A wizard always comes back for his hat.

To the uninitiated sceptic, the outpouring of affection and grief expressed across social media, at the passing of Terry Pratchett, might seem a touch affected, or even trite. It is not.

I am not generally given to sentimentality; forty odd years on this planet have granted me sufficient perspective to judge my own feelings, and motives. I am reasonably hard headed, and worldly, and yet for my part, I have been crying, on and off, all afternoon since I learned of Terry Pratchett’s death.

Why grieve? Terry Pratchett was only a writer after all, and a writer of comic fantasy at that. Well the only real way for the sceptical to appreciate the loss we feel is to read Terry Pratchett’s books, in particular his Discworld stories. The first few are buoyant, cheerful affairs, lovingly mocking the standard tropes of fantasy literature, but gradually, as the series progressed, they became something more. His worlds gained nuance and his characters a surprising depth. He used those characters to gently express, and even analyse the human condition. He examined our morals, ethics, and beliefs, with an equal measure of love, and irritation. In his books specifically for young people, and in particular the Tiffany Aching stories, he created characters that are amongst the finest ever written for children. And of course in his adult books are three outstanding literary creations; Sam Vimes, Esme Weatherwax, and the inimitable anthropomorphic personification, Death. Between these three, Pratchett sought to express what I unashamedly and happily describe here as the nobility of the human spirit. They are on a par with the likes of Atticus Finch in the dignity in which they meet their struggles. Part of our grief is that we will now never know what happens next.

There is something else though, these characters have been with me all of my adult life. They have become, in a curious way, teachers, mentors and ultimately friends. I am convinced that I am a better person for having read Pratchett. I fear death less, and love all the mad, chaotic, strangeness that is life more. And I have recognised Pratchett’s most valuable lesson, which is that the first sin is to treat people as things, as do his villains and antagonists. As Granny Aching teaches her granddaughter, Tiffany, “Them as can do, has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices. ”

So here’s to Terry Pratchett. To quote another famous fantasy author, “I will not say, do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.”

Oh and by the way, did he take his hat with him? You do know that a wizard always comes back for his hat.

Prometheus and The Eternal Sunshine

I lost my oldest friend today and it’s my fault. Before I continue let’s be clear that this friend, we’ll call him John for the sake of his privacy, has not died, or disappeared, or slipped down the back of the sofa to join the many other important things in my life that I should be more careful about. John is quite well and safe and with his family. When I say I have lost my oldest friend I mean he has un-friended me on Facebook.

I enjoin you, dear reader, to a moment of unhappy reflection on this most terrible rebuff. I myself felt compelled to cry out, ‘The horror, the horror’.

Okay so I’m being facetious and unfair. John really was a good friend. We were teenagers together, growing up in a no-account, one bus market town somewhere in rural England. We spent summer days down at the local lido starring at girls in swimsuits while smoking cigarettes and summer nights trying to get served in the local pubs by bar staff who really didn’t care that we were two years shy of being legally allowed to buy a pint of Yorkshire Bitter. We dabbled in drugs, got into scrapes, bandied ideas, formulated opinions, fell in love with the same woman and generally bounced around in that feckless, but strangely enchanting way teenagers do. Just kicking our heels, waiting for life to happen.

Later when we were both at different universities we kept in touch. The first email I ever sent was to John. He was the first to teach me what we then called netiquette. We would visit and marvel at the way life was not at all what we had expected. The last time I actually saw John was the summer of 1997. We got very drunk one Saturday night and frankly had a ball that was followed the next morning by the kind of hangover that should be prescribed under the Geneva Convention.

Not long after that, armed with an Engineering PhD and a certain genius for design, John emigrated to another part of the world. We fell out of touch, only rediscovering each other a decade later on Facebook. By then he had a beautiful family and a good and comfortable life. He employs his genius for design to make the world a better place; again for the sake of his privacy I won’t say what he does or where.

My life has had a rather more fractured and less stable trajectory but as we entered our forties you would find some difficulty in identifying immediate differences between myself and John. We were educated at the same schools, grew up in the same town, we come from the same ethnic group and strata of society, (and how arbitrary do those delineations feel even as I write them?), we are forces children, with a similar ethical outlook and set of principles. Most importantly we were friends.

So what happened?

The truth is that, for our similarities, John and I live in different paradigms.

It turns out that while, in the last twenty years, I have become an irascible sceptic as well as an ardent anti-theist and atheist along the lines of ‘The Hitch’, John has developed a rather queer and strange subset of the Creationist theory of Intelligent Design in which extra-terrestrials are responsible for human evolution.

