Backward-ism

Backward by design

I can't lay claim to doing much in evolutionary terms. Riddled with Eastern European knuckle-dragging, caveman genes, me. Polish, like Yorkshire. As in “born and bred, strong in the arm, thick in the head”. When age and infirmity de-strengthens the arm, there's little useful stuff left. I'm willing to try though. I don't particularly want to scrape my knuckles back to a cave and a diet of sabre-tooth tiger eaten just before he eats you. Neither do I think pasteurised, heat and chemically treated, vacuum-packed microwaveable grub necessarily amounts to true progress, actually. Just another pollutant. Ingested.

Whooping cough is back. Babies are dieing, months old, from a disease that had been all but eliminated. TB's making a comeback. They're just the first two I can think of. There's plenty more, I can't name them because medical stuff bores me and I switch off.

They're back because of religion. Not the only cause. But the main one.

Muslim nations (perhaps rightly so, when you look at the history; but wrongly when you look at the science and the facts) reject innoculation programmes because they suspect the infidel west is somehow injecting the need for Rolex watches and wearing bikinis into kids arms. Others (Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses) deny their kids blood transfusions. Let's deconstruct this: they kill their own kids in the name of some god they have in their mind without any rational basis, any scientific basis, any philosophical basis for.

Here's where I fall down, arguing the point: lack of patience, tolerance, and manners. There comes a point (all too soon) when I'm off. An example: at a function, we arrived with others and I bought a round at the bar. Everyone took their beers and drinks and started mingling. A colleague's wife wouldn't accept her gin and bitter lemon because the bitter lemon was the diet version.

Now, she may have had a point. But it was boring, it was the inappropriate place and time, and she was clogging up my ability to get away and talk to people about stuff far more interesting than an artificial sweetener. Apparently, if you feed lab rats on aspartimine, in truly biblical, Oliver Reed binge doses, in the absence of other nutrients, they die. A bit early. Really, lady, the odd glass at a do may reduce your life expectancy by minutes, but if those minutes are spent reading the labels of mixer bottles, then what the hell?

Rudely, and wrongly, I slapped the money on the bar and told her to bring me the change when she finally resolved the problem. I'm the same when trying to assimilate the reasoning of people who say there must be a god because of the 'intelligent design' all around. Where? Where, exactly, are the god-backed improvements in design? There's been a series of Roman Catholic leaders (and yes, they do wear silly hats and ask who, exactly (or similar) are Tottenham Hotspur?) who claim that condoms do more to spread AIDS than limit and contain the disease.

Recently the radio has broadcast the arguments from the great and the good and the very good at arguing their point from the various god-excuse positions. None hold water, and all, I think, are backward. Sooner or later, there's problems (as in war, torture, bullying, mass killing, refusal to face facts and progress) all from the God / Allah / Buddah / Whatever / - botherers. Thanks guys. Thanks for the TB. For the whooping cough. Who knows? For the plague? For the twin towers, anyway. For AIDS in Africa. For everything else you've inflicted. Really. Thanks.

Now. Clear off.