The 4th Industrial Revolution: Now is getting faster ....

When many tens of thousands of years ago, those first twigs were rubbed together and a guttering fire produced, it was no doubt uttered shortly thereafter, in whatever crude grunts passed for language, that change was afoot. Similarly, when that first set of crude and probably not very round, teeth-loosening wheels rolled forth, onlookers would have pronounced, in more sophisticated tones, that a great change was taking place. We've always been saying it. And it's always been true. In a sense through its always been seen as a reasonably steady gently accelerating process, with the odd spasmodic jerk and a few localised and depressing plateaus like the dark ages. But the pace of change feels different now. That hardly needs to be written or said, for if you haven't noticed this in the last few years or so, it can be safely assumed you're living an exile's life in outer Siberia.

 

We are now in the 4th Industrial revolution. It is being driven by a technology revolution the likes of which we have never before experienced and its impact is sending transformative shock waves through every aspect of our lives. Much of this is being driven by rampant progress in the field of artificial intelligence ("AI"), which, having suddenly erupted into the public consciousness, underpins much of the recent progress in machine learning, automation and robotics. This alone is already changing our world in ways which not so long ago we would have considered almost unthinkable. This has resulted in a plethora of eye swivelling warnings and predictions about the imminent demise of the biological human through to us all living in a state of permanent holiday from work. The nature of this rapidly accelerating technology means that it will probably develop in many ways that, from today's vantage point, we simply cannot foresee or imagine.

 

This is because we have entered the era of exponential technological change, and it's not just an AI related phenomenon; its happening everywhere. It's there in the speed and power of our super computers with Exascale computing (a billion billion calculations per second) predicted to be with us by the early 2020s. At the same time quantum computing, and the race for quantum supremacy, may be even closer and could even eclipse the journey towards Exascale computing. True quantum computing could well deliver a further shockwave to a world already in the midst of its own technologically induced future-shock. Again, this could have the potential to change our world in ways which are very hard to predict.

 

Just for a moment, consider that entity which we used to call the Internet.  Can you even remember what it was like 20 years ago, aside from being comically primitive by today's standards? In 1996 could you ever, in your wildest dreams, have imagined what it has become today along with all its tangential impacts upon our lives. Now try to imagine what it will be like in 2036, or even 2026. The technologies about us are moving at such speeds and in such interwoven and unconventional ways that such predictions are almost impossible now. It's as if our forward windows of prediction have slipped from decades to years towards months.

 

This revolution is all around us. It's will be in the exponential increase in distances that will be traveled by driverless cars and fleets of trucks. It's the rampant increase in the interconnectedness and smart-chatter of the so called Internet of things, the full implications of which may not yet be really understood. We see it in the rapidly vanishing size and expanding power of our hand held devices, which we still whimsically term "mobile phones" when they are packed with enough technology to have filled a car boot only a decade or so ago. We can sense this sudden change is the arrival and power of deep learning and learning machines and of social robotics. We have seen it is the seeming emergence out of nowhere of the "Cloud", with all its implications and how so much of what we used to possess, hoard and store has migrated away into the intangible but ever accessible. We read about astonishing medical developments like the emergence of 3-D Bioprinting and the ability to artificially construct living tissue..

 

It seems wherever we look, this multitude of strange new technologies is expanding, converging and multiplying with hitherto unprecedented speed and in increasingly unpredictable ways. And even as we recognise it for nothing like we have ever seen before, we may well remember this time as it being in its infancy.

 

For years this revolution has been expected. Initially it was foreshadowed by the authors of hard science fiction and a few lone Cassandras but gradually it has gained momentum as more serious intellectual and industry heavy weights, like Stephen Hawkings, Bill Gates and Elon Musk spoke up. Now it is entering mainstream consciousness as those respected periodicals of the establishment like the Economist are suddenly talking about AI, Uberisation and a universal basic income. Even still, this emerging wider awareness is still lagging behind the speed of developments, we still think of our future world according to our models of the past, yet it's not the rules of the game that are changing - it's a new game and very few of our "old world" institutions and mind sets are geared to keep up.

