Why? “Why not”.

I only discovered Charlie’s journey tonight but I’ve already subscribed to his blog. It’s at www.charliewalkerexplore.co.uk. I don’t know what it is about these adventures and the people who go on them that appeals to me. I love my comfort, a nice comfy bed and showering more than once a month. I have no plans to do anything so mental as walk across India or sail around the entire coast of the UK but I am absolutely fascinated by those who do. Here’s one final video for this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWh62BvgxE0 I’ll post more about these nut-jobs in the next few weeks. In fact, I’ll have something important to post about one of them very soon.

I was driving through the Wicklow Mountains with Eva yesterday and came across this old TV dumed just off the road. The contrast between the TV and the wet, windy heights was mental! Had to stop and take the photo above.

Myself and a friend were at the Vodafone Comedy Festival in the Iveagh Gardens over the weekend. We saw six comedians across two shows and one of them stood head shoulders above the rest. Rob Broderick, who performs as Abandoman – normally with James Hancox but he wasn’t there, totally stole the show.

Abandoman mixes the improvised hip-hop of a rap battle with the improvised comedy of Who’s Line is it Anyway to great effect. The entirety of his set was made up on the spot, buit from things as simple as what the audience members had in their pockets. I saw him at four o’clock on a rainy afternoon in a half filled tent – that’s not an easy gig by any standard – and he absolutely nailed it.

I think what I liked most about Abandoman was how easily I could go and see him again – and get a totally different show. Too often you see comedians rolling out the same routines they’ve been doing for years – it’s understandable, writing comedy takes a lot of time and effort – but Abandoman will give you a different show each time.

If you get the chance to see Abandoman live, take it. I certainly plan on keeping an eye out and whenever he’s next in Dublin I’ll go.

* * *

I suppose, if I were to list them, there would be many separate and distinct reasons why I do not believe in the existence of any deities. These would include lack of any evidence, moral and ethical reasons, and the fact that I have never felt within myself, either emotionally or reasonably, the presence of any supernatural beings, either conforming to the rules of a specific doctrine or to my own specification – a ‘personal god’, if you like. I also think the means by which many Irish people come to be atheists is through a rejection of the obvious fallacies imposed upon them by the Catholic Church during childhood. In answering the question ‘why I am an atheist’, it is through these two points – the lack of connection with the supernatural and the rejection of the church, that I find perhaps the most important personal reason arises.

Like most Irish people, my formal education began with the local Catholic national school (hardly surprising given the fact the Catholic Church still owns in excess of 90% of our primary schools). I was exposed, quite strongly, to religion at home before this, but indoctrination began in earnest once I entered the school system. Daily praying was commonplace, and religious instruction was friendly and subtle – children’s books depicting kindly drawings of the good deeds of gentle Jesus (meek and mild) are a lasting memory. As a small child I was slowly drawn in, nothing in any of this was threatening or even terribly confusing; ‘a friendly looking bearded man loves me’ I thought. Seemed simple to present it in such terms in the early 1980’s, sentences like that are now rigorously queried by parents if reported from their child, I dare say.

I’m afraid that I have no memory, being just a few days old, of agreeing to the acceptance of my first sacrament, baptism, whereby I was formally admitted into the church. However I do recall preparation for my second, namely Confession. Through this, I was informed, all of my wrongdoing could be absolved by simply admitting those childish errors to an elderly man (thankfully, for the first confession, not seated in a creepy confessional), who would then hand out a modest punishment. As a seven year old, my militant tendencies were barely evolved and reserved only for parental lobbying for toys and sweets and so I did not protest the acceptance of this sacrament, especially as I would have been the only child amongst my peers to have done so. I do recall however, querying the whole process. Were my sins really so bad (didn’t do the washing up and called my sister a bad name, being two that I recall) to warrant me having to pick up the direct line to god to ask for forgiveness? Couldn’t god just forgive me anyway, once I’d realised my errant path, without the need of confessing my childish crimes to a stranger? How do I not use this ‘get out of jail card’ to never wash another dish whilst directing a tirade of expletives towards my siblings? I did not ask any of these questions, as the whole process seemed so normal in my surroundings, but I did worry that I was not understanding this ritual fully – why was I not understanding this? Am I stupid? Does this make me a bad Catholic in god’s eyes?

