The weekend that absolutely did not go to plan…

Last Friday I found myself with bugger all to do once again, having repeatedly failed in my attempts to organise a night out with a bunch of lads from school.

My mother, on the other hand, was out having the time of her life with her colleagues from work, who had been drinking at a steady pace since 3pm. When Alan (mum’s boyfriend) and I went to pick her up, it was 9pm. She was, if I even need to say so, pretty drunk. This night also happened to be the 5th anniversary of her-and-Alan’s first date, so she decided it would be a wonderful idea to take me along to the bar where they met, where she regailed me with stories of the first time they shagged (‘It’s okay, though! We waited until a month after we met!!!’).

During the afternoon of this particular Friday, the internet access in my dorm-room had once again gone tits-up, so I got Alan to drop me off outside the medics’ society building before he drove Mum home (they’ve got wi-fi and 24-hour access for members). After spending an hour or so getting my facebook fix, I wandered down to the student union where The Christian had told me he and the rest of the university Christian group would be spending the evening, giving out hot chocolate and biscuits and talking about God.

I ended up staying and chatting to them until about 2am. The banter was actually quite good, although any conversations I took part in involved a minimum amount of God. After a while, passers-by began to assume I was part of the group. I had a lovely conversation with a random student about biscuits – we argued over the merits of chcolate digestives, and I told him the best way to eat a digestive biscuit is to put two together with butter in the middle, like a sandwich. He replied,

“Wow, I’ve never heard of that! I didn’t realise you Christians were so nice!!”

The irony was a little delicious.

Anyway, I decided to go back to the church with them and give them a hand putting their equipment away – that way I wouldn’t have to walk home by myself. I declared to The Christian that this was my good deed that would get me into heaven. He told me that such an idea was an inherently Catholic one (he doesn’t think Catholics are real Christians), and proceeded to go off on a long tangent which I’ll briefly summarise by saying he thinks it’s faith, and not actions, that gets you into heaven.

I said, ‘Okay, okay, stop. You’re confusing me. Just complete this sentence for me: When I die, I will go… where?’

“Well, hell.”

‘…Does that make you sad?’

“Of course it does..

(Yes!! I’m in there!)

..That’s why I spend time doing this every week – it makes me sad to think that so many people are going to hell because they didn’t get a chance to be converted.”

Damn. Now I don’t feel at all special anymore.

Anyway, we had packed up all the stuff, and they had all had a big support group-like discussion with each other about the people they had encountered throughout the evening and the discussions they had had. It made me realise that, annoying as these guys may be, they really do have the best of intentions. They honestly do believe if you don’t believe in god, you’ll go to hell. The fact that they’d give up so much of their time to try to, as they see it, ’save’ people, is really quite sweet. I felt that the evening had been a valuable experience for me, to have gotten this insight into the motivations behind the preachy behaviour of religious folk that is normally held in such contempt. Until…

‘Okay then everyone, shall we pray?’

Oh. Fuck.

The Christian

I recently (read: almost a fortnight ago) went for drinks with a guy from my course - he’s in my tutor group, we were paired on a lab practical and then got paired together again for an interview assignment. He also, incidentally, happens to be a Christian. Of the hardcore variety.

Now, my previous experience of having any kind of interaction with Christians has not been particularly confidence-inspiring. It might have something to do with the fact that I’m not the most tolerant of people. And I’m pretty argumentative.

I take the ‘everybody has the right to express their own opinions’ stance like any other democratic, free-speech-enthusing Westerner… but only when the opinions in question aren’t fucking stupid. I hate to sound authoritarian, but some people just don’t deserve the right to express their opinions. Racist people, for example. With the right to free speech comes the responsibility not to use it to harm others, and some thoughts and theories do just that, whilst having no other value, intellectual or otherwise. I realise there’s a lot of grey areas here – some opinions, when expressed, will unintentionally cause offence to some while still expressing a valid point. And I also realise that there’s no way to stop wankers from saying stupid shit.

I’m just saying that when they do they should fully expect me to deliver the mother of all verbal smackdowns.

ANYWAY. I don’t know whether this guy was just particularly amiable, or because I had imbibed enough alcoholic beverages to make me unusually amenable [normally when somebody says 'I think homosexuality is wrong' to me, I get a little hot-tempered], but we actually ended up having a really cool conversation.

During the course of which he let slip that he doesn’t want to have sex before marriage.

 

…

 

Challenge accepted.

