking, and the rainy weather should really have inspired me to walk quicker (peeing down it has been all day, over here).
But I did manage to wring a laugh out of it all. A Big Issue seller called to me;
“Cheer up! Things’ll get worse.”
I was still laughing when I got to my destination.
It’s things like that, and the attitude from which they come, that make it all worth while. It’s also inspired me (in an indirect way) to get some more of my story typed, and definitely, and soon, parcelled up and sent off to a suitable publishing house, for their perusal. Because I doubt very much I’ll be able to continue with the productive spondulicks earning any other way much longer.
HOORAY, OH HOORAY (ALMOST)
Mr Blair has finally handed his notice in.
All would be 100% well if he also called a general election for the day he turns it all in.
You know, give us a chance to decide whether or not we still want to be ruled by (New) Labour under a different leader, or whether we want someone else from another party to have a go.
It’s only fair the people, who after all are the ones those in power claim to speak for, should decide whether (new) Labour should stay or go on the same day Mr Blair goes.