Hot on the heels of the sacrament of confession, came my third, and most consumable sacrament – that of holy communion. Still digesting the ‘child sin hotline’ as revealed to me through confession, further startling revelations about what was on offer were about to become clear. Apparently, it was now possible to say a spell over some bread and wine, which would literally transform (emphasising ‘literally’, not ‘symbolically’, no wishy-washy Protestantism here) these foodstuffs into the flesh and blood of my now edible hero, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ indeed! I was now invited, in the strongest possible sense of the word, to partake in a ritualistic cannibalism of the son of the god I was explicitly told not to offend in the first place. Nervous times. The reason behind why it was felt we should all eat this converted flesh was never really explained to my satisfaction, and indeed to this day I am still at a loss to understand. However, as before, I went along with the wave of enthusiasm, and received my first piece of the lord from the hand of no less than the bishop of the diocese, a minor celebrity in our naïve world. I went on to eat more than a body weight in small pieces of my saviour over the coming years, but the lingering pang of doubt remained with me throughout, as I felt I simply did not understand what this process actually meant. Thoughts of my lack of comprehension plagued me, and I began to feel like an unworthy recipient.

More than four years passed, and I continued as a practicing child catholic, trying desperately to feel the presence of our lord in my daily life, and kidding myself into thinking my prayers made some sort of difference when in my heart I knew they did not, all the time feeling that there was something wrong with me for not understanding my church. It was now time for my fourth and final sacrament: confirmation. Now, through learning of the history of monarchies, the idea of a man ruling something, and then his son being involved, perhaps as a sort of heir-presumptive, is something I could understand. The world has been good to god with its never ending adulation, and naturally he’d want to involve the kids, even after humanity murdered him and continually feasted on his body. But what in the world is going on with the pet dove? For confirmation, we got familiar with the silent partner in the trinity: the holy spirit, represented by a shiny white bird. I do recall having a sense that the educators and clergy had somewhat given up at this point, and explanation was barely attempted. The ritual itself too was entirely forgettable, but I had a vague notion that I was now a full member of the church, a ‘made man’ if you will, however the feeling that I would be caught out as a pretender at any minute prevailed, and I still felt a devoted but confused conformer to a faith I simply did not understand. My religious faith stayed with me until I finally rejected Catholicism, and soon after the idea of the supernatural, in my late teens.

The late great Christopher Hitchens said that religions arguments were so flimsy that even a child could see through them, and this can be regularly referenced by the direct questions they often ask when religious instruction fails to make sense. You may think that I am including myself proudly amongst such children with the sacramental stories I have told you above, but unfortunately I think of it in opposite terms. When I finally rejected religion and became an atheist, it was such a rush of relief, and I felt that the world was suddenly revealed to me in all its beautiful craziness. I spoke a lot around this time to people my age about their experiences and, whether they were amongst the faithful or not, I got one overwhelming sense of how religion is perceived, in this country at least. Very few people, except the small number of exceptionally devout, really believe any of the bizarre claims outlined by the church such as in this story – and in this I include most clergy and religion teachers. I feel I may have been unusual in my guilt over not understanding the central tenants of the church as revealed to me, but I believe nobody fully understands them, as they are simply nonsensical. The only reason it was so important to me is that I felt I was alone in this lack of comprehension, whereas almost everyone else questions it much less, going along for the ride out of either habit or indifference, or as a child even for the financial perks of taking ones sacraments. I wish then I could have had more of the logical sense afforded to some of my childhood peers, and simply have said to myself ‘right, this makes no sense, but so what, I’ll just get on with my day to day life’

