Good evening. I trust you have had a pleasant day.

There is much I would say to you, but in the final analysis, all I have to say can be shrunk down drastically and still be too verbose.

So here is what I have to tell you…

You’ve been hurt. You’ve been trashed. You’ve been dragged through the dirt. And sometimes you think I’m responsible for it.

I can’t help that. I can’t put things right. And I can’t explain.

Let me explain why I can’t explain.

Let’s say there are three ants in a dish.

One has a grain of sugar and is eating it. One has nothing, and is just crawling around. And one is drowning in a drop of water.

All of them are in this same dish. But obviously all of them inhabit very different personal worlds. For one, that world is satisfying. One has nothing. And one is in terminal distress.

It is meaningless to ask Ant One to appreciate the agony of Ant Three, because try as she might, she can only feel an approximation of what Ant Three is going through. And it is equally meaningless to ask Ant Three to even imagine the possibility of the taste of sugar. All right.

So, extrapolating, we live in a world where we share space in the physical sense. That’s it. In every other way, all of us live in different worlds.

Not convinced?

Let’s say you’re a teacher. What matters to you? Are the kids listening to you, are your lessons getting through? What are the problems that come up in PTA meetings?

Just what does your world have to do with the world of, say, a stockbroker? How does the rise or fall of the stock market affect you? Do you, personally, give a damn if the bottom falls out of the market?

And just how does your world as a teacher intersect with the world of other teachers, teaching other children, living different family lives, with different money or relationship problems?

Do you get my drift?

Since we each inhabit unique personal worlds, our interpretation of the same phenomena will be coloured by our personal perspectives. What I say or do will be interpreted by you from your worldview – not from mine.

And there is a problem. You see, suppose you convinced yourself that the world is flat, and that if you walk far enough southwest you’ll fall off the edge of the world. In that case, you will avoid walking southwest, and as far as you’re concerned the world is flat.

If, therefore, you decide that I have deliberately said or done something that hurt you, your reactions and behaviour will be so influenced by that perception that it will be indistinguishable from my actually saying or doing something deliberately to hurt you – even if I intended nothing of the sort.

I’ll stop now. I have said enough already.   

One of the things that went through my mind, then, was what constitutes my identity. Who am I?

Now it’s pretty obvious that what I think of myself – my view of myself – isn’t necessarily what someone else thinks of me. Who am I? Who am I depending on the time of day, my mood of the moment? Am I creative, am I just a journeyman? What do I do with my life? Live it, or try for something more?

Also, whoever I am, I’m not the same person to each person I interact with. No two people reading this post looks at me from the same viewpoint. No two people I talk to look at me and say or think the same thing.  Also, do I unconsciously modify my behaviour to adapt myself to the person I’m addressing at a given moment? I’m sure I do, even though I can’t put my finger on it ; nor can I stop myself doing it. But isn’t that giving a false impression to the other person of who I am?

Or is it simply that there is no such thing as a single, solitary unitary “me”, and all the multiple “me’s” make the person who calls himself Bill the Butcher?

Enough philosophising. See you tonight – and I intend to begin work on another story.  

So what’s happiness? Is it entirely subjective? A hot bath on a cold night? A cold fizzy drink on a hot day? Is there such a thing as objective happiness?

There’s an awful lot of guff in the papers these days on “happiness surveys”. Like every “survey” I ever heard of, the results contradict one another and all stink.

For example, on the list of most happy nations comes inevitably the name of…Bhutan. This tiny kingdom, apart from being one of the most poverty stricken countries in the world, is ruled by a polygamous Buddhist theocratic absolute monarch who rules over a “contented” land – which means a land where there is just one, weekly, newspaper, where all citizens must follow Bhutanese dress, language and culture (called the Driglam Namza) and where the Nepali speaking minority has been ruthlessly expelled to refugee camps in Nepal.  

By those standards, even Nazi Germany was ecstatically happy.

And also we keep hearing how Indians are so happy.

