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When I was a kid (and we’re talking infant school here), sometimes I let my imagination get the better of me. I had (have?) a really good imagination and I’m surprised it didn’t lead me to more a more theistic worldview. But I guess you need gullibility as well as imagination? Anyway:

I used to pretend that in order to get a pen working that had stopped, you could ‘trick’ it into beginning to work again by writing swear words in big letters in your school book over and over again. The pen would realise what you were doing and it would try and mischievously get you into trouble (the pens were obviously very mischievous – why else stop working in the middle of a school day for no reason?) by turning the inkflow on again just as you’d stopped paying attention to what you were writing and would unconsciously proceed to write “FUCK” in big letters across your times tables.

But I always just used to feign inattentiveness to doubly trick the pen. Once it started to produce the goods again and work for me, I’d just stop writing. And there it was, I’d outsmarted the pen. I don’t remember if the pen continued to work for a while because it couldn’t just withhold ink immediately at will or whether that was just a cover to not let me know that I’d outsmarted it, because it was too proud to concede defeat. Either way, this method got excellent results and I recommend it to anyone who needs to get a dry pen working again in a hurry. But remember, it has to be something important that you’re scrawling bad things on. The word “cunt” at the top of your mother’s day card, for example, or your girlfriend’s sister’s name on a gift tag or something like that.

Mormons, Mormons, everywhere but not a drop to… think? I don’t know, ignore this opening sentence if you want. It’s optional.

All dressed up in pinstripe suits and ties, the sparsely distributed occupants of seats in the first official part of the day’s inquest into the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (what we call “Mormonism” because we are verbally conservative (read: lazy)) were sharing in-jokes, singing hymns and letting children make up prayers. All without any women in the room to be distractions (that’s not the reason they gave; more on this later). It didn’t feel like a cult, even if everyone was uniformed and had their own little language; it was too friendly an atmosphere for the underlying evil inherent in this twisted and contrived Christianity spin-off.

First thing is first, though; I arrived (at special request) early so the “sisters” — what they call “people who are part of the church who happen to have two X chromosomes” — could give me a tour and prime me for what usually happens during the day. We then adjourned to a small classroom so they could ask me if I’d prayed for guidance like they told me to when we met before. I hadn’t. I said I had, though, since everyone knows prayer does fuck all. I’ll submit some prayers to the Mormon God later. God’s all powerful so He can make them apply retroactively, don’t worry. I said I had prayed and that it was foolish and nothing happened. As before, I wasn’t doing it quite right.

We then talked about how last time I demanded something miraculous to happen to prove god’s existence and I suffered the inevitable “I know someone who knows someone who prayed after the doctors gave her days to live and got better” anecdote — I’ve heard them all before. If they had any ring of plausibility to them they’d have at least made the news, right? Anyway, I asked about all the people who god didn’t heal and she said “maybe god needed them in heaven. God has a plan for everyone.” So I asked them if Healed Anecdote Woman would have become well even without prayer and she said no. Then I asked her if her prayers had changed god’s plan and she evaded the question.

I was very intrigued by the idea of god needing someone in heaven, so I pushed it. I absolutely got her to admit that god makes people get hit by cars and die if he needs them in heaven. Fucking ace, you guys. God murders kids. That little girl from the “hit me at 40 miles per hour” advert? God killed her because he needed a little blonde child to take care of some stuff in heaven so don’t sweat it.

I truthfully told them how I actually would love for there to be an actual god that you could pray to for stuff; I have been raised on fantasy books with panthea of deities (and dragons and magic, fuck yeah, fantasy novels). But just because I’d like it to be true, doesn’t make it so, otherwise I’d be a flying superhero who is invulnerable to harm and shoots lightning or eye lasers. She kept insisting that she knew that god was real and he spoke to her, and before I could really get into why that was exactly wrong (I am pretty sure we consider something to be knowledge only if the person is certain of it and it is true), we had to go into this first meeting.

All the men filed into the big room that was partitioned off for this small gathering. The women went around the back to some other, probably less nice, room. When I asked why, I was told that “women learn differently from men.” I was like WUT TEH FUCK??! in civilised words and she said “we are more, you know, girly!” Fuck sake. Left to my own imagination I just presumed that the women’s meeting was parallel to the men’s only with way more jokes about menstruation.

