I am at war with my radiator. Tensions have been escalating since late last week when I finally made the Herculean effort to bleed and repair the thing, only to be repaid by it intermittently and entirely without cause or provocation racking the heat up to something to rival a smelting plant. It singularly failed to respond to all tweaks and twists and things finally came to a head this morning when, waking up in a puddle of my own sweat in the middle of yet another ad-hoc blast furnace, I took a spanner to it, just to show it who's boss.
I'm not going back into the bedroom for a while, partially because I'm waiting for it to cool down, and partially because I have work to do, and I have a terrible suspicion that when I go back in the whole place is either going to be ablaze or covered in sheets of ice - the thing has absolutely no compromise or middle ground.
Anyway, moving away from radiators, I've decided to get all literary. The only books I ever seem to read lately are training manuals for so many near-inscrutable multimedia tools. Only this morning, the postman saw fit to deliver me my 620-page user guide for Final Cut Pro 6, which is apparently so different from Final Cut Pro 5 that they needed to put out an entire new training manual the size and weight of a coffee table. To counteract this, I thought I'd buy a good novel, to read in betweeen mind-numbing point-and-click exercises and plumped for 'American Psycho' by Bret Easton Ellis, partly because I have friends who have been recommending it to me for years, but mostly because it wasn't The God Delusion. I won't read that book again, even a little bit, just because I feel that doing so would irreversibly lessen my intelligence.
Let me just come out and say that I fully accept Atheism as a theological standpoint. If you choose to believe it, good for you, but it's still nothing more to do with me than if you were a Buddhist, Hindu or a man who believes Godliness stems from putting custard on your head. Atheism is all well and good if that's your choice but the likes of Dawkins and the British Humanist Society need to wake up and realise I care as much for your views on religion as I do for your views on watercress. It simply isn't important.
My ire today stems from the fact that Dawkins and the Humanist mob have started paying to have an 'edgy' adolescent slogan put on the side of London buses, reading 'There is Probably No God, So Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life'. Now, if you think that's big and clever, you're probably fifteen. I would have probably thought that was cool when I was fifteen as well, because being fifteen gives you carte blanche to be a politically unaware idiot. Richard Dawkins, however, is 67 years old, and should probably know better.
See, the problem is that I refuse to believe that anyone has ever had their firm, deep-rooted religious convictions shattered by something written on a bus. Largely because most things written on buses are about what someone called Daz did to something called Shaz on the way home from a gaudy nightclub, but mostly because firm, deep-rooted religious convictions are unlikely to be shaken by anything short of Cthulu rising from the ocean; pastel-coloured slogans on bendy buses just don't cut it where giant rampaging sea-beasts don't. It's also so absolutely petty and childish - I'm not entirely sure what the British Humanist Society has against people having a different belief system to them, but unless they have a physical condition whereby they find themselves writhing in screaming agony every time someone believes in God at them, they're being rather pathetic about the whole thing. I strongly disagree with whoever managed to get some terrible creation called 'Lady Gaga' to the top of the UK singles charts, but I don't put on the side of a bus.
Sadly, for a supposedly respected academic, Dawkins has always gone about advertising his beliefs in a way much better suited to the angry teenage proto-athiest who militantly and misguidedly despises all world religions up until he turns 20 and realises nobody ever gave a toss. If you've never really looked into his book, 'The God Delusion', allow me to fill you in: You pay Dawkins five pounds fifty to call you an idiot for 464 whole pages. It really jumps off the page how much Dawkins wants to take anyone who still harbours any doubts about our being brutally and undeniably alone in a Godless universe, and give them a damn good thrashing until they understand how inquestionably correct he is about everything. If you dare to be religious in the face of what he considers ultimate proof, his prose effectively screams at you from the page as what attempts to be passed off as reasoned debate more than a few times comes down on the wrong side of down-talking and dismissive implications that you're a blithering idiot. Never before or since have I felt more like a paperback was trying to shout me down.
I'm just as qualified to bang on about this sort of thing as he is, if only because my plumbing is possessed by the Devil. If you paid for this book, you paid good money to be called an idiot or to justify your pre-existing beliefs with a book no more advanced than one you could write with nothing more than a long weekend and a mild case of autism. If Richard Dawkins truly wants us to dismiss all religion, he'd probably do well to stop trying to create his own.
