Tumescent Moon

Recent events in Norway have, rather than fuelling the fire of this discourse, had the opposite effect of dampening it. I could - I fully intended to - grab my trusty Chainsaw Of Logic and cut the world's religions (most of them anyway) into bleeding chunks but I find myself wondering what the point of it all would be: it's all been said before by more intelligent people than me and, ultimately, I don't really care how absurd anyone's beliefs are as long as they give them some measure of happiness and they don't use them as an excuse to hurt anyone who can't accept them . The problem is not even religion per se but our own accursed and apparently incorrigible habit of mistaking the mental models we make of reality for reality itself. Whatever ideologies we embrace, whatever stories we tell ourselves for the sake of comfort or understanding, whatever scientific or magical structures of thought we build in explanation of the universe and our place in it, are, a

I’m the child of occasionally church-going parents (an escaped Catholic father and a Presbyterian mother) and between the ages of five and ten I attended a Church of England school (not as the result of any religious conviction on the part of my parents, it was simply the only school in the village). The teachers at the school did do their best to pump us full of Christianity: I’m not sure how successful they were on the whole but I don’t think I can be counted as one of their triumphs in that, looking back, I don't honestly think I ever truly believed in God, or at least not the God they were anxious I should believe in. On the other hand I didn't do much questioning either. Until my mid-teens I went through all the 'right' motions - even attending a weekly Bible class - but in all honesty my motives for doing so were insincere and self-serving. I suppose that I could have continued to pay unreflective, agnostic lip-service to the culturally-approved mythology fore

I've been promising myself (or somebody, maybe even a Higher Power!) that I'd try to worm my way around the writer's block by producing something - anything - even if it's not fiction. I don't guarantee that any of the parts that form the postamble will be cogent, coherent, comprehensible (or even written in anything that is recognisable as English) but I'll give it a bash. What may (or may not) follow this brief introductory spasm may (or may not) be a series of personal reflections on the greatest misfortune ever to emerge from the muddled thinking and desperate hopes of humankind, i.e. religion. These will probably not be well-reasoned, and for reasons of personal sloth they will certainly not be supported by references, but this will give everyone the opportunity to point out the deficiencies and suggest amendments or corrections, or to pile in and hammer the crap out of me. I'll amble away now and leave you with a quotation from Mark Twain. Take it