God, why he/she/it does NOT exist.

God, what a lovely thought.

Faced with an increasingly complicated world it’s so tempting to think that surely there’s someone who is watching over us and making things better in his/her own inscrutable way.

I’m sorry to anyone reading this who does believe in a Creator, a God, a Supreme Being, it just isn’t true.

To anyone who was brought up in an atheist home it’s quite a ridiculous notion that any supreme being exists, we were read fairy stories as children and our parents probably only went to church a few times, to get married, attend other peoples weddings, christenings and funerals. God didn’t figure greatly in our childhood and we’ve grown up without any reliance on ‘him’.

There is a lot of truth in the saying ‘Give me the child til he is seven and I’ll give you the man’. Children are easily influenced, they will believe, quite literally, anything those they trust, tell them is true. This is how religion works, when everyone is on a prayer mat, praying to God, its easy to believe that this is the right thing to do and conform.

For mankind the idea of there being a God probably began as an attempt to explain the world around them, once mans brain had developed to the point of asking ‘why am I here’.  The idea of a God is also a comfort blanket for those who realise that they are not immune to death, the great leveller. They would rather believe that death is not ‘the end’ and to an extent I have a similar belief and I’m not talking about re-incarnation either.

So, there are plenty of texts explaining how the idea of God comes about. I won’t bore you (any more) about that.

Why God doesn’t exist.

Can I prove God doesn’t exist? No I can’t, for the same reason that I can’t prove absolutely that mermaids don’t exist. Its extremely hard, if not impossible, to prove a negative. What I can say is that there is no independent evidence that God does exist.

While Christians point to the bible and claim it as proof of God, I merely see a book, full of contradictions, written by many different men, subjected to various translations, interpretations and so on. If God truly exists then where is his signature?

Science recently showed us the likeliest explanations for our existence lie in a lottery like coincidence of chemical interaction many billions of years ago. Once you accept that Darwins theory of evolution is a fairly accurate explanation of how we got to where we are today you realise that we are all simply the latest iteration of evolution.

Every one of us, or our children or grandchildren, is literally the most recent example of successful reproduction over millions (maybe billions) of cycles of reproduction. Some families boast of being able to trace their ancestry back a thousand years or so, they are simply the ones with a ‘paper trail’ to follow, for most of us the ‘paper trail’ has blown away but we can be quite certain that our family tree goes back millennia for nobody ever sprang into existence from nowhere.

DNA evidence shows conclusively that there IS a relationship between us and other primates, we share a common ancestor. So apes and chimps and monkeys are all related to us, and each other. Not only that, we are all related to other animals via a ‘so called’ tree of life. Google ‘What is a common ancestor’ and you will see the latest accepted scientific thoughts on this.

The hardest part to get to grips with is why ‘we’ are humans, why weren’t we born as horses or cows or dogs or cats? Surely its miraculous for us to have been born as human? No, it really isn’t.

Leave aside the fact that millions of ‘other’ sperm died when your Mum and Dad got naughty, and that ‘you’ feel you are somehow ‘special’ the fact is that you simply ‘are’.

In much the same way as someone wins the lottery it’s all a matter of probability, and despite the millions of people facing odds of multi-millions to one of winning the jackpot, someone frequently does. Not special, just lucky. No rhyme or reason, no supreme being singling them out for special treatment, just blind chance.

We are all the winners of a fantastically complex set of events and coincidences, descended from apes who in turn descended from something else who … you get the picture. Once you grasp that fact, you can grasp the fact that there’s no God involved, at least, not the one we portray in the Bible, or the Koran, or any other religious text from antiquity.

I hope that helps. If there is no God then it follows that we can either be very selfish, or do the other thing and help our fellow humans, and give our less fortunate fellow creatures, a bit of slack.

First blog post

It’s been 9 months since we voted to Leave the EU and here’s my first ever blog.

Brief Recap

The campaigns were fought, debates were held, people believed or queried, convinced themselves or (less likely) convinced others to believe in their cause and then they voted, in their millions to let the Government know what they wanted them to do about Britains membership of the European Union.

Despite all the money, expert advice and leaflets aimed at them, the majority of those voting decided the answer was that they wanted Britain to leave the European Union. David Cameron resigned and shortly after that Theresa May became PM and announced that she would respect the referendum result.

That’s when all the cracks in society really started showing.

Leavers were vilified by Remainers, who called them all sorts of names and predictably enough, opposing positions hardened. To cut a long story very short Mrs May has sent the EU a letter triggering Article 50. And you might think that the complaining about Brexits validity would have stopped now.  You would be wrong.

Remainers Arguments for Ignoring the Result

Some would have you believe that the ‘official’ Leave campaigners never meant to win, and as such, that Leavers have no ‘right’ to win, and they may well be right about the official Leave campaigners. I have personally never seen winners so glum as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove on the day they ‘won’ the referendum. It would explain a lot but its also irrelevant.

We didn’t vote to fulfill someone else’s machiavellian scheme. We voted because we had our own opinion about the question posed.

Some claim that Leavers were deceived into voting Leave by the ‘350M for the NHS per week’ promise and that the referendum is void because of it. They weren’t and it isn’t but its remarkable that only Remoaners (those Remain voters who just can’t accept they lost) claim this is what actually happened. How they ‘know’ this to be a fact is a mystery to me … but they ‘know’ that’s the truth. Our votes still count.

There are those who persist in linking a discredited video purporting to show Leave campaigners saying things like ‘No-ones saying we should leave the single market …’ despite that video being dissected and discredited publicly by Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics. As if it makes the slightest bit of difference to how people voted.

Many Remoaners are skilled at debating the pros of the EU and dismissing the potential benefits of Brexit. They re-fight the referendum daily, convinced of their own arguments that the EU is wonderful, needs a bit of reform, we’re better in than out etc etc hoping to get Leavers to change their minds. It’s a waste of time.

