Bring back Clarkson

Daddy didn’t give affection, no!
And the boy was something that mommy wouldn’t wear
King Jeremy The Wicked
Ruled his world

I love cars. Which is why I love Top Gear.

But I soon discovered that Top Gear is not all about cars. Oh no, it’s about Jeremy Clarkson. It’s not a one-man show, but his sidekicks Richard Hammond and James May, proficient though they are in their own right, are like the cars they feature, little more than beautiful (and did I say accomplished?) props.

Top Gear is almost all about Jeremy. Funny, irritating, laughing, teasing, politically incorrect, offensive, shameless, devilish Jeremy. There was a time the only reason I bothered to watch the telly, apart from sport off course, was because of Top Gear.

And now he’s in trouble again.

This time, suspended for allegedly throwing a punch at a BBC producer. The reason does not matter. Producers after all are supposed to serve gods actors food on time… and take a punch or two for the greater good.

There’s a litany of indiscretions that’s got him into trouble before, but the BBC knowing what a treasure he is, sensibly did not let those mundane distractions keep him off the box. But now it appears to be different. Two whole shows have been postponed. That’s pretty darned alarming.

So he’s alluded to truck drivers being murderers of prostitutes, and called former Prime Minister Gordon Brown a “one-eyed Scottish idiot.” So fucking what? I despise truck drivers who’s only mission in life seems to be to cause traffic chaos, and everyone knows Gordon Brown is an idiot. Surely we don’t need to be convinced.

But it’s also alleged that Clarkson has offended various race groups, nationalities and religious denominations around the world, including Mexicans, Argentinians, Asians, Muslims and Indians. Boo fucking hoo! People are just too darn sensitive.

Hey, I’m Indian (South African), and I was not at all offended by Clarkson’s remark about Indians being unsanitary. India is on my bucket list of places NEVER to visit, up there with Saudi Arabia (practically all of the Middle East actually), North Korea, Pakistan, Malaysia and 98% of Africa. No, not even when I’m dead and my atoms return to star-dust.

The guy’s a gifted comedian for fuck’s sake. The world needs more of them really badly.

Yes, there’s a much more selfish reason why Jeremy just has to come back. The Top Gear Live Show is scheduled to return to Johannesburg, South Africa in a couple of months, and I DO NOT want to miss that. It just won’t be the same. It would be Stuck In Gear.

Power, freedom and other less-noteworthy stuff

The power utility Eskom, had a further mishap at one of their plants yesterday which resulted in a blackout that lasted nearly four hours where I live. That was time in which I meant to download all the photographs from the two cameras I had taken on my recent road trip around the country.

Luckily it was only four hours, which meant I could catch up on the latest news following the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris by what is believed to be Muslim fundamentalists. Looking around the interwebs, it is disconcerting to note the scale of hatred being directed at ordinary Muslims and Islam. This is pretty unfair as they are as much victims as the rest of us. The whole of Islam cannot be blamed for the misguided actions of a minority of fundamentalist idiots.

I managed to get in a post yesterday which was meant to show my solidarity with the victims and also my stance on freedom of speech which should of course be inviolable. It must be recognized that yesterday’s outrageous attack on Charlie Hebdo, was an attack on our freedoms.

On to other less important things…

I’m back at work and it sucks after such a long vacation. This week has been draining. It seems as if there was a conspiracy to hold back completion of all projects for me to return and take care of them.

Today I managed to download all my photos and will start cropping etc. The one above is one of them taken while driving, as we descended from the majestic Karoo down to the Eastern coastline of George.

I hope to start posting some of them here soon. Until then…

A nice change from the usual religious hate e-mail I get

Normally I receive religious e-mail that threatens me with all sorts of horrible punishments for not believing in god or Jesus.  Or, they are extremely condescending sales pitches for a religion, and appear disguised as motivational prose or clever anecdotes, usually accompanied by breathtaking pictures. Yes, you’ve seen them too!

The threatening and pseudo-motivational ones are invariably from Christians, even Muslims, but the e-mails from Hindu’s are revoltingly superstitious in nature and suggest that your luck will take a turn for the worse, if you either don’t do something such as pray or fast; or more absurdly, refuse to forward the mail to x-number of persons within a certain time period. For some reason I don’t receive any religious e-mails from Jews or Buddhists (to their credit); perhaps because the former are part of an exclusive club, and the latter are not really religious.

I was therefore pleasantly surprized, when I received the following piece of poetry which is clearly from a Christian source, but which does not threaten or insult my atheist status. As a matter of fact, it seems to chide Christians, but could apply equally well to persons of all religions; even atheists. ***Note: I personally don’t think it’s the best poem in the world; it’s just titled that way in the e-mail***

Best Poem in the World

                           I was shocked, confused, bewildered
                           As I entered Heaven’s door,
                          Not by the beauty of it all,
                          Nor the lights or its decor.

