… but I’m not going to tell you why until Thursday at the earliest. It’s a secret! Nothing bad, though. See you later in the week…
AAAARRRGH! I’m absolutely livid this afternoon over this… this… travesty of education! Quite frankly I don’t even think I need to comment - you can easily see for yourself why I’m so shit-spittingly furious.
The worst thing is, I’m forced to once again agree with the Daily fucking Mail!
I’d say thanks to Homosecular Gaytheist for bringing this to my attention, but I’m really angry that I even had to encounter this abhorrence. If anyone wants me, I’ll be shampooing my eyes and trying to forget how to read.
Today, the Earth begins its 30th circumnavigation of the sun since my infantile caterwauling first graced the delivery room. I was going to do a post about the arbitrary human division of time, but of course the length of a year, as with a day, is clearly dictated by the motions of our planet (weeks and months are the ones we made up). Instead, I got to thinking about the universe. I am reminded of Douglas Adams words in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy:
“Space… is big. Really really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you think it’s a long way down the street to the chemist but that’s just peanuts to space…”
As I sit here writing these words, I am being hurled around through space at hundreds of miles per hour as the planet hurtles around its rotational cycle. The Earth in turn orbits around a brain-buggeringly gargantuan ball of flaming hydrogen some 98 million miles away, which is itself an infinitesimal speck in a galaxy so implausibly gigantic that our puny human minds have no real way of comprehending its hugeness. That galaxy, so unutterably, incalculably, mind-fuckingly über-massive to us, is one of thousands, probably millions, in a universe far, far too big for us to come close to comprehending.
This universe has been in existence for about thirteen-and-a-half billion years, and the Earth has been knocking about for about four billion of those. Again, the numbers are so utterly huge that we can’t really get our heads around them. And yet I’m celebrating having existed for a mere 29 years - rather arrogant, don’t you think?
Regular readers of this blog will know that, as well as possessing many other talents, I am also a fully-qualified Reiki Master – the highest rank one can achieve in this form of esoteric healing. I would love to claim that this means I spent many years in dedicated study, pondering the inner mysteries of the universe, and engaging in harsh ascetic practices of mind and body. That is, after all, what mastery in other Eastern arts often involves. T’ai Chi masters (that’s a title I don’t even come close to claiming!) have usually spent thirty to forty years perfecting their techniques. Masters of Shodo may devote hours each day to practicing a single stroke of the brush. A master of the Tea Ceremony, of Chado, will have attained that lofty title only after decades of detailed study.
To become a Reiki Master, I paid £100 to attend a four hour seminar in a suburban front room. Together with three other prospective “masters”, I learned the “Master Symbol” (three Japanese kanji characters which I already knew and which the teacher drew very poorly), learned how to create a “crystal healing grid” (point some crystals at each other), made my own “Reiki wand” (a twig with a crystal on the end) and had a crack at “psychic surgery” (big on puffing and grunting, somewhat short on anatomical accuracy). Most importantly, I received the “Master Attunement”, which involved the teacher waving his hands around and blowing on my head – he’d had garlic for lunch, so that was pleasant…
After that, we were given a certificate and informed that we had attained Master status. This process, or one very similar, is the usual qualification for mastery in Reiki, and whilst practitioners would have you believe that such an honour is only granted to the truly worthy, in reality anyone with fairly deep pockets and a spare Saturday could qualify.
For those of you who’ve never embraced the woo, I suppose I should give a quick explanation of what reiki actually is, and where it came from. Practitioners describe it as an “energy healing system” – the basic idea is that illness is caused by a lack/imbalance of energy in the body, and can be cured by tapping into the ethereal power of Reiki, a sort of universal back-up generator. The man who first came up with this bobbins was a Japanese gentleman named Usui Mikao, who in 1914 supposedly spent a week or two fasting up a mountain, and came back down with magic healing powers. I say supposedly, because the history of Dr Usui’s life is hotly debated in reiki circles. Some say he was a Christian, others a Buddhist. Some claim he spent a week on the mountain, some reckon it was twenty days. Some say he taught only his student Hayashi Chujiro the true secret of reiki, others that he taught it openly. All the evidence we have regarding the founder of Reiki comes to us from his students, who tell many conflicting stories about him – a bit like Jesus, really.
