The end really is not nigh

On December 21st 2012, very little out-of-the-ordinary will happen.

Or

On December 21st 2012, large amounts of life on earth will be destroyed.

Or

On December 21st 2012, Humanity (sometimes life in all its forms) will undergo a shift of consciousness.

Here’s my prediction: On December 21st 2012, very little out-of-the-ordinary will happen, because, do you know who get it wrong a lot?

People who predict the end of the world.

History is littered with people who are sure that the end is nigh and that year is definitely the year that the world ends. There is a good article on Wikipedia Listing apocalyptic predictions throughout the ages, but here are some gems:

Many early Christian’s were adamant that Jesus was going to return within a single generation of his ascension (or death, if you prefer logic), which would trigger the rapture. As it turned-out, they were wrong, but that hasn’t stopped numerous groups since predicting exactly the same return of Christ and the end of days.

In 375 AD, Martin of Tours was sure 400 AD would be the year. It stood to reason, after all, the Antichrist had ‘definitely already been born’ and therefore the return of Christ was sure to follow. Jesus was a no show and history does not record what Martin thought became of the Antichrist.

On Feb 20th 1524, Johannes Stöffler reasoned that a particular celestial alignment would trigger the end of days. Unfortunately for Stöffler that day came and went, not to be deterred, he decided he had made a mistake, but that the world would end 4 years later, February 20th 1528. It did not.

In our more recent history, the return of Jesus was no longer the most popular way that we would all meet our end, having been replaced with fears about terror from the stars and/or planet-wide natural disasters. December 21st, 1954, was the date that Dorothy Martin was sure humanity would perish under tidal waves and terrible flooding. She knew this as leader of a UFO Cult who were in regular contact with their celestial masters. She was wrong and, feeling so cheated, her disciples abandoned her.

March 31st 1998 Hon-Ming Chen, leader of the Taiwanese cult God’s Salvation Church, or Chen Tao — “The True Way” — claimed that God would come to Earth in a flying saucer at 10:00 am on this date. Moreover, God would have the same physical appearance as Chen himself, (which was a stroke of luck). On March 25, God was to appear on Channel 18 on every TV set in the US. This did not happen.

On December 21st 2012, the Mayan’s predicted that the world would come to an end…chances are you’ve heard this story, some of you may even hold some sway in it in one form or another. But it’s rubbish.

The theory, relates to the Mayan Long Count Calendar System, which probably originated with the much earlier Olmec Civilisation, but the Olmecs are just not as sexy as the Mayans when it comes to new age guff. The Calendar puts the end of a cycle, not the end of the world, at around 21st December 2012. The devotees of this particular flavour of crazy will tell you no later dates have been found at archeological sites anywhere in Mexico, Peru or Belize, this is untrue as numerous dates have been discovered after December 21st 2012. This is kind of unfortunate as the whole movement hinges around the Mayan’s believing the world would end on this date and contemplating dates after would be pointless. In spite of the rather conclusive evidence against the Mayan’s (or any other early meso-American culture) predicting the end of days, a brief Google Search reveals many new age sites still peddling this rubbish.

If you travelled back in time 10 years, you would find plenty of groups and individuals who subscribed to the Mayan Apocalypse theory, but since then there has been a subtle change in thought. Possibly realising the aforementioned maxim that predicting the end of the world is risky business, a lot of the New Age Movement jumped on the idea of the end of a cycle. Fiery death and oblivion were repackaged as a planet-wide shift of consciousness, enlightenment and/or realisation on the connectedness of all life on earth.

I actually have much greater respect for those who have stuck by their guns and maintain a belief that the Mayan’s predicted the end of days. I can get my head around apocalypse, I can define it and, should it happen, I’m not likely to miss it. The same cannot be said for shifts of consciousness, which seems so much harder to define, even by the people claiming this is what December 21st 2012 will bring.

I have friends who subscribe to this these theories, we have vicious arguments and outstanding bets that I’ll be claiming on 22nd December when the world has not ended and no one has undergone a huge shift of consciousness.

If you want your fill of non-Mayan potential doom, the Doomsday Clock, the symbolic clock face, maintained since 1947 by the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago, currently sits at 5 minutes to midnight based on ‘Lack of global political action to address nuclear weapons stockpiles, the potential for regional nuclear conflict, nuclear power safety, and global climate change…’

So what do you think? I’m always open to well-reasoned counter-arguments, though I have yet to encounter any on this topic. Surprise me.

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What I believe: On Religion

I will not pull any punches with this post nor will I apologise if it causes offence. I often find myself amused by how angry religious people get about their religion being criticised and how little such people actually understand the concept of faith.

What do I mean?

If you believe in something , have faith that it exists and someone tells you that you’re wrong, you won’t get angry, right? Because you know they’re wrong. If any part of this post angers you, perhaps you should question the strength of your faith and if your anger stems from that little voice in your head that is hidden beneath all the dogma, that whispers doubt. I would never seek to take away a person’s right to believe whatever they want to believe and if your faith is strong enough then not a single word I write should be able to take that away.

