Religion

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof - Henry David Thoreau

To my grandmother – a staunch Methodist – religion was vital to her life because it gave her the answers to all those questions about life and what it was for, and so on, that she – probably unconsciously – realised that she did not have the equipment – either mentally or temperamentally – to discover for herself. While – to me – that was the very reason – probably the reason above all others – to despise religion, because it had the temerity to attempt to give answers to questions that I felt – and still do feel – can only be discovered by the individual through individual effort.

People often say that all human societies have religion. That is - as far as I know – true, but what does it really mean? People speculate about things - it is what we do, we have brains and we use them. We make up stories to cover the gaps in what we know. Some of those stories become myths, become religion.

Just as from the Greeks onward, knowledge was a subsection of philosophy which as over time developed and became the separate branches of knowledge like biology, physics, chemistry, psychology and so on, the same has happened to theological ideas. People would be religious in earlier ages, or in less developed societies, because there was no other word, no other concept, for them to use to describe that particular branch of their experience. But, as we have learnt more, understood more, the theological has become replaced as it has become irrelevant.

Of course, it is a wild generalisation, but religious people - to me - always seems to have a missing… dimension, seem incomplete, as though they have refused to take that necessary step towards full self-definition. Often they have the look of people who have remained living in the parental home long after they should have left. Perhaps it is that fear of parental admonishment; long after it should have been nullified, that gives them that vague, distracted, haunted look, an aura of intellectual naivety, timidity and blandness.

Management

Whenever I think of family holidays from when I was a child I always seem to recall the rainy days. Holidays would not be the same without rainy days. It is an essential part of the experience of a holiday. Going abroad to places with more consistent 'better' weather has robbed the British holiday of one of its most significant aspects. The disappointment, the sense of being trapped within a small area with limited resources is akin to those exercises for trainee army officers that management-types appropriated for those courses they like to send each other on. However, such courses seems to have more to do with an attempt to change the image of the office worker from that of pampered wimp into macho dynamic professional.

These paramilitary style courses are not really that necessary - except in the image sense as above. All they really needed to do - if they were serious about their charges actually learning something useful - is to put a new clause into all their office workers' contracts. A clause that states that the workers are obliged to spend two weeks every year on a caravan holiday in Wales with a young family. That would sort out the thrusting go-ahead achievers from the time-servers. That is if any of them survived.

However, it is more likely that it would be the go-ahead thrusting dynamic sort that would fall apart when faced with real problems. But that wouldn't really matter as business these days is more about image than anything else, if it was ever otherwise. Whatever happens, the thrusting dynamic youngster in the expensive suit is going to appear far more dynamic than the balding, middle-aged bloke in the jam-stained cardigan.

Nevertheless they would do wise to remember that in the Bond films it is the old, faintly ludicrous Q that comes up with all the useful devices, Bond is just a tool.

A Handful Of Stars

These things we think of, now and then. On waking suddenly in the coldest, darkest heart of the night I could speak of those things, but not now. They are all gone, lost on the wind that sweeps through the mind, purging it of all its night time thoughts.

The day begins slowly with the night sliding reluctant from the mind like some creature of the dark shadow-places retreating before the hesitant dawn.

Those things look different in the light of the day. The darkness of the night gives credence and plausibility to those things that would seem to be so absurd in the daylight.

Later, as the day draws to a close, when darkness falls and distances stumble to a few steps either side of you and shadows grow wide and tall enough to contain and conceal a whole world beyond you, it is then you look deep into the fire. Then, without taking your gaze from the dancing flames, you talk of those things that seemed foolish in the warm soft light of the day, realising these things need more light than a solitary fire and a handful of stars.

New Post Label

A new label for blog postings may not seem a bit enough deal for a posting of its own, but I think I may have come up with something new (for here anyway), which may increase the rate of new posts appearing here.

In various folders on this computer, and in various files on my shelves, I have quite a lot of what I am going to label here as Fragments. These are also going to be labelled as Fragment-Poetry and Fragment-Prose – which will be further divided into Fragment-Fiction and Fragment-Non-Fiction.

They are, as the label indicates, various unfinished pieces of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that have not – as yet – grown beyond a paragraph, stanza, idea or two. Consequently, as they are Fragments, I make no claim for them to be anything other than what they are, nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, I do want to continue with the blessays (blog essays) idea I stole from Stephen Fry, and what you might call fuller-length blog postings, but - by their very nature - such longer pieces will be less frequent than these shorter pieces.