I'm not going back into the bedroom for a while, partially because I'm waiting for it to cool down, and partially because I have work to do, and I have a terrible suspicion that when I go back in the whole place is either going to be ablaze or covered in sheets of ice - the thing has absolutely no compromise or middle ground.
Anyway, moving away from radiators, I've decided to get all literary. The only books I ever seem to read lately are training manuals for so many near-inscrutable multimedia tools. Only this morning, the postman saw fit to deliver me my 620-page user guide for Final Cut Pro 6, which is apparently so different from Final Cut Pro 5 that they needed to put out an entire new training manual the size and weight of a coffee table. To counteract this, I thought I'd buy a good novel, to read in betweeen mind-numbing point-and-click exercises and plumped for 'American Psycho' by Bret Easton Ellis, partly because I have friends who have been recommending it to me for years, but mostly because it wasn't The God Delusion. I won't read that book again, even a little bit, just because I feel that doing so would irreversibly lessen my intelligence.
Let me just come out and say that I fully accept Atheism as a theological standpoint. If you choose to believe it, good for you, but it's still nothing more to do with me than if you were a Buddhist, Hindu or a man who believes Godliness stems from putting custard on your head. Atheism is all well and good if that's your choice but the likes of Dawkins and the British Humanist Society need to wake up and realise I care as much for your views on religion as I do for your views on watercress. It simply isn't important.
My ire today stems from the fact that Dawkins and the Humanist mob have started paying to have an 'edgy' adolescent slogan put on the side of London buses, reading 'There is Probably No God, So Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life'. Now, if you think that's big and clever, you're probably fifteen. I would have probably thought that was cool when I was fifteen as well, because being fifteen gives you carte blanche to be a politically unaware idiot. Richard Dawkins, however, is 67 years old, and should probably know better.
See, the problem is that I refuse to believe that anyone has ever had their firm, deep-rooted religious convictions shattered by something written on a bus. Largely because most things written on buses are about what someone called Daz did to something called Shaz on the way home from a gaudy nightclub, but mostly because firm, deep-rooted religious convictions are unlikely to be shaken by anything short of Cthulu rising from the ocean; pastel-coloured slogans on bendy buses just don't cut it where giant rampaging sea-beasts don't. It's also so absolutely petty and childish - I'm not entirely sure what the British Humanist Society has against people having a different belief system to them, but unless they have a physical condition whereby they find themselves writhing in screaming agony every time someone believes in God at them, they're being rather pathetic about the whole thing. I strongly disagree with whoever managed to get some terrible creation called 'Lady Gaga' to the top of the UK singles charts, but I don't put on the side of a bus.
Sadly, for a supposedly respected academic, Dawkins has always gone about advertising his beliefs in a way much better suited to the angry teenage proto-athiest who militantly and misguidedly despises all world religions up until he turns 20 and realises nobody ever gave a toss. If you've never really looked into his book, 'The God Delusion', allow me to fill you in: You pay Dawkins five pounds fifty to call you an idiot for 464 whole pages. It really jumps off the page how much Dawkins wants to take anyone who still harbours any doubts about our being brutally and undeniably alone in a Godless universe, and give them a damn good thrashing until they understand how inquestionably correct he is about everything. If you dare to be religious in the face of what he considers ultimate proof, his prose effectively screams at you from the page as what attempts to be passed off as reasoned debate more than a few times comes down on the wrong side of down-talking and dismissive implications that you're a blithering idiot. Never before or since have I felt more like a paperback was trying to shout me down.
I'm just as qualified to bang on about this sort of thing as he is, if only because my plumbing is possessed by the Devil. If you paid for this book, you paid good money to be called an idiot or to justify your pre-existing beliefs with a book no more advanced than one you could write with nothing more than a long weekend and a mild case of autism. If Richard Dawkins truly wants us to dismiss all religion, he'd probably do well to stop trying to create his own.
1 comment:
I couldn't have said it better myself. Now stop reading my thoughts about Mr. Dawkins, it's creeping me out.
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