going deeper

This Christmas, forty years ago, three men from this planet orbited the moon.

And that’s a pretty special thing. In fact, it’s downright impressive. And the whole NASA thing has been done to death and I’m not going to go a lot further on it, but think of this: it was the 1960’s…computers could barely add, The Beatles were over-rated (when there were other, better bands around) and they were also designing Concorde.

And we put a man on the moon.

And we produced an airplane which could carry one hundred people in luxury at twice the speed of sound. Forty years ago! What have we done since?

I know people for whom the moon landings weren’t much of an issue and that’s all well and good, because the moon missions either got to you or they didn’t, but I still wonder how mankind’s most astonishing achievement passed so many people by. They made Apollo 13 in the ’90’s because it was thing thing to do then: make an action movie - that it happened to be true was beside the point and Apollo 13, had it been a lunar landing, would have been nothing more than a paragraph in the achievements of mankind. But there is a line in that movie where Tom Hanks, playing Jim Lovell says, “We just decided to go!” I don’t know if Lovell ever said that…I’ve had the occasional e-mail from Jim Lovell and he’s never mentioned it…probably because I never asked him.

But it’s true. There was nothing more to it than deciding to do it.

The technology was primitive, but the physics were a constant - they only ever really needed computers to follow set rules.  I’ll bet Neil Armstrong positively spat when ads for dual and quad-core processors came on t.v.

And let’s not get into the whole conspiracy thing: we went to the moon and that’s it. Charles Duke said it best: “We went to the moon nine times; why would we fake it nine times?!”

We all know that the Americans did it, but the general feeling around the globe ever since has been that We did it.

Now why would We think that?

So if the moon landings didn’t get you, then Concorde must have. Everyone knew Concorde.

For a start, it was beautiful.

For seconds, it was fast.

For thirds, it was primitive and it was from the ’60’s.

Which all brings me back to the sixties…nothing special really: the t.v. progamming was rigid and atrocious, The Beatles were akin to the devil, The Rolling Stones were a lot worse and all because socially, it was a time of change. There were rules, and the rules were being broken in society by the likes of The Beatles and the Stones.

And here’s a good thing: The Stones are better than The Beatles, and when it comes to being a band and a real talented group of songwriters and musicians, Pink Floyd (who were around at that time) were waaay better than both! And somehow it was seen that they were challenging society.

But here’s a better thing…when John Fitzgerald Kennedy said to the American people that he believed they should put aan on the moon, he didn’t just say we’re going, he said let’s be more than what we think we are. And that was an awesome statement. He really was saying “second star to the right and straight on ’til morning!” And Kennedy wasn’t a particularly great president; rumour has it he wasn’t much of a man either.

Which leads me neatly to my next point…

We are human beings. And we believe in things; some of us don’t believe in things and what I’m driving at is theism and atheism - but it’s more than that.

We have created the cushion of organised religion, which is, at it’s most basic distillation, membership of a club. I am a member of the Catholic Club; we’re not the most popular band of brothers, but there you have it. The fact that I don’t have a membership card in my pocket, or attend regular meeting doesn’t change the fact that I am still a member. In this country (England) there is a different Club: it differs from my club in no regard other than that it’s Chairperson is a woman in a dress - as opposed to my Club whose Chairperson is a man in a dress. Oh yes, there is one other difference…my membership qualifies me as a potential Chairman of my club: I can wear that dress!

And this cushion of membership is founded upon a very simple tenet (for the most part - polytheists will have to wait for another blog!) We believe in One God…if you piss that God off, you will have to answer for it later.

So…you reach a dilemma.

If you read the Bible, you will find that God sent down fire and brimstone, a squadron of vengeful angels and a host of plagues upon people who displeased him. And he laid waste to the odd city here and there, turned people into salt and generally made life a bit unpleasant for all the people who happened to be living somewhere in the Middle East.

But here’s the thing; we are a lot worse now (morally speaking) than those poor old people with their goats ever were in the Old Testament.

It may be true. The Bible, that is. And here’s why….

I believe, and I’m told, it is very un-Catholic of me, that if we believe in a God, we do so on our own terms. If we believe in a God we have done so for two reasons:

1. There is life after death

2. If you ignore the rules, or continually screw over your kine…you die/and/or pay for it

To me, there is no death.

And there are people who say to me: “No there is no afterlife”

But there must be more to us than what you may feel:

Take this:

“How do you feel?”

“I feel awful”

“You feel awful, how…do you feel bad for yourself?

“Do you feel bad for another?

 ”Or do you just feel bad because it’easy for you to say so?

“Or has someone made you feel this way?”

 But really, we are us. We do things because we have free will.

And that’s whay we’re not dead yet.

Free Will = Fear!

Because I have chosen=I do not Know!

But the atheist cannot survive because….

The person who does not believe has nothing

the ayes have it

Now, I have never made a secret of the fact that mathematics isn’t one of my strong points; this doesn’t embarrass me, it doesn’t bother me and it’s certainly not something I regret. And this is not to say that I don’t “get” math - I don’t particularly want to “get” it! Given a good teacher, math made perfect sense to me, but that never made it apparent what the actual point was!

I realised at a pretty early age that my brain was leaning towards language and the written word.

Fair enough, some mathematical theorems turned out to have their uses. Take Pythagoras for example: he taught me that when driving somewhere, there’s no need to go ’round when you can go straight down the middle. Then again, I’ll bet Pythagoras never figured on one-way traffic systems, so in a sense, you can actually disprove that particular theorem vis a vis it’s practicality in the 21st century! And just to get that particular theorem to work, you had to multiply everything by itself and then add them up just to arrive at a conclusion which, although interesting enough, is actually pretty pointless when you can just drive down the middle - assuming you’re not in a one-way traffic system! And here’s something else: you definitely won’t be whipping out a calculator just to see if you’re actually going to save time or distance; and your satnav doesn’t particularly care either!

But recently, my thoughts have turned to what it was about math that never did it for me and what it was about language that did do it for me.  And here it is:

Math is an absolute and language isn’t. For example, 2+2=4; that’s it! That has always been it and that will always be it! Sure you can add a few zeros here and there and you end up with an exponential of the same numbers, but make no mistake - they are still the same numbers.

But language is a different kettle of fish. Take for example the word Gay: fifty years ago, it meant happy. Today, generally, it means something else entirely, but it still also means happy. So thirty years ago when Larry Grayson was saying “What a gay day!”, he meant one thing but was implying another. Those same thirty years ago, 2+2=4; pretty boring, huh? Hell, two million years ago, 2+2=4!

Mathematicians like to bang on about how mathematics is the only pure language and they may have a point there, but think of this: it’s always been around and these fine folk needed actual language to express it. So we humans now have a “language” which the math chaps call pure, but it wouldn’t exist without the spoken and written word. And to dispel any arguments before they arise, why else would they have spent so much time raping the Greek alphabet and a goodly portion of the English one to express some of their more complex riddles?

And you can’t tell a story using math…Physicists will say, “Yes. We can express the creation of the universe mathematically”; but if you choose to believe in such stuff, the bible does it somewhat more eloquently. And Stephen King would have never had quite the impact he has had if, in ‘Salem’s Lot, he had chosen to describe Ben Mears pounding a stake through a vampire’s heart as an equation outlining the conservation of momentum!

It boils down to this: they say eskimos have about fifty words for snow, I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that I can say I’m telling a lie in quite a few different ways, or that I can say yes, or aye to confirm assent. 2+2 will always be 4.

And let me tell you this: 2-2=0, or put in English: two minus two equals nothing. If I had a choice of saying yes as a “1″ or an “aye”, the ayes will aways have it.