So who hates Noel Edmunds? Of course you do, he's a quite unbelievably irritating little fuck, (and he murdered Clive Anderson ;) ) It is a true testament then, to the format of his new show, Deal Or No Deal, that I find myself compelled to regular viewing.

The simplicity of the idea is great and allows for a practically endless number unique games all with some guaranteed degree of tension. I find it impossible not to look at the game mathematically and so what really fascinates me about it are the weird and wonderful little belief systems the participants build up.

It’s easy to get a bit carried away with the whole scientific view and scoff at the rituals and techniques employed. Doing this actually denies the very logical reasoning I felt so smug about in the first place however.

The point is that it makes no difference what order the contestant chooses to open the boxes in, so going through a whole theatrical rigmarole is actually just as valid an effective as picking the numbers out of a hat.

Now regular readers will be familiar with my views on organised religion.(1) Simply put, religious people are psychopaths. This isn’t meant as an insult, or even necessarily as a criticism, it’s just that my understanding of the word psychopath is that it describes a person who is unable to distinguish reality from fantasy.

To be fair I don’t think we actually have a choice about doing this kind of thing, it seems to be inherently in our nature. This said, it’s not really a tenable position to state that such systems are all bad is it? To paraphrase the scandalous yet blatantly obvious smack message in Trainspotting, there must be some upside to religion otherwise why would people do it?

Domestic chores are rubbish. I mean can I understand people wanting things clean and tidy, but who actually wants to do the cleaning and tidying itself? Now, uncharacteristically perhaps, let’s present a couple of extreme opposites.

Both a strict, regimented, military routine and sticking on some loud music and dancing about like a fool can have the exact same effect on domestic chores. The chores need doing, it’s a practical necessity to maintain your standard of life, but by losing yourself inside some structured system you can make the housework less of a chore, (crap pun definitely intended, and I don‘t care! :>> )

The reason I chose the to go with two there, instead of my habitually irrational obsession with three, was simply to demonstrate that the system itself really doesn’t matter, it’s what it does for you that counts. I’ve just realised that anyone with kids probably knows exactly what I’m talking about. This just the whole, ‘make a game of it’ thing when you want them to do something they don’t want to isn’t it?

Anyway, living together in peace and harmony, forgiving, tolerating and co-operating are all practical necessities to maintain a the highest quality of life we’re capable of. Right now we’re not meeting those necessities so the vast majority of us live lives that fall obscenely short of the standards we, as a race, are capable of providing for ourselves.

Why aren’t we meeting them? Because it’s fucking hard! Doing the right thing and building a better world may well be noble and exciting but it’s also a whole lot of hard graft. Why not, then , use structured systems to make the journey feel a little less bumpy?

So religions are brilliant ideas right? Well no, despite the reasoning above I haven’t shifted positions on that one. Although I’ll admit there’s nothing wrong with these systems in principle, there is a very real danger associated with their employment.

Now I’ve been exploring this concept recently and have found it a bit tricky so you’ll forgive me if I’m not entirely crystal. Perhaps a metaphor would be the best way to start:

Some great leader leads a people to greatness and, on his deathbed, writes a simple paragraph that will guide the masses through an uncertain future. Skip forward a century or two and the people are worshipping the shapes of the marks upon the paper having forgotten what they actually mean.

In the same way that the book is not important, it’s the thought held within it that is precious; belief systems themselves are empty and meaningless, it is only their practical impact that gives them any value. A good friend of mine is convinced, and I agree, that all the conventions of the major religions, such as not eating pork for example, stem from 100% practical origins.

I often find myself at work amidst the most frustratingly ludicrous arguments, Both sides are speaking English but because they each have subtly different definitions of the words their using they dance round in semantic circles until the vein in my head pops and I kill all three of us. (That hasn’t actually happened yet but one day I’m telling you...)

It doesn’t matter! Oh for fucks sake how little it matters!

The value of a religion has nothing to do with how snazzy the accepted dress is or how effective the breathing techniques to get you high(2) are. The only measure is the behaviour of the faithful towards each other and the rest of us.