 

Our science fiction is quickly losing its fiction. Now, year by year, month by month, technology is accelerating with relentless speed with new developments seemingly rushing towards us. Despite this, technology will never move this slowly again. And that old, calmer world of just a few years ago will increasingly seem like some lingering twilight memory of a distant childhood, where everything seemed so much safer and more stable. Yet, like our childhoods, that is gone for good now. This is the new normal.

 

"Now" is getting faster and it will never slow down.

Killed by Death: Lemmy remembered

 

 

 

When Motörhead's  Lemmy Kilmister died in December 2015 part of rock music died with him. Lemmy was the only really, true rock n roll star. The rest have only ever been pretending.  

 

Since I was about 14 I've been listening to Motörhead and Lemmy week in week out.  I was a typical scrawny kid with a cheap cassette recorder listening to badly recorded music on dodgy tapes but I've always loved rock music and it's Lemmy and Motörhead who have, rather discordantly and bombastically, been the sound track to so much of my life. Like so many fans of the band, it a life long thing, it's part of you. You don't grow out of it or move on to quieter more sensible or conventional music. As your tastes change, so they stay the same....

 

When you went to a Motörhead concert it was like the annual gathering of a strange, dark tribe beneath a pyrotechnic sky of swirling lights and amidst a primordial storm of volume. It didn't matter who you were or where you came from, whether you were a hustler, or a brain surgeon, a biker, an anarchist or an auditor. You were part of the tribe.

 

Lemmy seemed indestructible and uncompromising in a horrible, vulgar world, impoverished with its vapid fashion and  cheap shallow instantly disposable music. He was a snarling voice of anger cursing an increasingly Orwellian world that would like to decide how each individual should think and act and speak. It's free speech for all as long as we as we all agree that none us disagree. He was no respecter of all those systems and beliefs that we fool ourselves into thinking give us purpose and order in our over managed, over cautious, over insured and under-lived lives. His voice was a gruff roar, with his bitter telling lyrics curled around snarling low slung riffs, monster-clanking bass runs and the thrashing beat of the world's most terrifying drummer.

 

Yet we knew this moment was coming. His frailty over the last 2 years of his life was a haunting but very real harbinger of what we knew was inevitable. He was fading away before our very eyes. This pale and drawn old man, standing on stage, in a way bidding his goodbyes with each passing show in the only way he knew how. Even from within the maelstrom of the music the final silence was not far away.

 

Motörhead have played their last show now and Lemmy is long gone. Yes, we will still play those songs but there will be no new music. This is not just a silence that is the absence of decibels. This is the sadness of memories that stretch over a life back to a 14 year old kid sitting with his best friend trying to decipher the lyrics to a hysterically bad Top Of The Pops recording of Ace of Spades.

 

Lemmy was once asked what the secret to a long life was. The typically pithy response was "not dying". Tragically, in 2015 he ignored himself for the last time. The world is a sadder, and slightly quiter place as a result.....

 

"You know I'm going to loose, and that gamblings for fools, 

But that's the way I like it baby,

I don't wanna live forever......"

 

 

Lemmy Kilmister 24 December 1945 to 28 December 2015.

An alternative set of Commandments

Well, they aren't really commandments, in that rather angry “Thou shall not” authoritarian sense. They are more like suggestions. And there aren't 10 of them either.

1. You have freedom of thought - use it.

You have the freedom to think without constraint. So, take care in what you believe, remembering that which sounds too good to be true, invariably is. Don't accept any orthodoxies or doctrines or creeds, just because lots of others do or because you were brought up by your elders to believe these things were so. The truth or perhaps we should say reality, has never been dependent upon the views of the majority and is very often the opposite of it. Once, we all believed the earth was flat.

2. Don't fear the dark.

Don't entertain notions of your immortality, for you are not a supernatural entity. There are no such things so best you don't allow yourself to be deluded and misled by those who tempt and seduce with sweet promises of everlasting life and happiness. Remember, when you are laid to rest in the cool dark earth of this world it will be as a dreamless sleep from which there will be no waking. So do not fear the dark, for the days of your life are here and now; do not live for a time that will not come to pass.

