Good Luck to Matt

With the new blog

but, assuming I could remember how many "a"s it has, in the wake of atheists routinely denouncing their opponents as "mad", and given that they seem to support any bullying authority over any individual who doesn't share their worldview, I think I will give the debate a miss.

If Matt can get Alex back to work then that would be worth joining, of course.

Fed Up With Your Indigestion

That track makes me laugh, it's by "the fuckwits" or something. Can't remember their proper name but it ain't dissimilar.*

Anyhoo. Today's Times carries an interview with Sir Bernard Lovell, unbelievably still alive at the real and not piss-taken age of 94. Unfortunately, all I could think of was how Telly Twatteron out of the National Secular Society will respond in Monday's Times:

Dear Sir,

The interview with "Sir" Bernard Lovell was nothing short of a disgrace. It is, surely, an anomaly that in this pluralistic, multicultural, secular society, an important figure in the public sphere - and a scientist to boot - should admit to not being an atheist. My taxes - the taxes of a rational man - have supported this charlatan for fifty years, which is an affront to all right thinking atheists (although, clearly, the term "bright" is more appropriate and any other term is, in fact, an insult - and recent research shows that atheists are the most discriminated against group in the USA).
More than that, his disclosure that he has - appallingly- played the organ in his local church all this time shows that his scientific judgement has to be called into question. If such an apparently rational man could believe in the the "flying spaghetti monster" (a most amusing and very clever satire, on religion, published against the machinations of the all powerful religious conspiracy thingy) then surely all of his theories and thoughts must be discounted. This is a man who believes in other stuff. Stuff I have never seen. This means that when he talks about other stuff I have never seen, but that I am usually happy to take on trust from experts, he cannot be believed.
Accordingly, the 50 year history of Jodrell Bank must be called into immediate question. I mean - since his mindset is so clearly askew, any views he takes must, logically, be ignored. I ask readers of this newspaper a simple question: if you were in a car driven by someone who told you he was an excellent driver, but who also said that a lovely fluffy bunny would meet you at the end of the journey, wouldn't you jump out, regardless of the speed of the car? I am not saying I disbelieve Jodrell Bank on pulsars, just that..well, you know.
And I _keep_ coming back to the central point: how dare my taxes be spent on anything that does not reflect my worldview?

Yours, Tervy Narcisseron


ps Do not attempt to reply to my letter: I have gone into hiding because I will surely be targeted by religious extremists following my exceptionally brave letter, and also interview in the Catholic Herald a couple of weeks ago aren't I brave after all it was a right hatchet job ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (ad infinitum, or rather ad finitum ha ha ha ha)




Indeed.


Besides of this crap, life goes on. Or rather it doesn't for a number of people, whose names I do not intend to list here. It came as something of a surprise to me to wake up this morning, although I had not drunk anything except mathematics last night. Perhaps that was the reason. I still thought: "fuck me, what do you know?"

Any Catholic readers I still have (and I have reason to believe that Crushed By Ingsoc still reads me) will understand this: when I was 12, I had no-one, literally no-one, to pray for during Eucharistic Prayer 1 when the priest says "Now we pray for those who have died...". Now-a-days my list goes on almost until the end of the prayer. Fuck me: friends, chums, aquaintances, favourite pop stars, family, teachers, tutors, not lovers yet thank fuck - it just pours out like a stream of mortal diarrhoea. I estimate it finishes around "on earth as it is on heaven".

for any well read atheist readers, yes I know it goes on to say "..marked with the sign of faith". So what. We're all fucking dead in the long run. All fucking dead.

For any bastard tenacious atheist readers yes I know I don't sound very positive for a Catholic. So the fuck what. Christ came for the tossers, the wankers and the fuckwits. Not for the people who had it all sorted. Hence Nietzsche calls it a slave religion, and hence now we've told him to fuck off we're still obsessed with victimhood. Nietsche would laugh then he'd fuck off down the pub. For a quick flirt with the Swedish barmaid and a boast about how when he's not in the pub he's really something quite important. Then he'd get into a fight with some twat who thought he was mad and he'd say "Oi who are you calling mad you ignorant cunt" and he'd glass the twat then he'd say "had enough have you you fuckwitted arsehole, had enough eh, you fucking cunt" and he'd kick the tosser in the bollocks when he was down then he'd say "think god isn't dead do you you fucking twat, you cocksucker, think the will to power means nothing do you you stupid fucker" then he'd punch the semi-conscious face of his opponent and say "jesus fucking christ a weak thing would fucking hide itself in a sturdy fucking barrel" and then he'd tell the fucker to get up then he'd say "fuck me you dickhead you English are all the fucking same; you lose the religion but you don't lose the fucking ethic".

