Search for the Truth – Leave no stone unturned or thrown.

Pigorilla Power!

60

26 – 01 -2010

I never really know what or where things are going and am

only comforted by the knowledge that those who think that they do know are very often proven wrong by facts.

Facts are made up of irrefutable evidence

that can generally prove something or disprove it. They are also extremely useful at pointing in a good direction to continue searching.  For instance....in the all to recent tragedy of a disaster in Haiti, specialists and dogs were brought in to listen for cries in the rubble in order that when an area was found where a cry or a sigh had been heard, that is where the firemen and volunteers would remove rubble to look for people that were still alive. It wouldn’t make much sense for a sound reader to pick up a cry for help in one area and then the operator send everyone off to another area to find the person, would it? It is a simple application of factual scientifically derived knowledge to look where the instrument directs us.

Science has helped us with putting a stop to deaths like Anne Darwin, who it is believed eventually died of tuberculosis in 1851 after having deteriorated from contracting scarlet fever a few years before with her two sisters. Poor Charles, with so much scientific acumen within him, stood not a chance at helping her with Gully’s water cure in the Worcestershire spa town of Great Malvern where her little ten year old body is buried. Thank goodness for science. I watched my mother dying when I was ten years old and I would hate for the roles to have been reversed. The pain of losing a child to a slow death that is totally out of your control must be unbelievably intense.

While we have made huge inroads into the curing of disease and improving Human longevity, there are still diseases out there that we are struggling with. I am, however, very grateful that the same cancer that took my mother has had so many more millions of pounds committed to the disease and my sister now stands a so much better chance of beating  it with early diagnoses and effective chemo-therapy that seems to be doing its job all too well. While it is not an exact science, I am very  grateful that I have people that have studied and specialised in the disease looking after her. Combatting the disease is so much further along the line than it seemed thirty years ago. I remember my mothers all too upsetting remarks on the mercy of Jesus and how her faith in God would pull her through. I hope this helped her, because it didn’t make any sense to me; not before, or after she died.

In a way, I am fortunate, because I have been at the “raw” end of religion and with having had someone that had such ultimate belief in the religious system. I took a break at the beginning of this paragraph and switched on CNN who had a documentary running on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Ethiopia and other African countries. Despite most of these barbaric rituals occurring in Islamic countries there is no order to commit them in the Koran. Imams, however,  are insisting that it is there in the Koran and this helps them control women in these countries by using religion. Hellllooooow!!! Is this news? Religion has been used to control people since the beginning of religion. Perhaps it was the only way to keep some sort of organised control and perceived to be a good way of instilling a value system, but ultimately, it has created more division amongst the Human Race than any other factor.

We are hurtling towards extinction! If we don’t buck up our ideas and start to work together as a planet soon, we will be the source of our own demise. Although my Christian friends and I will have different thoughts when that mushroom cloud is hurtling towards us, a few moments after that, we will all be stone dead. Whether those thoughts a few moments earlier were of the great rapture finally being upon us or not will mean very little.

There is starting to become too much at stake for us to have belief systems that are no longer valid in the world in which we live. While I wasn’t impressed with Bill Mahers film Religulous, I am grateful for the initiative he took. Humans appear to have a deep need to believe in something greater than themselves, and trying to get people to distance themselves from a belief system that they think works for them is very difficult. For the greater good of the human race we need to start taking responsibility ourselves and look towards common sense for divine fodder.

We have lots to learn and science does not know everything, but very much has been learnt and understood and accepted without a shadow of a doubt. ...enough, in the mind of many of the worlds intellectual thinkers to totally discredit much of what is in the different books of religion. They are, for the most part, far too similar to be different stories, and yet have often been used as the basis to pit nations against each other. If I was a non free thinking person in Afghanistan right now, I would be a Muslim. I have a very good fundamentally Christian friend who accepts that had he been born in Afghanistan, he would be a Muslim fundamentalist and would no doubt be preparing himself for all the lovely virgins once he blew himself up in Allah’s name. If it is possible to accept that our belief is dictated to by an overwhelming extent by our place of birth, surely it cannot be too much of a different, difficult step to break the shackles and accept that we have been led to believe in one big fairy tale?

