Last Sunday, barely 10 minutes after I’d managed to drag myself out of bed, I got a phone call from my sister, Tam. Normally, this appalling crime warrants a stream of profanity-laden verbal abuse, but as she’d only called to let me know that Richard Dawkins was on BBC1’s “Big Questions” programme, and that the topic was whether the bible was still relevant, I was quite content to drop all charges. My abject lack of tolerance for religious nonsense, and my appreciation for the works of Richard Dawkins, are two things (among many) that I share with my sister, so I was grateful for the heads up. However, since I had still to fully peel open my eyelids and let in more than just a thin sliver of daylight, I promised I’d watch it later. Read more “Not collecting stamps”
One day, in the (hopefully) far distant future, my heart will issue its last, vital beat, my lungs will resign from their tediously repetitive job of inflating and deflating to provide me with oxygen, and, in quick succession, every organ, system, and function within my body will shut down, never to be restarted. The deafening noise of the trillions of explosions in my brain will go quiet, and the light that lives just behind my tired eyes will go out for the last time. There will be no one home. Every biological function that I had enjoyed without ever having paid them much thought will have come to their natural ends, and I will be dead. Read more “Death of a heretic”
I’m not sure when I became an atheist; in a way, I guess I always have been. Sure, there have been times when I dipped my toe in the waters of faith, but I always felt rather hollow, usually to the point of dishonesty, when I did. I didn’t really, deep-down believe what I was trying to persuade myself I believed and, on the very few occasions in my life that I actually prayed, I felt like a complete fraud; wishing out loud to a being I didn’t believe existed for shortcuts to problems I was either unable, or too lazy, to solve myself. Read more “My atheism”
