God: The ony male member of the Girl Guides.

   I keep having to reminding myself that this story doesn't come from the US, but in fact my own, vastly more secular country, the UK.
   It also comes from a source that I wouldn't usually associate with religious (or non-religious)  prejudice - The Girlgiding UK.
  To those of you from across the Atlantic, the Girl Guides (or the Brownies)  are the British equivalent of your Girl Scouts - this story probably won't seem that overly shocking to you either, as this kind of thing happens in your country all the time, like in the US Scouts, that don't allow gays, despite having a rainbow in their logo.  

  Maddie Willett, is a normal seven year old girl. She has two normal, law-abiding, loving parents who have nothing dishonest that can be said about them... accept one thing... they're atheists.
  Maddie has spent 6 months at Brownies, and wants to continue. But too stay in brownies, she must first take the following pledge:

"I promise I will do my best, to love my God, and serve the Queen and the country, to help other people and to keep the brownie guide law" 

 The atheist parents of Maddie Willett, thought it wrong for their daughter to have to say that she loves God, and that if they would allow her not to take the oath, or, to simply replace the word God for something else, say 'Life' or 'The Universe'. That's not a big deal I think, and it's not like they're asking to completely change the oath, it's just for their daughter, and possibly for other children of non-religious families. I also don't see what the problem in doing this would be. Would changing one word for one girl send the whole girl guides into anarchy? I don't think It would.

Mrs Willett gave this statement:

"We don't have belief in God, and our Daughter is yet to make a decision, it's a big decision for her to make and It would be offensive for an atheist to say they love God."    

   But anyway, the guides said that this would be ridiculous, and the Oath was to stay the same and if Maddie didn't say it, then there would be no other option but to ban her from the group.                                          

  But what do you think? Is this just a petty word - she can say she loves God, but it doesn't mean she has to mean it.
  Or do you agree with the parents?  That a child, shouldn't have to declare love for something she doesn't even know if she believes in yet.
 Or perhaps... you agree with me.
That the word should be changed, but not just for young Maddie, but entirely! The Girl Guides is a great place for young girls for them to learn teamwork, knitting or whatever the hell they do, but religion should have nothing to do with it.
  Whether you believe in God or not, should be a choice you make by yourself, when you're old enough to do so and it shouldn't be forced on you while you're at school, or when you're at Brownies.
  You may have noticed that I nether used the phrase 'Christian Child' or 'Atheist Child' in this post, that's because It makes my blood boil, when I see young children being actively forced into or even being associated with religion. ( And if you're wondering, yes, that is why I didn't come to your son's christening.)

Capital Dumbishment.

   You've probably already heard, it's been trending on twitter all day,  but there's talk of MPs taking a vote on the place of Capital Punishment in the UK. They're doing this because, apparently, a majority of the nation want to see Capital Punishment reinstated. Well, a majority of the nation also vote on reality TV shows and pray to an invisible cloud wizard, So I don't think they're fit for making any kind of decisions. Unless that decision is whether Candeice has a better tits than April.

  For moral guidance on Capital punishment  I decided to look in the Book. No, The Bible, better.; The Lord of the Rings.
 There's a brilliant bit in Book 1, where Gandalf is telling Frodo how he and Aragorn caught and interrogated Gollum, before setting him free. Frodo is angry at this and tells Gandalf that he should have killed Gollum while he had the chance. The following is my favorite line from the Lord of the Rings. And pretty much somes up my entire views on the death penalty

" Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise can not see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum  can be cured  before he dies. But there is a chance of it. " 

                                                           ___

  To me, Capital Punishment is not a question of whether criminals deserve death or not. But it's a question of whether the rest of us have the right to give it to them. And as far as I'm concerned, we don't.
 I think it goes back to the macho-conservatism that I talked about in my first blog post, when deluded people seem to insist that it's justice  'AN EYE FOR AN EYE" they'll scream. I'm surprised this is such a commonly chanted mantra, when decades ago Gandhi completely ruined it by ingeniously adding  '... will make the whole world blind' to the end.

 It also needs pointing out that Capital Punishment doesn't work as a deterrent. There are no results that show that crime goes down when it's instated, and no results to show it goes up when it's taken away. If somebody really wants to commit a crime they will, whatever the the punishment, because, believe it or not; they usually plan around getting caught.

 Capital Punishment doesn't prevent crime, it just pushes it under the carpet. If you really want to permanently reduce the rates of crime in the UK, first do something about the 13 million living in poverty. It's not a little know fact that their is higher crime in poorer areas. Reduce poverty, you reduce crime. And instead of dehumanising the already prisoners, you educate them to be, so when they go back into the outside world, they can get a job, instead of having to revert back to crime. 




   

Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister?

Sometimes I feel the anguish that this world gives me, slowly start to fade away. But that constant torture has become like a drug, and I need to feel angry, in order to not feel ill and lost. Luckily, living in the Internet age, it's pretty easy to get my fix. All I need to do is go on facebook or Huffington Post, and minutes later I'll be ripping feather pillows apart with my teeth.

Today, I woke up with a smile, so I new something was wrong with me. I got onto facebook. I knew I needed something to really get me going. I thought for a minute... who do I hate? Glenn Beck? No, I used him last week. ShockofGod? No, that's more just pity. Then I thorght of the perfect person... Jeremy Clarkson! I facebook searched his name. I don't know if you've ever facebook searched Jeremy Clarkson, but this is what you find:

            
That's not all of them. I counted 46 before I got bored and gave up.