Does religion suite people so much that reason is no longer effective? I believe that the rule of law and democracy is enough to keep people in check. There is no need to have been born with sin and the risk of eternal damnation to follow certain basic ethics and values. Some of the ten

commandments have been broken by many of my Christian friends. Before one judges my friends too harshly, read them again. Is that the best an omnipotent God could come up with? Come on! I could rattle off ten commandments better suited to todays life on earth in five minutes, if you feel that it is indeed commandments that we need.

None of our old religious books can help us anymore. In my mind, we live in a far more humane caring society. The raw injustices of our developing years to date have been rough at best. It is time to distance ourselves from them. Perhaps they have been a help, perhaps they haven’t, but I feel that the time has come for all people to work together in a positive light towards a future we will have to make for the generations to come. I hate to tell you, but we will not be part of that future....not as a son, a father, or even a ghost. Do good, because you want to. Don’t chase possessions more than helping your fellow compatriots along the road with you. Think of all people in your actions; not only the living and the dead, but especially those still to come. Believe in yourselves, that is where the responsibility goes no further and most importantly, try and make the most of all the good things that you do.

The search for alien life continues and  we are coming to realise  how many galaxies that there could be out there and that certain stars are likely to have been around more than twice the four to five billion years that Earth has been in existence. I am pleased that SETI (search for extra-terrestrial life) enthusiasts are coming to agreement on the messages that we should be sending out into space. Planets similar to ours may be a couple of hundred light years away which would leave any respondents to messages dealing with a few generations down the line from ours.

It wouldn’t be right to send out the wrong signals.

Dwell not on poor Yorick! Rattle those Antlers.

Pigorilla Power !

59

13 January 2010

Well....Wow....here we are, Pigorillians....2010. It’s always felt like such a big year, although it couldn’t have been as big as I remember the build up to 2000 being. At least there was no risk of our computers crashing! Anyway, here it is and we can do whatever we want with it.....or can we? How much of what we do is already dictated to us by what has been jammed down our throats.

I’ve been fortunate to have sisters that loved their school career so it has been good to take a glimpse of that side of the fence. I am consistently reminded by my father how fortunate I was to have gone to the school I went to, and the financial sacrifices that made it possible for me to be there. After twenty four years of deliberation, I would like to finally conclude that it did me no good, and if anything, was the beginning of my acceptance that things were often just not going to be the way I wanted, and I should accept them for the way that they are. The fact that I was very unhappy away from where I grew up and all my childhood friends was not an issue. It was the “right” school, and I was to enjoy it at all costs, including, it appears, the cost of future security and contentment. Not indefinitely, one hopes, but certainly, till now.

I am still in contact with several boys/men from the school, and some, like my closest friend at Clifton and Michaelhouse has gone on to become a game ranger and has not been any more the wiser or more connected from having attended the school. Others have “networked” quite well within the school attendees and managed to achieve varying degrees of financial success through their clever posturing. There were others (perhaps the vast majority), who slotted effortlessly into the three most important aspects of the school.... Sport, Sport, and Sport, and no doubt loved every minute of it.

Very little else was given any real importance. There were “honours” badges for “Mathematics Olympiad” achievements, but there was no respect ever afforded to these champions of intelligence unless, of course, they also happened to play “centre” for the 1^st team. We had one of the South African greats of hockey in our school, but despite achieving far more than anyone in any other sport, he only achieved marginal fame amongst his peers. Hockey was more of a girls sport than for budding men.

