Why I believe that God loves Punk Rock?

 As I understand it, the Universe came into existence about 13.8 billion years ago. There are two main theories how this happened. Th first is that there was a 'Big Bang'. The second is that someone called God was rather bored and lonely and said 'let there be light' and then sat around waiting for something interesting to happen. I can remember when I was little. My Dad showed me to make nitroglycerene, in a rather wise bit of parenting. He told me that it was a useful life skill. We then made and detonated a small bomb. It was a massive buzz, so I can completely get why God would enjoy making a 'big bang'. If I was in Gods shoes and nothing was happening, I'd make a Big Bang myself.

God then sat around for 9.3 billion years watching all of the galaxies, stars, planets and moons forming. I guess that if you've been surrounded by nothing for an infinite period, that''s not verylong really, is it? Around that time, a little planet, about 93 million miles from a fairly non descript star formed. I personally have no idea if that planet is unique or if the Universe is full of such planets. I've always been interested in that question, but sadly God hasn't chosen to share the info with me or anyone else, to the best of my knowledge. Maybe one day we'll find loads of other similar planet, with all the same problems we have, or maybe, like God before the "Big Bang", we are utterly alone. But anyway, that little planet was in what is called the Goldilocks zone. This does not mean that three bears eat your porridge on the planet. It means that it's orbit is not to near to boil off the oceans and not too far to freeze them. It had an ample supply of water, it had a reasonably large moon, that exerted a strong enough tidal force to move oceans and make an intermediate zone between land and sea. This was quite useful when life evolved (or was made by God). It meant that creatures in the sea, where it started, moved on to land. The first life forms are believed to have existed 3.5 million years ago, about a billion years after the Earth came into existence. We don't know anything about the first life forms, as they were simple creatures that left no fossils. We can guess that they flourished, as there were no stronger organisms murdering them. That came later. 

Two main sorts of life forms evolved. Plants that made oxygen from CO2 in sunshine and animals that ate the plants. Sometime later, animals started eating each other as well. Now if, like me, you believe in God, this is where God started having fun. If you were God and you had a planet full of boring plants like ferns and grasses and boring animals like worms and slugs, what would you do? I know what I'd do. I'd have some fun. I'd make some cool monsters like dinosaurs, some amazing looking plants with brilliant flowers. Dinosaurs appeared around 240 million years ago and the first flowering plants appeared about 140 million years ago. After about 75 million years, God got bored with dinosaurs and sent an asteroid to destroy them, according to various theories. I have my own theory. God made some cute, furry animals called mammals, that were small and the dinosaurs couldn't catch. These little bastards ate all the dinosaurs food and they died out. Those little furry cuties, evolved into, rats, mice, horses, wolves, lions and eventually humans. 

Now imagine you're God and you've been sitting around forever and all of a sudden there's all of these humans running around. They form tribes, bash each other up and breed like, well humans. It's all very well but it isn't exactly exciting is it? So what do you do? Well you encourage them to bash things with sticks rythmically. You then encourage them to make alcohol and dance to the sound of the things being bashed. It's only taken the whole of eternity, plus about 13.8 billion years, but hey ho, you've invented fun. After sitting around being bored for ever, all of a sudden there is something worthwhile happening in the Universe. 

So if you are God, what do you think to yourself. I am just speculating, but I think God would look at his work and think "yeh, this pretty cool". The first evidence of people playing music was about 40,000 years ago. Drums and flutes appear to be the first musical instruments. The first stringed instruments appeared around 13,000 years ago. More advanced stringed instruments started to appear around 4,000 years ago. The first musical groups appeared to form around 2nd century BCE, in Mesopotamia and Iran. So imnagine you are God for a second. It's taken all this time, you've seen countless life forms come and go and up until now, all they've done is eat, reproduce and kill each other. Now they are having some fun, doing something creative. You've been waiting an eternity for this, so what would you do? It's obvious really, send one of the kids down to see what it's all about. 

