Not much on tonight. "Museums and the interpretation of visual culture" is a less and less inviting read and having spent 2 hrs taking in 3 pages, a seemingly fruitless venture. Although might well grow ever more fruitful as essay deadline looms... Assume that self-discipline and motivation are on a christmas break and will wait patiently for them to return. The armchair looks like it could use some company anyway, and the clever bloke who wrote all those books about evolution you were supposed to read before your cambridge interview is on at 8, sparking controvesy with a docu-rant about pros of science and the cons of religion.

My religious stance as almost always been proudly atheist. Proud, because i was sure, aged 14 that i had single handedly unearthed the crux of human existance, or at least discovered that there was no identifyable crux at all, because the science of our nervous system simply allowed us to think, and consequently, be, and this was definite. End of story, get on with life, enjoy.
Believing in something you cant see just sounded like a bloody ridiculous waste of a lot of candles and a perfectly good a sunday morning if you asked me.

So it is with horror and shame that as i mature into the third decade of my life, (my 20's, in case i got that logic wrong)my mind has begun to entertain views of a wholly impure nature, unpicking my clasp on the cup of philosophical cooldom and sending me into the bottom-less chasm of agnostic indecisiveness.

Perhaps it was leaving school and no longer having regular biology lessons to knock me into shape. Perhaps it was a brief academicly motivated wade through the work of some influencial philosophical thinkers. It was almost certainly, a sudden and unerving realisation of just how much we dont know, and more, the distant wonder that if evolution had not naturally selected in quite the way it did, would we even know any of it at all? Cant help thinking that would be for the best, but alas...
So even speaking scientifically, we certainly cant say this thing-what-people-believe-in is not there. I mean, really, who actually knows if something is still red when you cant see it?
For me, it's not so much of a 'Well there must be something else' type theory but a 'Bugger. What if there is something else, then we'd all look stupid, eh'.

So i await the thoughts of one of oxford's finest scientists with interest, and a slightly raised eyebrow.

Unfortunately, the programme isn't quite what i had in mind. Dawkins doesn't open our eyes and enlighten us to the ridulousness of religion in a beautifully articulate 40 minutes so much as remind me of the arrogance of science. He angles his attack on religion through the vehicle of evolution and while he illuminates the bits of religion we already knew were a bit loopy, he fails to produce a debate with any of his interviewees that is truly persuasive.

True, ardently believing in a god is, as Dawkins points out, tantamount to believing a small teapot is orbiting the sun just because no one can say it isn't, that much is agreed. But his distain to religious practise was hardly inviting empathy for his crusade (sic).

However as Dawkins discusses, religion, as a provider of peace and goodwill to all men, is definitely pretty lousy, and the interview with a man who kindly promised islamic world domination near the end of the programme was nothing short of terrifying. But whilst this kind of hard-talk reitifys the fear born out of the recent terrorist attacks, he is adamant that the western world has completely lost its way and needs aggresive moral guidance now, courtesy of islam. And who are we to deny it? With obesity, binge-drinking and teenage pregnancy high on the public agenda, it doesn't look like we're in a particularly good position to start pointing fingers.

I think it's funny how things look when you've got your face pushed to the glass of an alien community, and while religion, in the middle east especially has undoubtedly and somewhat catastrophically upset the equilibrium of peaceful living, it could similarly be argued that a critical eye on our society would see violence, poverty, and 'evil' of equal measure.

When the issue of morality arises, what is interesting is that religion is viewed by many as a sort of definitive guidline for life, showing us the path to rightful existence, delivering us from evil and all that. Yet while social mores are defined by society, morals one would expect, hold true regardless of time, place and culture. (Although evidently that's open to debate). I mean not killing someone is as good a universal moral as any.
So it is amazing to discover that religions can disagree so much on the 'correct way to behave'. And particularly frustrating is that in the battle to defend these morals, they themselves appear to be disregarded for the greater good of man. So if someone is misbehaving, it's alright to give him what for, even if that involves transgressing the very rules you're defending.

But fear not chaps, I've got the answer. What we need is for a big ethereal looking bloke to appear in the sky and say - 'ha, told you i was bloody real, now listen up kids, you've made a right royal hash of this haven't you, it's time to clean up your act, i've amended my definitive guide to life since you all got so confused about it in the first place and you shall all adhere strictly to it this time, or there really will be none of that hip, happening afterlife party stuff you read about'. That would be fun, would certainly liven up my life a bit. And it would shut that dawkins up, bloody nerd.