I got to hear about how even when everything is going wrong, we should just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get on with life. Which I agreed with; no use bemoaning the shit going on that you can’t do anything about. They somehow managed to worm eternal life in there, though. “Don’t worry about this life, we’ve got a kickass spot in heaven reserved for us [paraphrased].” Then after hearing about Mormon Conferences, where prophets gather to discuss doctrine in what I imagine to be a cross between the Pope’s Cardinals and the UN, the man doing the talk drew a circle on the whiteboard and some arrows on it. This was meant to indicate the brain and how when doubt comes in, it pushes faith out, and when faith comes in, it pushes doubt out. This was an alright analogy, I decided. At least it is sort of intelligible. There was a catch, however: they kept saying how faith pushing doubt out was the good scenario, and doubt destroying faith was the bad one. Scepticism, bad? DON’T THINK SO GUYS. How offensive.

On to the second segment of the proceedings: learning the teachings of the gospels. Today’s focus was families. The sexist gender segregation was the first hint of the sinister foundation of this church. The praise of excessive breeding was the second warning sign. Of course! Have lots of children and raise them in the Mormon faith. This is how a little sect from Utah, USA could have grown large enough to make it all the way to little Basingstoke, population 100,000. We heard a story about a man who didn’t feel like he had achieved anything in his life until his church pointed out that he had eight children. This gives you an almost legendary status amongst your peers in Mormonism. Really, why aren’t they recruiting from the pool of working-class teenage mothers? If anyone knows about excessive breeding, it’s the school dropouts who have two children before their 20th birthdays.

Argumenta ad hominem against the low-information demographic aside, I slowly realised during these first two meetings that the veneer of smiles, warm greetings and excessive handshakes did not stand up to even remotely minimal scrutiny. Smiling chatty missionaries and a clean, presentable church interior were merely components of the flimsy skin stretched over the dark heart of the insipid plot to grow the LDS movement to huge numbers at any cost.

Finally, we were ready to enter the main service where bread and water were blessed and then consumed. I didn’t get a chance to ask if this was a rip-off of the zombie vampire pagan derivative the Catholics call holy communion because a deathly hush had descended over the now-solemn Mormons.

After hymns were sung, we heard two talks from self-important church speakers. They were rambling and didn’t have a whole lot of point to them, but I picked up on some important matters. Both speakers admitted to going into primary schools and their confidence that the children they preached at accepted their word about god with very little argument. I forcefully kept myself from shouting out that children are genetically predisposed to accept what authority figures tell them, enabling them to learn more easily (and drawing the bog standard parallels with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy), choking down my rage and letting it filter out slowly in the form of a level, icy stare of death into the eyes of the speaker. The second guy also briefly touched on how children were so accepting of what he had to say, as though tricking a child into believing nonsense is some badge of credibility. He also very quickly touched on widespread science that conflicts with the views of religion. “I’ve talked to my friends at work, who tell me about all this science, and I accept that science answers some questions that religion can’t.” Stop there, please, I thought to myself. He ploughed on regardless of my silent wishes: “But religion also answers questions that science can’t even begin to find an explanation for.” *FACEPALM* Ruined.

It was after the end of this service that I finally got to talk to the sister who is my unofficial Mormon guide about the perils of breeding too much, how having new children when so many desperately need adopting and how overpopulation is going to really fuck us over (I didn’t say ‘fuck,’ I was actually uncharacteristically well-mannered all day). Later on she said she would definitely adopt when she has children. If she means it, victory: Will.

As it was, I didn’t really get enough one-on-one time with the missionaries who pulled me in off the streets. I didn’t get to ask my questions about the Mormon stance on polygamy, homosexuality, abortion, contraception, evolution, stoning heretics to death and so on. I did, however, get to take home my own copy of the Book of Mormon to scour for racism that I am told is present, to pick up all the unverified claims about the fictional shenanigans of the Nephites and to try and find out why it took god nearly two thousand years to get this little addendum to the New Testament published. On each page of the book is, helpfully, a date or approximate date during which the events supposedly took place. Those idiots, at least with the Bible they have that little extra layer of deniability of there being few dates at all mentioned. I don’t know if they were using the Julian calendar in the Americas during 0th century AD and 0th century BC, where and when this poorly penned fiction novel is set, but having recently read about it for unrelated reasons, I found out that most common people of the Roman empire didn’t know the date, since the number of days in the year was fiddled so often (it took the Romans a little while to get the hang of leap years — check it out).