I was raised Church of England by my parents and used to attend Church. From quite an early age, I remember worship left me cold, I felt nothing but a guilt that I was doing something wrong. I’d look round our old, beautiful village Church to see the faces of people enthralled with faith and I was envious. I’m not envious any more and I’m certainly not Church of England.

Then What am I? Muslim? Hindu? Atheist? Agnostic? The truth is: I just don’t know. I think it’s okay not to know. I do know that I believe in science and I believe in people, their capacity to make links with others in ways that we are only just coming to understand and I believe in a connectedness with the natural world around us. I’m not an atheist I don’t think, at least not by most definitions, I guess if forced at gunpoint to pick something to believe in (should you ever find yourself in this situation, here’s a handy flowchart to Pick a Religion), it would be an adapted form of Paganism.

But organised religion has long fascinated me.

Religion is insane

There’s no getting away from it.

Religion is insane.

If ever there was a task with zero return on the amount of time invested in it, it’s religious observance. But not only that, in order to fully utilise this zero return on investment, you have to accept things, that you know are categorically not true, are actually truths. Oh and you can’t pretend, you truly have to believe the lot, because otherwise the unseen bearded sky fairy will judge you harshly…it’s called faith, it allows you to do and say stupid things and treat other people with a heady mix of condescension, contempt and, often, just good old fashioned violence. Here are some crazy things you have to believe (and do) to have a faith:

• God(s) exist (Religions mostly rely on some form of bearded sky fairy…In my honest opinion, of those religions widely practiced, Hinduism has the best Gods.)
• Homophobia is not only acceptable it’s to be encouraged (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism etc)
• Women should be subservient to men (largely all Western Religions)
• The earth is only a fraction (14 000 years old based on the Bible) of it’s actual age (Most creator myths have flawed timescales, none more so than the Bible).
• There are minor God’s who reign over things like household chores (Hinduism).
• The souls of vaporised Thetans, who once inhabited our planet, are bound to the souls of all humans living (Church of Scientology)
• Joseph Smith is a prophet (Mormons – Seriously, watch the South Park episode on the Mormons, it’s a work of genius. Jo Smith gives us all hope that anyone can end up getting revered as a prophet.)

Irony car haz ironyz

Religious people do not get irony. I recently witnessed people with strong Catholic beliefs criticising the beliefs of Scientology because they were ‘crazy and far-fetched’ and, best yet, that ‘Scientology causes more harm than it does good’…I’m not sure another better definition of irony exists than either of those statements. Simply because your particular brand of crazy has a longer history than  another, doesn’t make it any the less batshit crazy. Let’s not even get started on the numerous vile abuses by the Catholic Church over centuries that make most of the quite-frankly sinister goings on in the church of Scientology seem like high-jinx.

Religions biggest crime

I’m not going to claim that religion starts all wars, it contributes to many, sure, but we’ve never needed much help. Take away religion and war will remain, the study of history is the study of a species constantly evolving new and varied ways of bashing the shit out of itself and every thing else around.  No, for me religion’s biggest crime is keeping people stupid. Though it claims to provide answers religion offers nothing in the way of truth. Richard Dawkins refers to a reliance upon a ‘God of Gaps.’ For the religious mind, God, their great deity, exists in the gaps in our current understanding of the universe, but those gaps are closing.

It’s totally impossible to write this post without mentioning Richard Dawkins’ most controversial work, The God Delusion. It;s heavy-handed and patronising in parts, but remains a work of brilliance in explaining, in eye-searingly exhaustive length, why religion is dumb and God almost certainly does not exist. Richard Dawkins is almost definitely right, I find him an objectionable little man,  but he is right. His writing style has always struck me as being much like the Big Labowski’s Walter:

“Am I wrong, am I wrong?”

“No Walter, you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole!”

So, I highly recommend reading The God Delusion and many of Dawkins’ other works, being a bit of a dick doesn’t necessarily make you wrong. I find commonality with him in the belief that the natural world, evolution and biology are wondrous enough to not require bearded sky fairy God to add extra wonder to my life. Go outside and look at the intricacies of a flower; think about the complex social interactions that make up our daily life; the way a squirrel walks across a razor thin fence; the giant cock of a Sperm Whale; the hive minds of ants and bees…Wonders and there’s no need for God.

In slight defence of religion

I’ll never allow myself to be fully critical of religion, I’ve seen it’s power at work, first hand I’ve seen a benefit. My Mum faced death and was empowered by her religion, was not afraid. My Mum truly believed her God had designs for her and her illness and passing were part of his plan. Now, I might have my opinions about that, in fact I entirely disagree, but I could not have taken that belief away from her, it goes back to that point I made at the beginning: if your faith is strong enough, then it is armour to protect you from my words. But if I could have taken her faith away, I truly believe she would not have faced her death with such humour and grace.

We probably need religion

It’s always been with us since the earliest Hunter Gatherers started forming complex societies, Göbekli Tepe, built in Northern Turkey, some 11, 000 years ago was largely built for ritual and religious use and on to the present day. So often throughout history,  the temples come before the city; religion, worship and bearded sky fairies of one brand or another have been here a long, it’s unlikely they’re going anywhere soon. Perhaps it is true as some have argued, we have a need for religion, as a species, not because it gives us senses of ethics or morality, but because it does something else. Logic dictates it must have a benefit to us as a species otherwise it would be unlikely so many would have devoted so much of their time to it, whilst ignoring a lot of serious flaws in the dogma.