Now the trouble with this is that us lot really weren't ready for a fella to turn up and tell us that it would all be better if we were nice to each other. He gave us a few hints, turned water into wine when the plonk ran out at a wedding. If you believe the book, he made 40 gallons of the best stuff. Sadly we all know what heppened next. I guess we can count ourselves lucky that we didn't go the way of the dinosaurs there and then. This is always something that has puzzled me. I'm a Dad and if anyone hurts my kids, I am not going to be reasonable. There must be some reason that he put up with our savage behaviour. Now it is clear it is not because we are good or nice. What can it be?

Well there is a small clue in the Holy book, where Jesus tells the religious types that the tax collectors and prostitutes will enter heaven before them. There are many interpretations on this, mine is that having fun is OK, in fact it is highly desirable. Sure we've all got to be nice to each other as well. But we should not be scared to have fun. So having established that nothing much happend for a very long time, lets skip the bit of the story up to 1976. A brief summary. Drum kits, Marshall amps, Les Paul and Fender guitars have all been invented. All manner of musical genres have come into existence, classical, folk, jazz, soul, ska, reggae and glam, to name a few. This was all great. Music had become the soundtrack to our lives. Whereas the dinosaurs simply had the wind and the sea to listen to, we had a plethora of amazing music. There was only one small element missing. Musicians seemed a breed apart. The band was the band, the audience was the audience. And then the second big bang happened. Punk Rock burst onto the scene. A chap called Mark P produced a magazine called Sniffin Glue. On the front cover, he put three chords and an invocation to go out and form a band. Now we all had permission to be a part of it. 

And I believe that God saw this and thought it was good. Sure we are as imperfect as we've ever been. Sure we do bad things, we screw up, we hurt each other. But we also make beautiful things, we make beautiful sounds. I've lead a charmed life. Like the Earth in the Goldilocks zone, I was born in the Goldilocks zone of music. I was born in 1962. I was just the right age to be immersed in punk music. God has given me many gifts, but being born in 1962 and having the life I've had is the best. I was pondering on this. An odd thought occurred to me. If the universe was created in a random big bang, it could end in one, at any time. We could all disappear in the way we all appeared. Gone, not a trace. Or this could all go on for a hundred trillion years. Whatever happens though, we are in a special time. We have music all around us. We can listen to almost every piece of music ever made at the touch of a button. I just wanted to thank God for the fact that 13.8 billion years of evolution has put me here, now and able to appreciate it. If you don't believe and buy into the random chance theory, that's fine with me. This isn't a sermon, it is just me trying to explain why, despite rotten politicians, greedy oligarchs, bad priests, malicious forces that we can't control and fools on the internet, there is beauty in the world and we should cherish it. There has been death and destruction for a very long time, art, music and beauty is a relatively new thing in the big scheme of things. Isn't that a cause for hope. I believe there is a God and that God loves punk rock, because it is something that allows us to be creative and express ourselves. And I have to conclude that being creative and expressing ourselves is perhaps, our saving grace. And is we want to be creative and express ourselves, it makes us nicer, which is, as best as I can tell, the message of all the holy books. And I hope if got this all wrong, God doesn't hold it against me. I am doing my best.

Anyway, here's a little tune I made earlier, which sort of sums it up

And as it's St Patricks day, here are some of the finest tunes from the Irish diaspora to celebrate!

Is there a God?

As it's a Bank Holiday and it ain't too sunny, I thought I'd post something nice and thought provoking. Here's a question for you. If you were offered the chance of a flip of the coin to win £100 million pounds if you won and get immediately executed by a firing squad if you lost, would you take it?

Just think - what a choice - an end to all your problems? Either way you'd never have any financial worries ever again. So who would go for it? I guess anyone who is feeling suicidal due to financial woes would jump at the chance. Problem solved. Who else might go for it. I wondered whether a believer or an athiest might be more prone to try their luck? A believer may think that a few well placed prayers might tip the balance in their favour. If they survived it would be proof of divine intervention. As to an athiest? Would they be less or more likely to go for it? Would a person's faith make any difference to the decision? I suppose that a Muslim is forbidden from gambling, so may decline as a matter of principle.

