The Youth of Today

(written for publication in the prestigious journal that is the EMS newsletter)

I’m sitting in the student union computing centre, waiting slightly anxiously as 5.30 comes nearer. I’ve never done anything of the sort before, but fortunately I do have some idea of what to expect, I have after all watched people conduct interviews in the past. My task is simple really, to go along to Tuesday stage band, locate a couple of first-year victims, and to get a whole first-year perspective on the entity we know and love as the Engineering Music Society. It is a bit odd really, searching for this supposedly foreign ‘first-year perspective’ when I am of course a first-year myself, but I don’t doubt that it will be an illuminating experience nonetheless. Now, back to working out what I’m going to ask. This could be the start of the career in journalism that I never realised I wanted to have. I still don’t think want one, but just in case, I don’t want to screw this up.

Atheism

And while we're on the topic of religion, I thought here might as well be a little outline of my beliefs or lack thereof. So here goes...

First of all I don't think there is any good scientific evidence either way for some sort of supernatural creator, and me being stuck here with a rational scientific mind, this means there's no evidence that's acceptable to me. This leads me to one result, what Graham Oppy calls a Fallibilist Atheist. That is, I don't believe there a god, but I am happy to accept that I might be wrong.

You might protest "But hang on, you just said there's no evidence at all, how are you suddenly taking a side" I see it like this: we are not debating between the existence of God A and God B, where yes indeed, the lack of evidence would require a fence-sitting position in the middle. What we are discussing is the existence of God vs absence of God. This is an incredibly important distinction, and to me, there is a very strong case that where there is no positive evidence for the existence of something, it is only logical to come down of the side of believing it doesn’t exist.
I don't have to disprove that there's a monster under my bed, but it is very reasonable to assume that it doesn't exist without having to conduct an exhaustive search of every nook and cranny, and missing sock, and old newspaper that might lie under this bed of mine.

It would otherwise get very exhausting if I had to rigorously disprove the existence of every possible conceivable entity before I could safely dismiss it as not existing. Surely in the lack of positive evidence for something that everyone can see how reasonable it is to assume it doesn't exist.

To me that's all atheism needs to be, yes you can take it further, but I don't think it's reasonable to take it any further. I believe there is no god, but I am not certain in any way about this.

St Mary of the Cross

Basically, In the context of Catholics going crazy over her, and others such as Catherine Deveny going crazy against this whole process, this sums up my position: If they want to have their sainthood party, why should I care? The Catholic Church can do some pretty horrible things in my opinion, but this canonisation isn’t one of them. I’ll stick to having a go at them for their horrific child abuse, condom use policy that leads to the infection with HIV/AIDS of sickeningly high numbers of people in Africa, and blatant intolerance and stigmatisation of any other sexual behaviour outside of heterosexual procreative missionary intercourse within marriage, and in particular their brutish discrimination againt homosexual activity. For all means, criticise the Catholics for what they deserve to be criticised over, but to me this St Mary business isn’t worth kicking up any sort of fuss over.

Incidentally, on Mike Stuchbery's blog in response to a suggestion by a commenter that "atheists go to the most desolate parts of Africa, where the Catholic church funds clinics to treat AIDS patients" I suggested that the church might want to change its condom policy if it really wanted to have an impact on HIV-AIDS rates. I received the response:

I’m sorry, but that argument is the biggest cop-out ever. I can’t imagine there are too many Catholic Africans having sex with prostitutes and raping their daughters… and refusing to wear a franger on moral grounds.

I was quite literally stunned to get such a response, this attribution of the whole terrible magnitude of this problem where in some countries HIV rates are greater than 20%, to some men "having sex with prostitutes and raping their daughters". I honestly spent about 10 minutes staring at the screen trying to comprehend this assertion. In the end I decided it was best to post one brief response and just leave it alone. Good Decision?

In Defence of Footballers

In Defence of Footballers

In the media at the moment, it seems there are two prevailing views regarding sexual assault and footballers: either footy players are a horrid bunch of men, who see themself as gods, have no self-control and get themselves into all sorts of trouble; either that or that the footballers aren’t to blame, they’re just blokes having a good time at bars and nightclubs, and if women don’t want to be assaulted, they should avoid such places and or be less provocative.

Now, if I may, I would like to disagree vehemently with both of these positions.