If any off you are laughing now, you can just shut the fuck up! For the first twenty years of my life I believed that there was an omnipotent super intelligence which pervaded every single point of a Universe ninety-six billion light-years in any visible direction. This super intelligence, so I thought, knew the exact position and motion of every particle in the Universe, could interfere at any time in the laws of creation, and could read straight into my mind, where I kept all those dark secrets, such as my desire to have sex with half the girls in my year, (I had a truly inflated view of my own stamina and performance).

By comparison a rehash of the plot of the film Prometheus doesn’t sound too bad at all as a belief system.

Back to friendship, Facebook and the sceptic’s paradigm.

I post things on Facebook; memes, articles, comments. Sometimes they are about cats or mountains, sometimes they are political or philosophical, sometimes they are just plain funny. I make no apology for this; Facebook is an example of the phenomenon the networked society. It is our social space much more so than my high street or city square. It is a forum in the truest sense; it is the place for discussing ideas and thoughts, it is a place where we can look at art and the news and shout from our soap box. It is the venue for debate. For this reason I have set the privacy policy on Facebook such that anybody can read it. I don’t intend to hide, I am open and, in so far as I can judge, I am intellectually and morally honest.

So the other day I posted a meme from the British Humanist Association, (amongst whom I am happy to be numbered), which celebrated the banning of the teaching of Creationism as a scientific theory in state funded schools.

John, in a rejoinder, commented that both Evolution and Creationism were good theories. Now let me be clear, Creationism is not a good scientific theory; it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory. Creationism fails to meet any of the criteria that are required of a scientific theory and worst of all it is a position most commonly employed on the extreme fringes of the British and American right wing. If you’ve encountered Britain First or The Tea Party movement you’ll know what I mean.

I described creationism as marsh gas. John quipped that my bottom was marsh gas. Employing the best of my native wit, (stop laughing), I responded that my bottom produces marsh gas due to the nature and evolution of my alimentary tract as indicated by Charles Darwin. So far so good. Some childish jokes, no harm done.

John then proposed his Prometheus Theory of Creationism and intimated that it should be considered equally alongside any other scientific theory.

Now creationism is ridiculous but perhaps I shouldn’t have gone where I went next. I told John, my oldest friend, that his opinion, and indeed my opinion didn’t matter. The only important thing that mattered was the facts and the theory that they supported. I said I didn’t give a shit what he believed as long as he didn’t try to get ignorance and foolishness taught in our schools. I outlined the factors that define a scientific theory. I suggested the opinion that religion and religious belief are inherently wrong, (they are but no matter) and a blight on human progress which we should discard in favour of something better.

John’s spluttering reply was prefaced by an ad hominem assault which described me as a tax wasting public servant posting during work hours while he, a hard-working self-employed man, was just trying to do his best. He went on to insist that a scientific theory was a only a form of hypothesis just like belief and therefore his belief in aliens interfering in human evolution was equally as valid as the theory of evolution by natural selection. John indicated that the authority of his PhD alone was reason enough for him to spout such garbage.

At which point things, as they say, went nuclear. I gave him a several thousand word intellectual slapping. I won’t bore you with the details but it was good stuff. I was on a roll. I was roaring like the intellectual colossus I often imagine I am, bestriding the discussion; lucid, clear and in command of the facts. My prose style was clean and my thinking clear. I had been insulted by someone in the middle of a debate, and I came back punching. Yeah baby, bring it on, I’m channelling the Hitch! I’m the fucking reincarnation of Bertram Russell, spouting Zola and Epicurus.

No.

That’s not what happened.

I made my oldest friend, the person with whom I have most in common, look like a fool. I dismissed his deeply held beliefs and humiliated him in a public forum.

What kind of colossal cock am I?

Here’s the thing. With all that is going on in the world, all the violence and misery brought about by our inability to reach across our respective paradigms, if two entirely similar people with just this one philosophical difference, can’t accept and even love the inherently ridiculous in each other, what hope is there for the rest of humanity? John and I are just two middle aged men with access to the Internet, but there are people out there with access to atom bombs and biological weapons.

I’m one friend down and that’s nothing to be proud off. And I’m a human being and right now that’s nothing to be proud of either.

We must find ways to accommodate each other and we must find ways to forgive and show mercy. If this sounds like a familiar trope then it is. We’ve been taught it all our lives, but we never act on this teaching.

John unfriended me and deleted most of his part of the discussion. I have deleted the rest of the post so as to hide his humiliation and my shame.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;

-Alexander Pope

Poisonous History

I was reading an article on the origins of the schism between the Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam this morning. Now for those of you who don't know why entirely similar neighbours are continually butchering each other in the Middle East, (ably assisted by huge quantities of American and British arms), it transpires that the root of the problem lies in the legitimacy of the succession and leadership of the one hundred thousand or so practicing Muslims then living in the Arabian Peninsula.