                         But it was the folks in Heaven
                         Who made me sputter and gasp–
                      The thieves, the liars, the sinners,
                          The alcoholics and the trash.

                     There stood the kid from seventh grade
                        Who swiped my lunch money twice.
                         Next to him was my old neighbor
                          Who never said anything nice.

                           Herb, who I always thought
                            Was rotting away in hell,
                        Was sitting pretty on cloud nine,
                            Looking incredibly well.

                        I nudged Jesus, ‘What’s the deal?
                         I would love to hear Your take.
                      How’d all these sinners get up here?
                           God must’ve made a mistake.

                          ‘And why’s everyone so quiet,
                          So sombre – give me a clue.’
                 ‘Hush, child,’ He said, ‘they’re all in shock.
                      No one thought they’d be seeing you.’

                                   JUDGE NOT.

          Remember…Just going to church doesn’t make you a Christian
             any more than standing in your garage makes you a car .

                           Every saint has a PAST….
                           Every sinner has a FUTURE!

 And, while the conclusion is “cute,” I prefer to think of myself as neither a saint nor sinner, but just a human being; and more importantly, I care not for the past nor the future, but the present, which I have control over.

Another Hoax Mail: Protest at Film Depicting Jesus and His Disciples as Gay

Gullibility and superstition are bosom buddies. Thus those who tend to be superstitious (usually the religious) are bound to be susceptible to gullibility as well. So, it was no surprise to me when I received another hoax email just the other day, in the form of a petition against the supposed release of a new film called Corpus Christi, and which claimed to depict Jesus and his disciples as homosexual; there were already 580 South African signatures appended to the mail.

In reality, there is no such film! How 580 people allowed this obvious hoax to spread, without even a cursory check on the veracity of the claims, is beyond me. According to Snopes.com, this hoax has been circulating since 1984 in one guise or another. But the thing that really bothers me is a reference in the mail to actions taken by another religious group when they perceive that their religion, gods or prophets are being maligned: “If the Muslims do what they believe to be right against their religion , where do we stand as Christians?” Are the originators of this hoax actually suggesting that Christians should resort to the same violent protests that sprang up all over the world recently, over some cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper? A total religious onslaught against freedom of speech is a serious cause for concern to all freedom-loving people.

Anyway, back to the 580 gullible South Africans who actually signed the petition: Where were you lot when Bill Maher’s Religulous was screened just a month or so ago at several cinemas across South Africa? I don’t recall any mails or petitions or protests. There was not so much as a whimper from the religious crowd when the film was advertised in the mainstream press, and eventually screened.  This inaction just confirms a very important observation: Religious folk are fixated with things that don’t exist (as in this Corpus Christi film, for example), but are  seemingly oblivious of real things (such as Bill Maher’s film, Religulous).

Hate Not the Believer…

This Sunday, while with a group of friends who get together once or twice a month to provide food aid to orphaned or abandoned kids, we drove past a Mosque in a rundown area called Grasmere. I think it was towards the middle of the day and the call to prayer was being sounded through loudspeakers, probably mounted on one of the minarets. One of my friends quite uncharacteristically remarked that these Mosques were springing up everywhere, and that he hated the Muslims for their militant behaviour and the spreading of Islam. My friend is religious of course, but his religious allegiance is not important; the hatred shown toward a competing faith is.

I must have surprised the others in the car for the rebuke I offered, because they are all aware of my irreligious or Atheist stance. I commented that one should not hate a man for his religious beliefs, but rather hate what his religion and his religious teachers or clerics make him believe.  Before I could continue exhorting my abhorrence of the word “hate” we came to our turn-off to the children’s Place of Safety and the subject changed to something else. Since Sunday, several incidents have made me reflect on hatred, justification for hatred, and religion, Islam in particular.

When I got home that Sunday, I came across an article and a video in the online heraldsun, an Australian publication, “It’s OK to hit your wife, says Melbourne Islamic cleric.” The video clearly shows Islamic cleric Samir Abu Hamza instructing his male followers “…to hit their wives as a last resort, but they were not to make them bleed or become bruised. ” In case you’re thinking I’ve resorted to some sort of quote mining to deliberately distort his meaning and intention, the video available together with the article is quite clear that this is what he said. He went on to state that “If the husband was to ask her for a sexual relationship and she is preparing the bread on the stove she must leave it and come and respond to her husband, she must respond,” in a clear reference to a man’s right to demand sex from his wife.

