Do Morality and Ethics Belong to Religion?

Well, no – of course not. They’re both innate in human beings. One only has to read history books to note that the religious and non-religious alike are guilty of  immoral and unethical behavior by the bucket-load.

But it doesn’t stop religious groups from a) claiming that morals and ethics are provided by religion, and b) telling people that it’s not possible to live a meaningful, ethical and moral life if you’re irreligious. All clearly bullshit.

See the happy, relaxed and enquiring young faces at God Camp? There's only one word for it: abuse.

The concept of morality isn’t exclusive to the church, it quite literally means ‘manner, character and proper behavior’ (from the latin ‘moralitas‘).  Morals are an arbitrarily determined set of rules – they are not, I repeat NOT defined by religious texts.

Now, it just so happens that religions of all kinds like to tell people what to think and how to think it. They also like writing things down. A lot. So it’s no big surprise that bibles end up peppered with moral tales, not to mention ‘morals’ that are downright immoral in this day and age…

But, at last, summer indoctrination camps for kids run by religious scout groups and churches (which have claimed de-facto ownership over providing morality to kids, amongst other things) are being challenged:

Camp offers ‘godless alternative’
An atheist summer camp in Somerset is offering children aged seven to 17 a “godless alternative” to religious camps

We don't need no thought control.

Rationality and reasoned thought form an invaluable mental toolkit for all kids. To think that generations of parents have left their childrens’ enquiring little minds to church groups who then fill the void with a God-flavoured version of morality… it’s dereliction of duty at best. Giving kids a moral sense that is policed by a mythical God figure (and therefore underpinned by guilt, repression and fear of God’s wrath) is a human tragedy. In much the same way that the creationist myth is peddled, answering children’s “why”s with “because God said so” simply robs children of a full understanding and appreciation of the world around them, not to mention hijacking their innate moral compass.

Anyway, back to camp…

"My £10 note is demonstrably real"

Best of all, there are signed £10 notes from Richard Dawkins as prizes to any child who can ‘prove that unicorns don’t exist’. I imagine that any kid who’s read Dawkins’ books might do well (in kudos, at least) as they’ll know that it’s not, with absolute certaintly, possible to disprove the existance of anything which doesn’t present any form of observable evidence. The most one can do is present a rational argument based on rational probability: it’s highly improbable that unicorns exist, given what we know about the world around us. ‘Faith’ isn’t enough on it’s own (for ‘faith’ read ‘programmed unquestioning acceptance of the existance of the improbable and the intangible that makes the believer feel superior to others.’)

But it’s not for rationalists to disprove the existance of God -  why should they? Afterall, they’re not the ones making wild claims about the universe. The onus of proof surely lies with the believers – they need to back up what they claim with proof or substantial evidence, otherwise we would be allowing anyone and everyone to define ‘truth’ on their own exclusive subjective terms. We would allow the world to be flooded with insane mumbo-jumbo, crazy cults and rafts of unthinking ‘believers’.

Um. Hey, hang on a sec……

GZS

PS: one final thought:

Ungrumpy Vid of the Day: The Ultimate in Fancy Dress!

Walking with Dinosaurs

I still can’t believe that these things actually work. Okay, so they’re “just” giant ‘animatronics’. I understand that they’re ‘driven’ by between one and three people. I get that they’re powered by a bunch of remote-control motors. At least, that’s what my rational brain tells me… But, every time I watch these things moving, my mammalian instincts scream “run for the hills” for a split-second.

The life-like movement that they get out of these life-size dinosaur ‘mega-puppets’ make them incredibly awe-inpiring. Now that’s what I call a sight worth seeing!

more about “Ungrumpy Vid of the Day: The Ultimate…“, posted with vodpod

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Makes me wonder whether, at some point in the distant future, the new dominant lifeform on Planet Earth will be creating latex and animatronic humans…

GZS

Head-to-Head in The News: Gerrard VS Doomsday.

Today’s Head To Head in The News features two giants: One giant rock and one giant cock.

Firstly, both Nasa and other space agencies across the world are working on ways to develop an early-warning system to detect planet-killing asteroids. Even so, our growing awareness of the threat of global annihilation from astronomical objects carries  a sense of futility. Should we happen to spot a planet-killer on a collision-course with Planet Earth there is no Bruce Willis waiting in the wings. No elite drilling crew itching to be trained up as astronauts in an implausibly short time and launched into space to split the rock before it careers headlong into terra firma. In short, if something much bigger than a truck comes along we’re likely to take collateral damage, or worse – resulting in a new ice age or total planetary fragmentation. The end of all life on Earth. Just to prove how realistic this possibility is, this was in the news today:

Jupiter ‘struck by large object’

The impact 'spot' is about the size of Planet Earth.