3. Lead a life of decency.

You shall lead your life in harmony with those around you and you will do no harm. This is because it is by helping others to lead fulfilled lives themselves, that yours too will be one of fulfilment and happiness.  You will be successful and experience contentment by enabling the same in others with whom you have contact, no matter how brief an occasion. Remember, there is no situation where you cannot act with humility, thoughtfulness and compassion.

4. Don’t Despair

Every night-time of the soul must break. Without moments of despair, we would never know happiness and joy. There would be a bland greying spectrum to the course of our lives. Those times of despair cannot last, because the swirl of events about you will mean it must itself take on new shapes and forms and ultimately pass. So take action in your despair, speed up the flow of events that wash along in the river of your life and which will transport you to new scenes and vistas.

5. Liberate yourself and take personal responsibility

 Liberate your thinking and confront those binds and locks that have imprisoned your mind for so long.  Accept that you are the product of what you have inherited and the experiences and choices you have had and made in the course of your life. Neither your fate nor your personality has been determined by the random position of stars and planets in space. Supernatural beings do not watch your every step, or turn their ears to hear and act upon your nightly prayers.   You will not find the true course of your life by consulting ancient books of myth or by blindly abiding by dogmas out of antiquity.  So take responsibility for own actions and their consequences.

6. Understand that you do not always understand.

Do not fear that which you cannot explain or understand. It has ever been thus with our kind. Gradually we are discovering more about the world and the cosmos within which we exist. Yet there is still much we do not know and may never know. Indeed, the more we find out, the less we realise we know. We will always know less than we don't know. Accept it. Do not seek to answer that which cannot yet be known with supernatural, fictional or wildly fanciful stories that you heart wishes were so, but your head knows are not. You cannot comfort yourself with a delusion; it's only reward is blindness, and the intolerance of others.

7. Be spiritual

Instead of thinking of our gods as supernatural versions of ourselves, imagine that God is a metaphor for those undefinable aspects of our lives that can fill us with wonder. For God is like time passing, or perhaps not passing, like the line of a horizon that never ends and is never reached. God is the expanding universe, God is what will forever lie beyond the light of the Big Bang, God is the Big Bang and the time before the Big Bang. God is the honesty of open thought, unbounded like a sky. God stands for those things we cannot understand and will never understand. God stands for those things we must accept; that we exist and that we will never know why we exist.

God is a moment when we contemplate our infinitely small and brief place in an order of things so vast and so timeless that we might even, in a moment of warm irony, call it miraculous that we can comprehend it at all. It is finally knowing that we cannot know and finding the liberating freedom to reject the doctrines and orthodoxies of those who claim to have the knowledge of that which is unknowable. So, understand that the sweet beguiling guarantee of a specific eternal outcome to your life is merely a dream, and instead marvel at your own bright and shimmering moment of being in the vast and measureless span of the infinite.

Isn't progress a magnificent thing......

From the time we started to think as modern Homo sapiens we have sought out explanations for this strange world around us and its mystifying skies full of stars above. Initially it was with myth and superstition that we filled the dark voids in our knowledge. Both served as the best and in fairness, only alternative true understanding. Perhaps it is because we adopted this way of thinking so early on, that it seems in many ways to have more or less becomes an internal fixture in our minds, a habit of thought from which it has become very difficult to break free.

 

Constantly seeking to explain the world we see around us, even now we seemingly struggle to accept that there are questions to which we will never know the answers. In the past it was into that void in our understanding and our knowledge that our ancient ancestors poured the quick drying cement of their superstitions and ancient faiths, based on fantasy and often fear. Yet, even today, everything must still have an explanation, and in the absence of this we too often fall back superstition and myth. We don’t call it that of course, now it's the paranormal, the pseudoscientific, so called "revealed knowledge, pure (blind) faith and so on. Just consider that crowded gallery of competing gods to whom we pledge our competing allegiances. The majority are ancient memes whose shadows stretch back, sometimes into antiquity. Their characters and attitudes seem like those of flawed heroes from out of ancient legend (which perhaps they are). They all seem to exhibit a spectrum of startlingly schizophrenic behaviours: violent and loving,  forgiving but capable of blood chilling all damning  judgement, barbaric hateful savagery mixed in with enlightened philosophies of peace and tolerance to others ; more likely it is our imaginations in permanent overdrive.