It reminds me of the “feel good factor” – a craziness of a bit over three years ago, when the right wing BJP was in power in New Delhi. The BJP claimed that the Indian people would vote for it because they felt good…whether they had anything to feel good about was beside the point. The usual reasons were the stock market, economic growth, and assorted similar rubbish. It wasn’t even a concrete measure of happiness, even a ridiculous one like the average American’s : the cost of a “gallon” (whatever that is) of “gasoline” (petrol). However silly a few cents less a “gallon” may be as a measure of happiness, that’s a concrete measure; not so the average Indian’s “pride” and “happiness” when a Ratan Tata uses Indian government money to buy a foreign steel firm for his private company. But that’s India. Feel good, what a laugh.

So – to get back to the point. Is happiness a win in cricket? Is it the absence of fear or pain? Is happiness only known by the fact that you’re no longer happy? Is there anything called happiness at all?

If you’re “happy” with a special someone, is it that you’re happy in that moment or you’re just anticipating more moments with this person, who’s someone special to you? If you’re “happy” at a particular hobby, say, are you happy in the hobby or just anticipating its culmination? You may be “happy” building model ships in bottles; but would you like to make one through all eternity, never reaching its end?

Is happiness just a metaphor for pain and sadness, then? Do we try and cling to it because we fear the alternative?

Maybe the Buddhists – the original Buddhists, not the lamaist perverters of the religion who call themselves “Buddhists” these days – were right, and one has to liberate oneself from happiness as well as from sorrow to find Moksha.

Maybe anything.

In the meantime, I’ll be happy with a novel, or at least I’ll try to be. Until the novel ends.

Then I’ll remember being happy, assuming it’s a good novel.

Otherwise I’ll be happy that it’s over.   

This blog was born of a remark by Jim on this post by Eva, here. It led me to think of the weird relationship religious fundamentalists (all religious fundamentalists, but the Christian most of all, since that is the variety I am best acquainted with) have with this thing called science.

First off: they don't really know what it is.   

If the average Christian fundamentalist thinks of science at all, the first reaction is - this is the enemy. An enemy that has to be ignored if at all possible. And when it cannot be ignored, it must be fought. And when it cannot be fought, it must be suborned, and twisted to one's own purposes.

And - to their own minds - they are actually pretty good at it.

Let's see the issue a little more in close up.

Science, as Jim pointed out, is a process. It is not a collection of facts, since facts change. Newton was once the cutting edge of science, for centuries, until he was overtaken by Einstein and Planck. That did not make Newton a non-scientist, either. A scientist is a scientist not by virtue of being a collector of facts but by believing in a process of logical thinking, experimentation, deduction from the results, and further experimenting to test the truth or falsehood of further inductive reasoning following from the experimental results.

If a scientist comes across an idea that does not work, he does not, like Bush in Iraq for example, go on pushing it through; he does not invent "facts" to explain his results; he goes back to the last facts known and he begins all over again. He must be able and willing to begin all over again if need be.

Ultimately, there is no such thing as a "final truth" in science.

That is a fact that scares the hell out of the fundamentalist theist.

OK, so what does the theist do about it?

First, they (OK, I'll - for the sake of convenience - use "they" for "he or she" which gets kind of clunky if I have to keep using it) - well, as I said, they first of all try and ignore science completely if they can. If you can close your eyes and pretend that the earth is flat and the sun goes round the earth once a day, why ever not? I mean, you can survive if you tell yourself you were created in "god's" image and did not evolve, can you not?

But, unfortunately, you can't ignore science forever and completely. Even religious fundamentalists have to come up against the secular world, and its most visible face is science. Then, what do they do?

The second track is to take it on head on and try and defeat it. Now that they can no longer burn scientists at the stake like they did Giordano Bruno, they have to do it verbally.

One has to understand that any real science oriented person is not going to be taken in or brainwashed by religious rhetoric; so, basically, what they are doing is preaching to the converted, to keep them converted. It's too dangerous to let a "faithful" person begin to think for him or herself; there is far too great a danger of sliding towards logic and atheism. 

(Ah - I can hear a question arising: why? Why should the religious care whether someone slides to hell-bound atheism, so long as their own "souls" are safe?

The answer comes in two parts: First, the "save their souls" kick: this is the public face, the idea that the "hell bound" has to be saved from damnation, and this saving gives "merit" to the saviour, who steps a little bit closer to heaven.

