A new Calendar
I suggest 1809 should now be year 0 and henceforth we move into a calendar based on that. Year 1 is AD 1810 and so we are living in AD 207
Surely in this age of science and enlightenment it is time to move on?
The world has largely progressed out of the age of superstition and has emerged into a new understanding of life and the universe. When someone asked AJP Taylor, the famous historian, when it was that we emerged out of the Dark Ages, his reply was that we had not done so yet. When someone asked Ghandi what he thought of civilisation he replied that it would be a good idea. I take a more optimistic view; I think we are at the start of a new era. It is the era of science and enlightenment.
I have hopes for it. I believe it will augur a new age of tolerance. We are at the threshold of an age of discovery and wonder – the age of science.
Once the genie is out of the bottle it cannot be put back. There is an inexorable flood.
Every culture has its creation myths and religious stories which are being shown to be the products of fertile human imagination – nothing more.
We have moved into an age where we are no longer willing to believe the fantastic without evidence. Science has affected our gullibility.
Science is evidence based. The results are all around us. They have transformed the world. If something cannot be seen, measured and replicated then it is no longer believed.
Science is the melding of imagination, creativity, thought, observation and recording. It has heralded a new age of wonder, awe and incredibility.
We have learnt more in this last single year than in the whole prescience history of the world. Yet what we know is still only touching the surface.
This is still the beginning. We are only just beginning to slowly shuffle out of the Dark Ages and there are many forces struggling to throw us back.
To signify this move forward into the light of a new era I suggest we adopt a new calendar. Not a calendar based on some erstwhile religious prophet, such as Jesus or Mohamed, but one based on a scientist of note; one of the many who have risked all to take us forward; someone instrumental in dispelling the myths and shedding light on reality.
There are many courageous people to choose from. We could go back to the likes of Copernicus, Galileo or Da Vinci, who risked grizzly death at the wrath of the church for daring to challenge the myths and investigate the truth. We could go back to the ancient Chinese or to the pre-Islamic scientists who invented agriculture, maths, the alphabet and astronomy. Here were the rudiments of science. There are hundreds to choose from.
We could go to the geniuses who arose after the enlightenment who laid the groundwork for the amazing technology of today – people like Newton, Currie or Einstein – or even Hawkin? We could choose Watson, Crick and Franklin.
II even toyed with Richard Dawkins. I felt he would be a suitable candidate. Whoever it turned out to be had to be a symbol for all the brave pioneers that had gone before, someone who symbolised this move into an age of reason.
For me there is only one candidate – the man who by revealing the whole sequence of evolution demolished all those millennia of myth. Charles Darwin started a ball rolling that has not stopped. It clearly shows that we are not divine creatures created by a god but flawed animals little different from our closest relatives – the chimps, gibbons, orangutans and gorillas. DNA has taken it a step further. The ball is still in motion. The new age is unfolding before us. It has brought the electric light, cars, flight, space travel and all the machines and technology we have become used to.
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, along with genetics, fired the magic bullet into the overinflated balloon of organised religion. For me it meant that the claims for Jesus, Mohamed, Shiva, Jehovah or Zeus are all exposed as primitive superstition.
Science has not yet discovered all the answers and probably never will. Perhaps there is an underlying spirituality? The machinery of the universe is extraordinary and more mysterious with every new discovery but it is a million miles away from the simplicity of religion and our primitive concept of god. We are not the centre of any universe and of no great significance. To suggest the universe was created for us is laughable – an egotistical nonsense. We have quarks, string theory, quantum physics, black holes, quasars, the human mind, artificial intelligence and a universe that is a whole lot more complicated and wondrous than anything in a religious text, more extraordinary than any religious leader could imagine.
I suggest we take the year of Darwin’s birth as the beginning of our new calendar.
I hope 207 After Darwin – 207 AD – is a good year for you!
Darkness Descends
Behind everything is a philosophy. It creates the ethos. It creates the zeitgeist. It pervades the air we breathe. Philosophy drives everything. We all have one whether we know it or not; every society has one as its basis.
The basis of my philosophy has been one of love and hope. I have put my faith in mankind and that the good in people will prevail over the bad; that we must build, through education, a world that is full of the best we can do and not the worst.
On one hand I see the destructive greed, power-seeking and cruelty that is mindlessly destroying the planet and on the other I see the beauty we create, the altruism and love that reflects us at our best.
Mostly I am optimistic that the billions of kind, caring and pleasant people will prevail over the far fewer heartless, selfish, violent beasts.
