Remember, clocks go back one hour at two am this morning.
UNCHRISTIAN CHRISTIANITY+
Everyone’s favourite New Zealand born evangelical Christian, Ray Comfort, and his pal Kirk Cameron, who in his younger days was an actor, have really shown their true colours by putting out their own version of ‘The Origin of Species’.
What do I mean, their own version?
Well, it’s exactly the same as it was first published, one hundred and fifty years ago, but with a special addition. At the front, before you actually get to the book, is a sort of preface, fifty pages of it, written by Ray Comfort, listing the mistakes of evolution, (Piltdown man, anyone?) how evolution tempted Hitler into his own brand of hateful racism, how Charles Darwin was a racist and a misogynist, etc.
In other words, it’s the book with a load of anti-Darwinist propaganda stuck at the front.
Now, putting aside the fact a few (corrected by other scientists, who after all are only human) mistakes, doesn’t make evolution less true in itself. For every Piltdown man there is a Darwinopterus, which is a genuine, perfect example of what Creationists would call the (a) missing link. And that fact that Hitler was (he wasn’t) a rabid evolutionist who massacred millions of Jews in the name of Darwinian purity, doesn’t make evolution fiction. Neither does what Darwin himself thought of other races and females. Darwin’s ideas about other nationalities does not detract from the fact evolution explained the diversity of life on earth and still does after one hundred and fifty years. But don’t worry about that.
Instead, concentrate on what Comfort and his pal Cameron are doing. Now, I used to be a Christian, and I was taught by many old saints, that charitable works, cheerful giving, being kind to those you can’t stand, loving service, is what Christianity is all about. Because when non believers see your example, they will want to know more about this Christian business and might even get saved themselves. But no. Western Christians like Comfort and Cameron are too busy pedalling propaganda to go out and serve in the name of Christ. If you go and do an old person’s shopping for them, or babysit to give a harassed single mother a few hours off, or help build a shed or make a bed, and do it for Jesus, that’s Christianity. There is nothing in the Bible that says ‘write a load of stuff to turn people to me’. Actions, not words, make the Christian. That’s what makes people like Comfort and Cameron unchristian.
As to the job and my efforts in getting one front; I’m not going to post postings(?) as to my daily job-finding efforts. There are few things more boring than having to put up with an on-going autobiography concerning what a body gets up to. I will only mention it again when (if) I manage to get work.
JUST THE BEGINNING
I went down the job centre and perused the jobs on offer. Found three that I might take to. All cleaning jobs, all evening jobs.
Anyhow. . .
I rang up the numbers provided.
One job had gone. (Nice of them not to ring up the job centre and tell them to remove the offer).
Another, you had to have a clean driver’s licence. (Why? Unless you have to clean an area so big you need your own transport to get around it).
The third led me to an answerphone, leave your name and phone number and I’ll get back to you. So I did. This was about dinner time, and they’ve not got back to me yet.
I might nip down to where I worked before and fish for the possibility of getting my old job back. I doubt it, it’s been too long since I turned it in. Still, I can always reapply. . .
A HOPE, A CHANCE
Th doctor has prescribed tablets for my arthritis in my legs, and the pain and stiffness is actually easing off to such a point where I can get up and down the stairs without too much effort. Plus, the pain that kept me awake and out of my bed has gone almost completely.
And, now, to be honest, I can’t think of any real reason why I can’t try and get a job. Cleaning or something, maybe. Something that doesn’t require pieces of paper to prove you can do things you can do because you’ve taught yourself. ANYTHING is better than sitting about watching life pass you by, the minutes drip dripping like water from a tap with a damaged washer. I’ve read everything in the house, I don’t put my computer on until after tea most nights (saves money) and there are vast, trackless wastes consisting of time I can’t fill up doing bugger all. Being out of work is damn boring. I feel useless. I’d feel like I was achieving something again. Plus, the money from a job would be nice.
It will be nice to get back into the world of work again. Then I’ll have enough money to purchase a Microsoft word CD-rom and use it to e-parcel stories up in such a way they will be read by a publisher who specializes in reading unsolicited manuscripts.
I think I’ll take a stroll down the job centre, see what they’ve got on offer. I’ve got the will to go ahead, and I’m keen to start. There is always a chance, even with jobs vanishing as businesses go under. Someone might give me a go. I’d like to work as I did before, the night shift in a supermarket. I’m a natural night owl, am more active after eight pm. Now my noisy, anti-social neighbour has vanished, possibly for good, there’s no reason why I can’t work at night and sleep during the day. There’s more choice as well, as not many people want permanent nights, and the money’s better.
I’ll have to get moving. The longer I put it off, in this employer’s market, where the employer can reject you if you haven’t been in work for a set time, the less chance I have of getting work.