Despite already scanning the skies for possible astonomical threats, NO ONE KNEW IT WAS COMING.

We follow this literally potentially-Earth-shattering news of a giant rock pummelling a defenceless body, with the story of a giant cock pummelling a considerably smaller but no less defenceless body:

Liverpool footballer Steven Gerrard’s involvement in a bar brawl.

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Yes, it’s yet another arrogant overpaid prick of a footballer bringing the whole of mankind into disrepute. Honestly, what the fuck is it with these professional morons? They’re paid more in one minute than most people earn in a decade. For kicking a ball around with a handful of other people. During a few weeks of the year. For ninety minutes.

If it’s not enough to be super rich, the Captain of your team, young; athletically fit, able to take your pick of the women, AND be a potential role-model for young fans – why not go out to some craphole of a pub or nightclub, announce to everyone that you’re Steven Gerrard and live up to your ungrateful immature egomaniac footballer stereotype by smacking someone’s face in.
“Yes, I’m The Steven Gerrard. Yes, the Captain of Liverpool. Yes, The Steven ‘I can’t feel good about myself without beating up the DJ just because he won’t let me put Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby on the pub stereo’ Gerrard.”

WTF is it with footballers? Why don’t football managers do something about it? Anything. Something like this:

“Now lads, I know you’re young, rich and all the rest. But, you’re professionals now. Kids look up to you. Gerrard – you’re 28, not feckin 18. Stop gettin’ pissed an’ goin’ ta pubs and clubs an’ pickin’ fights every five minutes – here’s a wake up call, you shape up or ya feck off out of the team.”

Actually, I have no idea if all football managers speak like an angry and sober Father Jack Hackett from Craggy Island, but I bet they do. All of them. Or at least I wish they would -  they could clean up this so-called ‘Gentleman’s Game’ overnight. Footballers – they don’t know how good they’ve got it (and if they did they’d just piss it all away that bit faster).

So, this week’s Head-to-Head In the News was brought to you by:

Football twat Gerrard + a stereo + a skinful of beer = violent attack in pub

AND…

The end of all life as we know it.

There’s nothing like the news to provide a bit of perspective, is there.

GZS

EDIT: I see that Gerrard got off scott-free.

I wonder how many connections he’s got, apart from being able to afford amazing lawyers, to get the judge to say this:

“What at first sight to the casual observer may seem to have been a clear-cut case against you of unlawful violence, has been nowhere near as clear-cut upon careful analysis of the evidence.”

and this:

“At all times you insisted that you only ever acted in what you believed was reasonable self-defence to what you understandably, albeit you accept mistakenly, believed was an attempted attack upon you by Marcus McGee.“

WOW. Did they even watch the CCTV footage?? Yes, the man got up out of his chair in an aggressive way, but since when is it illegal to do that? Perhaps more importantly, what must Gerrard have said to make the guy instantly snap? He’d been put in charge of the pub’s music, so he can’t have been an totally irresponsible psychopath. And I ask again – who threw the first punch? Answer: A member of Gerrard’s entourage. Who threw the second, third and fourth punches? Answer: Steven Gerrard. All the victim did was get out of his seat, and still we end up with this comment from the judge:

“The verdict is a credible verdict on the full facts of this case, and you walk away from this court with your reputation intact.“

‘Credible’? ‘Full facts’? ‘Intact’? Whatever you say, M’lud. Whatever you say.

BBC Earth News: Total Environmental Disaster Day

I had no idea that the BBC had launched a microsite on the back of their regular news website which is totally devoted to ‘green news’ – it’s called ‘Earth News‘. Now, any regular user of the BBC’s news output – web, radio or TV – will be used to the gloomy stories of the day getting top billing, whilst stories about local heroes or upbeat heart-warming items get pushed to the bottom of the pile. So, it was with gritted teeth that I clicked on the link to Earth News. I fully expected to see some ‘breaking news’ that amounted to the imminent Death of Planet Earth. Due to happen around teatime on tuesday.

But, to be fair, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. In amongst the ‘soon-to-be extinct’ and the ‘evil of mankind’ type stories, you can actually find items of scientific interest and even the odd environmental-recovery story.