Reiki students are “attuned” by a master to the Reiki energy, and after this are able to use it and direct it at will; at least that’s what they’re told. Higher levels of initiation involve further attunements, which cost progressively more; some masters charging hundreds of pounds for these sessions. Actual practices vary widely between different schools – some use special symbols, some incorporate elements of crystal healing or ayurvedic medicine, some include therapeutic massage in their curriculum. Some chant mantras. When you visit a reiki healer, be prepared for all manner of strangeness…
The fundamental problem I have with reiki is the general refusal of its proponents to submit to clinical trials. Dr Ray D’Alonzo of Procter & Gamble’s Research Division has published a couple of (necessarily) sparse but interesting meta-analyses of the small amount of clinical work done – see here and here. The few tests which have been carried out suffer from severe bias, since they tend to be sponsored by organisations dedicated to complementary therapy. Advocates of reiki, however, generally shy away from controlled trials, arguing that reiki cannot be understood by scientific means – although they are happy enough to circulate triumphantly those few papers where science “proves” the treatment is effective. This, to my mind, is woo-speak for “please don’t expose us for the frauds we are”, and until I see acceptably neutral, peer-reviewed randomised controlled trials that demonstrate reiki’s value as a medical treatment, my Master’s Certificate will remain unframed at the back of a dusty drawer.
At the moment this blog uses the Tarski theme, one of the standard templates for WordPress. I really like it, I like the clean, neat lines, the colour scheme, the customised header, the layout, even the blockquote style. However, it has been pointed out that the theme suffers from one serious drawback. The comments thread for each post is embedded as a footer, and so falls below the blogroll and other sidebar listings. As a result (and as I’m sure you’ve all noticed), there is a great deal of empty white space between the end of my daily rant and the first responses to it. I’ve looked into the matter, and it seems there’s no way to correct this without making radical alterations to the base CSS template, which I’m not even close to knowing how to do (and I’d have to pay for - ain’t gonna happen!). My alternatives are therefore threefold:
• Lose the Atheist’s Bookshelf link and the Latest Comments/Most Popular Posts widgets, and drastically truncate the blogroll. I’m not keen on this, since I wouldn’t know how to choose who to lose from my blogroll list.
• Change to a different theme. I’m less fussed about this, but as stated above, I really like everything else about this theme, and I’ve grown rather used to it.
• Ignore it and let everyone continue to scroll down through the Zen-like emptiness betwixt post and pundits.
I’d appreciate anyone’s thoughts on this.
Now I hate to sound like a Daily Mail reader (for American readers, the Daily Mail is like an unholy cross between the National Enquirer and Der Stürmer), but I fear I’ll be in agreement with them over this story. The adoption of religious law, be it Muslim, Christian or otherwise, is in absolute conflict with the Western values of tolerance and equality. If anything, this distances Britain’s Muslim population even further from the rest of the country, creating a legal ghetto of Sharia whilst fuelling the “us-and-them” mentality so prevalent amongst Little Englanders. The proposals may not go so far as to incorporate barbaric Islamic capital punishment, but they will set a precedent for tolerance of religious law in the UK, and that is a slippery slope. What happens when Muslim criminals demand to be tried under Muslim laws? Do we capitulate, or do we establish that Britain is governed by British laws, and exceptions will not be made? What happens when the country’s Jewish population gain the option of adopting Mosaic law? Can non-Muslims be prosecuted under Sharia?
It’s a minefield of conflict and contradiction. Our legal system may not be perfect, but at least we only have the one.
It looks like the issue of female bishops may actually manage to split the Anglican Church right down the middle. Henry VIII must be rolling in his grave, since it seems as though the main beneficiary of the chaos will be the Catholic Church. Just as when the Church of England decided to ordain women as ministers a few years ago, the dissenters will probably end up moving over to Catholicism. Let’s consider that for a moment. These clergy are so upset by the prospect of women entering their precious boys-only clubhouse that they are willing to set aside all other doctrinal differences (and believe me, there are some biggies!) in order to jump in bed with the religion they split from about 400 years ago.