The serious point I would like to make for why I am an atheist is as follows: I think there are few things as depressing as the thought of a normal, intelligent, curious child feeling stupid and doubtful for not understanding  a lot of dubious, nonsensical superstition in a surrounding of complete acceptance from the society in which he lives. This neither fosters nor encourages intelligent development, and in the case of the Catholic Church, it is an indoctrination into a sexist, bigoted, homophobic and sexually repressive organisation run by elderly men who are entirely out of touch. As a criticism of ‘new atheism’, I have heard the accusation that atheism is just another ‘religion’ to replace those that are now, thankfully, beginning to drift into irrelevance. But I challenge anyone to describe anything secular today that is even close to the level of indoctrination of children as outlined in this story. I began by saying I am an atheist for many reasons but I think the primary one is this: I am proud not to believe in any god or organisation that takes it upon itself to force children to believe their own views, and I think it is absolutely commonplace amongst non-believers not to practice this notion, no matter how sure they are of their own worldviews. The ideas of free thought, free discovery and finding one’s own path is something held by most non-believers as (if I may borrow the word from the faithful) sacred.

* * *

John Manning was born 1 week after the papal visit to Ireland in 1979, and like three other boys in his class in school was christened ‘John Paul’. Eventually rejecting religion completely in his late teens, John later discovered the writings of Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens, authors who helped give expression to the philosophical and indeed moral arguments against forced religious indoctrination. John lives, works and volunteers in Dublin City.

* * *

In a lot of blogs people give all sorts of reasons for their non-belief and it can sometimes read like an introduction to an AA meeting:

My name is Matt, and I have been without God for six months. This is why…

Or they take a rather more direct approach and come to the conclusion through intellectual arrogance.

I am an Atheist and anyone who is not one is a moron

Neither of these approaches suit why I decided against believing in any form of mumbo jumbo.

I was raised Methodist but my parents were not overly religious nor where they particularly anti anything. Until the age of nine I was taken to church and made to sit through Sunday School. I remember this as a particularly profound boredom. Nothing that the Minister or the parents running the group ever said ever really connected with me. Once my parents split up and we stopped being forced to go I simply stopped thinking about god or anything related to it. I would however always question people with faith as to why they held those views but that is more a sign of my own arsey-ness than any intellectual curiosity. I guess, being brought up in England which is a very secular society makes being an Atheist easy as more people seem to be agnostic than are believers.

My parents and brothers have held on to their faith and take my young nieces to Church with them. Obviously, I do not agree with this but it is, after all, their decision to make. They hold on to their beliefs in the afterlife and in to the version of God they have been taught to worship.

For me the idea that anyone in the sky is taking a vested interest in our lives and acts a guiding hand is absurd. It is the same as the stories you tell to small children to calm them about the dark. I find a lot of what the Religions say to be utterly nonsensical, phrases such as “God’s greatest gifts are the prayers he doesn’t answer” send me to a tailspin of irritation. That no one has spotted that is a massive cop out actually hurts. It is a perfect example of twisting logic to suit needs – if you get what you want then that is god’s will and if you do not then that is also god’s will. It is all bollocks.

I briefly complained about the arrogance of some Atheists (notably Richard Dawkins) but some fundamentalist Theists are just as bad. They want the whole to think and to act like them. They want us all to see the world as they do, through the eyes of Bronze Aged farmers trying to explain what they do not know. Arrogance such as enshrining anti-abortion into constitutions, dictating Creationism is taught in schools and at National Trust visitor centres.

I do not come from a Science based background but from a grounding in the Humanities so I cannot argue the finer points of evolution or the make up of the cosmos. I can however, point out that Holy Books are often contradictory, almost always have an ingrained misogyny and are not the literal truth. Also, I find it interesting how people believe their particular Holy Book is the oldest and most authentic disregarding thousands of other equally Holy books and other assorted nonsense.

I do not want to change the opinions of people, nor do I want to change the world but I would like Religion to be treated as a minority interest, such as speaking Klingon or excessive gaming. I have found more comfort in literature than I ever have out of Holy Books.

* * *

Matt lives in Wicklow and has been in Ireland for five years. He tweets at www.twitter.com/popematt. Matt’s post originally appeared on his blog.

