Directory of Lost Causes

How can I be deluded? I am Richard Dawkins.

Oh, hang on, or am I Quentin S. Crisp?

Justin Isis has started this hilarious, violent, thrilling, romantic and deeply moving thread on Richard Dawkins's website. He invited me to join in, but I'm afraid my contributions have been feeble so far. Anyway, please do feel free to join in yourselves. The more, the merrier, as they say.

[Edit. Guess what. Justin and I have been told to "fuck off" on the Dawkins forums. Ha ha. What a bunch of wankers!... Apology now offered and accepted and apology offered in return (here) for remarks such as 'wankers'.]

I'm coming to see this blog more and more as an actual medical condition.

I'm pretty sure that no one believes me when I say I hate my blog, because the obvious response to that is to say, "Well, why do you carry on writing it, then?" And the obvious response to that response is, "Because I hate it." It's what's known as digging yourself into a hole. Or perhaps as having enough rope to hang yourself.



Actually, there are times I do like my blog, but a lot of the time I find myself thinking, "What on Earth am I doing? I'll have to patch up the damage I've done by writing another blog post." And then I have to patch up the patches and so on.

But I've learnt that there's no use in fighting my condition. I have to use reverse psychology, if I can. Or aikido, perhaps - using the power of the enemy against them. If I have a twitch in my arm that won't stop, perhaps the best thing to do is to become a boxer, so that the twitch has a reason to be, and can become useful and healthy.

It seems like I have conflicting urges. On the one hand I want to explain myself, but on the other hand, I really, really don't. I don't want to be misunderstood, and I do want to be liked, but the first is inevitable, and the second is simply out of my hands. Besides, if I really am to utilise something like reverse psychology on my condition, then I should really revel in being misunderstood. There is a kind of freedom in it, after all. Not only does it free you from other people. It can also free you from yourself.

I do actually feel I'm changing as a person, but those changes - even if I wanted to - are impossible to explain. Perhaps I'm not changing, anyway, except in so far as everyone is changing as they age and decay towards final dissolution. I think what's happening to me is more than that, though. But it can't be put into words. It sometimes seems like most of the problems in the world are created by people believing that the word for something is the thing itself, or, for instance, believing that words like 'Allah' and 'God', because they are different words, indicate two different things. Materialism is just such another example of moronic faith in the literal meaning of words, to believe that 'physical' and 'spiritual', because they are separate words, are actually separate things. I don't trust words, myself.

Perhaps it's strange that I don't trust words, considering the fact that I'm a writer. Again, it's because I'm a writer that I don't trust words. I know very well what slippery devils they are.



In the comments section of a recent blog entry I wrote:

You don't need religion.

Well, this is true. As far as words ever are true. Which is not very far, actually. And because it's not very far, I grew uncomfortable with the statement, and had to qualify it. And then I grew uncomfortable with my qualification, but I didn't qualify that, because the whole thing is never-ending, especially if you think that words can somehow contain the truth, which has been the mistake of Western philosophy for thousands of years. What you're left with is digging yourself into a hole. Giving yourself enough rope to hang yourself.

So, what do I see as the problems or untruths in the statement above? Well, again, to try and explain that, I am going to have to commit some degree of untruth in a different direction. Let's start with what's good or true about the statement, which centres on the word 'need'. No, it's true, you don't need religion, but... Here come the qualifications. You don't need me to tell you you don't need religion, either. More than that, the existence of religion might not be a question of need, anyway, if it's a naturally arising phenomenon. I don't need to choose certain clothes in accordance with my taste, but I do it anyway, because it's natural to do so. Then there come problems with the meaning of the word 'religion'. How far are we going to take this? I suppose I would say that if one's religion has about it something of seeking - seeking to find God, seeking the truth, seeking to convert others in order to build Heaven on Earth etcetera - then no one really needs that. There's something a bit dysfunctional about that. However, a religion might be more to do simply with living than with seeking. It might be a matter of thanking the earth for the food it has given you. That's nothing to do with seeking anything. It's just the way you live. I suppose that I personally, in this sense, have far more sympathy with animistic religions that seem very much 'grass roots' (perhaps even literally so), than with monotheistic religions, which became 'organised', so that we got the dreaded 'organised religions'. I haven't entirely made my mind up, however, whether Christianity (one of those monotheisms) was good until it got fucked up, or whether it was always, inevitably going to get fucked up because of some germ of fanaticism contained within its original inspiration. If we assume for the moment, however, that it was a good thing to start with, then it seems to me it probably went wrong with Saint Paul, who was a cunt. (Excellent, I was wondering this morning who the next person to get called a cunt on my blog would be, after Dawkins, and now I know. It's Saint Paul. Excellent!) Anyway, for a succinct little take on why Saint Paul fucked everything up, you can read this interesting little sketch by Kahlil Gibran. (I wonder whether 'not' in the last line is a typo, and it should have been 'now'? I've got a copy of the book somewhere, but not with me.)

See, I've written two paragraphs since quoting my original statement about not needing religion, in order to qualify that statement, and I've hardly even begun to say all the things that need to be said in order to qualify it properly. Sometimes such qualifications can be great and interesting and elucidating (do I mean 'illuminating'?), but other times they can just make misunderstandings worse, or, more often, they can be a mixture of both. This is the problem with language again. And so, more and more, I feel like just leaving statements in simple form, such as 'Richard Dawkins is a cunt', and just letting people unpack them and see what truth or untruth is in there. And I feel almost as patronising as Richard Dawkins himself (who defines the genre) just in having explained the very little that I have in this post.