 

Yet it was our endlessly  enquiring minds that may well have been what was essential to our survival as a species, especially at the dawn of the human era. After all, we have few other self-preserving physical assets, like tough skins, poisonous bites or stings or being able to move at anything more than a rather feeble walking speed over any meaningful distance. Understanding our environments, being able to explain why events transpired as they did, being able to predict the likely behaviour of prey, not to mention predators, all would have been key to the survival of early humans.

 

As with cause and effect, grappling with why things happened and understanding and being able to foresee the outcomes of our actions would have been an integral part of how we developed. This ability to project what if scenarios and to anticipate, even influence the course of future events, all would contribute to the development of our concepts of the passage of time and our fleeting place within it.  As we became more aware and perceptive with this increasingly advanced form of thinking, it seems only natural that we would have started contemplating more deeply our own position in the order of things:  why we exist and are we alone, how did it all come into being, and what happens to us when we die?

 

In so many ways our knowledge is immeasurably greater in every sense since our earliest ancestors started contemplating these questions. Yet some of these questions will always remain a mystery. And in that sense, sometimes it seems we have hardly changed. It is as if we are still in those dark caves of our ancestors, and, with crude ochre paints, etching out our fantasies and dreams in the flickering half light of guttering fires, and mumbling our clumsy words of worship before stone alters. The astute observer will of course happily and perhaps caustically  point out that we are no longer, quite literally, in the caves of such ignorance. For we have now applied the satisfying veneer of sophistication to our fantasies and superstitions. Now we worship super beings in magnificent cathedrals, argue whether aliens are stealing our DNA and debate how we will spend eternity in Internet forums and on Whatsapp.

 

Isn't progress a magnificent thing

Authentic politicians: Only the Mavericks are real.

Watching the Labour Party trying, with some apparent difficulty, to select its next leader is very revealing, not just about the Labour Party, but politicians of all views and hues in general.

 

There are 4 labour candidates, Jeremy Corbyn, Andy Burnham, Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper. Of them, only Mr Corbyn appears to be real. What marks him out is that he appears to sincerely believe what he says. Whether you think it makes sense or not, is not the point here. It's that he comes across as more or less authentic, answering questions and talking his mind, much perhaps as he would if asked the same thing by a fireside or in a pub. This is indeed rare in politics, and especially unusual with a politician on the stump.

 

By comparison the other three could not appear less authentic if they deliberately set out to be. It's as if they have forgotten how to talk like normal humans; every utterance is as an opportunity to slight another, undermine a "colleague" with oblique barbs or attack an opponent for holding a different view. In the case of Cooper and Burnham particularly, it seems that both have had every last shred of individual character burnt out of them after too many years in the House of Droids.  Perhaps it's their watery, shifting stances on any issue slightly more contentious than apple pie (yes, even motherhood became an argument). Perhaps it's the smoothly meaningless word-salads they regurgitate at the sight of a press opportunity or television camera. In a sense, they are the meat puppets manufactured for and by a political machine that seeks power for power's sake but which has long since relinquished the need for real, meaningful views about anything at all.

 

This is not unique to one party though, they are largely all the same. In the USA by coincidence the same process is unfurling in both the primaries as they select their presidential candidates. The ultimate exemplification of ruthless, insatiable hunger for power is manifest in the Clinton campaign. The anointed machine candidate Hillary, robotically practiced and carefully coiffured, is the CGI  of the perfect candidate designed by a political focus group. What is on show is in reality the composite expression of power-lust, privilege, wealth and vested interest.