Or something. [breathes in and out like Harry Enfield character c.1991]


the drums...the drums...the drums...the drums...the drums....



*=They are "The TingTings", or so I am told.

A Crap Death

Now far be it from me to condemn anyone's passing into the other world, but today's death of Scott Timmins (aka Stingray) on Neighbours was downright arse. I've nothing against stupid or freakish deaths (like the guy who died while clambering down a cliff face to shag a chicken, or the bloke who had a heart attack while watching a fight between a set of bagpipes and a black pudding on "The Goodies"), but this takes the freakin' biscuit.

Firstly, Neighbours is resolutely secular, even unto refusing Harold a prayer while Stingray committed himself to surgery to save baby Kerry; it is always going on and on about the benefits of secular values like promiscuous sex sans the consequences; but today....Jeez....

Right. Firstly, Stingray, feelin' fine, but saying he'd "sit this one [dance] out" went and sat down and looked lovingly at his family's party. Then, the camera angle swooped to over his head _and rising_, then from that pov the fmaily noticed he was slumped in his chair and they all went over and the credits rolled. For such a secular show to even suggest that some kind of soul or spirit or some such nonsense "rose" out of Stinger (why do religious images suggest that rising is good? We are natural to the lowest point available and being in the air is an abomination) is a massive, massive cop out to an audience, which they believe doesn't do God, but still wants some kind of reassurance that the default position of tv companies is that "souls" or whatever, rise out of dead humans upon their death. Pathetic. If they'd really thought their worldview through they'd've just shown him slump, or sent the screen blank. But not a rising camera angle. Neighbours does not do religion or God, even if Stinger said "say one for me", like my old atheist grandad used to, today in a ghastly, shitheaded act of foreshadowing. This was cowardice, a sop to a society which _still_ has not got past Nietzsche's point about George Eliot: that they have given up the belief, but not the ethics, or sort of, or something.

I mean, how crap was that? A rising camera! Why not go the whole hog and show little fucking angel wings coming up as well?


Yes, I know it isn't real. But still. For goodness' sake. It could be I'm reading too much into a camera angle ascending on someone's death, but I doubt it.



No Stingray, you must die. Die Stingray, die, Stingray, die, die!!!! Hah! Hah! Hah!!!

Scepticism, Enquiry and Reason

As regular readers of my blog will know, but perhaps not care greatly about, I am a sceptic who wishes he wasn't. I look for patterns and sense in the world, as well as for things to counter my limited view of reality - the strange, the unaccounted for, and so on. You might also remember that I've mentioned in the past my disappointment that these things have failed to turn up in my life. Technically I suppose it is unreasonable or irrational to want there to be other things than I can see, but there are three main elements (rather than reasons) behind my belief:
1. I cannot believe that the perception of such a limited creature as myself should bear any resemblance to the great truths of reality or existence;
2. I do not want our cultural arrogance to turn out in fact to be the case;
3. I would like there to be purpose to life, irrespective of whether we can or choose to give meaning to it.

These have not been arrived at through logical thought; rather through experience, disappointment and irrationally choosing one position over another on the sole basis that I find it more morally-aesthetically appealing. I am a sceptic but a reluctant one - a position which for me refutes the idea commonly advanced in favour of hating certain groups of people and being able to express it loudly in law, that they "choose" their worldview. I don't. I have it. If I do become an atheist at any point (I'd rather not) it would be because I felt I had no choice in view of how I saw the world. I could not simply change the way I understand life, it would change me. I would like to be shocked (as I often pretended to be as a teenager) into a radically different view of the world, but as it happens I have never been.

I mention all this because of a recent post over at James's place in which he used a photo I was sure I'd seen before. Right enough it was a photo of the 1950 Trent Farm UFO sighting, one which though it has been put through lots of analysis has yet to be proved definitively fake. This means nothing of course, except that it is evidence in favour of a kind of faith (at the moment), and is a minuscule reason to hold to the idea of other things. I am often asked whether ufology is compatible with religious belief - I've never seen the contradiction myself (a la God, in the great Radio 4 series Old Harry's Game: "Do you really think you're the best I could manage?"). The Trent Farm photo proves nothing, suggest very little. To me it just means that there might, still, be something else. All too often evidence for the existence of ufos has been thoroughly and incontrovertibly smashed into fragments. Perhaps this will be (I've seen it happen often enough to "good" pictures). But it's still out there.

Alas I'm struggling to publish it here but you can see the photo here

It doesn't look much, but I'm told it's been terribly good in tests.