However, considering that most people now acknowledge that the planet is indeed on its way to total fuckdom, the Earth News site looks decidedly suspicious. I suspect that if they followed the same editorial rules for this site as they do for the regular ‘you’re gonna get cancer/swine flu/bird flu/mugged/raped/murdered/run over by a drunk/repossessed/made redundant tomorrow’ style news page, the Earth News page would (and I suspect should) look like this every day:

The End.

GZS

‘Do UFO’s Exist?’

Before a bunch of new-ager’s, ‘believers’ and self-proclaimed ‘ufologists’ jump up and scream “Yes!” it’s important to know what the acronym ‘UFO’ actually stands for:

Unidentified
Flying
Object

So, journalists, hacks and local news reporters take note:
You all sound like dicks when you open a news item with ‘Do UFO’s Exist?’. Look, we all know that 99% of the time you’re going to end up showing clips of loonys with silver-foil hats on, voiced by an oh-so-tongue-in-cheek presenter who gently debunks the whole subject in a patronising piss-taking manner, culminating in a smugly-delivered hanging question: “So, do UFO’s Exist? You decide.” by which point the viewer already has “Do they Bollocks.” firmly implanted in his or her mind. Job done then, Mister Smug Bastard of Foregone Conclusion News.

UNIDENTIFIED means UNIDENTIFIED. Therefore, OF COURSE UFO’s exist. If it’s in the sky and it remains unidentified then it is, by definition, a UFO. People routinely use the word ‘UFO’ where they really mean ‘Extraterrestrial Space Craft’. If they want to pose the question “Do Extraterrestrial Space Craft exist?” then that’s one thing, but if they insist on posing the dumb-ass unthinking question “Do UFO’s Exist?” everytime some village idiot takes a photo of a bird, a ‘Chinese Lantern’ or a helecopter at night then it just adds insult to injury.

And that brings me on to the morons who post stuff onto the web like this:

"I didn't see anything in the sky at the time, but when I looked at the photo later I immediately jumped to a ridiculous conclusion"

and this:

"Oh my God! Hovering Orange 'Orbs'! That can only mean one thing! Yes - I've flushed my common sense and intellect down the toilet!"

Listen up – if you’re about to post a photo or video of a so-called ‘UFO’ which looks like a blurry dot (especially if you catch yourself writing ‘I didn’t see anything at the time, but when I looked at the photo later…’) then DON’T. You just look like a flying-saucer nut at worst and a gullible unobservant twat at best. Guess what – if you didn’t see a 50-foot alien spaceship behind your wife’s head in that holiday snap you took on the beach then there PROBABLY wasn’t one. So, what on earth could explain a cigar-shaped blur moving through the sky? It it a bird, is it an insect – no, it’s a 50-foot alien ship. WTF…

And, if you look up into the night sky and see a ‘slow moving orange sphere’ or an ‘orange orb’ or a ‘flickering orange cylinder’ then, unless these things are darting all over the sky and performing rapid changes in speed and direction, please please for Pete’s sake hold your horses. Don’t jump on the web and upload some shaky mobile phone footage of your ‘Fleet of Orange UFO’s over Twatsville’. The sad truth is that there is now a global business in selling Chinese Lanterns to wedding receptions, party-organisers, special events and UFO-hoaxers. Yes, there really are companies out there with names like ‘UFO Balloons Ltd’ selling these Chinese lanterns (amongst other things, like giant solar UFO balloons) under the thinly-veiled recommendation that it would be ‘cool’ to perpetrate a UFO hoax. These companies, and the people that buy their products, are consummate morons who fall under a neanderthal trance whenever they see a bright light or naked flame. Just look what can happen when these things go wrong:

Apart from being a fire hazard, these things can get very high indeed – it’s only a matter of time before a light aircraft or microlite collides with some wanker’s idea of fun. Often people call the police thinking that either a plane has gone down or aliens are about to land – hoax balloons and anything ON FIRE that can get to such a high altitude should be banned. No more wasted police time, no more drunk people posting footage of Chinese lanterns on YouTube, no more hysteria over false UFO sightings. And yes, I do mean false Unidentified Flying Objects – as they’re patently identifiable. They do not defy rational explanation. And that leads me to my final point:

The acronym ‘UFO’ should be redefined to mean UNIDENTIFIABLE Flying Object. By definition, everything is ‘unidentified’ until a rational explanation is found. If people want to use the acronym as a synonym for ‘Alien Spacecraft’ or ‘Extraterrestrial Ship’ or ‘Phenomena Unknown to Science’ then we need to start talking in terms of quality of evidence. In my book, if a UFO sighting successfully resists a viable, rational positive identification or potential explanation of the object in question then the object’s status is ‘unidentifiable’. In other words – it becomes a true enigma, something of value to science that warrants further investigation, untainted by spurious knee-jerk explanations and biased terminology such as ‘Flying Saucer’ or ‘Intelligently Controlled’ or ‘Craft (all those terms are loaded and over-used by ‘believers’  – you know who I mean, the ones who upload videos of blindingly-obvious hoaxes to YouTube and dub the X-Files theme tune over the top – the sad tossers.)