The whole wide-eyed and virtuous thing just totally does it for me - I don’t know where this predatorial, despoiler-of-innocence thing suddenly came from, but all I’ve been able to think about since the pub is riding this boy. I don’t think it’s the idea of the sex that turns me on so much as the bit afterwards where he curls up into a ball and weeps with shame at having forsaken his mighty principles. It’s a power-trip – that must be it.

In any case, we get along astonishingly well considering how we disagree on fundamentally everything: he disdains drinking, and I only ever drink to get drunk; he doesn’t believe in sex before marriage, I don’t even believe in marriage; he believes in god, I’m practically a nihilist. And he likes musicals for fucks’ sake.

But in spite of all these things, or maybe because of them, I absolutely adore him.

Twilight pt. 2 – Breaking Dawn [SPOILERS]

PS: And don’t think I didn’t notice the blatant glamourising of Bella’s asinine determination in the face of all that is sensible to continue with a pregnancy that would likely result in her gory and exceedingly painful death. It reeks of pro-life agendising. I like my trashy teenage novels to be free of thinly-veiled underlying Christian motive, thank-you-very-much.

Personality.

Touching briefly (hah) on the topic of Christian constructs and the issue of being a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ person, I have to address the obvious underlying issue here – the soul. Which, for all intensive purposes, we shall consider synonymous with the concept of personality – a concept I’ve blethered on many times in the past.

Here’s the basic summary of my beliefs on the issue at present:
We are not unique. There is no underlying soul or entity which will determine how we will act in a given situation, based on permanent, pre-determined characteristics.

I think the concept of the soul has come about because of this illusion of originality* that people have about themselves. Which is just that – an illusion. We are all driven by the same motivations – basic requirements e.g. food, shelter, company, as well as higher motives such as desire for respect amongst ones peers, power, money, which are just extensions of the basic ones.

I’m not saying people aren’t different from one another – different people do have different behaviours. But it’s not because we’re inherently varied or wonderful. It’s not because we’re different as ‘people,’ but because the human race is unique for its greater – hence varied – intellectual development compared to other species. Our perceived characteristics reflect our upbringings. As some of us have been brought up in different environments from others, and have consequently been exposed to different influential factors during the key stages of intellectual development, different people will react differently to different stimuli. It’s basic behavioural habituation.

For example, you’re walking down the street, and a stranger approaches you and, unprovoked, slaps you in the face. Keeping to the theme of our Biblical references, whether you ‘turn the other cheek’ or take the ‘eye for an eye’ approach will depend on how you have been taught to react, or how you have observed others react e.g. parents, in similar situations.

Another example – apparently, 75% of convicted child abusers were abused themselves.

So, the way we react to certain stimuli is not a prescribed behaviour caused by our being ‘nice’ or ‘impatient’ (or some other adjective) people. As far as I’m concerned, none of the inherent values commonly associated with the soul technically exist. If someone is described as ‘nice’ (I can’t say I’ve ever had the pleasure), it is because they have acted nicely in the past, not because they necessarily will in the future.

I know I’m beating the dead horse here, but for some reason this issue has been really bugging me.

*I got a copy of Girl, Interrupted for Christmas – “Whatever we call it – mind, character, soul – we like to think we possess something that is greater than the sum of our neurons and that ‘animates’ us.”

End.

Spirituality.

I said previously that unconditional love is a religious concept. According to wikipedia it means showing love towards someone regardless of his or her actions or beliefs. It is hence something which is above and beyond human rationale and other material, earthly things and so implies the existence of a higher concept of being by which humans can associate with one another – the soul. This is all, of course, associated with spirituality which, by definition, is that which is above and beyond the material.

This just happens to be what we’re covering in our RE class at school at the moment.

But first, I’ll give you the low-down on my religious education teacher for this rotation – we’ll just call him Mr X, for Christ. He’s, well… Christian. Very Christian. He’s one of these bizarre born-again types – the product of an ‘epiphany’ he had when he was younger, when he was ‘touched by God’ and made the decision to devote the rest of his life to Him. You know the type.

And on the surface, he seems like the loveliest guy – annoying, but lovely. Everything he does is entirely New Testament – you know, turn the other cheek, love thy neighbour as you love yourself, etc – and he’s just very well-meaning. We spent our RE periods sitting in the circle of happiness while he sings hymns at us and tells us to ‘get in touch with our feelings’ and we’re all very awkward and polite and pretend to like it, even to each other.