After the service I spoke to a big black guy named David Ogle. He said I had a cool name too, so relax. I told him how even though I was a member of the Warwick Atheists (plug plug pluggity plug), hearing that a chapter of the American-founded Mormon church had opened in little Basingstoke meant that a visit was just too tempting to pass up. He said that a lot of the founders of the Mormon church actually emigrated from Britain anyway. I haven’t fact-checked this yet so correct it if it is wrong. He also said that there were as many LDS adherents as there were Jews, which is true, but he also said this number was thirty million (when it is actually thirteen million says Wikipedia) so he’s only 50% reliable. He and the sister I’ve been discussing then made it a point to tell me that having a large family is not a commandment. Could have fooled me with all the talk about how the true path to happiness was through family, the most rewarding experience being raising children and how families could all meet up together in heaven if they went through a special rite in church. This matter will require further investigation and some excellent arguments that are more convincing and less evil-sounding than “material possessions are the ultimate source of happiness, actually: good food and good stuff, with good people to talk about the stuff with.”

Sexism, irresponsible breeding and childhood indoctrination are the first three issues raised from this first encounter with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Armed now with their flawed holy scriptures, I can begin to write up a list of more things wrong with their devious religion and return in a few weeks in the early morning to get some quiet question time in with the missionaries where getting a word in doesn’t mean speaking out a dissenting opinion in front of fifty people and interrupting what must be long-prepared speeches. Even if I can get them to re-iterate that god hits people with traffic when he feels like it, I’ll take it as another victory for me.

Idly perusing the internet this afternoon, I made my way to the website of the Basingstoke church near me that I went to the youth group of a few years ago. I’ve been out of the loop there for a while now, because the people are mostly intolerable and that’s ignoring the fact they’re a bunch of theists. I knew they were planning to buy a bigger shack to hang out in, though, since the building they are using at the moment is a bit cramped.

I found out that their intention is to move into a part of the closed down hospital in Basingstoke, called Park Prewett.

Or, as it was also known, the Park Prewett Mental Hospital.

That’s right, a band of Basingstoke Christians have finally come to terms with the fact that the voices they hear aren’t coming from God. It’s just a pity the hospital has been closed down for twelve years. Perhaps they are planning some fundraising event to bring back the men in white coats to staff the place. If anyone knows any psychiatric doctors who need a job, I think I know where there’s going to be an opening.

The good news is that there is room for a thousand beds there and undoubtedly facilities to deal with the more violent patients, so the question of running out of space is solved for now. If the hospital manages to get a high turnaround with treating the mental health of inmates, they won’t run out of room for a huge number of years.

In this day and age of supposed enlightenment, more theists should take responsible action and commit themselves to their local asylums (asyla?). Then maybe we can avoid obviously crazy people getting into power and suggesting things like an anti-blasphemy law in Ireland.

I’ve been checking out some stand-up comedy DVDs recently to investigate whether any of the good and well-known comics of the day (including Mr. Carr, Mr. Gervais, Mr. Minchin, Mr. Bailey, Mr. Moran and a few others) hold views that are respectful or in any way sympathetic towards religious believers.

They’re not. Put plainly, if you believe in any non-trivial definition of god, you can’t laugh at jokes at the expense of the irrational, be they theists, psychics, “new age spiritualists,” etc., without incurring a hefty hypocrisy penalty and losing all credibility.

This tweet in reply to my glib observation of the above point suggests that my ability to laugh at humour that’s at the expense of “White [sic] people” is analogous to Christians’ ability to self-deprecate by enjoying comedy at their expense. No prizes for telling me why that doesn’t make any sense.

