Out And Proud, and I don't mean that in a Gay way.

I live in a place that is packed full of Christian Goodness. There are times when it feels like I am stuck in an episode of the Brady Bunch; the other choice is to head out beyond the Flannel Curtain to the outer suburbs, which resembles Shameless.

And the trouble is, in a community this small, you need everyone on side, because there aren't enough people here to have sectarian strife. Except for those tossers in Hobart, we don't need them for anything.

We all have to get along with each other, 'cos if you pissed too many people off your social circle would shrink down to your relatives, and that would make dating and infidelity far more awkward.

But even here, I am finding it hard to be polite about people's religious beliefs. I don't believe in:

1. The Undead Flying Hebrew Construction Worker Who Said to Be Nice, or

2. The Sacred and Unquestionable (in spite of all the nasty shit he did in the Hadith) Prophet Mohammet with the Flying Horse, or,

3. Moses of the Profound and Notable Absence from the Historical and Archaeological Record.

And as I write this, I am actually feeling really creeped out to be criticizing these Abrahamic faiths even so far. That is probably because, until recent times, the Terrifying Faithful could kill you in Very Nasty Ways for even thinking such things.

Well, here goes. I am outing myself.

I don't believe in the Supernatural, and that goes for any and all Gods, Demons, Ghouls, Angels, Pixies, Reiki, Crystal healing, Spirit Guides, the Entire Hindu Pantheon, all 40, 000 of them or so.

I Believe that things happen because space, time, energy and matter interact with each other in very complex, but ultimately knowable ways.

And I believe that I am a part of that, for as long as my matter is so arranged that the energy of the universe, made available in my body as it breaks down complex molecules and reacts them exothermically with oxygen, powers the matter that is my body to wander about thinking, eating and on rare occasions when the opportunity presents itself, shagging.

I believe that I am a piece of carbon based Darwinian life, and i am extraordinarily grateful to exist, in light of the odds against me being born and the ease with which my body can cease to function.

I am seriously fucking grateful to the universe for my consciousness, not because it is an eternal Soul, but because it is an ephemeral Effect, as the prism of the physical brain 'refracts' the energy of sunlight stored in my food, and shines my consciousness out into the slightly warm almost-nothingness that is the great expanse of space, for just a very little while.

My thanks for this are deeper than can be expressed by saying thank-you to a god that I have made in my own image. I exist, for now. So do you. For now.

And as Now is all we have, lets make it a damned good Now, with as much kindness and charity and good engineering and splendid music as possible.

If you love someone, I don't mind how, so long as everyone has a nice time and no-one catches anything nasty. If you are into weird games, like S+M or Rugby Leauge, you're welcome to it, just wear protective equipment, and try not to dislocate anything.

All my love, peoples. Have a Blast.

B.

The Urge to get High

One of the things that I cannot find in the literature about young people and substance abuse is an acknowledgement that people -and I mean all of us- have at some stage, wanted to get loaded.

I'm not talking about two glasses of bubbly after work, I mean that feeling, after 40 hours in an office, where your threshold of self restraint has been busted like a banner gets busted when a football team runs through it. You want excess of SOMETHING.

Booze, Sex, downhill Skiing, it doesn't matter a damn how you get there, you just need the dopamine.

It's that cranky combination of claustrophobia, habituation to the smell in the office air conditioning, physical jitteryness from lots of inactivity and caffeine, sexual frustration and mental fatigue. And, Boredom.

Capitalised, proper-noun, weapons-grade Boredom of the ordinary kind, refined in the workplace into something that can etch glass. Its as bad as being back in high school.

It was fucking dull to be a teenager, as I recall, if you weren't beautiful, sporty and/or had parents that could (and) would dress you in a way that wasn't socially debilitating.

My nickname, for example, was Sargent Obesity because I wore so many clothes from Surplus stores and was, indeed, a proper fat bastard.

It was shit. I found my way through it later in life by loosing 30Kg and buying some proper fucking clothes as soon as I was free of the family home and financially able, but more importantly I came across ideas that inspired me and made me feel that life was worth living.

That, and I finally got laid.

The next guy that tells me that high-school was the best time of his life is going to have me tell him that he is either terribly sad, or was very, very lucky, in addition to the standard Go Fuck Yourself that will accompany either option.