Why are they so up in arms? Well, the church as we know it is founded on the work of the apostle Paul, and there’s a bit in 1 Corinthians where Paul vents his displeasure on women being allowed to speak in church:
“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.” 1 Corinthians 14:34,35
Pretty clear cut, there. Except that if you view the earliest copies we have of this letter, you won’t find this verse in them. Why? Because Paul didn’t write it – this was a later addition to the text. The verses are out of context - they appear bang in the middle of a discussion of prophecy - and directly contradict the instructions in 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul explains exactly how women should speak in church!
The other popular verse cited is 1 Timothy 2:11-13:
“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve.” 1 Timothy 2:11-13
Again, that’s fairly unambiguous. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that Paul was not the author of 1 Timothy. The writing dates to the early part of the second century, by which time Paul would have been at least 90 years old – not an impossible age, but exceedingly uncommon at the time. Furthermore, the style and vocabulary of the epistle bear almost no resemblance to the other attested Pauline writings, which share many commonalities.
The real reason that so many clergy are against women bishops is pure, unmitigated bigotry. They may hide their misogyny behind the supposedly respectable façade of religion, but any right-thinking person will see that lie for what it is. Equal rights for women is one of the mainstays of a truly civilised culture – it seems many of our clergy do not want to exist in such a society.
Hat tip to God Be Gone for the article.
So a few of us were knocking around on You Made Me Say It, discussing the issues involved with the definition of atheism, when Exterminator came up with the frankly brilliant term, faithfreeist. We are indeed not “lacking” in faith, but altogether free of it, and it’s important to stress the freedoms that atheism entails.
We are free from the guilt of believing that nothing we ever do is good enough for God.
We are free from the need to follow rules and regulations laid down by Bronze-Age tribesmen.
We are free from the constant struggle to reconcile our beliefs with the observable world.
We are free from the requirement that we trust a man in a pulpit, who claims to know what God wants from us.
We are free from the need to maintain our dogma in the face of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
We are free from the demand that we waste our Sunday mornings in a draughty church, mouthing platitudes and singing off-key dirges.
We are free from the expectation that, because of our faith, we will hold fixed opinions on certain matters.
We are free from the requirement that we hand over our hard-earned cash to an organisation founded in fantasy.
We are free from the complacency that comes with the anticipation of an afterlife.
We are free from charlatans who claim to heal by faith.
We are free from mental strictures which seek to confine our minds.
We are free from the terror of everlasting damnation.
We are free from being fearful and ashamed of sex.
We are faithfreeists – and we are free.
For those of you, like me, who are keen on the wielding of knitting-sticks (actually, FutureWife makes a much better fist of it than I do), the resident genius at HistoryWeaver has come up with the knitting pattern for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s a reasonably tricky project, but if you want to make the perfect gift for the Pastafarian in your life, I can’t think of a more obvious choice.
I am often told, when I claim that I do not believe in God because there is no evidence, that I am committing a logical fallacy. How, my interrogators ask, can you claim that there is no proof when you have not looked everywhere for it? To claim there is no God because you can’t find any evidence of Him is absurd, because it assumes that you, the atheist, are sufficiently omnipotent to have examined all evidence, everywhere in the universe. And of course, no one can do that.
(Except God, of course)
Therefore we, the apologists, are right, and God must exist.
Well, that is indeed true. My claim for the non-existence of God is not based on my having reviewed all evidence, everywhere, exhaustively. However, there is a serious problem with this apologetic. If the argument is stripped back to its most basic form, it essentially assumes that any being whose existence cannot be proved must be given the benefit of the doubt. Invisible pink unicorns. The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Bucky O’Hare. Odin. Superintelligent shades of the colour blue. We have not examined, indeed, we cannot examine all the evidence for these creatures, and therefore, by the apologists’ argument, they must all exist.
I will be joining the church of Zeus as soon as possible.
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