Many writers on futurism don’t see a future without religion or belief, in fact many see a return to more Paganistic or even Shamanistic belief as a response to the increased reliance on technology, including the widespread genetic and technological augmentations that is predicted. So while belief in, broadly-defined, greater powers may not go away, most futurists seem to agree the future for oppressive bearded sky fairies is unlikely the last, in anything more than small pockets, for more than the next 100 years.

I’m going to write two more posts similar to this On Science and On Magic.

If nothing else take away this final thought from my post:

You know the drill, if you don’t like these Thoughts, stick around, I’ve got plenty of others. x

Further Reading

Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins – The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

Alaine De Botton – Religion for Atheists

Christian Post – Atheist Alain de Botton Insists Society Needs Guidance From Religion

Scott Adams – God’s Debris (Free PDF copy)

Searching for Eve

There are few stories in the Bible that I find more noxious than that of Adam and Eve. The central message of the tale can be paraphrased as ‘women, it’s all your fault. It’s vile misogyny and we allow our Children to be taught it as if it’s some nice moral tale. It’s wrong, wrong, wrong, so I went in search of a different Eve.

This piece was originally written as part of a research group into the Female Goddess. Is it speculative in parts? Yes. Still beats biblical Eve hands down in my opinion. Hope you enjoy.

All About Eve

 

I would dearly like to try and save the image of Eve, mother of humanity and to do this I’m going to take a fairly sizeable leap away from tired, misguided religious dogma and its associated misogyny and into the field of early human evolution and present a much more wholesome case for the Eve of genetic memory.

Enter right Mitochondrial Eve a figure from our biological evolution who, perhaps most importantly is real and allowed to exist without Adam’s rib with not even the merest hint of a pointlessly-placed tree bearing forbidden fruit or a serpent in sight. So who was Mitochondrial Eve? She is nothing more nor less than the most recent common ancestor for all humans living today and can be traced back to roughly 200, 000 years ago. Mitochondrial Eve has her counterpart in Y-Chromosomal Adam who can be dated back 90,000 – 60, 000 years ago. So how does this relate to the story of Eve?

To begin with, it doesn’t really, the Homo Sapian genus spread onwards, expanding exponentially until about 70, 000 years ago when it hits a rather alarming genetic bottleneck that reduced a large population of humans down to possibly as few as 500 breeding pairs but certainly no more than 10, 000 breeding pairs. Humanity was going through the roughest patch of its entire evolution. As for the cause of this bottleneck? Well that’s a tricky one as we don’t really know, but the best theory that science seems to have come up with is that of the Toba Extinction Event.

The Eruption of Lake Toba, in Sumatra, Indonesia is one of the largest volcanic eruptions ever to take place on the planet with estimates that after the initial destruction, floods and a variety of other nastiness the entire planet was plunged into a 6-10 year volcanic winter event with almost all sunlight being blocked out by huge clouds of ash. Although the Toba event carries the title theory, there are corresponding genetic bottlenecks in other species dating to exactly the same time, it is fair to say the very survival of genus Homo Sapian after this event is statistically improbable, yet survive they did! But what does this have to do with Eve?

Imagine the survivors of this event, don’t forget they didn’t all survive in one place. Here we have a population of only 10, 000 breeding pairs at most spread across the entire planet, small pockets of life seeking survival in conditions humans have not experienced since (though will likely experience again before the end of our history). It seems likely that the female of the species played a role more important than ever before? This Researcher wonders if the fact that early cultures revered the female goddess so much more than later cultures is a direct result of Genetic or cultural memory that comes from the centuries after Toba.

Here we have a very different Eve, not living in the Garden of Eden, but living in hell-on-earth revered amongst early societies for the ability to bring new life, to rebuild what was lost. Admittedly this last part is speculation on my part (though I’m confident I am not straying into Dolphin-riding Atlanteans territory), but if I have to believe one view on Eve or another then I’ll pick the mother of humanity revered for bringing life after great catastrophe rather than a 1-dimensional construct produced by men to control women.

Bibliography and Further Reading

 

Chesner, C.A.; Westgate, J.A.; Rose, W.I.; Drake, R.; Deino, A. Eruptive History of Earth’s Largest Quarternary caldera (Toba, Indonesia) Clarified (March 1991); Geology 19: 200–203.http://www.geo.mtu.edu/~raman/papers/ChesnerGeology.pdf. Retrieved 03/10/2010

Dawkins, Richard; The Ancestor’s Tale, A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. (2004) (“The Grasshopper’s Tale”); Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. pp. 416.

Gibbons, Ann; Human Ancestors Were an Endangered Species. (19 January 2010). ScienceNow. http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2010/119/2.

Would Love to hear any feedback, good or bad.

You know the drill, if you don’t like these Thoughts, stick around, I’ve got plenty of others. x