It is possible that I will return to some of these fragments and expand them out into full poems, stories, essays or whathaveyou in the future. If I do, I will try to link back to the original fragment wherever possible.

I don’t know when the first of these Fragments will appear, as I said there are a lot of them, probably numbering in the hundreds. So it will take some time to sort them out, but I hope to publish some here as I go along.

The Cost Of Crime

This unfortunate comment by the Home Secretary about being too afraid to walk the streets of London at night resonates with something that struck me just after Christmas, when I read this.

Both items make me wonder why should the law-abiding have to pay the cost of crime, all the time.

We – it seems – have to be constantly ‘upgrading our security’: burglar alarms, window locks, security lighting and so forth on our homes; car alarms, immobilizers, removable – or theft-proof - satnav and car stereos in our cars. Then, if we do dare to walk the streets (unlike our glorious politicians), we are told to hide our valuables, do not use mobile phones and keep to the well-lit and busy streets. As well, as the article above implies, as even going as far as hiding the empty boxes our precious new stuff came in.

Of course, it is true when people counter this by saying something like ‘but crime has always been with us’ and ‘it was worse, not any better, in the past’. This may indeed be true, but the point is that we are supposed to be moving on, getting better. Society should be moving forward, not back.

The saddest part of this is the growing acceptance of the fact that society, if not growing worse, is not really improving for the majority of us. Yes, we are getting materially wealthier, but it seems we are spending increasing amounts of our money, time and effort on protecting ourselves, and what we have. Consequently, we live in a state of anxiety that one day we could have it taken from us by an increasingly bold, aggressive and uncompromising criminality that appears to have taken over the world outside our doors.

God Knows

I suppose I am an atheist. I say ‘suppose’ because I don’t really think of myself as an atheist. I just regard myself as… well… ordinary. Up until quite recently I always assumed that people of well, let’s say the post-WWII generations would quite naturally be non-believers in any and all the religions. So it used to come as quite a surprise to me to come across young god-botherers. That is until I came across the (mainly Americans) I met on this new-fangled internet thing, especially it seems in more recent years.

Of course, there are exceptions.

It often seems as though Dawkins et al, keep going on about the absurdity of the existence of a God, which to my mind is quite right but somewhat beside the point. Religions have somehow managed to appropriate ethics and morality, so that when ordinary people think of religion, they think of something that is in a vague and generally undefined way ‘good’: good as in morally on the right side, good as in generally good for people, and a ‘good’ thing to be. That is why they tend to see religion in a person as a ’good thing’ and have suspicions about atheism.

Our (atheists – for want of a better word) time would, I think, be therefore better spent pointing out that religion and morality, religion and ethics are not ‘the same thing’ at all. Not only that, blindly following the religious strictures can often turn out to be one of, if not the, more immoral choices available. Of course, there are some good moral points in religions ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a fine and splendid example, of course. However, to blindly follow the writings of some desert dwelling tribes from thousands of years ago (actually even longer as we know the ‘modern’ religions are just adaptations of previous forms.*) is not just silly, but dangerous as times, knowledge and understanding all change, and morality must take on board these changes or become irrelevant.

*In fact, it is interesting to speculate whether the religions we have would have stayed so frozen in form if they too had belonged to a far more pre-literate age. In other words, has having them ‘written in stone’ in the holy books prevented them from adapting to changes in morality and society?

Girls! Girls! Girls!

As a way of getting back into the groove, here is my comment on a Grauniad Cif piece from just before Christmas: A tide of bland imagery tells girls that sexy is everything

My comment on the above:

Well, my gast is somewhat flabbered. An article on CiF I can agree with... whatever next? Perhaps it is Christmas after all.

However, unfortunately for smug Guardianistas, you can't completely blame this consumerist commodification of the self (for both males and females) entirely on the usual right-wing, free-market demons. For trendy-left anti-elitism is also - at least, partially - responsible for a dominant - but stagnant and stultifying - shallow popular culture which puts image way, way, above substance to the point where anything of substance is completely lost.
Of course, the (former) broadsheets themselves (both of the nominal right and the left) are complicit in this too. For they are constantly telling the mothers of these kids that they 'must have' this handbag, that exact pair of shoes, those particular knickers if they want to be a real woman, rather than suggesting to them it would be far better for them to grab a handful of, say, Wollanscroft, Greer and de Beauvoir.

Comment Ends.