Having got this far I was struck by how different some belief systems appeared when looked at in this way. Sun worship was the example I came to first, the archetype of a ‘primitive’ and ‘naive’ belief system. I managed to shrug off society’s conditioning for a moment and look at this this thing from a new angle, ie. no longer down my nose.

What you have is a system centred around one thing that every single human being on the planet can instantly relate to, something that neither geography, history or any other high school department can divide or overcome.

Now thanks to the wonders of modern science we have skyscrapers and SUVs and 20 million TV channels. We have also managed to study and classify our environment in an ordered fashion so as to finally understand how it all works.

It turns out that energy just moves about and changes form, like through food chains or weather systems. Apart from a some negligible heat and motion from our still molten core, there we have only one source of energy: Sol, our sun.

Now worshipping the sun, I suspect, could also make it much easier to see yourself as a deeply connected part of the ecosystem and make it easier to understand that neglecting or actively wrecking the natural world is the same as hurting yourself.

As you might expect there’s a third side to this post. Beyond the pitfall of mistaking your belief system for reality lies a much deeper drop. Once you have a group of people locked into a routine the eggs of their beliefs are packed neatly into one tight little basket.

Suddenly it becomes very easy for some unscrupulous and/or arrogant bastard, (and there’s always at least one,) to turn the whole thing into a social control mechanism, a power structure with them sat at the top, getting fat in a dress and a silly fucking hat.(3) People can’t do this to you if your belief system is purely your own.

Ever since I read “Island” by Aldous Huxley, which I highly recommend by the way, I’ve been working on the blueprints for a new society, not perfect, just loads better. There are, literally, an infinite number of factors to consider within such a task so I’ve been taking my time and just considering things as they come to me.

Kicking some virtual ass on the XBOX earlier I was thinking about this post and about my slightly ambitious, Huxley inspired project when I had a sudden and sickening flash. One of the cornerstones I’m currently still moulding is a culture of reasoned understanding. This would basically involved people being furnished with the skills to communicate, evaluate and appreciate ideas.

When things need to be done they are agreed upon because all parties concerned understand the overall impact and share commonly agreed goals. People work harder, with more enthusiasm and passion because they believe in and are happy with what they doing. What If I could just work out a way to do that, I thought, some system by which that could be made the norm there’d be nothing we couldn’t achieve.

The flash, both sudden and sickening, was that if such a system could be created it could probably be abused. The scary thing is that were that to happen there could be no resistance, the people would not realise they were being manipulated and would happily carry out the will of the damn elite.(4)

Oppenheimer, the scientist whose work was used to build the first atomic bombs, ended up wishing he’d never looked down a microscope and I reckon I’d probably curse the day I picked up a pen if an idea I wrote led to endless slavery for the human race, that’d be fair.

It’s all alright though, all I need to do is think in some safeguards here and there. And that the point really isn’t it? The systems through which we live our lives are ours to design, redesign and implement as we see fit.

Some people think god, a being with an apparent presence but no physical form, created man in his own image, an identical looking being but with a solid physical form. Sounds to me like someone needs to explain the concept of what I would call a ‘mirror’ to these guys.

footnotes

(1) note the word organised, I think it’s in the interests of our entire race that individuals explore themselves in a ‘spiritual’ manner, whatever that may mean for them; I am convinced that it is far easier to do this without blindly submitting to what is basically nothing more than social control mechanism,

(2) all religions have these, mantras and hymns baby, they fuck you up! basically they’re just ways of getting you to breath out more than you breath which changes the amount of CO2 in your blood and gets you high, today’s church/mosque/synagogue/temple is yesteryear’s crack den, nice huh?

(3) my silly hats observation: for some reason that I have yet to fully grasp, the whole of human military and religious and political history seems to revolve around silly hats, and in particular which are worn by whom,

(4) there’s always an elite and elitism is at the heart of pretty much everything bad in the world, we will never be free to realise our potential while elites exist,