If you are religious, you are widely considered to be wrong. It takes some very shaky reasoning to justify even the most vague claims about a god without throwing questionably-sourced specifics in as well (read: Biblical claims). Any nonreligious person who is even vaguely aware of the damage that irrational faith, childhood indoctrination and religion as a force in its whole all cause to humans as individuals and humanity will look down on those who choose to accept religious beliefs. No matter how nice and tolerant they might seem to come across as, if nonreligious folk accept that religion is damaging then they must accept the religious are the root of the damage.

Stop laughing at our jokes belittling you. You don’t get to laugh, you are all too mired in your own self-sustaining incorrectness to laugh. God will smite you if you laugh.

This is going to be a good one, guys.

For one, Smallville resumes broadcasting. I’ve refrained from mentioning it on my blog so far because I haven’t that much to say about it… it’s a TV show, it’s not to everyone’s taste but I am enjoying it. But Season Eight is the first season where creative control has not been in the hands of the original creators of the show, so I am anxious to see what developments will be made.

Next, Death Blossoms, a new Rise Against single, will be out for Guitar Hero: World Tour. Of course, it will be made available as a torrent online; what isn’t? But for a brief while, it’ll only be out on the game, a game owned by my generous housemate… Perhaps he will let me buy the single (and the other two Rise Against songs released at the same time) and play them all, one after the other, on his console.

Finally, it’s the Warwick Atheists’ formal-dress social. Starting out at a nice(ish) place to eat in Leamington, the guys in their suits and the girls in their dresses will undoubtedly move on to the pub and wind down the evening in the dying noise of Wetherspoon’s. A classy end to a shitty term.

It’s about the only thing I am looking forward to in the near future.

Dog owners always claim that their animals aren’t stupid.

I look at the behaviours of people’s dogs and fail to see how they could possibly be personified or considered anything other than dully running around and satisfying basic needs.

For example, take a look at this quick contradiction: the intelligence of pet dogs is “exhibited” by a dog’s ability to learn how to do ‘tricks’ – that’s the ability to recognise an event and respond accordingly. The ability to learn that certain effects follow certain causes is pretty much a vital natural trait. The dog is commanded to sit. It sits. It gets praised.

Then how about this one: the dog fetches a ball, it brings the ball back, it loses its catch, only to have to chase it again.

If a wild dog brought its kill and dropped it at the feet of anyone, it’d starve to death. A friend’s dog keeps a ball and hoards it, growling if anyone approaches. I think this is more intelligent behaviour than if it dropped it into an outstretched hand. But that’s what owners will strive to train a dog to do.

In that respect, a dog’s “intelligence” is measured in its ability and willingness to defy common sense. In light of this, I’d reconsider the use of the word “intelligent” to describe a well-trained dog…

Try “faithful” instead?

Oh man, Bob Catley is a fucking rockstar. He’s basically a superhero. I met him, and shook his hand, and was all “yo AHS, check out Bob Catley,” and they were all “woah, his music is awesome!!”

We went to Tamworth for Jenna’s generic-winter-festival party and saw her dad and sister and town. We had a great party.

Then I went back to Leeds (again) to share Liz’s birthday party with Chris and Norman at their four-fifths atheist domicile…

Then I came home. I got back to Leamington and almost kissed the ground with happiness. But not because I’d been away, but because of what happened while I was away. Basically, I was glad to be home without regretting being gone. Let’s leave it at that.

That’s the summary of all the decent things that happened this weekend. Not at much detail as last time, I guess I’m just not in the mood.

Oxford

So began the first of my holiday outings last Wednesday, when I went to visit the wonderful Jenna at her Oxford University college: Linacre.

We decided to try and cram as many awesome things into the day as possible, which is why we set off to Modern Art Oxford and the Natural History Museum (which were great) and also swung past the “castle,” or the mound-where-a-castle-once-used-to-be (which was not so great - not only was it a lame attraction, but Jenna confessed that she hated me so much that she was skipping the country to avoid spending new year’s eve at my house).

Modern Art Oxford was a very pleasant experience. They had a few exhibitions on (including one which was disappointingly closed), ranging from boring to plain weird. It was all loosely connected by sharing common binaural techniques to create the sense of sounds coming from positions they weren’t, which was interesting and entertaining. We stopped by the gift shop and I was bought a 25mm badge.

