The Uncomfortable Truth

When I was a young boy I had a horrible and haunting experience. It was a few days after my seventh birthday, and I was awoken by the sound of my Grandad calling my Nan from the bottom of the stairs. I ran to see what I could do. 

He was stood there with blood all down his lips, neck and chest. To my innocent eyes it looked like a very bad nosebleed. I ran to tell my Nan about the nosebleed, and it was this fact which she took at face value. Grandad was having a nosebleed. The tissues were in the kitchen. I should go off to tell him. She would follow on in a bit. No big deal.

A few minutes later I was kneeling on the blood-soaked floor of the kitchen, cradling my beloved Grandad, as he died. His eyes were begging me to help him. There was nothing I could do but hold him.

I finally came to terms with this in my late thirties.

When I was 19, I met with a psychologist who explained how my tendency to run the incident through in my mind could have been shut off by grief therapy, had it existed when I was seven. Later still, another counsellor asked me to honestly ask myself what a seven-year-old me could have done... really? The honest answer was nothing, but that fact took a while to sink in.

You see, the problem is that as I got older, and studied more about first aid, First Response & pre-hospital emergency care, in these increasing levels of complexity, I saw that incident from a more and more informed perspective. I lost sight of the fact that I was only a seven year old kid, with none of the knowledge I gained as I grew up.

This 'Grandad's Death Apologism' ultimately led me to have some serious delusions about how his demise was my fault, because I didn't perform some, now, routine actions which may have saved him. Such as recognizing that it wasn't an epistaxis for starters!

An astute reader will already know where this story is headed. This is a blog about religions and their follies after all. So, where do we usually find events recorded by ill-informed, scientifically ignorant authors whose stories are later retold from more modern and complex perspectives as more information becomes available?

Yes... The Holy Bible.

The job of the Christian Apologist is to deny the actual words of the authors, the stories within the text as seen through primitive eyes, and make up new ideas to explain what they meant, and why the stories actually meant something other than what they say.

Genesis 1:1-2:3 is a text by Aaronid "Priestly" scribes of the 6-5th centuries BCE, writing around the time of or just after the Jewish exile in Babylon, whose Yahweh speaks everything into being from some pre-existing materials, such as space, water and soil. Meanwhile, Gen 2:4b-Gen 3:24 is a text two hundred years older, written by Elohists who were following their tradition of Yahweh moulding humans, animals and plants out of the earth, clearly more from an agricultural perspective.

These texts actually have messages all of their own, but modern Creationists cannot bear to accept that these are from two traditions, which if taken at face value, clearly demonstrate that Yahweh is a human literary construction, used as 'Priestly Propaganda'! Instead, they have to find a way to construct a narrative that explains how the second, older story is a clarification of a period within the first, younger story, and tells us that they are both, in fact, telling a single story.

They are rewriting the story from a point of view of having both an agenda and a new set of data. Just as I did with my Grandad's death.

When you fail to take a story, or an account of an event, at face value, and forget the knowledge level of its author(s), or participants, you diminish your ability to objectively analyse the truth of it. If you're not 100% honest in your dealing with Bible texts, you relinquish any claim you have of understanding some 'arcane knowledge' or 'hidden truths' held within the text.

I didn't know about pulmonary pathologies, traumatic cardiac events, haemostatic techniques, CPR, or Stroke management when I was seven. I had to be honest about that before I could recognize the truth of my Grandad's death. If you're honest about the Creation myths of the Bible, you must accept that they inadvertently undermine the veracity of your god claim... in short, they explain the circumstances in which you can be certain your god isn't real... and never was. 

This is the uncomfortable truth!

Why Does It Matter If I'm Racist?

I'd like to start by clarifying something.

I am not, nor have I ever been racist. In fact the whole point of this post is to explain a fundamental point about how these 'isms' work, and why we can't differentiate between them to suit our own prejudices.

The so-called 'Regressive Left' defend atrocities committed by Muslims, (including recent immigrants) such as rapes, sexual assaults, female genital mutilation, paedophilia, gender segregation, knife attacks, acid attacks, bombings and gay bashing, as "just part of their culture". This "cultural differences" argument in morality is fine, when applied equally, but otherwise it is a crock of shit.

I come from an iron mining town, sandwiched between the two largest coal towns in South-East Wales. It was the 70s and racism and sexism was very much part of our culture, and still is in large parts of 'The Valleys.'

Someone I know from a generation above mine, who is a liberal aptheist, still occasionally comes out with comments like "A local man just married an Asian girl, she's from Vietnam, but she's very kind". "But?" Why? Is it at all unusual for a Vietnamese lady to be kind?

He doesn't mean anything by it. It's just our culture. He's no more a racist than anyone else I could mention, but the Regressives would be all over him like a rash, because he's a white man.

The question I have for these Regressives is: Why are you upset that people, who come from a culture in which race, gender and sexuality are targets for oppression (and in a few cases serious bullying and violent attacks), are racist, sexist, or homophobic? Surely that's "just their culture" isn't it? 

When the BNP rally and want to be racist, why is this a problem for you? The British, as tolerant as we are as a whole, have always harboured a distrust, and dislike, of 'Johnny Foreigner.' It's a cultural thing for us.

Yet, according to you, Mr & Miss Regressive (the subject of the worst of the Mr Men and Little Miss books) we are not allowed to express our culture. When we are disgusted at seeing videos of Muslim men and women shitting in public, or we hear of Muslim men beating their wives, gang-raping children, hanging gay people, or sexually assaulting white and Sikh girls, (because they are taught this is what they must do,) we are the ones accused of intolerance - and our outrage is lambasted as "deep-seated hatred of", or "intolerable racism towards" Muslims.

You cannot have it both ways dear Lefties. Either these Muslims have to come to terms with our culture, and start behaving themselves, or the racists get to continue being expressive of their hatred.

Which is it to be?