I would like to see humanity moving to a more civilised state where nature is respected, animals are not treated cruelly, our population is controlled, and things such as war, racism, exploitation and sexism are banished. I want a world with wilderness, fresh air and equality.
The only way I can see us achieving this is through a centralised government, the end of nations and religions, and a move out of the tribalism and primitive thinking that creates so much hate and violence. I dream of universal laws to prevent pollution, war and discrimination.
That is why the Brexit vote was so appalling to me. It seemed to me to be a vote based on fear and hatred that would spawn an ethos of isolation, xenophobia, inequality and further disharmony. It was the dream of the terrorists, nationalists and racists that prevailed over those dreams of idealists like myself.
For me the world lurched into a darker place that is less safe and much further away from the unity and togetherness of the world I dream of.
I can only see a future of gloom, environmental destruction and war. The philosophy of Brexit is opposed to everything I hold dear. I have lost my faith in people. The philosophy we live in changed.
I wrote this at an attempt at catharsis. I need to become more optimistic again.
Darkness Descends
Gigantic dark waves
Crashing on grey sands
As huge gloom-ridden clouds
Obscure the light.
Ice-cold winds bite through
The skin with shards of steel
As warmth and sunshine are banished forever.
Never again will the sun break through
To bathe the land with hope.
No more will the heart beat
With enthusiasm for the fight.
As the cloying mists of misery
Swirl in clammy fingers of doom
And claw the very life out of
All that would dare to breathe.
Opher 10.7.2016
‘I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest’
There are times when a song conveys a truth to me that nothing else does. The words of this song do that for me. Paul Simon hits the spot. His lyrics are poetry.
I think we all hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest. We live in a bubble that reflects our own attitudes back at us. We select the things we listen to and watch. We put our slant on all we see and hear. We listen to the arguments that reinforce the views we hold. We buy in to the lies we are told and still naively believe the promises.
‘Now the years are rolling by me
They are rocking evenly
And I am older than I once was
And younger than I’ll be
But that’s not unusual
No, it isn’t strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same
After changes we are
More or less the same’
I often feel that despite all the knocks, disappointments, betrayals, disclosures, realisations and lies I am still the same naïve person I was. I am still the idealist who believes we can make things better. I haven’t changed that much. I’m just older and wiser and a lot more cynical. I’m a little bit more depressed and a bit more desperate.
It seems strange to me.
‘In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving”
But the fighter still remains’
Life is a bit of a battle. We carry the scars. But there are things worth fighting for, things worth believing in. There is hope. There is love and there is creativity.
We stand up for what we believe. We speak our mind. We take the consequences.
The moment I stop striving is the moment I am dead.
Jewels in Eternity
I had this feeling that eternity was nothing more than endless darkness. Even the brightness of the big bang and the coming to life of the stars would be darkness if there were no eyes to witness it or no brains to appreciate the splendour.
In order for there to be light there has to be the consciousness with which to see or else the brightest light is still in darkness.
Consciousness evolved out of the slime over billions of years, just as it took tens of billions of years for the stars to emerge from the cosmic gas cloud.
The stars will shine and shed their light for hundreds of billions of years to come. Will there be eyes to see them? Or brains to glory in their majesty?
In the span of eternity maybe the life of a universe is a mere sentence, the life of a galaxy a brief flash, and the whole of human history a moment.
Perhaps there are multitudes of conscious beings scattered throughout the universe with senses to see and light up with joy.
I imagined those bursts of consciousness to be jewels that briefly shone within the darkness; each had its vain moment of glory and was gone.
Each of us a jewel in the darkness whose purpose is to shine.
Jewels in Eternity
Eternity is strewn with jewels
That twinkle briefly in the starlight
And then gone.
Each jewel a brief moment
That is full of life and hope
Then flickers out.
Yet better than the darkness,
Preferable to nothing at all,
For we have our moment.
For we are those jewels
So full of hope and love
That shine so briefly in the dark.
Each one of us so full of joy
That put the stars to shame
Through our dreaming.
We must shine with all our strength
For that brief moment
Is all we have.
And it is enough
To know
That we have shined too.
Opher 5.7.2016
Never has there been a greater need for conservation. We must stop the destruction of the wilderness, the indiscriminate chopping down of rainforest, the loss of habitat and the wanton killing of animals. We are destroying our planet.
One look at the interaction between this mother and her child is enough to show the intelligence and love. Yet these close relatives of ours are being destroyed with such cruelty! It has to stop!
