A few days ago IanVisits published (as usual every month) a rather super list of things one can do out of London during the coming month — ie. December.
Watching BBC Breakfast yesterday (22 October) I spotted my first Remembrance Day poppy if the year. It was being worn by some female, the head of one of our plethora of regulators, who was being given an easy ride of an interview.
This is obscenely early, given that Remembrance Day (11 November) isn’t for another three weeks.
But then, as I’ve said before, I sometimes think I’m the only person in the country who finds everything about Remembrance Day sick and obscene. I’m with novelist Evelyn Waugh who in his youthful diaries described Remembrance Day as
… a disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality. If people have lost sons and fathers, they should think of them whenever the grass is green or Shaftesbury Avenue brightly lighted, not for two minutes on the anniversary of a disgraceful day of national hysteria.
So David Cameron is intent on restricting internet access to anything which he deems might in someone’s eyes be pornographic.
This is so prattish and dangerous it makes me angry on just so many levels.
Just who does DC think he is to tell other people what to think, say and look at? How dare he impose his (apparent) morality on anyone else? Imposing one’s morality on someone else is frankly … well … immoral!
This is government censorship. Given that freedom of speech and belief is enshrined in international law, that probably means the UK would be in violation of international law.
A freedom which exists only when it is in accord with your views, is no freedom at all.
When we treat people merely as they are, they will remain as they are. When we treat them as if they were what they should be, they will become what they should be.
Goethe says the same:
If we take people only as they are, then we make them worse; if we treat them as if they were what they should be, then we bring them to where they can be brought.
Or looking at it another way, in the words of the great Spanish ‘cellist Pablo Casals:
Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage.
If we want people to be responsible, then we have to treat them as if they are responsible.
Finally, as I’ve said many times before (for example here and especially here) sexuality and nudity need to be normalised, not marginalised and criminalised. Only by doing so are we likely to drastically improve the nation’s overall health and well-being.
It is time to be a leader, not a cow-herd with an electric cattle-prod!
[PS. No of course rape, violence and child abuse are not acceptable; no-one is saying they are! But blanket censorship is not going to get rid of them; it will just drive them further underground and into the hands of the criminal fraternity.]
Sorry, it’s been too long since I posed the five questions of Series 4, and thus my answer the the first of the questions is long overdue. So here we go …
Well wouldn’t we all like to know! However it seems to me that this is one thing we can, by definition, never know. That doesn’t mean that all the reports of “near death experiences” are meaningless or imaginary; they may well not be. But clearly, despite appearances, the people experiencing them aren’t actually dead, so they don’t (and in my view never can) tell us what happens after we die.
As a scientist the reality seems to me to be summed up in the words of Genesis 3:19:
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
and the Burial Service from the Book of Common Prayer:
Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life …
(Isn’t that just so much nicer English than all this modern stuff?)
So yes, the scientist in me says that we disintegrate back into the environment for we are no more than a collection of chemicals: earth, dust and ashes.
However … our thoughts can go on: as books, music, art, whatever. In that sense we may be dead but our brains are never buried, never lost, ever immortal.
And yet. And yet there remains that nagging little doubt somewhere deep inside which says that there is some form of reincarnation. Not in the Biblical sense of a Day of Judgement. More perhaps our “soul” (whatever that is) gets chopped up in some way and distributed (with bits of others?) to future beings. Who knows? We can likely never prove it. But it would explain a lot. And it would be a whole lot more fun than earth, dust and ashes.
Today let’s look at three words which seem to be becoming increasingly misunderstood and misused: atheism, secularism and humanism.
Atheism
1. Disbelief in, or denial of, the existence of God or gods.
2. The doctrine that there is no God or gods.
Secularism
1. The view that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs or public education.
2. The doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God or in a future state.
Humanism
1. A system of thought that rejects religious beliefs and centres on humans and their values, capacities and worth.
Hence one can be a secularist without being an atheist, although the reverse is I suspect rather difficult. While atheists are generally secularists, at least in Europe so are most believers because they know their own freedom of belief depends on freedom from the belief of others. Humanists are by definition atheists.
Atheism challenges belief but secularism challenges religious privilege. Humanism replaces a belief in god(s) with a belief in Homo sapiens.
And yes, for the record I am both an atheist and a secularist. I’m also a humanist but not one who identifies with humanism as an organised belief system, a là British Humanist Association — I don’t do organised belief systems!
A few days ago there was a piece in the the Portsmouth News, the local paper for the eponymous city on England’s south coast. The reporter, Liz Bourne, asks “Why do we think nudity is shocking for children?” and comes to the conclusion that it isn’t.
