I listened to an audiobook by Julia Sweeney today and it got me thinking about the world – specifically the negative, hopeless view that atheists are perceived to have of the world. (I am an atheist. I know, scary stuff. As Sweeney said: “it’s one thing to say you don’t believe in God. It’s quite another to say you’re an ATHEIST.”)
Tim Minchin put it well when he said he does believe in things – “I believe in rocks, and gravity.” The natural world is amazing, and taking away a creator doesn’t diminish the amazement of our existence; for me, it enhances it. “You mean we developed to this level ON OUR OWN?!?”
Richard Dawkins said that all of the circumstances that led to our being alive, all put together, are so unlikely to happen – my mum could have just not slept with my dad, or a different sperm could have got through, or they’d have never met because my mum chose not to work at the bakery, or a million other things. Someone else could have been here instead of me, and it’s likely that these unborn ‘ghosts’ that never will be would include better musicians than Mozart, better writers than Shakespeare; and yet, I’m the one who gets his little moment to do things in his brief time on this planet.
And what’s great is, humans are fantastic tool-builders. Steve Jobs recounted a story of a survey he read, where various species were all being compared on their speed, and humans scored unremarkably about third or fourth from the bottom; but then they tested the other animals against a human on a bicycle, and we won outright. We’re great at using tools and inventing things. Everything that’s around us, everything man-made that we have, started off as nothing more than an idea in someone’s head, just like the ideas we all have every day. (Incidentally, Steve told this story because he described the computer as a ‘bicycle for our minds’.)
So we’ve evolved to a point where we can put strings on wood and make sounds, and change the shapes of our fingers to put like sounds together, and then here I am all this time later, listening to Green Day do just that – IN MY EARS! That’s AMAZING! So even though the scope of my existence doesn’t accommodate a supreme being, I still have plenty of reasons to look at the things around me with wonder.
I was reading Katy Perry’s wikipedia page earlier, and noticed she has really cool fashion. I’ve been focusing lately on making my image better, and concluded that bright ‘n’ tight was the way to go forward. But it’s not particularly innovative. Even the people like Perry and Lady Gaga, who are said to have great fashion sense, are just taking styles that were big decades ago and using them now. Nobody’s putting trousers on their heads and exposing half an arse cheek, which would be really different – and if they did, they’d just look silly anyway. I guess my stance on this is that as long as you’re comfortable and pick stuff you personally like without trying to fit in with what everyone else likes, it doesn’t matter. (Billie Joe Armstrong was once asked by a kid ‘what’s punk?’ So Billie Joe kicked over a trash can and said ‘that’s punk’. The kid kicked over a second trash can and said ‘that’s punk?’ and Billie Joe said ‘no, that’s trendy.’)
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