the other side of the mountain

The down side to being an atheist is that I often end up working on religious holidays when my supposedly devout colleagues are happily skiving off at home or on the beach. Nevertheless, I am actually quite content with the dearth of deities+ in my life and up until recently, I have been happy to let those with a spiritual bent go off and do their own thing, provided that the favour was returned.

However, for a growing number of infidels – including such worthies as Richard Dawkins – tolerance of religion is simply not an option any more. In essence, they have taken the stance that if you know something is fundamentally++ flawed, then sticking your thumb up your arse and looking the other way “out of respect” for someone else’s erroneous beliefs is a total cop-out.

Even though I recognise the urgent necessity of bringing unbelief to the non-heathen and eradicating religion, it’s a task which has “uphill struggle” written all over it. I mean, nobody ever gave up smoking just because someone told them it was unhealthy, so trying to persuade people that they are praying to figments of their imagination will be no mean feat.

And before anyone pops an artery over this, consider for a moment what sort of world it would be if we showed respect to people who believed passionately in Apartheid, Nazism, Slavery… need I go on?

+ i.e. imaginary friends

++ I just crack myself up sometimes

Some days it’s difficult not to conclude that the default setting for the human race is “brain damaged”. Yesterday, my meetings to work done ratio hovered around 5:1+ by the time I left the office. The part that baffles me is that despite the hefty weight of precedent, people still go into meetings expecting to achieve something useful. Perhaps “brain damaged” is too harsh a description and “inexplicably optimistic” would be more accurate.

I was idly ruminating on this during one of yesterday’s epic get-togethers. I can’t quite recall which meeting it was, but I do remember that I’d been busy with a rather intricate doodle featuring Giger’s Alien eating the project manager’s brain++. Anyway, it occurred to me that you can pretty much herd everyone in the entire world into either the optimist or pessimist corral, but the really weird thing is that people usually think they’re in the other camp.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but optimism or pessimism isn’t something that truly happens on a conscious level. For example, consider someone who has had to wait for over half an hour at the bank because there’s (of course) only one teller on duty at lunch time. If this person responds to the experience with ” well, that wasn’t too bad”, then he or she is at heart a pessimist, because they were honestly expecting things to be worse. Conversely, it is often the individual who bitches and whines bitterly about the crap service who harbours the optimistic hope that the line would move more quickly.

So remember – just because you’re cynical doesn’t mean that you aren’t an unwitting optimist.

+ and that excludes all the time I spent screwing around online.

++ it was a very small and unsatisfying snack.