How many people would go for the chance just to feel the buzz of such high stakes? Just suppose you got 50 atheists and 50 believers who were prepared to give it a go? Statistically 25 of each should become very rich and 25 of each should get their brains blown out. Just suppose all 50 atheists lost and all 50 believers won? Would that persuade you that God exists. What about if all 50 atheists survived and all 50 believers got the bullet? Would that persuade you that God exists and has a sense of humour? So what has all of this got to do with whether there is a God?

Well what is the first question people ask when tragedy befalls them? "Why me?" they ask. "What did I do to deserve this?". I pondered all of this and it occurred to me that it is strange that despite the billions of believers in God, no one seems to have the slightest idea of the true nature of God. Does God really intervene in the events on Planet Earth. Being of the Roman Catholic tradition, there are many logged "miracles" that people take as evidence. The problem with such miracles is they are extremely random and extremely rare, in a planet of billions of people. Any statistician will tell you that such oddities can prove nothing. What about the other side of the coin? The assumption of athiests is that there is nothing before/after/beyond this existence. All we experience is as dust. Life started as a result of random chemical reactions (which as yet are even more elusive than the search for God). Athiests strike out the religious argument as "unscientific", without being able to provide a provable scientific answer as to how life actually started. If it was as simple as passing a lightning strike through a soup of mud and water, it would have been recreated in a laboratory years ago.

The big problem for athiests is that there is a great big chunk of the jigsaw missing and you can't legitimately claim that others are basing their arguments on superstition and stupidity when you don't actually have scientific proof yourself. It got me thinking to what is the nature of God. I suppose there are two theories :-

1) A superbig megageezer in who's image and likeness we are all made

or

2) Somerthing else completely, which we are unable to fully comprehend and understand


I personally subscribe to 2). Look at how scientific knowledge and progress has changed us. Take the cleverest person alive 2,000 years ago (if we exclude people who may or may not be the son of God, based on your personal beliefs). If you gave that person a couple of hours in todays world, how would they rationalise TV, The Internet, air travel, electricity, X-rays, nuclear weapons, Taser guns?

My guess is they'd struggle to explain any of it. If we can develop so much knowledge in 2,000 years (most of it in the last 200), how far will we progress mentally in the next 2,000 years. I have a little theory that 95% of what we understand to be God is just enlightenment. I don't think religious belief changes bad things or alters bad things. I think it just gives us the enlightenment to deal with the consequences. I believe that this world is mans realm and as such we are left to get on with it. Does God have a personal relationship with us? Yes in as much as we can experience enlightenment. Does God perform miracles? I see these as opening the window to somewhere else and a little light shining in. When we draw the curtains and we see the sun, the sun warms us and lights up the room. It changes the way we see things, but the sun is 93 million miles away. Sunliht makes plants grow and our skin change colour, but we can't really get anywhere near the sun. We need the sun to survive but we need the sun to be 93 million miles away otherwise it will burn us up.

For this world to work and life to exist, you need a planet this size to be 93 million miles from a star the size of the sun (too small not enough gravity for an atmosphere, too large and the gravity would squash us). To have life on dry land, you need a moon the size of the moon to exert tidal pressures and have a marginal area between land and sea. You need the right mixture of C02, Oxygen and Nitrogen. Now I've no idea if it's true, but I was told we only have the proportion of Oxygen in the atmosphere because we have plant life. Plants can't survive in the dark in a pure C02 environment, so the earth has the atmosphere because of the plant life on it. If you want to know what sort of a planet you have without life, a moon, the wrong size and the wrong place, look at Venus or Mars.

So back to the question. Is there a God. Well if you say no, then you believe in a massive load of enormous coincidences, a massively complex chain of chemical reactions to initiate the process of life, with hugely complex bio-chemical chains being built that cannot be replicated under any conditions in any laboratory and which then have to completely change the planet  to get us where we are today.

I have my views and beliefs. I'm quite happy to discuss it and to have the flaws in my logic pointed out, but what really disturbs me is that many atheists use science and reason as a weapon against religion, when there just isn't the evidence there to support their hypothesis. I'd be perfectly happy for an atheist to say "I don't believe in God, because God doesn't fit my view of how the Universe operates" That is a perfectly vaild viewpoint. I have a problem when they say "Science, reason and logic supports the hypothesis that God doesn't exist", because as far as I can see it doesn't.