I’ve boiled it down to two things that affect most ordinary people:

1. If you were more concerned at mass immigration and the effects on your local GP, hospital or school than a potential downside to the economy then you had no choice but to vote to Leave.
2. If you believed that your MP’s, and through them the Government, should be the sole lawmakers for Britain and that no-one from anywhere else should get to decide anything ‘UK’ related then you had no choice but to vote to Leave.

Anyway, the decision has been made and it’s pointless to carry on fighting the referendum. Might as well stop the name calling too.

The only thing that matters now is that the referendum result is respected by the Government. Because if it is NOT respected the people will know that its all a sham, they will have had proved to them something they have long suspected, namely that our Government DOES hold us in contempt, and we will not be able to laugh it off and we will be furious.

Civil War – The Risk of Ignoring the Result

We read in history books about the English Civil War and that’s OK, it took place ages ago. What some forget is that those people from hundreds of years ago were not so very different from how we are today. And if they got such a bee in their bonnet about the right of a man to act like a God, its not impossible that ‘we’ may feel the same way about a Government that promises to respect a referendum and then ignores the result.

If you were in Government would you risk it? I don’t think there is going to be any risk of a British Civil War, so long as Brexit is seen to happen and that will mean (as we were told it would mean) taking back control of our laws, our borders and our money, all of which are achievable as they all require zero negotiation with the EU, simply a statement to that effect.

UK Economy is going to suffer badly from us Leaving the EU?

The main argument from Remoaners is that the economy will tank as a result of us leaving the single market. Quite why that should happen when we leave is unclear, they point out that border controls will add costs and delay to movement of goods, that workers coming here to work will somehow not come afterwards.

The answer to the first is that ‘Yes’, there may well be additional costs and delays to goods travelling across our borders but this is not inevitable, in many ways we could enjoy the same benefits as we did when were in the Common Market, a sort of EU but without so much of the politics. It’s a negotiable item on the Brexit ‘to do’ list. Even if there are delays and costs, they are the same delays and costs faced by other countries outside the EU who trade successfully with it so a period of adjustment may be necessary.

Hopes for the future of the UK.

I hope the Government will invest more money in our UK youth who have a smattering of technical talent to provide them with the education and training to become skilled workers rather than recruit workers from abroad to save money. Similarly with more academically gifted children, we need scientists and mathematicians to make better use of an increasingly complicated world. I (and many others) want British children to fill these roles for the future welfare of all the British people.

What cannot be allowed to continue to happen is for hundreds of thousands of people to come to live in Britain year after year, we don’t have the room to house you all, and we need our green spaces to be left as green spaces for ourselves. Sorry if it seems selfish, but that’s the way it is for me. I am NOT happy to see the population increase at a rate comparable to every mother giving birth to triplets every year instead of a single child. Who the hell wants to live in a high rise flat with no garden, like bloody rabbits in a rabbit factory? Not me, and I don’t want it for my kids either. An ever increasing population cannot go on increasing forever. At some point a halt will have to be called, I’d rather its now than later.

Mass immigration is not the ‘fault’ of migrants, they are just people looking for a better life and our EU membership allows very easy access to EU citizens vs less easy access for anyone else, it’s discrimination based on where you live before you come to the UK.

Is that fair? It isn’t fair to everyone who lives outside the EU and its not fair on those living in Britain. Its extremely unfair on those hoping to buy a house anytime soon, with populations rising far faster than houses can be built the only people to rub their hands are the estate agents as their % fee becomes bigger and bigger. For the rest of us its awful, whether you own a house or not, but especially if not..

Why do EU people want to come here anyway?

We’re told its to work and I’m sure that’s true for most. But why come here? I would suggest its because there is no work for them in the rest of the EU. Why else would anyone uproot themselves and their family to come here, the EU isn’t working for them either.

What is the EU doing? Regulating ‘everything’ for one ..

The EU makes no money of its own, it simply (or not quite so simply) redistributes money from contributions from its member states to other member states, and takes a percentage for itself, to keep the wheels of bureaucracy running smoothly. There are plenty of illustrations of waste in the EU, from building airports with only 4 flights a day, to them regulating the power of vacuum cleaners and (apparently) kettles.

Its a fact that a 3kw kettle will heat a litre of water quicker than a 2kw kettle AND use (slightly) less power to do so given equality of efficiency in the electrical element and thermal properties of the kettle. So why regulate it? How much will it cost to pass the regulations to make it happen, how many people will be paid to waste their time making a regulation that will cost manufacturers money to comply with, that they will subsequently pass on to the consumer?

The same with vacuum cleaners: I have a new 1600W vacuum cleaner, under EU regulations 1600W is the most power any vacuum cleaner is allowed to develop. I can’t actually vacuum at full power, because I’d never be able to push the vacuum head across the carpet, its that powerful. The same as the 2000W vacuum cleaner I had before, I have to turn the power down anyway. Everyone does. So why pass a regulation to limit the power available if in reality, people are going to limit their vacuum cleaners power to suit their carpet (and their own strength) anyway?

There is an EU industry in producing regulation after regulation that are, for the most part, unnecessary, expensive to implement, and solely imposed (apparently) to keep the EU people ‘busy’. What a waste of time and money. I’m sure we have our own electrical standards to ensure product safety and I would rather the producers produced safe appliances and let the public decide for themselves whether they want to buy a more (or less) powerful machine.

What is the EU doing? Giving money away for dubious reasons (apparently) ..

Yep, your hard earned cash is being redistributed by the EU to various worthy causes, such as these from 2010. http://archive.openeurope.org.uk/Content/documents/Pdfs/top50euwaste2010.pdf