Hokay …
Lynn: you can stop reading now because you'll only doze off otherwise.
Anyone else who doesn't like the long, ranty, boring, Godbothering posts can go do something more interesting.
The rest of you (the two or three who actually miss "Dive" and of course, Shan, who will once again be very disappointed in me) can put the kettle on and settle in with a coffee.
He's back, and he's rambling incoherently and offensively and doesn't give a flying fuck.
I don't know if any of you can remember but just before christmas Dive got ticked off by an "official statistic" about Godbotherers:
Here's a recap:
"
I just checked the stats for the UK; a frankly unbelievable 71.8% of Brits profess to being "Christian", with only 15.1% giving "none" for their religion.I wonder how many of the people who fill in "Christian" actually gave a thought to celebrating the birth of Christ on Christmas morning; I wonder how many of them got off their fat asses and went to church instead of sat around opening presents and teaching their children greed and ingratitude.I'm not talking about the Yanks here; some of them actually DO go to church; I'm talking about the millions of Brits who profess themselves "Christian" in the census but for whom that is the end of the matter.They go to church for weddings and funerals and vaguely believe in some sort of "spiritual God thing", but that's the extent of their commitment.Their sole purpose seems to be to make the statistics look like we are a nation of fervent believers and regular churchgoers when in fact Sunday in this country is a day for lazing around in front of the TV and most of our professed "Christians" are no more Christian than I am.Probably considerably less as at least I still read The Bible and try to make sense of it all; the closest to Jesus most people around here get is watching the fucking da Vinci code.I've been down to my local church on several occasions; the big festivals where you'd expect the place to be packed out.The most I've ever seen in there is around twenty people and all of those were elderly.Which for a church that has a catchment area of over five thousand people gives a much clearer indication of the nation's spirituality than the official statistics …"
So … In my parish, a little under half of one percent of the population actually go to church, and most of those are little old ladies who go for a sleep during the sermon, then a nice singalong and the free tea and biscuits afterwards where they can gossip about TV and their latest operations with their biddy buddies, rather than to discuss theology.
I did a little test: I found Marion (who actually does go to church) in the queue at the village post office a couple of weeks back and as we got chatting I threw out a few Bible subjects at her.
She had no idea what I was talking about …
I started with Isaiah - which, for any Brits reading this is basically the ranty threats and imprecations of a bloke moaning to his mates about the way Jerusalem was being run two and a half thousand years ago - but which today's US evangelists somehow interpret as prophesying with alarming accuracy events such as a Democratic President heralding The End Of The World … or indeed anything else that they don't like (or that smacks of reality - something which scares the shit out of them) heralding The End Of The World …
… to which Marion replied "Ooh, it's been so long since I read any of that I wouldn't know what it said any more."
Similarly, Daniel elicited some memories from Sunday School (back in the 1920s) about the lion's den but nothing else at all.
Turns out that Marion - one of our more devout Christians - knows a couple of phrases from the sermon on the mount but the rest of the Bible is a closed book to her, far less important than the events on TV's "Strictly Come Dancing" … "Ooh, the dresses are so beautiful! You should see them!"
She goes to church because it gets her out of the house on a Sunday and she can have a nice natter.
Anyhoo … I won't spend today knocking the evangelists (much) as they're more than welcome to put whatever spin they want on those old stories as long as they don't try to push that crap on me.
No … today I am happy to announce a survey that actually seems to coincide with reality a little more than the official Christianity figures.
Here you go: check this out:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/02/Turns out that four out of five Britons repudiate creationism (and most of those who actually profess to believe in that stuff are Irish and Welsh, so for England the figure is even higher).
"
The survey suggests there is a widespread lack of religious sentiment across Britain … 89% dismiss intelligent design and 83% reject creationism as plausible explanations for the existence of human life."
And even better: "
The East of England may be the most Godless region in the UK …"
Woohoo!
The most Godless region of a Godless country.
It's so nice to get official recognition at last.
Reading a little further into the article, however, I discover something else about this country:
The survey (to mark Darwin's 200th birthday) found that:
- five percent of UK adults think Darwin wrote Hawking's "A Brief History of Time";
- three percent of adults think he wrote Dawkins' "The God Delusion";
- and one percent (that's actually over TWENTY of the 2,060 canvassed; extrapolate that for the country as a whole and it's scary) think he wrote "The Naked Chef".
I've come to the conclusion that a tiny percentage of the population of England can truthfully be called Christian (those who believe without thinking, as I once did before I lost my faith/started using my brain - delete where applicable) and around four-fifths of us are rational people who actually use our brains and are not truly Christian.