In short, theories such as evolution are not a problem for me. It is fairly easy to demonstrate evolution. The AIDS virus has evolved to be drug resistant in a very short period of time. Flu viruses mutate and kill millions of us, but to extrapolate this rock solid evidence of Darwinian evolution into an explanation for every form of life on earth (and possibly beyond) is to me pushing it. Given the distinctive genetic differences between men and dogs, how long would that process have to take. If a dog had a puppy that was a cat, the cat would not survive as it would need another cat to procreate with, to establish genus Felix. The chances of two dogs having two cats at the same time are beyond the statistical probability that is possible of feasable. To apply the same logic to every genus is, even more tenuous. You can completely change the temperament and appearance of a dog in 50 generations of selective breeding, from a wolf to a pug. You can't change the genome of a dog to a cat in a hundred times that.

Now I'm not seeking to convert you to my beliefs or my way of thinking. I'm just asking you to think about these things as if you come up with some better arguments than mine, we'll both end up a little more enlightened and that will bring us both a little closer to God, regardless of whether you believe or not. For my God, the only enemies are lies and ignorance. Hope you've enjoyed your bank holiday weekend as much as I have.

You won't find God on a London Bus (probably)

Some stories are truly bizarre. There is a report on the BBC website that the British Humanist Society are placing adverts on the side of bendy buses proclaiming "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The report says the BHS has £27,500 to spend on this message. My first thought was that this story was a wind up. It wouldn't surprise me if they'd had a nice big donation from Heineken for the advert. Maybe a byline "Humanism, probably the best religion in the world".

Now I'm not one for censorship. If the BHS thinks this is the best way to get it's message over, that's fine by me. Like many things, some people get hot under the collar when people challenge their beliefs. I disagree, it is healthy to examine your beliefs periodically. The thing is though, if you look at their message scientifically, their proposition is unsustainable. As the existence of God is unproveable, Humanism is just one of many religions, beliefs or viewpoints. As we cannot know which of these is right, statistically they are all probably wrong. In statistics, you have something called sample theory. The bigger the sample, the more likely you are to get a correct answer. Now on this basis, God wins as there are more believers than humanists. That clearly is a pretty dodgy basis for believing, so why use a scientific principle - probability - in the context of something that is outside the realms of current scientific knowledge. Until someone actually produces a valid scientific basis for showing God probably doesn't exist, then the statement is just a belief, the thing Humanists claim to despise.

As to the other part of the statement "Now stop worrying and enjoy life". I don't know about you, but my worries at the moment are nothing to do with God. I must admit that if the BHS had given me the £27,500 instead of giving it to TFL, I'd be worrying much less. I'd probably buy a few cases of Heineken and be much happier. The implication of the advert is that all religious people are neurotic misery guts's whilst Humanists are fun loving party people. Now in the article well known Atheist Professor Richard Dawkins says "Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride - automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children." "Even on the buses, nobody thinks twice when they see a religious slogan plastered across the side." "This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion." Well he sounds like a fun guy to get stuck on a bus next to. One of the most boring programs I watched was the one he put together about what a load of tosh religion was. Give me a Pogues gig full of drunken Irish Catholics any day! The best party I've been to this year was my best mates son's Bahmitzvah. I can also honestly say that I heard more jokes and laughed more at the wake for my Mother, following a good old Roman Catholic funeral than anything on the telly for the last 30 years.

Now I don't mind what people say, but come on. The suggestion that people of faith are all miserable sods is unsustainable. If the BHS wants to plaster buses with these messages, thats fine. If they want to give a misleading impression, which is so obviously a load of nonsense, that is up to them, but I think it makes them look rather silly. Being a Good Catholic boy, I'm now going to sit back, crack open a Heineken and hope Celtic give Manchester United a good stuffing in the Champions League. I can assure you if they win I'll not be worried at all and I'll really be enjoying life!