This interested me because, aside from my interest in nudism, local papers are not often known for their liberal views. But here was a balanced and reasonable article which said essentially children aren’t phased by nudity, even when “a little squeamish about wrinkly bits” and we can all understand why some people want to be nude even if it isn’t for us.
Here are the nuts of the article:
In my experience, children love nudity. When very young, two of my children both enjoyed stripping off and flouncing around with the sun on their bare skin. On several occasions my son was known for taking all his clothes off in a rage, usually in the most public of places … Although not encouraged, within reason I did accept it as an expression of their innocence and, in my son’s case, frustration of being restricted by clothing. Now that they are older, they are less keen to bare all. And when news of the naked bike protest was revealed, they were struck with both bemusement and horror.
“Ughh, all those saggy old men”, one declared.
“Won’t they get cold?” was another reaction.But as a parent of three impressionable children, at no point did I feel the need to sign a petition against the protest. By making a point about nudity being ‘offensive’ and ‘indecent’ aren’t we sexualising it unnecessarily? Children revelling in their own nudity isn’t sexually motivated. And the naked cyclists had other things on their agenda. By protesting against it, isn’t this linking nudity with a sexual element, which is much more skewed?
I explained to the children that the cyclists were protesting against global oil dependency and our inherent car culture, as well as how vulnerable cyclists are on the roads. With this information, they understood the purpose of the nudity and, although still a little squeamish about wrinkly bits, accepted that if this is how some people wish to express themselves, so be it.
The protest took place in the middle of the day — a school day — and passed without incident … for research purposes, I took a couple of snapshots and showed them to the children. The images of blurred buttocks were met with derisory laughter, not shock and outrage. They were more perplexed that I had chosen to go and watch it …
Why anyone would be concerned about such an event I am not sure. Why should we protect our children from nudity? There are so many other things we should be protecting them from — drunk people in the street, dog poo on the pavement and the overpowering stench of celebrity culture in the media … That, in my mind, is much more damaging than seeing a few saggy buttocks on bikes.
Indeed so!
… or more precisely, retired Archbishops.
The BBC reported a few days ago that according to Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, allowing Gay marriage “paves way for polygamy”.
In an article for the think tank Civitas, Lord Carey … argues that the government is effectively seeking to change the definition of marriage to “a long-term commitment between two people of any sex, in which gender and procreation are irrelevant”.
He says he does not want to be “alarmist”, but that could logically be extended to “say, two sisters bringing up children together” or “multiple relationships, such as two women and one man”.
Let’s just leaving aside the fact that this is an absolute load of old baloney — the relationships his Lordship cites have been happening since time immortal, so where’s the problem? But I do worry what school Lord Carey went to when he can clearly think that two women plus one man is two people. Do divines have different arithmetic rules to the rest of us? Or has he actually lost his marbles?
Fortunately others of Lord Carey’s colleagues are more sane:
[T]he Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Rev Nicholas Holtham suggested in a letter to the Telegraph that it was time to “rethink” attitudes about same-sex marriage, as Christians had done with slavery and apartheid. “No one now supports either slavery or apartheid. The Biblical texts have not changed; our interpretation has.”
And in a brilliant response to Lord Carey …
Stonewall chief executive Ben Summerskill said: “This is regrettably hyperbolic shroud waving”.
You just have to love someone who can talk about “hyperbolic shroud waving”!
As every year Wednesday 22 May is World Goth Day — a day where the goth scene gets to celebrate its own being, and an opportunity to make its presence known to the rest of the world.
While it’s true that most goths prefer night time World Goth Day lets them parade the black look proudly in the sunlight!
Goths are often met with criticism and fear. But despite their dress, they’re just like everyone else and judging someone based on the way they look means missing out on getting to know some great people. Consequently because of the stigma attached to being a goth, many have struggled to get friends and family to accept them as they are.
World Goth Day is the day they come out in the light to proudly proclaim their way to the rest of the world, and to show us some of the fun things we’re missing.
And there’s lots more information over at http://worldgothday.com/.
In addition to everything else Saturday 18 May is Random Huggers Day.
We all like a hug when we’re feeling down and giving people a hug is very special; it is a simple way of expressing love, care and friendship. And it can save lives.
Random Huggers Day was established in 2003 to spread some warmth, love, fun and all the wonderful energy that is in a hug; to spread that special feeling around the world.
There is no charity or corporation involved; Random Huggers Day is just about one human being giving another human being a gift, for nothing!
You can sign up to be a Random Hugger, or just go along to an event in a city near you. You’ll find details oner at .