Here’s another acronym for all those true believers out there: RBT -

Reject
Biased
Thinking.

GZS

How may I fucking help you? The science of Swearology.

No Fucking Swearing

Some boffins have worked out that swearing like a navvy is actually good for you. Well, providing that you’re in some kind of pain:

Swearing ‘helps to reduce pain’

I suspect that this started out as another ‘waste of a fucking research grant’ which has turned into a ‘fucking interesting and potentially fucking useful fucking bit of Swearology’.

The bastard point that I’m fucking making is that there are loads of twatty fuckers and sad wankers out there who fucking well swear all of the cocking time, and use swear-fucking-words where other shitting words will do, in the merry-fucking middle of normal cunting sentences.

Like, fuck, yeh?

They’re not in pain. They might be standing at a bus-stop and reading the timetable (“Wot the fuck’s the fuckin’ time? When’s the next fuckin’ bus?“), asking a shopkeeper for change  (“I need some ten-pees for da fackin phone fackin’ box, dun’ I.”) or the most prevalent of them all: the almost-literally-meaningless idiot-speak about nothing inparticular to be heard everywhere and anywhere: (“So I went to the, fuckin’ y’know, fuckin’ Mcdonalds an ordered a fuckin’ cheeseburger an’ the fuckin’ bitch gimme a fuckin’ normal fuckin’ burger, an’ I was like fuck, an” she was like ‘oh fuck’, so I said fuckin’ forget it an’ walked the fuck away. Fuck that. Fuckers. I mean, Fuck, yeah?”)

It’s really not worth my time to point out that these people are morons who aren’t and never will be self-aware enough to realise that they’ve fallen into a habitual way of speaking that is roughly comprised of 40% extraneous swear words, 40% conjunctive words and 15% nouns; leaving only 5% for the other words that create meaning.

The main thing here is that these people use these words outside their normal contexts: pain, frustration, anger, comic irony and other kinds of  wordplay.  For example, it’s a useful linguistic tactic to use swear words to highlight extreme situations  – as exemplified by Gordon Ramsay. He’s the perfect example of a man who needs to swear to help failing restauranteurs wake up to the deep shit they’re in (but he’s become a habitual swearer in the process unfortunately). My point is that these people who swear throughout their everyday speech have no-where else to go when they actually are in pain or angry. They’re already at 9.9 on the ‘swearometer’ before they’ve even started!

I mean, what happens if one of these personalities slams their hand in the car door? “Oh fiddlesticks!” ? Don’t think so. It’s more likely to be “Ohhhh FUCK! FUCKING FUCKER! FUCK FUCK FUCK! BASTARD! FUCK! FUCKER!”, which is what you might expect, but it only amounts to a rise in volume and 3% more swear words than ‘normal’. So, to take it up a notch – what if they slam their hand in the door, the car starts rolling towards a bus-stop full of swearing kids and the poor guy drops the lit cigarette from his crushed hand onto the car seat and it catches fire? See..? There’s no where else to go, no more heights on Mount Swear to scale. Or, perhaps there is – it’s just that they haven’t been discovered yet. Maybe it’ll take a habitual swearer, pushed to the extreme, to unlock a whole new realm of Swearology.  I don’t think the universe could take the resultant Swear-energy that would be released – it would probably create some new kind of radiation which punches a hole through the fabric of reality itself into a fifth dimension where swear-words fill the air like a sea of magical ether and Swear-wizards ride the waves by barking out a torrent of  “fuck!” “shit!” “bastard!” etc. Probably.

There’s only one type of person who’s allowed to use swear words in everyday speech – a comedian who understands irony. If, like this man, you swear in the normal course of business you’ll soon realise that (punching holes in the fabric of reality aside) there is no place to go after you’ve used up a full arsenal of top swear words. Apart from extreme violence. Here he is – the mother-fucker Mike Strutter:

more about “Strutter Direct“, posted with vodpod

I say we should keep swear words for the proper occasions, otherwise they’ll lose all their power – and then what will we say the next time some inconsiderate bastard nicks your parking space? “Oh crumbs! What a blasted buffoon.”?

GZS