MG has been bemoaning his lot (again!); in every email I get from him, he can't resist putting in some reference to how bad life is! The latest whinge, and it's not a whinge really because he likes helping people, is how he seems to be becoming a 'handyman' not just for his mother (which I doubt that he only does out of filial duty) but also his mother's neighbour, who has MS in its 'tertiary nasty' phase. Now, if you ask me, and since you're not in a position to do so yourself, I'll ask on your behalf; what the bloody hell is he complaining about? If he wants something to gripe about perhaps he should come down here and be bored out of his skull for four months with his arse glued to the freezing ice; I bet that would change his tune! Only be too glad to get back to hoovering the stairs and putting miniature water features and lamps together with instructions badly translated from Japanese; 'force sock A into ferrul B and tight screw, certain that wire H is already to thread'.
Now as MG's emails often do, that got me to thinking about things; a bit. Multiple Sclerosis, MS, is, I think one of the most malicious diseases imaginable. Not that I think that the effects of cancer of the bowel and breast or any other part of the body for that matter or Ebola or full-blown AIDS are any less nasty, they're not, but it seems to me that for a disease, for which there is no cure or palliative unlike HIV or cancer, to strike you when you are in, generally, your twenties and then to hang around for a long time without causing any undue effects, like a Damoclean xiphos hanging over your head, before progressively disabling you nerve fibre by nerve fibre seems to me to be the height of auto-immune, bacterial, viral, prional, whatever it is, vindictiveness. I feel the same way about Motor-Neurone disease. It just isn't fair. Disease should be cured or it should take its toll, usually death, pronto! That's how at least I want to go; not death by progressively disabling increments.
While I was thinking about this and the, seemingly, random nature of the disease (it doesn't seem to be down to any one cause, like diet or lifestyle), a phrase leapt into my mind; Bradford's 'there but for the Grace of God go Bradford', ie I. That got me thinking about how you could substitute God in the phrase with something more in keeping with the worldview of an atheist. I came up with a few. You could substitute fate for God but then you are still dealing with God or Demi-Gods; the fates (or the Norns of Scandinavian myth) are still eternal beings who weave the web of our lives. Perhaps Fortuna, Fortune, would do; no she was a Goddess, Nemesis, too.
Destiny would be an option; 'Luke, it is your destiny', but destiny implies surety of the future. It does after all come from Old French which is in turn derived from the Latin destinata, the feminine past participle of the verb 'to make firm, establish', which surely must come back to Fortuna/Nemesis; why else, feminine. 'It is writ in the stars' would be another option but that explicitly implies a belief in Astrology, which, while prevalent in the past, cannot now be said to be a widespread belief. And there, perhaps, is the rub; belief.
The human mind, for all its vast scope, cannot deal with, come to terms with, chance; the random patterning of the universe. And so chance, a random occurrence must be dressed in the garb of purpose. Humans seek purpose in everything and it has brought them great rewards; dominance of the globe is not the least. But seeking purpose in everything is not perhaps the wisest of moves. Accepting that some things may be completely random is not, I think, so difficult to achieve. Many things which may seem random today will not seem random to our descendants but, and it's a BIG but, if Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle holds largely true, then we should accept that true random nature exists in the Universe; or at least to our eyes. And let's be blunt, It's only OUR eyes that we care about.
To go off subject a little, I often (not that often, I'm a penguin; remember?) cruise the web just looking for things you humans seem interested in. Now what I sometimes get interested in especially is your 'take' on sex. I have to be honest, human porn bores me; how you can get excited about the all too familiar women, even if she is a different person, doing the same things to similar (often the same) men, who all seem to have penises way bigger then yours? (I am of course assuming that the prime market for such things is male.) When you've seen one, you've seen them all! (Although the French during the mid-seventies and the Germans during the same period and the early eighties did produce some fine films; but perhaps they were to be only enjoyed by a more refined European market. Was it too subtle for the Americans? The Germans were once ace at 'funny pornography', there's a misnomer for you, but now seem to be trapped in a cycle of pandering to fetishists the world over while at the same time encouraging the wilful degradation of women.
However I noticed 'trolling' through some websites (the verb to 'troll' means to hang your bait over the side in hope; it doesn't mean {solely} posting offensive comments on a website), that there were a greater number than I expected of 'promoted as Arab' women performing sex-acts but also a statistically significant number performing in habibs and burkhas. This implied to me, that they were no different to American or European women who flaunt themselves by appearing in downmarket, fourth-rate porno-shorts (less than 45 minutes and shot with all the finesse of a rampaging ten-ton truck) for the Warhol-inspired fifteen minutes of 'fame' and some cash, which was surely the intention.
I have no beef with anybody's beliefs and if 'modern' women want to have sex on camera for money to pay the college fees with total strangers, that's fine by me. It's been happening for 10,000 years; except it was seldom captured on camera. But one has to ask oneself; what is this small Arabic fixation intended to achieve? Although it is counter-intuitive and perhaps not what the American 'studios' (I use the term very,very loosely) intended, what it says is that 'just like us!' I find that, in the wake of 9/11 and the supposed 'war on terror', supremely ironic.
Thought for the day. If mankind should increase the number of mass extinctions of the past to six and some newly-evolved, intelligent life form 65 million years hence should look to causes, what are the odds that they will put it down to an arrogant, self-serving, erect ape-like creature who refused to accept that they were damaging, perhaps irreparably, their own continued existence? Probably not an odds-on chance.
I find such a post on a known atheist's blog to be faintly amusing and not a little incongruous. Despite the mouthings of the Catholic Church, there is no substantiated evidence, as opposed to pure happenstance, that prayer makes one iota of difference, although the placebo and nocebo effects are well documented.
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