The Museum of Natural History, where I had previously had the pleasurable experience of watching Richard Dawkins face off the imposing John Lennox in debate, was another fascinating experience, made even more so in the light of the remnants of the memories of my last visit; atheism and evolution tend to go hand-in-hand these days.

I got to spend some time in Linacre college, which my friend Tom Etheridge tells me is “not a real college, [because it's] full of grads.” But what if I’m visiting a “grad”, Tom? The college was nice and modern (but still with that Oxford University class pretension about it). The student rooms were cosy and nice and the dining area was homely.

The most important thing that I can say about Linacre, however, was that when I got a shot at using one of their computer rooms, I got a nice surprise. Some of the new motherfuckingly huge iMacs were there, but what did their screens have plastered all over them? It wasn’t Leopard… it was XP! That was quite an unexpected highlight that appealed to my technological nature.

In the evening, we stayed in the college’s common room, and I met some people. We had fun playing darts and Pictionary and watching some Channel 4.

Leeds

The first thing to note about Leeds is how fucking far away it is! Regardless, hitching the train up there was alright; I do like getting trains. While I was there to see and hang out with all of Leeds’ remaining A-Soc, strictly speaking I was Liz’s guest.

When I arrived at the station, I moved into the shopping centres, passing through all sorts of different bits, including “Victoria Quarter,” which had an interior made of gold and had shops whose very names were too expensive to pronounce. Liz and her housemate Michelle intercepted me (despite the terrible description I gave them of my location) and we wandered around the city centre for a little while. I spotted four Caffé Nero coffee shops, and visited two of them (Stuart, have pride). After some guilty confessions from Liz that she didn’t actually know her way around Leeds’ centre, we decided to try and find the restaurant that we were meeting A-Soc at later. We did find it, and spent the waiting time in Wetherspoon’s (where else?).

The restaurant served fairly standard food but I’d say it was overpriced as well. Nice atmosphere, though, and the glass panel in the middle of the landing of the first floor was just terrifying. Afterwards, we didn’t return to Spoons, as was my initial inclination, but headed off to somewhere a little quieter, which was a better idea now that I think about it. I heard about the London antics of Leeds Atheist Society and met and spoke to some cool people.

i think a-soc is a pretty cool guy. eh debates god and doesn’t afraid of anything

After things wound down (meaning: they closed at 11pm and didn’t give me the required time to finish my bottle of wine), Chris gave me a lift back to his house, stopping at Tesco to pick up the classic Southern Comfort and Pepsi Max party drink. Back at “Atheist House” (which is not as good as the name “Fort Atheist”), we stayed up most of the night watching various animated shows (American Dad prominent amongst them).

In the morning, I got up and sped off to Leeds station to catch a ride back home, but not before having my half-can of Relentless thrown off the First travel bus. They got their comeuppance, however, because I scrawled “FGW Are[sic] cunts” on the First Great Western train that was my final connection to Basingstoke (and last public transportation vessel for the day). That will teach them not to allow cans of drink on their Leeds buses.

The next person I hear say “but the universe is fine-tuned for life” is going to get kicked in the balls. We don’t know (and I wouldn’t say that we’re reasonably certain, either) that under different universal constraints that something that has apparent ‘life’ (growth, replication, reaction and so on) would not begin, so fuck anyone who says that. Just because it’s not carbon-based… or just because its atoms aren’t composed in exactly the same way; hell, even if there were no such things as protons and electrons and neutrons, if we’re talking about the universe kicking off with a different palette of universal constants to work from, who would even dare predict the kinds of fundamental particles that might exist?

We’re obviously not looking at the correct use of the cosmological anthropic principle, which is to say that the universe must be such as it is to accommodate human life as we know it. That could even extend to other, less complex forms of life. But to say that present universal conditions are necessary for any form of life as it’s defined is something I’d expect, frankly, from a creationist.

And I’m not convinced by the ‘multiverse,’ either, but that’s another thing entirely.

Wow! Jesus action webcomic!

IN THE NAME OF THE GUN