And, there is the real reason: religion is good business - excellent business. Where would all the Vaticans and Tirupati temples be without donations, donations, donations? And who would donate but the faithful? After all, every corporation worth its capitalist name fights tooth and nail to retain its market share.)   

So, when there is one tiny, minuscule, fault they can find in the established ideas of science (which in any case scientists are always questioning) they take it as a good excuse to deny all of science. Everything. And if one tiny religious myth is proved to have some dim distant basis in history, they take it as an excuse to validate religious dogma and myth, in toto.

If, for example, someone says there is some reason to believe that a particular humanoid fossil was not directly a precursor (as hitherto believed) to Homo erectus, say, the religious fundamentalist will seize on this as "proof" of the non-existence of evolution. If there is an old temple discovered under some desert mound where a prophet is alleged to have sacrificed, well, that proves their religious scripture, in toto, miracles, resurrections, and all.  

That's how they fight.

But comes a time when no amount of frontal confrontation is enough. Unless you somehow try and deny the evidence of your senses, it's rather difficult to say - for example - that the universe is six thousand years old. What do you do then?

Ah, and then they get cute. They appropriate science for their purposes. Like, for example, there was a  Big Bang; the background radiation can still be detected, and there is hardly an astrophysicist anywhere who any longer denies it happened. So, what does our theist do?

Why, he declares that the Big Bang  was the Biblical moment of creation!

The typical response of theists of my acquaintance when faced with incontrovertible scientific fact: "But there are great scientists who believed in God."

Which great scientist?

Well, if the theist is relatively well read and intelligent, you might hear the name of Einstein. Einstein did talk of God. No doubt about that. one point to the theist side?

No.

Einstein, unfortunately for these people, was a man whose idea of God was in essence the sum total of the physical laws of the Universe: not the idea of a  white bearded old man in a white nightgown sitting on a golden throne counting the fall of every sparrow.

But they will never, ever, give up.

We atheists don't actually go and convert the theists. We let the facts speak for themselves. But theists will not accept facts for what they are; they will, as I said, ignore, confront, and subvert science; and sometimes they will do all three simultaneously and never notice the contradiction.

For example, they will call the Big Bang the moment of Creation; then they will say the Earth was created six thousand years ago, and there had never been evolution; and then, they will talk of dinosaurs on the Ark.

The only thing they will never, ever do is acknowledge that there might be a reality other than their own.

Science is happy to allow religion to exist undisturbed so long as it doesn't come in the way of science; religion will never return the favour. Let's see, in the long run, who will win. 

On that rests the future of the human race.   

(PS...I know the illustration has little to do with the subject of the blog, but I just could not resist it)

Feel.

Feel the thrum of an engine under you, the hard curves of the fuel tank between your knees. Feel the wind in your face through the helmet’s faceplate.

Listen.

Listen to the rumble of engines, yours and others, of the beep of indicator lamps, the rustle of wind. Listen to the road under your wheels. It has its own voice, and you get to be able to listen to it.

Let your hands and feet dance.

Your right hand is on the throttle, it twists it smoothly to increase your speed. Your left hand’s fingers press down on the clutch as your right hand decreases the pressure on the accelerator, your left foot presses on the gear lever to shift up to the higher gear. As you release the clutch, you increase velocity again.

A turn’s coming up. You ease off throttle, flick the indicator with your thumb, lean into the turn, automatically, the motorcycle banking under you. You shut the indicator and  straighten in time to see some stupid old biddy wandering into your path, thinking of who knows what. The fingers of your left hand press down on the clutch, those of your right hand on the handbrake, and your right foot on the rear brake, all together, simultaneously twisting the throttle down to zero. You screech to a halt, glare at the oblivious old dodderer as she wanders off to be run over by someone else, and move off again.

Traffic, and you have to stop, go, stop again, your eyes constantly searching for the oncoming vehicles, and in your rear view mirror for those trying to …damn it, that bastard’s trying to overtake from the left! Who gives these bastards a licence, anyway? – move over to the right, watch that road divider, make sure you don’t crash, and look out for the traffic signals coming up.

All right, you get the idea.