The first photo is of the pews in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Rodez. The entire region of France was on a pilgrim trail so there were a lot of big, beautiful churches near by. The cathedral in Rodez was particularly impressive. I really liked the look of the row upon row of empty seats. Although there obviously wasn’t a mass on, I felt it was a slight commentary on the state of the church…

This one was taken on the bridge in Espalion, a small town near where we were staying. As we were exploring the bridge it started to rain so Eva started walking back towards the car ahead of me. I had my camera out taking touristy shots and took the opportunity to snap a picture of her walking away. I’m happy with how it turned out!

Eva has a tea addiction. It’s something that we have to face together. Even in high 20 or low 30 degree heat, sitting by the pool, she was rarely without a mug of tea. Proof?

The final photo for this post is another one of Eva’s back. The big advantage my new camera has over my old one is burst mode. We went out for a cycle and I stopped and got Eva to cycle past me. I took 4 or 5 photos as she went by and this one worked out the best!

There’s still 1196 photos that I could post here so there’ll likely be another few up sometime soon.

* * *

Hello, I’m Conor Murphy, this is a post telling my “why I’m an Atheist” story.

Well I guess it started off with my Parents. My parents didn’t baptise me and decided that it would be wrong of them to impose any religion on me at such a young age. My Mother, I suspect is privately religious as her mother (my grandmother) passed away about a year ago and she was very religious. So I guess to her giving up on the belief and the traditions would be giving up on the memory of her mother. She wouldn’t be a regular mass goer at all, not even Christmas but she does the little manger and lighting of the candle in the porch “for lost travellers”. I live in an estate, no lost travellers here. My dad is very anti church and religious institutions which is coming more out now that I’m an adult and he knows I feel the same way. He has his own unique take on the universe that’s a bit out there and certainly not scientifically based.

Since you can join any religion at any time and religions only indoctrinate children out of fear that their “souls” would be lost if they were to die and they weren’t made a member of the cult/religion it was sound reasoning to let me figure out my own path through the maze of these concepts and proof and if I decided to become a member of X religion at the end of this quest then no religion would refuse me. They enrolled me into a non-denominational primary school that wasn’t local to us but was on the commute to my mom’s work (or at least not too inconvenient from it). Catholic instruction was possible in this school but it was meant to be done outside of class time and was an opt in rather than the non-religious opting out. The teacher simply gave us extra Maths or Irish for the half an hour or so that the class was split. I remember having no concept of what the word “Religion” meant but I knew that it seemed to be a way of getting off Maths. I remember asking my parents what is this “Religion” thing and can I do it? To which they replied “eh, Conor I don’t think you’d like that” and as soon as I found out that this “Religion” meant bible lessons I think I was willing to suffer the Maths in preference.

I’ll fast forward a bit to around the 10-12 age. At this stage I was an early bloomer in terms of intelligence. I was no means “gifted”, I would struggle at things like Irish and some aspects of Maths but myself and another kid, would’ve been above our age in scientific interest and comprehension. I would’ve been a regular watcher of BBC Horizon and Wildlife on one at this stage and would’ve understood most of it. This I feel was key to laying down the foundations of the scientific basis of evolution and the relationship between similar animal species in my head. I could see the similarity of Humans and the other great apes and of dogs and wolves and other examples. I was only just hearing of Darwin and his body of work at this stage as my first, and still one of my greatest, hero of Biology and natural world is David Attenborough. It just made sense to me and the evidence has only gotten stronger since then. At this stage I felt that I wasn’t a believer based on the information I had at my disposal, I didn’t have a label for it

My transfer to second level wasn’t an easy one, I went to my local one whereas my primary school friends naturally went to the nearest one to the primary school. It is a Community school and is “officially” supposed to have some catholic founding or history but in truth they were and I presume still are quite progressive in their teaching of religious concepts. I don’t think I’d be as far progressed and as comfortable with my position as I am now if there was more of an emphasis on indoctrination, (or maybe that would have caused me to rebel against it more, I don’t know). I retreated quite a bit into my shell for the first 3 years and in some areas I haven’t fully gotten over those self-esteem issues. I was convinced I was the sole atheist but funnily enough that didn’t make me feel down as I had built up a mental brick wall and a façade towards my fellow students. I was only myself around my immediate and extended family. It was 4th year or transition year where I came out of my shell quite a bit and made lifelong close friends. I saw no need to keep up the façade and saw transition year as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start afresh. The fact that there were several bonding trips such as cycling for a week or Paris or skiing (5th year) only catalysed my intent.

