Seasons greetings

I hate the aftermath of Christmas. The pavements are full of dog shit from all the new dogs kids got for Christmas and don't know how to look after. I've gone from slightly overweight to moderately overweight, hence have to make the same "go to the gym twice a week" New Year resolution I make every year. And I feel guilty because the presents I gave out are shittier than the ones I received; and there's always someone you weren't expecting to giving you a present when you haven't got them anything.

But it's not just the aftermath, it's the 3 months of build-up; 3 months of trees and tinsel in John Lewis; 3 months of "I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day" pumping out of Woolworths; 3 months of TV adverts for perfume; 3 months of cheap shitty lights in the town centre. By the time Christmas actually comes round, I fucking hate the whole business. And why the fuck do the carols keep going until New Year?!? Surely if there's one thing Boxing Day is good for, it's recovering from Christmas with the luxury of the first day since August without "Jingle Bells" playing somewhere near your alcohol saturated head.

Before you accuse me of being Scrooge, note that I'm not the only one who hates Christmas; there're plenty of examples of people not entering into the compulsory goodwill (this is a prevous Christmas rant of mine I never put on this site; saves me writing a new one ;-)):

"Some town councils have banned Christmas decorations in public areas for fear of offending other religions; mistletoe is to be removed from office Christmas parties to prevent sexual harassment; lights and tree decorations have been deemed unsafe in case they fall on someone’s head, and school-children cannot wear tinsel to their school parties in case they strangle themselves. Crackers are to be withheld for fear of bits from them hitting someone in the eye, and Santas in grottos cannot pick up the children without proper training as they risk back injuries. And of course, these days, the middle-class are all allergic to everything, from wrapping paper, sellotape and ribbons, to Christmas pudding, cranberry sauce and grandma, so they’ve all gone too.

"On top of this, we have the usual array of crappy Christmas goings on; round robin letters; you know, the type where some boring bastard you met once 5 years ago in a pub writes a 6-page letter telling you about every bruised knee and parking fine he’s had in the past 12 months before boasting about his kids university places and the new 4x4 he’s having a great time running over poorer children with, wanker!. Then we have diabolical telly, and carol singers so miserable they make Victor Meldrew look like Santa.

"Speaking of carol singers, new legislation is around the corner that will vastly change the musical scene this year. ‘Birthday of a King’ has gone for fear of offending non-Christians, likewise ‘O Come, all Ye Faithful’, ‘Silent Night, Holy Night’, and ‘The Most Wonderful Day of the Year’. Following a surge of festive-themed ‘adult’ entertainment entering the market in the last couple of months, ‘Sleigh Ride’, ‘I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’, and ‘Ding Dong! Merrily on High’ have had to be removed from carol services. One leading bishop said “It was becoming impossible, whenever one of these carols was sung, all the male members of the congregation had their hymn-books decidedly lower than is practical for reading and singing up to God”. ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ suffered here too.

"‘We Three Kings of Orient Are’ is to be renamed ‘We Three Ordinary Men are from the Orient’ as part of a government drive on literacy, and following complaints from republicans. ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ has been criticised for drawing attention to physical differences of others, ‘White Christmas’ is to be changed to be ‘All Ethnicities Christmas’, and ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ has also been stopped after a successful legal challenge by the people of Bethlehem, Albany County, New York, claiming it was damaging their tourist industry by presenting the image of an unexciting backwater town. But we do still have Band Aid (for the God-knows-whatth year in a row!), which, despite complaints from several Muslim groups that they didn’t feel it necessary for them “to know it was Christmas time at all”, has been retained because of its charity links. And fortunately you can now write a living will stating you are not to be resuscitated if you try to take your own life after too much Bob-bloody-Geldof."

Right, that's Christmas well and truly destroyed, back to some new material. You may have seen adverts/public information videos from the Home Office on Tv recently featuring 'decent' people being blase about their new phone/home security etc. to a 'non-decent' looking person; the films then end with a patronising voice saying something like "don't advertise your car/phone/house/etc. to theives". Now, the problem I have with these films is not the patronising level they're pitched at, nor the fact that they've now spilled over into talking (in stupid, celebrity-impersonation voices) parking meters in Sheffield telling you to not leave anything on show in your parked car (although these machines are supremely fucking annoying; we're talking Jade Goody levels here). No, the problem I have is the ridiculously screwed up political correctness that has decided the racial make-up of the adverts. The victims are all ethnic minorities; the perpetrators are all white. This is just fucking bullshit! A massively disproportionate amount of petty (if you can call mugging, burglary, theft from cars petty) crime is commited by young black and asian men; I don't want to hear any shit about more-deprived backgrounds or single-parents, this is a simple statement of fact and it should have been dealt with in these adverts. The racial perspective shown in the Home Office adverts with misleading and, in itself, highly racist. But, as we see repeatedly, politicians don't like letting facts cloud issues they can spin.