 

Set against the Clinton machine is the outsider, in the form of Bernie Sander, daring to challenge preordained Democratic Party fate. Sanders is a bit like the U.S. version of Corbyn. Angry, seemingly genuine in his views and an apparently authentic politician. Whether you support these views is, again, not the point. His views are his, not those of a circus of spin doctors, lobbyists, political focus groups and special advisors who have lost all sense of the real amidst a psychosis of trend and data analysis, sampling and polling.

 

In the Republican camp you have another outsider in the form of the very weird Donald Trump. "The Donald" and Sanders could not have less in common ideologically, yet they are both mavericks challenging the party machine. Trump is currently riding high because, amongst other things, he is seen as speaking his own mind (again, whether you like the clutter that emerges is not the point here) and not being some soulless cut-out suit, pre-programmed with a pattern of politically correct strap-lines and all the personality of an empty paper packet. He is now being pushed by another "un-political" politician in the form of a retired neurosurgeon, Ben Carson. Once agin, trailing away in a dusty third, fourth and so on come the droids of the party machine.

 

Ultimately, even if elected, any one of these mavericks will probably fail, for as we know, good intentions are not nearly enough in politics, just ask Alexander Tsipras. The now famous quote that "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure", could be regarded as the First Law of politics. If so, the Second Law would be that, "Eventually, all politicians will at best disappoint, at worst betray, those who vote for them". Even the mavericks. Just ask those who voted for Alexander Tsipras.

Kevin Pietersen: Another droppod catch by the ECB

So Kevin Pietersen has not been selected for the English Cricket Test team after scoring 356 not out.

 

What a missed opportunity - and it looks like another ECB decisions from the twilight zone of Losersville.

 

KP is one of the most devastating upper middle order batsmen in the world, an area of current (or is that perennial) weakness in the English test team, the superb Joe Root aside. KP would have applied some steely determination, arrogant swagger and never say die defiance to the otherwise buttery vertebrae that currently constitute the curved spine of the unsettled English test team ahead of one of the most important summers of test cricket. For the Ashes are upon us, and that grail was poached by the enemy down under a few years ago.

 

The Ashes start in July. For England and Australia, winning this competition is the holy grail of test cricket. Forget about world test rankings, or other test series, or the commercialised banality of overhyped limited overs slog-fest yawns. The real, if unwritten, mission statement for English ( and Australian) test cricket is "Win the Ashes". Win it at all costs - everything else is secondary.  Like no other player, KP is noticeably salivating at the chance of getting to grips with the Aussie bowlers and scoring big centuries against them. But no matter.

 

However, England's new director of cricket, Andrew Strauss, says there is no trust between KP and the England and Wales Cricket Board and therefore no place in the test team for him. I could be wrong of course, but I don't think any members of that venerable board will actually be out there on the hot pitch, facing the bouncing wrath of Shane  Watson and trying to win the Ashes. So who cares if they don't like each other. This gob-smacking decision appears to go slashing, with cross-bat precision, across the only recent undertakings given to KP about getting back his test place if he reverted to  playing country cricket once more, accompanied with all that "hail fellow, well met" back slapping talk of slates being wiped clean and fresh starts. Adding insult to injury, in some tragi-farce act of bumbling management incoherence, KP was then offered an alternative option of advising England on one day cricket instead. Huh? Trusted to advise the team but not play in it!? With nuanced aplomb, Strauss manages to mix absurdity and contradiction without any sense of irony. But, no matter.

 

Well, so much for picking your best team to win. If we had crushed the West Indies instead of meekly settling for the pointless irrelevance of a drawn series; if we were regularly scoring 400 plus per innings or our bowlers terrifying opposition batting orders, then perhaps there would not be such an obvious need for KP.  If there was a burning zeal to take on and vanquish the Aussies, as opposed to an "oh no, here we go again" trepidation, perhaps the team would not need the OTT self confident and self belief KP brings. Yes, he often comes across as a rather weirdly obnoxious individual with both feet in his mouth at the same time, but that's the price, for he is also a giant bowler-killing, match winner with that "I refuse to lose" arrogance that rubs off on those about him (after all who can forget the sight of him dancing down the pitch to that pie-chucker Glen McGrath and swatting one of his mediocre lobs into outer space). And if it's not about winning against the Aussies, then it's not about anything ( there are no Cups for losing with dignity or for trying your best, or sticking to some ossified set of Victorian sporting principles). If you don't win, then in so far as sporting history is concerned, you may as well have not existed.

