I will start this blog off with an admission: I’m not gay.
I’m also not Christian. I’m not Muslim nor
am I a scientologist. I’m not black. I’m not Asian.
I’m a heterosexual, Anglo Saxon, atheist,
white male. To compound this damning description I also work in finance and
have voted Tory ever since I was legally able to.
Essentially I am about as far away from the
urban street as its possible to be, well perhaps Boris Johnson is a bit further
away but its safe to say I won’t be appearing as an extra on The Wire anytime soon. Unless it’s to
get mugged that is.
It doesn’t really matter though, I don’t
care and I’m sure 50 Cent and his chums don’t care much either.
I remember when I first learned the real
truth about human reproduction. I was
about 9 or 10 years old. It was the summer holidays and I was idly walking back
from the park with a friend kicking an old plastic football between us.
‘Fuck off! No way! Who told you that?’ I shouted after he had just, out of the blue, told me about it using terms like ‘Your dad put
it there, they did this and then you appeared’
‘Its true’ he said nodding solemnly
I thought about this for a while, trying to
exorcise the image from my brain.
‘That means your mum and dad must have done
the same then?’ I grinned, throwing it back at him.
‘Nope' he said 'not them, just your mum and dad' then he ran off laughing and waving for me to pass him the ball.
I didn’t believe him at the time but within
two years the horrible truth had been broken to me through the medium of pencil
and chalk drawings in school. Living and
Growing is a TV series I will never forget, for all the wrong reasons. Two
years later it was a topic which had taken over my mind almost entirely. My
forearms bulked out. Childhood was nearly over.
Anyway, it turned out to be not as bad as I
thought it would when my friend told me about it that summer’s day in the
late 1970s.
My three kids will find out one day, one
already has. The other two have some time yet but eventually they will too.
They might turn out similar to me, who knows. Two are half Asian so they
already have a significant headstart in the street credibility stakes long before
that even matters to them.
The good thing is regardless of their
ethnicity, their sexual preferences or their career choices there will
generally be no bias one way or another towards them. In general, and I am of
course generalising here, the world is a pretty unbiased place to live. Rio
Ferdinand might argue differently but we are certainly some way away from the
world as it existed say, 200 years ago. Pockets of resistance exist in amongst
some segments of the population and there is the odd country still believing
themselves to be ethnically superior to another but these are rare.
Religion is different though.
Science is right, of course it is, 2000
years of scientific study and clinical evidence cant be wrong, can it? With
such an overwhelming volume of work, postulating, hypothesising, proving and
disproving how could it be anything but the truth? Well it cant be but it is
certainly not the whole truth. It is still someway away from explaining the
whole truth. Which leaves me in the difficult situation of there being some
scientifically accepted scientific concepts I personally find impossible to
understand no matter how tight I screw up my eyes; infinity, higgs bosun, warp
speed to name just three.
So what is wrong with having a get out of
jail card called faith in your back pocket? If you don’t understand it simply
say it was gods will and move on. An omnipresent escape clause as John Loftus would describe it. But think about it, having an escape
clause, omnipresent or otherwise has to be preferable to trying to figure out how the
Starship Enterprise doesn’t bump into planets during warp speed. At least I
think it is.
Christian bashing seems to be in vogue. There
are multiple websites, facebook pages all with the intention of throwing
unanswerable questions at creaky old men in robes safe in the knowledge they
have no valid repost.
Its too easy. These sites seem to be awash
with smug atheists actively seeking a fight then sniggering or arguing about
creation and in the process trying to persuade some poor soul that his or hers
belief system is flawed.
Are these the modern day equivalent of
missionaries traipsing around Africa trying to convert the heathens?
Probably not.
To me it feels less of a conversion process
and more of a bullying/self promoting ‘I am right and I want to hear you admit
defeat’ type of process.
Either way its not very pleasant, in the
same way it wouldn’t be acceptable to have the scientific community going out
of its way to prove that man-love isn’t correct. ‘Its not supposed to go in
there you know?’ is a pretty valid argument but I’ve never heard Stephen
Hawkins say so and does it really matter?
Not really.
Anyway religion isn’t all that bad. The
vast majority – 99.9% - of people with faith practice it without any negative consequence on the rest of us so what’s the problem?
If you have to throw anyone to the lions
why not focus on the 0.1%. The door knocking Jehovah witnesses, scientologists,
Islamic terrorists and anyone who carries out violence in the name of religion.
Leave the rest alone to whatever it is they believe.
Just a suggestion though, it might be an idea
to keep your thoughts on the existence of god to yourself if you happen to find
yourself in the middle of Helmand province.
Who knows at some future point the bearded
chaps at CERN might discover the god particle and reveal to the world it was actually made by the big man himself.
They could prove that Mary did
conceive immaculately and not how my friend described it and they might prove that god exists and is a hazy man with a white beard.
What will you say then? Bullying atheists?
Huh?