When I think about so simple a thing as driving a motorcycle, I wonder at all the unconscious effort that goes into it. What amazes me most is that it’s not something we have the slightest evolutionary adjustment for, yet we adjust to it and far more complex things. Read a pilot’s manual to get an idea of the complexity of pilot training. And we adjust to all of it.

I just wonder – we’re such an amazing species, we can learn to do so much.

How the hell is it that we also, consistently, make a humongous mess of it all?

I still read Peanuts reruns sometimes.  

All right, now that confession is out of the way, and you’ve stopped sniggering, the reason I’m admitting it is Lucy and the new “philosophies of life” she used to expound every few strips. I was trying to formulate some kind of philosophy of my own, to evolve some idea of what I might distil out of the accumulated experience of three and a half decades on this planet. It’s amazing how difficult I found it.

What is a personal philosophy? How can one formulate one and stick to it at all times, under all circumstances? Is such a thing possible? I do feel stealing is not something I should do, for example; but if I were starving and without succour by traditional means, would I take the opportunity to steal enough for myself? Like a shot. Anyone would. Except maybe a suicidal masochist looking for sainthood.

Therefore, I do not think there is any way one can have a fixed, immutable, personal philosophy.

Yet, since I feel one owes it to oneself to formulate some kind of code one should at least try to live by, if only to distinguish oneself from totally unscrupulous opportunists, here goes, remembering of course that I have never formally studied philosophy and I don’t know any of the jargon:

In the first place, of course, I’m an atheist. Although this is not inborn in me (I was a semi-believer in some sort of divinity till my early teens, though never the deity of dogma) I began to grow out of it when I began applying a little thought to it. The final break came at the funeral of a relative when I asked why all the prayers for the repose of his “soul” were necessary if he, as they said, was in heaven because of all the good deeds he’d done on earth. The lack of a coherent answer was enough.

The fact of my atheism, of course, means I do not believe in any life after death or any such charming eccentricity and anyone predicting I’ll end up sizzling in hell will draw a polite bored yawn (assuming I’m not in a combative mood. If I am, however,…well, then…) from me. Also, this means that since anything and everything I do, so far as it affects me, is bound within the unguessable span of my own limited lifetime. The usual criticism of atheists by theists is of course that atheists are “immoral” because we don’t have fear of the hereafter. This view is not something I intend to discuss in this post, because once I get on my antitheist soapbox I find it difficult to climb off; but I have yet to find atheists who are quite as immoral as the most outspoken theists, and I’ll leave it at that.

To get back to the point: if I’m an atheist, it means to me that I alone am responsible for my actions, and there is no higher deity to pull me out of messes I create and make it all right. So it is up to me to make sure that I don’t create a lot of grief for myself, for other people and the world at large, human and non-human. I don’t see that that’s worse than theistic belief.

Furthermore, I’m a pacifist. This does not mean I am a believer in non-violence at all times. It’s just that I think that n most circumstances, non-violent methods get more done, and better, than applied violence. But when all someone is willing to listen to is the language of violence, that is the medium of communication that would get through to them. Fascists don’t understand palaver.

So far as I can, I try and believe in science. It clarifies things a lot. Just as an example: since this planet is due to be cremated in about five thousand million years when the sun becomes a red giant, is there any real point donning uniforms and killing people in the name of enforcing “inviolable national frontiers”?

Then, I guess in one dimension I might be called a contrarian. Certainly, if everyone around me espouses one set of beliefs, I’m naturally going to at least look at the other side. It’s just the way I am. I think any reasonably intelligent person ought to be expected to do the same. If you insist – without looking – that the sky is green, I might at least want to see if it is some other colour. If no one had been a contrarian, we’d still have been living in caves.

My political orientation is of course – I have never made any attempt to conceal my views – left wing. I don’t believe in trickle down effects or the inherent superiority of the rich and powerful. Nothing new about that; even Jesus Christ, assuming he existed, was far left wing, like virtually all religious founders. Their followers are unworthy of them.

Well, I never claimed I could be a Lucy. I can’t live by rigid philosophies. But for what it’s worth, there are my views.

And, no, I am no solipsist (even though I flirted with it back in my teens). You are not a figment of my imagination.

Even if you wish I were a figment of yours.