With me so far?

Now you may have noticed that I didn’t state the date of this schism in the above paragraph so just for accuracy let me tell you that this schism took place in 632AD. I’d like you to keep that date in mind.

Schism are fairly common in religion; they are mainly doctrinal disagreements or grievances against the abuses of the ruling authority. Usually such schisms are put down before they can become established; often violently, (anyone here ever heard of the Dulcinians?) Sometimes such schisms become so established that the ruling church will try and subsume the schism into itself through peaceful means as with the Franciscan order; St Francis narrowly missed being declared a heretic on his way to canonisation. However if the underpinning philosophical or moral difference is sufficiently potent the schism will endure, as with the Protestant Reformation that fractured the Catholic Church.

I hope you’re all keeping up.

I have another date for you to remember: 31^st October 1517. This is the date on which Martin Luther nailed his  “Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg. Never heard of it? You should have because it resulted in hundreds of years of Europe wide bloodshed, and the interruption of my boyhood Christmas shopping trips in London by IRA bomb threats.

Of course one of the greatest schisms in religious history is the one that took place in The Levant sometime in the 1^st Century AD. It should come as no shock to realise that, if you are a practising Christian, you are an adherent to a heretical Judaic sect; a two thousand year old Jewish schism. We are all far too familiar with the lakes of blood and charred flesh that we've had to wade through as a result of this particular schism. Indeed both Islam and Christianity could be reasonably characterised as heretical Jewish sects by a dispassionate observer.

Let’s throw another date out there for your recollection, (and this one is highly subjective): 33 AD.

Now so far I've mentioned only the “People of the Book”, that is Christians, Jews and Muslims. But of course there are other, far older religions still practised on Earth. They have their schisms too; Buddhism is a two and a half thousand year old schism from the Hindu faith, In more recent times Sikhism has split from Hinduism.

So what’s my point? That religion creates dissent and difference and breeds appalling violence in otherwise entirely similar communities? You know this already. Just switch on the news and you can hear about Buddhists burning Muslims to death in Burma or the endless bloodshed and misery that is the Middle East. But is this perpetuation of violent hatreds intrinsic to religion or an example of a more general fault in the human condition? 

In 33AD Rome had occupied Judea for 96 years. The Roman army had brutally subjugated the region and ruled through violence and intimidation. But here’s the thing; I don’t see modern Israelis or Palestinians locked in a bitter conflict with modern Italy over these historical events. In fact to suggest that Israel or Palestine should pursue Italy over atrocities and differences that took place two thousand years ago is absurd.

In the year 632AD many things happened. For example, Charibert II, King of Aquitaine was assassinated on the orders of his elder brother, Dagobet I. Has anyone here seen any recent examples of violence between Burgundy and Belgium over this murder? No of course not, to suggest that this historical event should be cause for continued grievance would be again be absurd.

In 1517 Vasili III Ivanovich, Grand Prince of Moscow conquered Ryazan and as far as I am aware no one has died in recent times as a direct result of this event. I don’t even know where Ryazan was.

In recent history we in Britain have endured two appalling wars with Germany. Britain and Germany are now allies with no good reason to despise each other and no prospect of future conflict, (other than on a football pitch).

In the long run most grievances and disputes between and within societies that are not religiously inspired fall into history and are forgotten (except by historians). However if the dispute is religiously inspired it endures and propagates down the generations. A religiously inspired dispute poisons history and blights the lives of people yet to be born. That a political decision made fourteen hundred years ago should lead to crucifixion and beheading in 21^st Iraq is ridiculous. That these acts are committed by and against people whose belief systems are almost entirely similar is an offense against reason itself.

But then religion is an offense against reason. Religious activity establishes self-professed eternal value systems that would elsewhere be dropped or adapted within a few generations. An excellent example of this, is the recent opposition to gay marriage by otherwise quite reasonable British citizens. Any logically ethical framework will automatically ascribe equality of legal status to loving homosexual couples when compared with heterosexual couples. This is self-evident and fair. But wait! Here comes The Book of Deuteronomy; an evil and blood thirsty legal system from the late Iron Age which instructs citizens to stone homosexuals to death.

If I were to propose a change to the British law based upon or inspired by the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany would anyone pay attention to me? No of course not. The only reason the Book of Deuteronomy or indeed any of the books of the Bible have any relevance in the modern world is because the nature and structure of religion allows them continued existence through largely unquestioned obedience.

You see my point? All religion (and I do mean all religion) by its own example, is historical poison casting its grievances and hatreds unchallenged across the millennia in a baleful and unnecessary shadow.

Why should we have to endure these ancient hatreds?