manko

Imagine, some religious tossers believe their world ends today. I'll drink to that, good riddance to bad rubbish.

I've been on a major atheism kick lately, after that gorgeous babe Texy sent me God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens from my wishlist, and am enjoying every godless page of it like hardcore porn for intelligence.

I'm not good with religion. I was brought up catholic, then ditched that kiddy[fiddling] fairytale for the agnostic reason but I'm still incurably in love with the catholic macabre aesthetics... I try to think soberly about magick yet I play with jinxes, curses and moving energy around (it's hard to ditch that which works so well). Now and then I have a crack at Tarot, hoping to discover science in serendipity. I guess I'm rather like a junkie with all this spiritual rubbish: binges following abstinence, benders then rehabs, excess before detox... it's all terrific fun.

But keen as I am to be entertained with this cocktail of Rapture / Judgement Day / End Of The World / Zombie Apocalypse that some deranged sects have spun for us for this afternoon, (and keen to entertain you with it too, as you shall see on FP very shortly), I just can't bring myself to swallow it. I suspect that this particular holy concoction won't amuse me with a heady exuberance, such as shamanistic ritual or chanting the Vishnu can evoke, it will be a true downer with a vicious hangover of embarrassment come tomorrow.

I coulda dressed up as a gypsy and read it in tea leaves that the state of the planet coupled with the state of the fundamentalist minds is reason enough for the whole shithouse to go up in flames any minute now. But the bloody audacity to pull out a date (a date of a lovely spring Saturday!) out of thin air of insanity, while banging that forged mistranslated misinterpreted book of fairytales, what a criminal waste of wood, and of spring.

I'll leave you with some photos soon to show up on the front page, and Richard Dawkins elegantly banging the nail on the head:

"Science knows approximately how, and when, our Earth will end. In about five billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen, which will upset its self-regulating equilibrium; in its death-throes it will swell, and this planet will vaporise. Before that, we can expect, at unpredictable intervals measured in tens of millions of years, bombardment by dangerously large meteors or comets. Any one of these impacts could be catastrophic enough to destroy all life, as the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago nearly did. In the nearer future, it is pretty likely that human life will become extinct - the fate of almost all species that have ever lived.

In our case, as the distinguished astronomer and former president of the Royal Society Martin Rees has conjectured, extinction is likely to be self-inflicted. Destructive technology becomes more powerful by the decade, and there is an ever-increasing danger that it will fall into the hands of some holy fool (Ian McEwan's memorable phrase) whose 'tradition' glorifies death and longs for the hereafter: a 'tradition' which, not content with forecasting the end of the world, actively seeks to bring it about.

However it happens, the end of the world will be a parochial little affair, unnoticed in the universe at large. The end of the universe itself is a matter of current debate among physicists, a debate that I recommend as providing a salutary, long-term, humbling perspective on human preoccupations and follies."