The Mind User's Prayer

"This is my Mind. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

"My mind is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

"My mind, without me, is useless.
Without my mind, I am useless.
I must use my mind true.
I must think straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me.
I must outthink him before he hurts or destroys me.
I will ...

"My mind and myself know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, nor the smoke we make.
We know that it is the thinking that counts.
We will hit ...

"My mind is human, even as I, because it is my life.
Thus, I will learn it as a brother.
I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its senses and its folds.
I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage as I will ever guard my legs, my arms, my eyes and my heart against damage.
I will keep my mind clean and ready.
We will become part of each other.
We will ...

"Before Reason, I swear this creed.
My mind and myself are the defenders of Reason.
We are the masters of our enemies - fear, despair, unchallenged prejudice, bigotry and dogma.
We are the saviors of my life.

"So be it, until victory belongs to Reason, and there is no enemy. Only peace!"

The First Page

On the Citizens of the Imperium forum, I just encountered a thread called "The First Page." The premise is simple. Post the first page of a Traveller novel.

So here below is my effort: the first page of a possible Traveller novel called Into The Dark.

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So this, thought Hanuman Ananda Johnston, is the future. We come all the way out here, and where we settle we put up houses with red brick walls and uPVC windows and kiln-fired ceramic tiles.

Adjusting his knapsack and blinking to keep his prescription liquid contacts fresh, Hanuman shrugged and exited the semi-detached house. A short walk down the path, and he was outside of the house's little safety net and on the street.

Around Hanuman were all the other identikit little houses, each containing their own tiny families, each with their own ridiculous plans and dreams, and their ambitions which would forever go unfulfilled for want of looking up.

When do we stop wandering? he thought. When do we put away our hopes and our fears, and wrap ourselves in the daily commute and the nine-to-five grind in a cubicle, and worries about debt and pathetic neighbourly rivalries, and affairs with next door's wife?

He glanced up at the morning sky. Why, he thought, do we turn our back on the stars?

Hanuman had looked up at the stars since he'd been a little boy. He'd heard that his family had once been wanderers; outcasts from the cradles of Humanity. Terra. Vland. Hell, there was even a rumour that one of Hanuman's ancestors may have even been Zhodani, a nomad among his people who'd stumbled into this universe of lies and treachery and hidden thoughts and motives ... and who'd survived despite this, long enough to breed at some point.

A gentle rain began to fall about Hanuman as he turned to walk up along the road. At the end of the boulevard was the main thoroughfare, and the omnibus that would take him to the capital. Somewhere on the wrong side of the capital, he knew, was Startown, between civilisation and the Starport; and it was there, in some seedy dive called The Boots Covered In Stardust, that he was to meet the crew of the ship that was going to take him away from this place and bring him to the stars in which he craved to wander.

Just once, just before Mr Harrison's place, he turned back to look at the entrance of his old house one last time, just before that particular location in the road where he'd calculated that the curvature of the avenue broke his line of sight. One step past this point, and he would no longer see the old house.

Hanuman realised that, once he could no longer see this place, he would never again come back to it. There was no point in returning any more. He'd done all the caring for his old Dad that he would ever do.

'Goodbye, Dad,' he whispered, as he watched the mourners beginning to gather. It had been a long life, and a good one, and his Dad had not been alone at the end; but if his Dad had done anything good for Hanuman, it was to remind him of where Hanuman's truest destiny lay: and it wasn't here, in this tree-lined avenue on this colony world, ensnared in its petty dreams of status and money and aspirations, and wondering what the neighbours would think.

Hanuman sighed and let go of the last ties that held him here. Turning, tears blurring his prescription liquid contacts, he walked away from his old life and onwards towards his new one.

Hanuman only hoped that the Captain of the Mariposa would be understanding, in the way his Dad had not been when Hanuman had brought home his lover Michael to show him ...

Atheism Question

I heard this line trotted out yet again on Sunday just gone, when the topic of atheism turned up in a TV debate program.

There was this Christian mouthpiece who trotted out this line; "But Pol Pot and Mao Tse Tung and Stalin were atheists, and they ran atheistic countries," and so on.

What's your response to this tired old attack?

Mine is "Two points with which I'll refute your argument. Firstly, they weren't atheistic nations. They were run like cults of personality centered on worshipping the dictators. Just like any religious regime, from the Vatican to Jonestown, questioning authority meant a swift and brutal death, just as if you were questioning the Pope's authority in days gone by.

"Secondly, atheists were even more persecuted in countries such as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, precisely because they questioned - even if they never seemed to want to question their leaders' authority, they were persecuted simply because they could turn their attentions to that forbidden question at any time."

I'd also like, at some point, to mention two further things if any discussion on atheism crops up.

Firstly, that atheism doesn't risk an acrimonious schism on the issue of gay atheists, or gay marriage within atheism.

Secondly, that the line "there are no atheists in foxholes" does not include the innumerable young men who, having survived the horror of those foxholes, saw their naive faith in God destroyed by what they had witnessed.

This is what I can argue, should the debate arise again. Anyone else want to comment?

Teletext Letters Page, Today

Today's Tele-Texts comments page has, as one of its two subjects, the torture inquiry - and whether or not we need one. I look at this page, and I see an awful lot of highly bigoted comments against holding an Iraq inquiry, along the lines of:-

"In war sometimes persuasion is needed to save many lives. The terrorists don't care what methods they use, so no inquiry." - Flashy, Wexford

"I'm afraid the welfare of terrorists and terrorist suspects is of no concern to me whatsoever." - Jean, Knottingley

"Why are people so worried about the alleged torture of people who want to torture, maim and kill us?" - Donna, Stroud

"Terrorists deserve no compassion whatsoever." - Jane, Croydon

"Terrorists deserve all they get. They torture and kill their victims without any regard for their human rights. Why does the government show such pity on these monsters? Perhaps they should look into why these terrorists hate and despise us so much." - Richard, Nottingham

(I suspect these posts could all have come from one person texting from half a dozen different mobile phones, but there you have it)

And this is my statement:-

"Yes, we need an inquiry. We need to know if a morally turpid government and people have turned our back on ethical principles which our forefathers fought to enshrine in law.

"Other nations may torture, but we British must not because we are supposed to hold the high ground. If we lose this, we become no different than a rogue state ourselves."

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I fear we have already lost that cherished status some years ago. But I do need to remind people of what our forebears fought for, and later generations sold off for Nintendo Wiis and cheap bananas.

Now here's the thing, before we go much further. Let's play a game. Let's take all the instances of the word "terrorist" in the rants above, and swap them for any other single word. It's a simple game. Just copy and paste into your word processor, then do a search / replace action on it.

Let's replace the word "terrorist" with the following word, then replace that word with the next one, and so on.

Let's start with ...

Paedophile

Pole

Romani

Pagan

Atheist

Muslim

Black

Gay

Jew

See what I mean? With each replacement word, the inherent bigotry becomes ever clearer.

People in my family tree fought to excise this cancer from British society. It would appear to have since relapsed, and in fact thoroughly metastasised.