I can always try, and I’m sure someone will give me a chance. It’s better than this doing nowt and achieving nowt at the moment. Anything is better than that.
CAUGHT AT KISSES
I caught my two babies Domino Basset and Lyra Tab kissing on the wicker chair in my living room.
Here is photographic proof.
Actually, the sad thing is that this event is a one-off as they are usually hissing and spitting and scrapping at one another.
BOASTING ON BEHALF
This evening, my middle sister swam thirty lengths of the local swimming baths.
Thirty lengths.
She is forty-two, not necessarily a sportswoman, and she has swum thirty lengths. She said she could have done more but she got fed up.
I’ve not been to the swimming baths for twenty years, and I remember getting all excited because I managed to do a breadth and a half. My middle sister, a hard working woman as well as a wife and a Mother swum thirty lengths and said she could have done more but she got bored.
She can play music, too. Any instrument, she can get ahold of and play, although she’s never had a lesson.
My middle sister is very talented.
Quick addendum: if my Dad had been less keen on me, as eldest, being the sports person in the family, and stepped over me and actively concentrated on my middle sister, he wouldn’t have been as thoroughly disappointed.
GROWING NICELY
This picture of Lyra Tab was taken when I first got her, when she was six weeks old.
This was taken about a week back, now she’s approximately five months.
I’m not sure why one eyes is partly shut on this one. She hasn’t got a sore eye or anything. Still. . .
Can you see the difference? She really HAS grown, hasn’t she? Matured as well, looks older.
To be honest, though, because I see her every day, I hadn’t noticed. It’s only pictures, even rubbishy ones taken on mobile phone cameras, that help me plot her growing path.
AND IT’S GONE
A couple of years back, I set off to look at my old home.
The house was still there, one of two in which was once, before my time, a terrace of houses, the others having fallen foul to council planning. The garages where I used to play, the spare ground where we used to pile bonfire wood for our yearly Guy Fawkes extravaganza, where all the street came together to supply fireworks or parkin or baked potatoes.* It was a day very much like today out, dry, sunny but not oppressively hot. Pleasant for a walk.
Anyhow, for lack of anything better to do, I decided to have another albeit virtual, walk down the street, thanks to my favourite internet map program (NOT Google maps, in case you haven’t guessed). And when I opened the correct map I got a shock that went right through me, knocking the air out of me.
At first I didn’t believe it. I checked again, from different angle, from various approaches, and hovered over the street itself, but it’s true. There is no denying it.
And I wept.
It’s gone.
Everything. The house, the street, everything. There are some damn modern flats built on where I used to play and where the bonfires used to be ritually lit yearly. The council planners haven’t even allowed it the dignity of keeping the name I knew that still awakens happy memories of wonderful times.
I’ve only ever loved two places in my life, one where I am now, which I probably will have to leave soon due to not being able to manage to stairs, and that street, that house, where I grew up, which in no more.
Bloody shame.
It will still exist in my heart and my mind, they can’t take my memories off me no matter what they erase, the landscape will still be as it was as long as I can remember.
*You have not lived until you have eaten potatoes baked on an open bonfire. There is no taste on earth like it.
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION
I’m sure Lyra Tab is a mute.
I’ve had her with me since the end of May, and she hasn’t meowed or made any kind of sound yet. Even when I talk to her and focus my attention on her and make a fuss of her, where Domino and all the other cats I’ve had have made sounds when I talked to them. She purrs, quite loudly, but that’s about it.
SONG TO END THE WEEKEND ON : ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU’ (ME)
It’s my birthday today, in case anyone out there is interested. I am forty-six. As presents, I got ‘Columbo season ten part two’, and a new Sony MP3 player, as my old one has just about given up the ghost. (Its smart; it’s a flat slim oblong shape, rust coloured, with a little screen on it. A bit like an ipod to look at.)
So, happy birthday to me.
But you’re not interested in that are you?
This weekend’s song to end the weekend on is a topical number. A rare recording of the Beatles singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’.
It was sung on the BBC children’s programme ‘Saturday Club’ and is sung to the club itself. Listen how strong their Lancashire accents are; ‘Saturday cloob’.
Anyhow,
As always,
Enjoy, and
A good week, whether it’s your birthday or you are a lesser mortal and don’t share the big day on the same date as me.
MORE BLOODY COMPLAINING
My legs won’t bloody work properly.
I’ve been running around looking after my Mother, as she has had a fall and couldn’t get out, and this old body machine has finally given in. I can’t get upstairs and going out isn’t going to happen.
Maybe a day in just fannying about will cure them.
I was offered a bungalow a couple of years back. Everything on one level. But my sentimental attachment to this place saw me turning it down. I had the key and was packed and everything. I sort of, quietly, in the depths of me, wish I’d gone to that bungalow now. But me, Miss Show-off me, never thought things would get so bad. I should realise by now that with this body machine, anything that can go wrong, will.