Young people need something to believe in and something useful to do. Until we can give them one or both, I am not going to bitch about it if they smoke a bit of weed and listen to heavy music. Really, this is a symptom, and unless we have something to offer I cannot bring myself to feel overly righteous and/or scandalised.

In fact, I might just ask them for a joint, if they have one going spare.

western Liberal Democracy: Get it Up Ya.

In Certain Terms.

This blog is to be written as a response to many statements that have been made about the West, from within and without, to the effect that we have become a group of people that lack belief, and lack principles.

It is at times suggested that the decline of organized religion, and religiousness generally, is leaving us anchorless and lost, in contrast to the fundamental-religious faithful, who would like to portray themselves as being believers, and not infidel.

I would counter that Western communities do in fact have sophisticated systems of belief, that have succeeded, and continue to succeed, in creating organized, functioning, relatively safe, and exceptionally tolerant places to live. They are not perfect, but it is not fair to compare a real society to a Utopia, which, as it’s name suggests, exists only as an ideal. The only meaningful comparison to be made is against other real societies, as they represent the outcomes of other systems of belief, and other ways of organizing a society.

And this brings us to exactly the point I wish to make: That the principles that keep Western Liberal Democracy ticking are in fact subjective values, that are believed in, rather than known. And that the behaviour of citizens in living those values is actually what makes a society function as it does.

I have come to believe that unlike religions, which have all sorts of texts declaring in absolute terms the beliefs that constitute them, and in them plenty of natural-born slogans to quote as points of reference, Western democratic values are, in practice, more of an unwritten code.

This is not to assert that there are not many writings embodying beliefs that we find current in Western societies. Locke, Mill, Dickens, Hugo, the Constitution of the United States, and the Holy Bible amongst countless others have all contributed. But I would argue that I held many of the beliefs that these texts emphasize long before I read them, and that they were acquired socially at a young age. I didn’t notice at the time, and it only became apparent that I had them when I came across someone that didn’t.

This is, of course, how values are actually transmitted, by people, to people. I never studied a document at school called The Bogan’s Manifesto, for example. I never read a passage that went: “And Dave-o the Welder said unto them: Thou shalt give all thy Cobbers a Fair Go, that there may be no cause for Whinging and Blueing amongst us…”

Someone more academic than myself could probably tease this value apart into its historical roots, and make astute comments about its origins and limitations. For me, I am happy to accept it as an artefact of a common sort, that you can find on any street corner. It doesn't matter to me if its origins are the Christian bible or Oliver Twist, its all the same. There isn’t an objective Truth, that we can consult, measure with a Micrometer and say: Yes, Dave-o, you're right. It’s a fact.
We choose to believe in this idea, and some live by it.

Our values are just things that we believe in.

It’s not the same as a Religion that has (relatively) fixed dogmas and creeds. Its more of a de-facto faith. It’s there, so it’s real. But it can change, and you can’t argue that it has left the One True Path, because it never claimed to be one in the first place.

What I’m worried about, is that this easy-going way might loose ground to hardline religion, simply because it doesn't have the structure and practice that religions have to keep people in their way of doing things. And honestly, if Western Democracy did have the equivalent of a Sunday School class, I would likely assert my democratic right to vote with my feet and stay away. But I do think that a little wee book with some pro-western democratic writing in it would be handy from time to time.

I know its presumptuous to write about the values of the two thousand million sentient beings living in democracies, but that isn’t what I am trying to do. Think of a cookbook from a very small country: I can say, in my part of the world, some of us like to cook snails like this…and I am not making any claims that it’s the only way, the best way, or that you should throw rocks at people who cook ‘em differently. This is my snapshot of what my communities values look like, through my eyes. I make no further claims for it, and hope that someone might find it enjoyable to read.

Hello and Welcome, to the Green Chesterfield

A title this odd owes an explanation, that i will happily grant you, gentle reader.

I own two leather Chesterfield divans, and they are sublime. I bought them on eBay, but don't hold that against them.

For those of you who haven't had crazy experiences in a formal lounge room fully equipped with leather furniture sexy enough to trigger a fetish, you have my sincerest sympathy.