But there are still millions of people out there who are too dumb to even think about anything at all.
They sit, drooling in front of their stupid fucking TV sets with their brains leaking out of their ears, stuffing junk food and becoming dumber by the day.
These are the people who come in to the office in the morning and start conversations with those awful, soul-destroying words: "Did you see …"
They are the lumpenproletariat; the "Duh" generation; the Daily Mail and Sun readers (in the US they'd watch Fox News); people who take no interest whatsoever in the world about them.
They breed in alarming numbers.
They TXT rather than write; grunt rather than speak; the only book they've ever read is the first Harry Potter, though most of them didn't get through it but just watched the movie instead.
They tick "Christian" in the surveys because if they don't someone might think they're Muslim.
If we don't start culling those fuckers they will be our future!
Anyhoo … disregarding The Dumb, we are indeed a nation who has lost our faith, big time.
Several theories have been put forward over the past few decades as to why Europe - and England in particular - is so "Godless" (though I prefer to wonder why the middle bits of the US are so obsessed with pretending to be prehistoric Hebrews); the successive traumas of the two World Wars being the most common and I am sure that has had some effect; forcing the survivors to question the existence of any God.
Christians in the US find that hard to understand but then their country came late to both conflicts and didn't arrive until years of slaughter had reduced both sides to depopulated, exhausted and brutalised wrecks who had fought to a standstill and then dropped, only for the bright, shiny GIs to mop up what was left and wonder what we were all so depressed about (hokay, I know that's oversimplification and cannot praise or thank the American service personnel enough for the glorious sacrifices they made, but basically, for the average US citizen who wasn't being bombed to shit every day and starving, the war in Europe was a long way away).
Our cities bombed to rubble and whole generations dead, damaged or traumatised; followed by decades of austerity and depression as paying back US war loans bankrupted us (ironically, the US used our money to rebuild German and Japanese economies while we struggled, managing to pay off the last loan in 1980 and are subsequently left a third rate country … thanks, guys! We love the GIs, but that still kinda rankles).
No … My own theory as to why we are a Godless nation is that - as the statistics show - four out of five of us have better things to do.
Now that we no longer need to wonder where rainbows came from or why the sun comes up and goes down we don't need to invent a God to explain that shit.
We are smart enough to look at Christianity and say "No, thanks".
Take the Bible:
Sure; as a very one-sided and biased history of the Hebrew tribes living in a small part of the Middle East two and a half thousand years ago, the Old Testament is sporadically entertaining and occasionally hilarious.
Sure; as rules for living in a nomadic desert tribe, some of the Laws make sense, though most of them would be deemed utterly barbaric in any form of society other than neolithic desert tribal warfare.
Sure; the "prophets" are a great read, especially out loud when a bunch of you are drunk … they are so fucking unhinged as to be some of the funniest things ever written but they read like drug-addled ravings of madmen and should be taken as such.
Just because some village idiot claimed he saw a vision of a goat with three heads does not mean that two and a half thousand years later some imbecile fundamentalist can pick and choose something he doesn't like that has the number three in it and start screaming about The End Of The World (though that doesn't appear to stop them).
Sure; the Hebrews' "My God is bigger than your God and is gonna stomp all over him" idea was a fun thing to yell in a fight, but the Hebrew God is theirs; they made Him up and they (not you, modern Christians) are His chosen people.
Besides, there IS no God unless you're too dumb, frightened or insecure to be able to cope with reality and need to make up an invisible friend to help you.
To read the Old Testament as anything other than an historical document about bickering tribespeople is truly insane.
As for the New Testament:
Sure; trying to apply Jesus' teachings to the way you live your life is a good idea; I try to do it myself.
Above all he taught compassion, which nobody can really argue is a bad thing.
But the main message I take from the Bible (and which is actually much older than the Bible itself) is the common sense and totally fucking obvious rule:
Don't do anything to anyone else that you wouldn't be happy for them to do to you.
Stick to that and you won't go far wrong.
You don't have to be a Christian to do it. Or a Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Moonie or Scientologist.
You can be Godless, like me, and still try to live a good life.
There's no God really, and no afterlife either so don't worry about it.
He was remarkably happy to be collared by a couple of fanboys and chatted away as we queued together and he signed our copies of "Grumpy Old Men" (another TV show he stars in where a bunch of grumpy old men sit around and complain about young people … not like me at all) which I spotted in the bargain bin at £2.99 each.
