I've been reading Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality lately, to distract myself from writing my very first mathematical paper--not for publication by any means, but for what they call my "general exam" in the PhD programme, sort of a teaser for my eventual thesis...
(Tangentially, as I was poking around for some links for this posting, I happened across this, which I thought looked quite pleasant, although I don't know if Penrose would approve.)
I've also been reading a translation of Giordano Bruno's Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante to distract me from that, as an 1100-page tome devoted to building up the conceptual framework of relativity and quantum field theory from basic mathematics by way of principal bundle connections and spinors is not exactly tea and cakes. Even with pictures. I think Bruno and I have a lot in common. Like a vitriolic hatred of Calvinists.
As I was reading through Penrose's account of supergravity I came across a most charming piece of terminology, with regards to supermanifolds, which, I confess, are something I do not understand. People have tried to explain them to me in the past, but they've been geometers, and by and large I find geometryspeak about as comprehensible as I find Czech, although much less sexy. One of the quite engaging things about Penrose is that, like a good relativity theorist, he's very focussed on visualising things. (Hence the pictures.) As a topologist, I respect that. Proof by picture is my favourite proof technique of all, though of course I've got to keep that from my students until I've succeeded in pounding the habits of rigourous argument into their perky heads, so as not to lead them into mathematical vice. Anyhow, Penrose had another dandy picture for supermanifolds, which I think was inspired by Ashtekar, though don't hold me to that. Think of a supermanifold as just a plain old workaday manifold M embedded in some higher-dimensional M': the "super" part is that, in addition to all the coordinates on M, we now allow ourselves to imagine we have access to a set of 1-forms on M', restricted to M, which can also act as a sort of coordinates. The ordinary manifoldy part of a super-quantity, Penrose says, is sometimes called the "body", while the super-duper-lovey-dovey-1-formy part is called the "soul".
This may be the single most whimsically apt piece of terminology I've ever encountered. That's right up there on my list of favourite technical terms with "top" and "bottom" as names for quarks, clear proof either that theoretical physicists don't get out often enough, or are better than I am at keeping a straight face.
Anyhow, the point of all this is: I hate God. In fact, I originally thought of titling this post "God vs. Hog: There Can Be Only One". I've been meaning to write some kind of god-hating post since last week, after my last distraction: Richard Dawkins' recent Channel 4 project, The Root of All Evil?, coming in two installments, The God Delusion and The Virus of Faith. Some kind soul has put the whole thing up on Google Video, and I have to say I just loved this to death. Dawkins is a man who clearly hates God just as much as I do. It's really quite breathtaking to watch him go at it; he's so, well, rude! Watching him talk to clergymen and American evangelicals with funny mouths and suchlike fuckos...He's extremely confrontational and tetchy, and it's probably just his very cultivated and pleasant voice and his not being American that save him from being punched in the mouth. His face says "How on Earth can you possibly excuse being so devotedly foolish, you mendacious little shitter?" while his lips say...well, almost the same, really. But they say it Britishly. (Have you noticed that the British have a way of speaking while cross that Americans can't seem to duplicate?) Brilliant editing, too. He chooses all the very best bits of footage to use in the documentary, the bits of evangelical pastors chanting 'OBEY! OBEY! OBEY!' like Daleks at their gibbering flock and suchlike.
(That's one of the best pieces, by the way, of Russell Davies' revival of Doctor Who, if you ask me: the Daleks as insane religious fanatics, out to atom-bomb the Earth until it resembles a Daleky Paradise. Much like neocons, only more honest.)
Anyhow, Dawkins is, like P. Z. Myers and myself, a naughty atheist: not a live-and-let-live kind of atheist of the sort who might make for good PR or community outreach, but one of the honest ones who's willing to say what, deep down, serious atheists really think: religion is completely fucktarded. I love the Internet; before it came along, I thought I was the only one.
This brings us to an interesting question: what makes me so damn cranky as far as religion goes? Why can't I live and let live? I was asked about this at a math picnic recently, and I've been pondering it since...
It's not down to my upbringing. My atheism is not the fiery conviction of the convert: I have never had even the most tenuous of religious convictions. My mother turned her back on the Catholic Church (go Mom!) and my father was a Methodist in only the most technical of senses, and I never received any religious instruction at all, so far as I can recall. My first exposure to Christianity that left any kind of impression was a child's book of Bible stories a relative gave me one year; unfortunately for them, I had already been to the public library and found a child's book recounting the myth of Osiris, although it left out the bit where a fish ate his dick. Once you've shown a kid that, and some big shiny books full of astronomical photographs and Carl Sagan's speculations about Jovian life, Christianity just doesn't have a chance. It took me years more to even realise that some people took this whole "God" thing seriously. I thought it was some kind of joke! Can you blame me? I mean, how can anyone take a big beardy git in the sky as seriously as the planet Saturn? Saturn is really real. It's very photogenic, in fact. Are there photos of the beardy sky git? Does he have an impressive system of rings and a large methane-shrouded satellite? I think not.
Anyhow, as you can imagine, when it came time for a frank exchange of theological views with my peers and classmates, I found myself saddled with the nickname "Lucifer" and was informed I was going to Hell. (The fools. Little do they know my mummified corpse will endure through eternity, periodically rising from the sarcophagus to terrorize archaeologists and canoodling virgins in parked cars with a wooden dildo. For Osiris is with me!)
This was actually rather fun, I thought. Clearly, these religious folks were releasing me from my obligation as a nice-ish person to treat them civilly, which I honestly tried to do at first. So I gained a new hobby, which I have enjoyed for many years now: god-bashing. It's great fun, and so easy. And, of course, rude. A reasoned and level-headed exchange of views on matters theological, without invective and abuse, simply isn't worth the effort. There are no arguments for the existence of God or the supernatural that stand up to even a moment's thought. At least, there are none I've ever encountered or even heard rumoured. At this point, while I can't totally rule out the possibility that there might, just might, be a convincing one out there somewhere, the evidence suggests this is slightly less probable than Tobey Maguire e-mailing me photos of his bum. (Epsilon, in other words, which we can take to be arbitrarily close to zero.) No, the only reason to talk about it at all is to mock the credulous and dogmatic. I think that, in many cases, this is perfectly justified: lots of them are just gagging for it. And this was years, many many long long years, before I ever dreamt of coming out. Long before I even suspected myself what a complete and utter homosexual I am.
Anyone who brings up Hell or damnation or the Devil with a straight face immediately abrogates any right they may have had to be treated with civility and politeness. They are flaming arsecandles, sirs and madams, arsecandles and nothing more! Honestly, how vile and pernicious a concept is Hell? Eternal torment without hope of relief, for worshipping the wrong god or loving the wrong person? Or eating the wrong shellfish? Or using a condom, for cock's sake? The Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists are running protection rackets: "Nice soul you've got there. Looks a little flammable, though. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it, if you know what I mean." No better than the Mormons, who in turn are nothing but the 19th century's Scientologists. "Go fist yourself fuckwards" isn't one tenth, not one billionth, as hostile and offensive as the merest whiff of the old brimstone. It merely expresses in a firm yet measured tone that I think such people are making grave errors of judgement with considerable negative repercussions for the world we share. Putting it in milder language simply wouldn't do the sentiment justice, not given the palpable harm such forms of religion do to humanity.
And that is why I refer to the Pope as a cock-thumbed Palpatinish goiter, and why Father Dougal Maguire is one of the greatest characters in the history of fiction.
Posted by aloysius at June 28, 2006 11:05 PM |