Apart from the fact that this disgustingly patriarchal attitude belonged in times long gone by, why is it that clerics from the Abrahamic religions, but more especially Islam getting involved in the domestic affairs of men and women? It’s bad enough that clerics make wild pronouncements on prophets and gods, but this insidious need to pronounce on the private lives of adherents as well, is quite frankly, alarming. Is the hold of religious clerics on their congregations so tenuous, that they need to now control every aspect of your life to ensure total and utter submission and compliance? Are the clerics merely re-iterating what is written in the Koran? I found three English translations at ConversationalAtheist, for the Koranic verse that refers to (governs?) wife beating, and although they differ only slightly, they clearly condone such behaviour. What drives a cleric to re-inforce behaviour that is universally condemned as unacceptable? His religious conviction? His unquestioning belief? His religion? Or his teacher before him? The vicious cycle continues…

Over the last few days I’ve been conducting an online discussion via the comments page on one of my previous blogs “The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know…,” with a young Muslim women from Singapore Malaysia, I think. She’s obviously a bright young women, but some of her naive religious beliefs are quite depressing; frightening actually. It’s quite clear that her thinking has been moulded by her religious instructors, the clerics. She like so many others, people from all religions are quite oblivious that their religious “panel-beating” shows clearly when they defend their beliefs.

Now I don’t want to create the impression that Islam is the worst religion by singling it out for attention; all the other religions are on the same footing when it comes to perpetuating irrational beliefs and behaviour. The point I’m trying to get across is that religion needs the clerics to keep it alive; and these are the people we need to despise, not hate.

I’m Having Second Thoughts About Being An Atheist

Now don’t get me wrong; I haven’t had an epiphany or earth-shattering change in my way of thinking. And I don’t intend returning to the religious fold any time soon, or ever. I’m merely considering that maybe attaching the label, Atheist to myself is not exactly such a good thing. Allow me to explain…

Over the last month or so, I’ve been having a debate with some guy (I will just use his first name, Daniel) on Atheist Nation, over the “ideology” associated with Atheism. Atheist Nation is a closed/members only group for Atheists, but Theists and in fact anyone are welcomed as members. Our debate concerned the apparent degeneration of Atheism into just another patronising, arrogant and self-important ideology which had slowly assumed the mantle of intolerance that Religionists display so proudly. Daniel went on to assert that world-famous authors such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens were fanning the flames of intolerance and zealotry in Atheists by their “hypocritical” criticism and condemnation of religion and its followers. Daniel maintained that by insulting all Christians, Muslims, Hindus, etc. collectively we were stooping to the same level as any unthinking, uncritical, religionist. Daniel, by the way is an Atheist, but actually prefers the term skeptic which is also favored by Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine.

The point, which I admittedly, at first failed to come to terms with, and which, Daniel was trying get across in often lewd terminology, was that religion itself was not the problem, but the ideological thinking behind it, more specifically the uncritical, dogmatic and irrational approach to reality by the adherents of religions. Atheists it seems, were being led to believe that religion itself was abhorrent because of the centuries-old antagonism and strife between the various religious faiths, and the despicable fundamentalist behaviour of many of its followers.

Daniel also pointed out that Dawkins equates Atheism with superior intelligence and thus relegates it to an elitist world-view, but I think this is a bit harsh on Dawkins. I am confident that Dawkins’ sincerity is beyond reproach. However, the insinuation remains and the best defense I can offer on behalf of Dawkins is that it was certainly not intentional, and he should not be held responsible for an individual’s interpretation of his work. What is important here is that this should serve as a warning to Atheists; that they, in their interactions with Theists, should be careful of giving or creating the impression of intellectual superiority, and a smug attitude.

It’s also true that Atheists and Theists face the same problems and challenges every day; we just deal with them differently. Instead of coercing Theists into adopting new “tools” for dealing with reality, we just need to make them aware of the choices and let them decide for themselves. I still however, favor the use of (respectful) dissonance to stimulate or provoke a change in thinking in Theists, but not in any way that could be construed as proselytizing. I know Daniel wont like it, but I don’t think it is that hard to do this, without succumbing to the behaviour described earlier.

I had this idea all along that Atheism was going to save the world; that we (Atheists) were going to save the religionists from themselves. But, we were going about it all the wrong way; by succumbing to near-fundamentalism ourselves. I now see how we Atheists could indeed become that which we were trying so hard to irradicate. It’s hard to believe that this could be true, but if I apply the critical, rational thinking I advocate, then I have no choice but to accept that it could be so.

So back to the label of Atheist. When accosted by a religionist, will I be able to just say “I’m just a skeptic, I lack a belief in God, the burden of proof is on you.” Or will my perverse desire to “kick some ass” come to the fore? Time will tell.