Another example, the teaching of Intelligent Design is to be allowed in schools, an education minister said the other day. For anyone who doesn't know, Intelligent Design is the rebranded name for the defunct theory of Creationalism. For now this 'theory' (we'll come onto the inverted commas point in a second) of the origins of life is to be confined to religious studies, rather than science as the potty religious-lobby were pushing for; but I suspect it will creep over. For starters, to call intelligent design a 'theory' is intensely misleading. If I'm feeling generous, it is a hypothesis. Evolution is a theory; consider:

1) Evolution is a possible (read: probable) explanation of the origins of life. It makes logical sense, can be explained through understood processes, and fits with all the observable evidence; there isn't any proper evidence (religious texts are not evidence) against the theory. But it is still a theory as there is no such thing as scientific fact.

2) Intelligent Design is an idea, based on the word of ancient books of unknown origin and authorship, and a complete misunderstanding of complexity theory, that fits with absolutely none of the available evidence. The only 'evidence' (besides the texts) the intelligent designers can come up with is "the structure of the DNA molecule is too complex to have occured naturally". This is a fundamental mistake. Modern complexity theory has shown that incredibly complex behaviours can emerge from extremely simple initial systems given small random initial perturbations. The Creationalists don't understand (and have probably never heard of) complexity theory and hence have no right to be dictating what we teach our children as to the origins of life. To put it in statisticians words: Intelligent Deisgn is an hypothesis with a miniscule 99% confidence region which does not encompass the observables, but they wouldn't understand that either. Hence a more accurate description would be superstitious bullshit.

We mustn't allow religion to regain any of the power over society that our ancestors worked so hard to wrestle from it. This way another Dark Age lies. But it's worse than the Intelligent Design story may suggest. It is now looking extremely likely that vital Stem Cell-based research will be stopped due to religious groups pressurising the government. They claim it's unethical and immoral, but refuse to answer why suspending research that may alleviate suffering and save lives isn't also immoral and unethical. Again, they've no knowledge about the science behind the issue. The irony is that they're also being so arrogant as to assume they know what God thinks is immoral. Perhaps God wants us to do this research to help ourselves. If not, why do we have the ideas and the capability to do so? Presumably he gave them to us.

This irony in their thinking was well illustrated by a cartoon I saw recently. A man falls overboard at sea, a jet ski comes past and offers to take him to safety, he says "No thanks, my God will save me". A lifeboat and a helicopter both pass, again offering aid; both of whom he tells "No thanks, my God will save me". When the drowned man meets St Peter (Paul? How should I know, I went to a religious junior schoool ;-)) at the pearly gates he says "Why did God not save me?", to which the saint replies "He sent a jet ski, a lifeboat, and a helicopter; what else was he supposed to do?".

But it's not just science they want to supress. It's anything that criticises their beliefs, be it cartoons, operas, or Monthy Python's Life of Brian. There was a fascinating program on the making of the film and the struggle with Mary Whitehouse and her band of loonies to get it released. The irony here was that the barmy army didn't watch it; they decided what was in it and called for a ban anyway. The way they always do. Religious groups are full of people who need to be told what to think. The film didn't even mock Christ as they claimed, it was all about organised religon. The Pythons tried to claim that their reason for not really targetting the life of Christ was that "He's really not funny". Only John Cleese stood up to this and made the (entirely valid) point, that actually the life of Christ is ripe for comedy. He put forward the case of Joseph finding out Mary was pregnent, Mary explaining to him what had happened, him falling (erm, believing, sorry) it, then telling all his mates down the tavern that it's ok, his wife hasn't been knocking about with the neighbour, she got knocked up by God. Comedy gold in the hands of a better writer than me.

Incidentally, wasn't Mary about 14 at the time of conception? So God is a paedophile? Explains a lot about the lifestyles of modern-day priests and bishops, I suppose. Speaking of which, the funniest story of the festive season has to be the Bishop of Southwark being found drunk in the back of a BMW he'd broken into, throwing childrens's toys about and saying "I'm the Bishop of Southwark, it's what I do"! Priceless!!

So, what can we conclude? By the way, for the religiously hard-of-thinking, a conclusion is a suggested explanation based on the observed facts that fits the measured data. Religion has given us:

1) Scientific censorship on anything they decide God wouldn't like.
2) Artisitic censorship on anything they don't like.
3) Lots of kiddy fiddlers.
4) Dog shit all over the pavement in January.

Sounds like a bad thing to me, I won't be converting.