 

At least the Aussies will be pleased with Strauss' decision.

Dead Ends: The empty promise at the heart of modern faith

For countless people of faith, the primary promise of their religion is that, in some form or other and following a brief life here on earth, they are to be rewarded with eternal life in heaven or some variation thereof.  No other promise has so powerfully captivated the thoughts of modern Homo Sapiens and endured with such resilience across long millennia. To many people, that heaven exists is a fundamental certainty as clear as is the one that every Monday follows a Sunday or that Antarctica is a real place. Furthermore, to persuade them that this might not be the case, is about as challenging as trying to convince them that one of those following statements is likewise a fiction too.

 

I am not one of these people. I consider Heaven to be both a philosophical and practical impossibility. I find it inconceivable that such a place, be it physical or non physical, could exist. It is the dead end of rational, sensible thought to consider it both possible and probable that each human's individual consciousness or "soul" (and what point is a soul without awareness of self) is going to maintain an awareness of itself for all time. This applies whether God is factored into that existence or not. Forget even the science for a moment, and just think about it; it's simply a conceptual nonsense.

 

Consider, how in times of great grief, when we have lost a loved one and are at our emotionally weakest, we are plied with phrases and terms that, although seemingly embedded in our culture, serve to perpetuate this grand illusion. With comforting words we are encouraged to imagine the recently deceased having being gathered to the arms of the Lord or that they have been called for by the Saviour and now wait for us to soon join them in the everlasting.  In truth words such as these are almost definitely no more than whimsy; a collection of meaningless, if lyrically composed words strung together and sugar coated into shallow prose; a palliative to dull reality. Conceptually, by seeking to link each individual's consciousness and therefore self awareness to an endless endurance beyond death, we are perpetuating the greatest of all humanity's delusions, namely, that we are immortal. What is clear, is that we do not understand the concepts tripping so loosely off our tongues.

 

If we consider the science of big numbers, then we can begin to appreciate just why the popular concepts of eternity in heaven and immortality are such philosophical non starters. Take the number 10 to the power of 80. That's  a "1" with 80 zeros after it. This is the estimated number of fundamental particles in the known universe, including sub atomic ones like Quarks and Leptons. The name for this number is “One Hundred Quinquavigintillion”

 

This is a vast number, but it has a name and can be written out although not comprehended. It is at least finite. Yet, it is many many times greater than the number of sand grains on every beach and in every desert on our planet and any and every other planet in the universe. Yet, not even this almost "numberless" number can begin to get even remotely near to describing the length of time that the chosen and the so called saved are to spend in heaven with their saviours. Our universe will, over the course of trillions of future years, have expanded out into ultimate emptiness, every star, even those yet to be born, will long since have burnt out and even the most vast of galactic scale black holes withered away into dark silence. Yet, even this near measureless span of time is no more than a rapid eye blink in what we fondly term as eternity. Despite this, many still believe that  the spark of our individual self awareness, our consciousness, is going to endure along with and beyond all of this. We are deluding ourselves.

 

Eternity is an 8 letter word, yet it seeks to engage our minds within the terms of a concept  that is incomprehensible. Perhaps because it is a word around which we can get our tongues and commit to writing; that in the normal course of our lives we work into our daily routines (after all , who has not felt that waiting for a delayed train on a dark rainy platform can feel like an eternity), that we have become comfortable with it and familiar too. We all know what familiarity breeds so perhaps it would have been better had eternity been spelt as a jumble of incoherent letters so that we could not use it in our conversations and every time we saw that incoherent jumble, we would know it as symbolic of the undefinable and that not measurable with any number. Almost certainly, we are not going to spend eternity there.