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not a ‘get in touch with my feelings’ kind of person. I’m a ’sit-in-the-corner-and-hate-everyone’ kind of person. And so that’s precisely what I’ve been doing, and thusly I’ve noticed that Mr X isn’t perhaps as kind and well-meaning as he may seem. He tells us to say whatever we feel, whether our beliefs are Christian or otherwise, but I can’t help but feel that he’s always subtly manipulating the conversation towards his way of thinking, and so we don’t notice when we automatically start thinking about things that way too.

Being in there has left me feeling vaguely annoyed for some time now, and I think that’s me just put my finger on why – On the surface, we’re made to feel that our discussions are completely open, without any boundaries. But I’m left feeling stifled because the topics are actually being closed in by boundaries I hadn’t yet detected.

How can he expect to encourage rational thought in people when the very topics we’re discussing have no place for that element?

An example, since I’m being annoyingly vague, is when we were talking about revenge. One of the boys said that if someone killed a family member of his, he’d hunt the murderer down and kill him in order to even the score. Mr X asked in response, ‘Do you think that would make you a better person?’
The boy said, ‘Yes, it would make me feel better.’
Mr X: ‘Yes, but would it make you a better person?’

And the boy just answered that question in the negative, without even pausing to think what it means. He didn’t even realise that being a ‘better person,’ or any kind of person, is an inherently Christian construct. In reality, I believe, there’s no such thing. Being a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ person would imply that there’s a scale somewhere, that each of our actions is tallied on the spiritual blackboard under ‘bad’ or ‘good,’ to be totalled up at some point and then to be answered for – think end of the world, St. Peter at the gates of heaven scenario.

As a result, ‘bad’ and ‘good’ people are ascribed different characteristics – the concept of selfishness, for example, is commonly associated with being a bad person. Such a concept is equally vapid. The term ’selfishness’ is used to ascribe negative connotations to behaviour which, before human analysis, had was morally neutral (there being, at the time, no such thing as morality). Hoarding as much as you possibly can for yourself and/or immediate family is typical animal behaviour – it’s survival instinct. When an animal does this, no such associations with badness or selfishness are made. It’s the nature of living things to kill and compete with one another – the only difference between humans and other animals, therefore, is that the resources we’re competing for are themselves human contructs. Rather than food, or habitat, or sunlight, we compete for money. But it still all comes down to land and possesions.

In any case, it’s nothing to do with ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ People will kill one another, people will fight with one another over material things, people will form purely sexual attachments – it’s human nature. It’s survival mechanisms that, while they are now fairly redundant, will stay with us because they’ve pretty much been bred into us, whatever that means. There’s nothing we can do, and despite the fact that our heightened intelligence makes us as a species, for some reason that I’ve yet to discover, feel the need to go against this, we will never be successful on a large scale.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to change it – to be ‘good people,’ as it were – I’m just saying we shouldn’t be disappointed when our efforts are fruitless. I’m only saying this because if everyone is nice to everyone else, the happiness of each individual is optimised. I don’t see morality in terms of a necessary categorical imperative - it’s just the avoidance of actions which would harm others. It all boils down to the very simple ethic of reciprocity – treat others as you would like to be treated.* Not because it is ‘just the right thing to do,’ or because it’ll look good on the blackboard when you get to the pearly gates, but because it maximises pleasure in this lifetime, which is quite possibly the only lifetime. In that way it ties in with this whole pleasure-seeking, hedonistic ideal I’ve been toying with. Actions which are considered ‘good’ are not so because they are inherently selfless, but because they are, in fact, selfish. Maximising the pleasure of others maximises one’s own pleasure.

I love it.

On that same vein, I give you psychological egoism, which is this delightful theory I stumbled across on wikipedia. Is it the view that humans are always motivated by rational self-interest, even in what seem to be acts of altruism. It really hit a chord with me, because I know we’ve all secretly wondered if our selfless actions are actually selfless. And, I suppose you can guess, I don’t think they are. It’s a well-known fact that we get a ‘good feeling’ out of doing something generally considered to be good, or that we know will benefit someone. There’s are feelings of pride and self-worth which come with making sacrifices for people. Of course, in lower animals, feelings such as pride and self-worth don’t exist, and so no animal ever does anything altruistic. And then of course, there might be a belief in karma, and so good actions are perceived to lead to an indirect benefit to oneself.

But all this doesn’t really matter. The motivations behind a ‘good’ action are superfluous – as long as it results in the maximisation of happiness (not necessarily for the greatest number of people – I’m not too sure about the whole Consequentialist thing) then who cares why someone did it?