I guess what happens when you go to a Christian school is that you end up getting Christianity rammed down your throat. Well, that didn’t impress me either. From an early age when I was attending bible study going to St James Church in the leafy suburb of Morningside in Durban, South Africa, where my father was a deacon and my mother was still alive, I was confused and bewildered by the stories that the grown-ups were teaching us. Even then, I remember the lack of conviction with which my questions were responded to. In their defence, on adult retrospection, they didn’t have too much in the way of facts working for them and that is perhaps why the word faith and the explanation of what faith means features so high in my recollection. At Michaelhouse it was the same old chestnut getting chewed over and over and over again. It is extremely difficult to think freely about things when you are bombarded by having to be a great sportsman or foster a belief in something that makes no sense to you. On the other hand, education was important in that one needed to at least average in the class to remain under the radar. My inability to be able to concentrate for any lengths of time left me feeling bored and inclined to play the fool in class from an early age. The teachers thought I was disruptive and made very little effort with me other than to give me a difficult time of it all for disrupting their class.

I gained very little real satisfaction out of smoking cigarettes....more often than not, they just made me dizzy and nauseous and I was often surprised that my smoking colleagues would try and squeeze in two in one sitting. What smoking did give me was a place where, in a sea of activities where I didn’t fit in, I finally had a little group of mates that I could hang out with and also share some of my dissatisfaction with the school and everything that forced me to be there. My smoking buddies were all more fortunate than I was when they were handing out the weapons to defend yourself during  boarding school, but were for the most part not particularly enamoured with the status quo and looking forward to breaking free when it was all over. They were, without exception, very interesting individuals and I’m still in contact with the most of them. It’s funny how you spend so much time with people and then through circumstance and the vagaries of life, you all bumble off and do your own thing on another part of the planet. It all seems to me to be so primitive. Where are we going with all of this? This little recollection of my impression of my school life isn’t supposed to be a cry for help for someone to come up with a way to send me back in time twenty two years and score the winning try in the final game of rugby for the year to put the school at the top of the log (or whatever it was) making  me an indomitable hero with the my whole school cheering while the opposition hang their heads in defeat (although I imagine that that must be right up there when it comes to “cool feelings”).

This is the New Year Pigorillian message of hope, peace and wonderful, warm, fuzzy wishes for the year ahead. Perhaps those feelings of happiness can be derived from the ten years of school that you may not have disliked to the same extent and you can finally look back and think, “Gee, that was ok!” or perhaps you may think, “His schooling doesn’t sound too bad!”, in which case, all it will mean is that I have not yet told you sufficient. The exact same events are looked at in a different way by different people experiencing it in a different way. The most splendid beautiful sunrise after a night of raving and careless abandon is often greeted by a euphoric sense of gratitude and marvel at the splendour of it all which can be accompanied (on the good days) by a washing through the body of freedom and bliss. On any given day, there is someone else in a different place that is looking upon the same sunset and wishing they could have the previous day over so that they don’t have to greet that sunrise with the doom that they now know is impending and imminent. Should we be happy and content as the one who is appreciating it and not spare a thought for those in different circumstances? Perhaps we should think about them after we have appreciated the sunrise, or how about before the sunrise, in order that we can appreciate the sunrise with no guilt?

Our lives are too random, for my liking. I’m not happy with mine because I am so aware of exactly what I need to improve it, and the implications of acquiring those things. On the other hand, it is unlikely that you will find a more grateful individual for what they have than me.  I am only too aware of how difficult life could be if you are born as a deformed mute; pull a boiling pot of oil off the stove over your head at the age of eleven, disfiguring you even further with immense and continuous pain and die of aids after a long illness by the age of forty.

Having just taken a break from my lamenting regurgitation of my rendition of life on earth so far, I put my head out the window and have been wonderfully surprised by my whole garden being covered in a thick layer of beautiful snow and still more fluttering to ground majestically (if you’re one of Londons homeless out there, you may feel that it is falling rather mercilessly!).

This cannot be another year where we wonder where it has gone, or what we did with it. The world is perilously close to being in big trouble and it’s up to each Pigorillian to make sure that none of it stems from our own little patch of environment or energy source. I’m resigned to the knowledge that I am going to have to work for money this year, but with my new man and van business which is being well received by my loyal Gumtree supporters, I am sure that it will all work out OK. I’m digging in my heels till July when I receive my British citizenship which will then bring a further wealth of opportunities to my table.

Keep the Faith and grab this year by the horns and shake it by the antlers till it rattles!