I don't hate Dawkins, by the way. Not at the moment, and not in the same way that I do, say, Ray Kurzweil, or Tony Blair. I just think he's incredibly arrogant and misguided and therefore irritating as all hell. And other stuff like that that I can't be bothered to go into. He does seem to suffer, too, from a literal-mindedness when it comes to the meaning of words. For instance, in one book (I don't have it here, so this won't be verbatim), he claims that sycamore seeds (or some other type of seed, can't remember) are "literally" floppy disks. No, they're not, Dawkins. I think this is your literal-mindedness coming out here bigtime. Floppy disks are floppy disks. Sycamore seeds are sycamore seeds. I'm sure that he really believes that imposing the word 'floppy disk' on the thing also referred to as 'sycamore seed', actually makes the latter into the former. He is a cretin.

This literal-mindedness (the mark of a truly shallow man) also comes out in his treatment of religion. In The God Delusion, for instance, he talks about Einstein's use of the word 'God'. First of all, he makes one of his many arrogant and patronising assumptions - the assumption that he understands the sense in which Einstein meant the word better than anyone else does. Naturally, because Einstein is a scientist with a good reputation, Dawkins 'knows' that Einstein's meaning when he said 'God', as in "God doesn't play dice" (or whatever it was), and so on, fits in perfectly well with Dawkins's own philosophy. That's what a cunt this man is. He has to make sure that everything you say and think agrees with his own philosophy, whether you like it or not. "Oh no, Einstein, I think you'll find that what you're trying to say is that you agree with me completely, and I'll speak for you now, if you don't mind, and there's nothing you can do about it anyway, because you're dead." Now, I actually forget what Dawkins suggested Einstein meant by the word (I think he skirted round the issue a bit and expressed it negatively by saying, "He didn't actually mean God" and stuff like that), but what I do remember is that he called this use of the word 'God', by scientists and so on "an intellectual betrayal". In other words, Dawkins cannot stand the idea that a word might have more than one meaning, and specifically, that it might have meanings other than those that he assigns to it. He cannot tolerate ambiguity. He cannot tolerate anything that is not literal. He cannot tolerate anything other than his own one-dimensional thinking. And, of course, in the case of Einstein, even supposing he happens to be right in his presumptuousness about what Einstein meant by the word 'God', he completely ignores things like the following quote:

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Anyway, as I said, I don't hate Richard Dawkins, yet, even if he is a cunt, because today, and for the last few days, I kind of feel that everyone is just trying to do what they think is right, anyway. Or are they?

Dawkins probably is, but there are some people, some people out there...

Jay Gould, it seems, once said, "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." Now there was a real cunt. I spit on his grave. In fact, I hate business generally. I am aware of one or two businesses that are being run pretty ethically and in an enlightened manner, but for the most part business is a concatenation of all the foulest aspects of the male psyche. I want to see businessmen destroyed. I want to see CEOs of banks in the gutter, where we can line up to kick them. And it's coming. Make no mistake, it's coming.

Some people are shits.

That's another quote. That one's from William Burroughs. The shits, it seems, are generally at the top, where we can't reach or even see them. I do like to keep an open mind, but I tend to think that people like George Bush (all right, so we can see him), who finds his "base" in "the haves and the have-mores", probably isn't just doing the best that he can, and probably is just a shit. Burroughs advocated (how seriously I can't say), a policy of 'shiticide' - "Slaughter the shits of the world". I wonder if that would work? I wonder, if we could get a reliable list of these shits, whether their removal would do the trick, and finally human beings could get on with each other in peace? Burroughs also refers to these shits as 'Venusians' (no, not literally, Dawkins, you cretin), by which term, I believe, he intends to make a deliberate dehumanising distinction. As I've said, I do like to keep an open mind if I can, and he may well be right about this. It could be that the only problem we humans really have, if we are, indeed, all just trying to do the best we can, is that we're being manipulated and screwed over by a few shitty Venusians at the top. Well, it's worth thinking about, anyway.

And well, as for me, and the way in which I am 'doing my best'... to be honest, I can't really explain. I feel quite lost a lot of the time. I suppose I feel like the whole world is going to change in about two years, and I want to write and publish the fifty million ideas I have for novels before then, while they are still relevant, since we won't recognise the world afterwards, but then again, what's the point? I can feel pretty bitter about this sometimes. I'm sure that in some ways my fiction is pretty shit, but when I read the other stuff that's getting published, I just begin to feel like publishers are a load of cunts. They really should be lining up to publish my stuff. They should be asking me, on a regular basis, whether I have anything new for them.



I've never actually had a single second of fulfilment in my entire existence. I mean, I'm not complaining, really. Well, obviously I am a bit, but I know plenty of people have had worse lives than mine. I just don't understand why we're given dreams and then never allowed to live them. That's not how I'd make the universe if I were God:

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits---and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

That, of course, is from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

But, afflicted as I am with various undesirable conditions, such as this blog, I feel that I am caring less and less. My afflictions amuse me more now than they did. There's much more I meant to say here, but I can't remember what it was, and I'm sure it doesn't matter. You wouldn't understand, anyway, and I don't know if I even want you to. And I'm not afraid of dying.

Gains my sympathy somewhere in the middle and loses it again by the end. Hmmm, incredibly boring sensible assumptions... Ho well.