*Of course the problem with this is that our actions don’t just directly affect others, they also indirectly affect people, which makes consideration of whether an action will unnecessarily hurt people much less simple.

Unconditional Love

One of the main issues regarding my previous rant that I didn’t really address is that of unconditional love, that very religious concept that governs intra-family relationships. The reason parents can take that attitude which I so dislike is because there is this unquestionable, unexplainable ’special relationship’ between parent and child.

Which I obviously think is bollocks. I don’t even think romantic love, as it is commonly understood, exists. I accept that there’s a combination of emotions one feels when they meet someone they like a lot, and when they get on with that person, but I don’t see it as some mysterious force that is beyond human reason and rationale, and that this can be called love for simplicity, but there’s nothing unexplainable about it. I actually found this article which makes me quite happy, not because I believe in the infallibility of the theory it’s prescribing, but because it attempts to dispel the myths and mystery of the issue.

According to Fisher, infatuation is remarkably similar to obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, a condition so called because it is characterised by obsessions and compulsions. Obsessions are frequent, automatic and involuntary thoughts of an upsetting nature. Compulsions are actions that people with OCD feel compelled to perform and which temporarily reduce anxiety.

“What I know is that both the intense early stages of romantic love and OCD are associated with low activity of serotonin, and that people in the early stages of romantic love think obsessively about their beloved and obsessive thinking often accompanies OCD,” says Fisher.

Obviously this is more concerned with romantic love rather than platonic love – I’m not sure how that would be explained. But I certainly don’t believe there’s any immaterial, pre-established bond between family members. I would say familial love is a fondness resulting from, firstly, knowing that you’ve created the subject of said fondness, and then, secondly, having been in such close proximity with family members and in most cases, as a result, knowing them very intimately. It’s nothing more spectacular than a long-term friendship. But it’s certainly not unconditional.

Take, for example, my Dad, who never met his father until he was in his early 20’s and tracked him down. He met up with the guy for a drink, but they just didn’t have anything in common. Yes, they were blood related, but he had never met the man before – he was a stranger. Of course there wasn’t any kind of bond. Absent parents may leave some sort of void within the child in terms of a masculine/feminine influence on growth and development, but any sort of attachment I think would only go so far as that.

I certainly don’t love every member of my family. In fact, maybe only one. I know it seems a horrible thing to say out of context, but I’m mostly indifferent to them or I outright dislike them – how can you have strong affectionate feelings for someone if you don’t even like them?

Progeny, pt. 2

I’ve never met happy parents. It’s not that they’re necessarily unhappy, I’ve just never observed any obvious signs of happiness, other than the new-parent euphoria. The point I’m trying to make is that I suspect parenthood isn’t the huge, positive, life-enhancing experience that people make it out to be.

Of course, I wouldn’t know – I’ve never had children. And that’s the argument most parents would use in response to this. Because they know, and I couldn’t possibly know until I’m in the same situation. They act like they’ve ascended to this higher plane of human emotion because they’ve experienced the gift of procreation, a plane which is beyond my feeble, emotionally stunted understanding.

Example: Last year I was tricked by my RE teacher into attending something called a ‘Life Conference’ at another Catholic school. We were told that topics discussed would include euthanasia and abortion. I’m obviously not naive enough to expect a balanced representation of the issue from a Catholic school, but the word ‘conference,’ at least denotes intellegent discussion. It wasn’t. ‘Life,’ it turns out, is a pro-life charity. It was basically a brain-washing exercise, aimed mostly at younger pupils. Obviously I was very upset at being deceived into representing such a hideous movement. One of the things that disturbed me most was the activities they had the kids doing – thinking up pro-life ’slogans’ (as if it were an advertising campaign, and not something which actually affects people) and deciding what would be the ‘Christian’ response to certain scenarios.

The scenario our group got lumped with was: A young, married, Christian couple find out they’re expecting their first child, but also that the wife has ovarian cancer. Getting treatment for the cancer would kill the baby, but having the baby would kill the mother. What should they do?

Well, obviously we decided she should abort. No question about it. I think the girls and I were discussing how fast we’d divorce someone if they decided that you dying would be better than aborting their unborn child, when a teacher from another school came up and said, ‘Do you think you have been influenced by society in that you are all selfish in your views?’ And she then proceeded to give us a lecture about how we don’t know what it would be like – she is a mother of two, and if she were in that situation she would, of course, selflessly sacrifice her life for the unborn baby.

Leaving a widow, and two children (plus a newborn) motherless. Stupid cow.