I know what’s happened to my legs. They have stiffened up with going out in the rain. Bloody arthritis.
Fortunately, I got a load of stuff in for my Mum yesterday, so she doesn’t need anything today. She says she’s going to try and go out, which is good for her. Fortunately, (again) I got a load of stuff in for myself yesterday so I don’t need to go out.
It’s bloody stupid. I want to, I have the heart and will to, it’s just my body machine won’t.
Bloody joke, isn’t it?
ANNIVERSARY. . .
Forty years ago today, 20th of July 1969, members of the human race in the form of Neil Armstrong and Buzz* Aldrin stepped upon the surface of another planet.
I was five years old that year, so was too young to really catch the excitement, although my Dad’s enthusiasm rubbed off on me somewhat, but not in much detail. I do recall being in our back yard and him picking me up and showing me the moon and telling me that men were up there. I could almost swear it was a full moon, but it’s probably due to layers of imaginative wishful thinking having me mis-remembering. I do remember though being very disappointed because I couldn’t see them, no matter how hard I looked.
Back to today, two of the three astronauts who made that first journey, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the one who stayed, alone, in the command module orbiting the moon and never actually landed, have suggested that the world of space exploration be reopened, and this time the goal should be a man on Mars.
As a species we’re only just beginning our journey to the other planets, as thrilling, dangerous and challenging as when the first men got into their galleons and headed for the horizon, across uncharted seas, in search of land. We are natural explorers and Aldrin and Collins are just two whose imaginations have been fired with the idea of breaking from earth and discovering other places; it won’t be within my lifetime, but if we work together as a species, and stop this silly tribal infighting, which should have died when fire was discovered as a way of keeping away the bitter winter chills, we can plunge into truly uncharted territory, beyond the solar system and out into the universe.
*Although his born given name was Edwin, Buzz has been Aldrin’s legal name since 1988. It comes from his younger sister’s mispronouncing ‘brother’ as ‘buzzer’, shortened to ‘Buzz’.
MORE THOUGHTS ON A SUBJECT+
I know I’ve sort of covered this already in a previous posting, but well there is more than one angle to cover stuff from.
Sometimes you get theists saying ‘if you’re an atheist, where do you get your morals from? Why don’t you go on a killing spree because you don’t think there’s a god making sure you behave?’
Surely this can be turned around; suppose it can be proven, scientifically, without a doubt, that Biblegod (the involved god of the theistic believer no matter what their flavour of belief) doesn’t exist. I know, I know it’s not possible to prove this, you have to use reason and logic that shows you it’s more or less likely that he is just made up, like all the other gods. But just let’s imagine it’s proven that he doesn’t exist. Does that mean all you theists will lose your moral way?
If god doesn’t exist, what would stop you theists from going on a killing spree? Surely it isn’t just the notion that a Father Christmas of a god, seeing if you’ve been naughty or nice, stops you from murdering and raping and stealing and performing other anti-social actions against your fellow human beings?
If your answer is ‘no, I wouldn’t harm anyone even if Biblegod didn’t exist’ well, why not? For the same reason us atheists/freethinkers don’t harm others. Because it’s built into us that harming others harms us as a species in general. It feels wrong because we have evolved to survive long enough to pass our genes on onto the next generation, ensuring they live on, and if we went ahead and killed and stole excreta, we would be wiping out our genes, and ultimately our future.* Welcome to the human race and the world of scientific freethought.
If your answer is ‘yes, I would. I would go on an anarchic orgy of mass destruction if Biblegod was proven to be false’ well, bloody hell. That’s all. Bloody hell. There’s more than just slavish belief going on in your mind. You ought to get treatment before it leaks out and around that wall of fear you have built up on account of your god and you go ahead with your desires. You are actually in the minority, and if you truly would kill your neighbour and/or rape his or her wife or husband if god wasn’t holding a break on you, then that’s why we have non-theistic, secular laws. But get help, seriously. For the sake of humanity.
As for my personal existence, I’m still in an agony of loss over my (ex)girlfriend. I miss her so much. But I have to respect her wishes, and for me to reach out in an attempt to regain her would be unwanted attention and heading into the dangerous territory of the stalker. And that’s a place I have no interest in ending up, for her sake and mine. Sometimes you have to love enough to let go.
*Another good reason leads us to the marvellous philosophy labelled Hobbesian reciprocation, which basically goes, ‘if you go around freely hurting others,without any consideration for them, then there is no logic reason why others can’t hurt you.’ Or ‘Don’t harm others because then there’s no reason why they can’t hurt you back’ I believe this is one of the best-reasoned and excellent philosophies, and a great basis for non-theistic morals, and can be correctly used in an argument with a theist who asks ‘where do you get your morals from?’