During 6th year, religion class was a study period with occasional guest speakers from various religious groups. We had an ex Jehovah Witness (he gave us the inside scoop that a practising one would never give us), group of Hare Krishnas and maybe a few others I forget. A funny side story is that 15 mins before our teacher brought in the Hare Krishnas he said to the assembled class “Now you’re about to meet a strange crowd, with bird droppings on their foreheads and curtains around their waists” I think a few students at the back were still chuckling when they came in with their hand drums and mantra chanting.

I wasn’t really an outspoken atheist at the time but would have told people if they asked. The same as I feel now. I found out a few of my friends were also atheists at this stage. But my closest friend funnily enough I don’t think I ever asked him. He either is an Atheist or a very lax catholic otherwise he would have put up with me all these years. This pretty much brings me up to speed as my views haven’t changed since then. I subscribe to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, The Atheist Experience and The Non Prophets podcasts (among others). I am a loose member of Atheist Ireland, by that I mean I subscribe to their newsletters and Facebook group and occasionally fall in for their social meetups.

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If anyone else would like to use my blog as a venue for their why I’m an atheist story, please do contact me. Conor blogs at secularcelt.blogspot.com.

Should be a regular post or two this week as well.

Instapaper

I use Instapaper more than I use almost any other app. Developed by Marco Arment, the original developer at Tumblr so that he would have great material to read on his way to work, Instapaper fills a need that you didn’t know you had: it gives you the ability to send interesting articles you find on the internet to your phone or tablet so you can read it later; even if ‘later’ has no internet connection.

By clicking on a little button in your browser, the content of whatever page you have open is stripped of ads, given basic formatting and sent to your phone or tablet. By opening the app on your device, you download the barebones article and can read it whenever you want. This even works with multi-page articles like some newspapers or magazine sites use. 90% of the time the formatting works perfectly, the other 10% of time it ranges from getting extraneous text, such as menus, at the top of the post (www.gizmodo.co.uk I’m looking at you) to being completely unreadable. However, Instapaper overcomes this by having a built in browser. The browser is also great for quickly following up on links in the articles.

Instapaper also integrates with other apps I use a lot like Twitter and Reeder, a RSS reader. The only app it does not integrate wish that I wish it did is facebook – but that is hardly Marco’s fault. In total, Instapaper integrates with almost 150 other apps!

One of my favourite features of Instapaper is the cross device syncing. If I start reading an article on my iPhone I can pick up at exactly the same spot on my iPad and vice versa. The iPad is a much more pleasant device to read on but I have it with me much less; it’s great to be able to start something on my iPhone when I’m out and then continue it once I’m at home with the iPad.

Instapaper has made me read a lot of long-form journalism. Articles that originally appear in Time or Esquire that you won’t, or can’t, read at your computer are perfect for reading over breakfast or on the bus. Instapaper has also made it really easy to find these articles with “The Feature” – a curated collection of the articles sent most to Instapaper. I have found some fantastic article through it.

Instapaper is available on the iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Android and Kindle. The phone and table apps work as expected, click a button in your browser and the link is sent to your device. The kindle service works a little differently; a collection of up to ten unread articles are sent to your kindle either daily or weekly.

Instapaper is not free – it’s €2.99. It’s worth every cent. I have read more newspaper and magazine articles on Instapaper than in the paper equivalent in the last year. I’m happy to pay the price of one paper or magazine for such a fantastic tool. If you aren’t, then Instapaper isn’t for you – but you’re missing out.

There are free alternatives to it that I have checked out and they simply don’t stack up to Instapaper. The alternatives often bill themselves as having more features however, all the extra features are useless if the basic ones are poorly implemented. In particular, cross device syncing is a big test – and Instapaper is the only one that passed properly.