 

Yet, we speak of and imagine heaven as a more or less physical place where God lives, for subconsciously it has become some kind of perfect, upgraded intellectual habitat from which is somehow banished, for all time, all that is displeasing or unpleasant about our daily human lives. It is the ultimate fairly tale believed real. Yet it is hard to hold a genuine conviction that heaven exists as a place. It can only be expressed in terms that allow it to be excluded from any material or physical world. It must take refuge in the esoterica of the unworldly along with our personalised concepts of gods and saviours. For it was at the point that the concept of God morphed from being the term adopted by those seeking to contemplate the origins and circumstances of that vast panorama of our world, our being, our origins and all that was so inexplicable within it and about it, into its current usage and understanding, that it entered a philosophical dead end.

 

As with terms like eternity and infinity, God was a mere word to refer to that beyond understanding. That concept has now been squeezed into a predominantly male body, imbued with human emotions, senses and body parts, given superhero like powers and expected to have a personal relationship with everyone, or at least those who want one with him. Subject to constant reinterpretation and ever more ridiculously detailed analysis, we know amongst other things, that he dislikes death metal music, cartoons of himself and working on Sundays, or Friday's, depending upon your view. This, the supposedly ageless creator/sprit of the universe. For God is now a word to refer to a competing collection of deities. In one sense he remains a Middle Eastern relic from the age of the Crusaders and Saladin, whilst elsewhere he is become a hyper energetic avatar from the phantasmagoria of US-led Evangelicalism bothered about every aspect of the day to day world. For dispassionate observers, he can appear as some out-of-step and an increasing spectral entity from the old world, whose papal cheerleader struggles to translate into real world relevance in the face of gay rights, disapproval of the use of condoms and tolerance of child abuse by the custodians of his creed. For God is trapped within the straight jacket of inflexible religious ideologies in a madly changing, diversifying world where he also has to be all things to all believers. So we see the so called supreme deity passing from original myth and undefinable presence, via sinister medieval autocrat into something closer to modern day comic book superhero.

 

We are now in the philosophical cul de sac down which the various stands of modern religion have raced each other over the past few centuries. Because too many religious leaders have been insistent that their holy books' parables and stories are rooted in iron fact they have done their faiths an extraordinary and incalculable disservice. As a result generations have been raised, often compelled, and taught to treat as infallible and certain, events both past and predicted that were never meant to be more than parable or myth. It's not quite like insisting that the story of Narnia is historical fact, but it's not that far short.

 

In reaction to this we have seen the rise of what's termed militant atheism, writing it's angry books about why, say, the bible isn't true or narratively coherent. It was never meant to be and undertaking a savage dissection of its contents to show as much serves as much point as undertaking the same exercise with the "Just So" stories. Those convinced their holy books are irrefutable statements of universal fact will seldom be swayed by these logical  yet belittling assaults against their citadels of absolute certainty. Few will suddenly forsake a life long held conviction that they are due to be rewarded with life eternal for having been a loyal member of their faith when faced with a torrent of scientific abuse that seeks to tear down and expose as nonsensical deeply held convictions hard wired into their thinking.

 

So, where to next? Not much is likely to change for as long as people continue to believe as fact the myths of their faiths. Modern religion needs to find a way out of its cul de sac and back to a wiser, far less fanatically literal interpretation of events and of the great unfurling, awe-inspiring reality before us. Perhaps science can help it,  but for that it will need to speak with a calmer and less hectoring voice. Ridicule inspires change in neither heart nor mind. Religion as a wider more benign form of philosophy for living may have a role to play in modern and future life. But for that, it needs to stop deluding its adherents with impossible guarantees about rewards in a life hereafter. For it is this alone which is surely the single biggest driver of much of the deviant and alarming behaviour amongst the faithful. This is manifest both at an individual level and collectively right up to the level of independent states and governments that are directly, or even indirectly, run as theocracies, for it is these doom-transfixed ideologies that threaten us all, faithful and unfaithful alike.