Maybe some of my foreign readers are unfamiliar with Jeremy Clarkson. (how I envy you) So let me explain; Jeremy Clarkson, or Jezza, as twats call him. Is a 51 year old man, with the intellect of a 14 year old standing outside an immigrant run newsagents, telling the owner through the window to go back to a country he doesn't come from. He's one of three presenters on a BBC show called Top Gear. The premise of the show is Jeremy Clarkson driving around in fast cars, telling people what he doesn't like about about races, genders and religions. A typical line from the show would be something like "I'm in a ferrari something-something-something, it's the fastest car in the world! Unlike Mexicans who a lazy, and sleep a lot!"

I used to enjoy Top Gear, until I reached about 15 (coincidentally the collective IQ of all three Top Gear presenters.) That was when Top Gear's politicly-incorrect rhetoric stopped being funny to me, and just started to seem repetitive and pathetic. If Top Gear excels in one thing though - and you have to give it credit for it - Top Gear is brilliant at hiding how conceived it is. The way Clarkson, May, and Hammond deliver their jokes, you'd be forgiven for thinking they're improvised. But you'd be wrong! In fact the three of them sit in a room months before scripting it all. I've always imaged to be something like this: 

                                                           Jezza: 

Do you know what would be a funny Top Gear joke? If I was to say 'women can't

drive' HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

                                                         Hamster: 

Ha-ha-ha Yeah Jeremy ha-ha-ha that would be funny ha-ha-ha.

                         Long haired boring one who wears the cardigans:

Yeah, and then maybe I can say something like 'is that because they're too busy in the kitchen?' 

                                                          Jezza: 

Yes, that's exactly what you should say. Because that's exactly what we do on Top Gear, we satirise political correctness. And even if any stupid women get offended and complain to the Guardian, it's ok. because, we have herds of mindless viewers, to utter the Top Gear Mantra: It's only a joke!      

Astrology and Religion.

    Astrology, is a concept, invented centuries ago by our ancestors who were still ignorant in their understandings of the cosmos. 
 With the objective of trying to put some false sense of order into a universe rampant with chaos, and to comfort people, by leading them to believe they have a privileged position in the word. Astrology offers vague and inconclusive predictions. And those predictions, will surely be different depending on whose you follow. 
   
  Astrology appears all across history, all across the planet, but the imagery, and stories are different throughout. The beliefs of the Ancient Babylonians are different to the beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians. The beliefs of the Native Americans are different to the ones of the Celts, who lived in Britain. And all them different to what's believed today.  There is no global consensus on astrology. What you believe, is based, not on facts or evidence, but on what country you were born in, and/or what you were told as a child.     

 Astrology goes against every thing we've learned , through science, yet millions of people chose to still believe in it. People force themselves dismiss truths, because lies smell sweeter. And based on their mistrusted faith, in these fabricated lies. People make wrong choices, and pass up great opportunities. 

Knowing this, any sensible person.  Would probably arrive at the conclusion that astrology is bullshit, and even a possible danger to the race. 
Now, read this again... but change 'Astrology' with 'Religion'     
                   

DON'T KILL HITLER!

are we too right-wing for time travel? 

 
Despite what a majority of you probably thought when you saw the title - especially those who know me well - this is not a post about the approaching September episode of Doctor Who entitled 'Let's Kill Hitler'. Nor is it an open letter to Quentin Tarantino, telling him... well I won't spoil the end of Inglorious Bastards for those who haven't seen it (although I've clearly already given it away.)  It is, actually, a blog about why you shouldn't kill Hitler....
 
There are a lot of people in this world who have no imagination. Regrettably, most of these creatively inept people have formspring accounts. So quite frequently, the same same, unimaginative, uninteresting questions appear in your inbox. Examples being: 'what's your favourite band?', 'What came first, the chicken or the egg?', 'U R GAY!' But there's one question that keeps coming up, and it's not the question that bothers me, so much have how so many people choose to answer it. The question is 'If you could go back in time, where would you go, and what would you do?'... Now, there's nothing wrong with this question, but 90% of time, I see it being answerd with 'I'd kill Hitler' 

Now, don't take this the wrong way, I hate Hitler too.I'm no Hitler fan. And I, like most, wish that Hitler had never been born .Or had never got it to power. However I do strongly believe that killing Hitler, by means of time travel, would be a bad idea. Now I can see where, at this point you might disagree with me. You might think that,by killing Hitler, you'd save the lives of ten million people murderd in the holocaust, and all the soldiers -on both sides- who lost their lives. Well, you'd be right. But that's not the point. Imagine a young couple in love, living in 1930s Britain. But before long the boy gets called to war, were he's eventually shot to death in occupied France. The girl grieves, for a while, and then moves on and starts a family with someone else. Now if you were to kill Hitler, she would have stayed with boy one, who would have never went to war, and they'd have lived happily ever after. The romantics may fail to see what I'm getting at here, but if she hadn't have met boy 2 , she never would have had that family. In your return to 2011 you'd find that the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren for the girl, would have never been. Now imagine this a thousand times over. You may return to the present day to find that your friend, wife, husband, boss or fiancée. No longer exist. As well, all the great films, paintings, literature and poems derived from the war, have all also vanished. Culture will be completely different, relationships with other nations will be weaker, no Winston Churchills or George Pattons to be idolised and Anti-Semitism maybe still running strong in the national consensus.   


This is what worries me about time travel , not all the complicated paradoxes about killing your granddad or sleeping with your mother. But man's inability to think past his macho-conservative attitude, and use time travel as a way to go back and kill everyone he disagrees with. It's not just benevolent dictators that are in danger either. What's to stop the Pope from going back in time and killing Mohamed and L. Ron Hubbard and every other prophet, making Christianity the only religion on the planet?


As much as I would love to experience time travel in our lifetime, I'm quite glad it's far beyond our reach. Hopefully, one day, when our race is far far past it's killing people phase, then we can have time travel. When it'll be used only for learning and recreation, and not as a weapon.