What I’m saying is that I think this whole ‘we understand human emotion better than you because we’ve created life’ attitude is all pretense. It’s probably just an act to make themselves feel important, to compensate for the fact that they’ve basically ruined their lives by having kids.

Okay, maybe ‘ruined’ is a bit harsh – I’m sure a lot of people don’t mind their kids. But I’m equally sure that a lot of parents secretly think their life would be better without them. I had this discussion with Charlie when he was driving me back from a gig in Glasgow one time, and he said that a lot of friends he used to have who went off to have kids just basically stopped having a social life.

So, I don’t want kids. It just seems like the experience, while having some obvious up-sides, results in a net gain of negativity. I’d never be able to do most of the things I’d want to in life like travelling and studying because I’d be too busy rearing children who will inevitably disappoint me in some way or another and fail to appreciate how much I’ve sacrificed them and how much effort I’ve put into raising them. It’s not worth it. I’m not even that fond of kids – I really don’t think I could emotionally commit to them. They’re life-ruiners. They might be very nice life-ruiners, but they are life-ruiners all the same.

Of course, when I, a girl of seventeen, say I don’t want to have kids, ever, you’ll just laugh charmingly and say in a patronising, esoteric voice, ‘Oh, just wait until you’re older, trust me, you’ll want them,’ and all this shite about maternal urges etc. I was reading an article about how many young women are now opting for infertility treatment, and how hard it is to get for the reason I’ve just highlighted. Of course, years later, none of the women interviewed regret their decision. One of them made an excellent point – when you’re young and decide not to have children, nobody takes you seriously, but if I said, ‘I want to be a mother when I’m older,’ nobody would question it. I suppose you could say that’s because procreation is natural – it’s how nature continues species. But with population as booming as it is, where’s the need to procreate?

En plus, if I do come under the sway of the mysterious but powerful ‘maternal urges’ (and getting a cat doesn’t satisfy them), I could always adopt. Although D tells me this plan is daft as I would biologically be able to have children and so I wouldn’t be a priority. As if there’s a shortage of unwanted children in the world.

But you’ve got to take what he says with a pinch of salt. This is the same D who told me, when I said that the very thought of going through pregnancy and childbirth makes me feel slightly nauseous, that I ‘don’t understand the beauty of childbirth.’ This coming from a 19-year-old MALE.

I could be wrong, of course. Maybe it’s just the parents I’ve met who seem unsatisified. Maybe it’s not just parents who are unhappy – maybe everyone in the Western world, parents included, are generally unhappy. I don’t know. I just hope I never want to have children.

As a final note, I’ll give you an example of some of the bidding prayers at the ‘Life’ mass.

“We pray for all those doctors who are blinded from the truth of life that they may come to realise the true meaning of life and understand the harm and death they inflict.

Lord hear us.

We pray for all those affected by the tragedy of abortion, especially the innocent babies who have lost their lives and their vulnerable and mislead mothers.

Lord hear us.”

Needless to say, I’m pro-choice.

Apathy.

ag·nos·ti·cism (www.dictionary.com)
1. The doctrine that certainty about first principles or absolute truth is unattainable and that only perceptual phenomena are objects of exact knowledge.
2. The belief that there can be no proof either that God exists or that God does not exist.

I think this is the theological buzz-word that would best describe my belief system at the moment (it’s subject to change on a whim).

I don’t know whether God exists or not.
But, most importantly, I don’t care. It really doesn’t affect me at all.

People have agonised for centuries over questions like, ‘How was the universe created?’ and ‘Why do we exist?’ and ‘What happens after we die?’
These questions are unanswerable, but the desire to get at least slightly closer to the truth can dominate a person’s whole existence. As for me, I just don’t give a fuck.

I just don’t see the point in devoting your entire life to matters which, by defintion, haven’t the faintest thing to do with your life at all.

I’m here, now, and I don’t know for how long. As far as I’m aware, no other-wordly force is affecting my life – only my own will. To not take advantage of the time I know I have by pursuing experience and other ’shallow,’ material things – substantial things, like knowledge, relationships with others, beauty – seems like a terrible waste.

I don’t want inner peace, to get in touch with my spirituality, to know God, to have the great mysteries of the universe revealed to me. I don’t want to feel like my life has a purpose, that somehow I’m raising the bar for human existence on some vague scale, to have that sense of fulfillment that everyone seems to strive for.

I just want to experience.

And if that means ending up dead in a flat by myself, having been decaying for three weeks with nobody even realising I’m missing, only eventually being found by my neighbours due to the smell, then fine.