Public speaking is such a common fear, but why? I suspect evolution holds the answer.

Wikipedia reckons that the “most common fears are of: ghosts, the existence of evil powers, cockroaches, spiders, snakes, heights, water, enclosed spaces, tunnels and bridges, needles, social rejection, failure, examinations and public speaking.”

Even thinking about it can cause some people's heart rate to rise

Now doesn’t public speaking make a strange addendum to that list? Apart from the first two – which are imaginary – the rest seem like perfectly rational fears of things that could result in physical harm.

[You might claim the the fear of rejection is not a physical harm, rejection could be: Romantic rejection, which reduces your chances of procreation; and social rejection, which to a pack animal would be a very dangerous situation. Both may lead to the gene's inability to continue to replicate itself, which is why we enjoy other people's company]

So how does public speaking arouse so much fear? Most things we fear, like spiders and rejection, are things that sneak up on us and shit on our happiness. But public speaking is, for most people, totally avoidable. But we don’t. We do it, we just get scared of it and do it anyway.

I’m a performer, yet I too become petrified when I stand in front of an audience. Adrenaline causes my pupils to dilate, and the lights suddenly seem too bright. I can hear my heartbeat as blood pulses through my neck, causing my pulsing neck to thump at my collar. I begin to sweat. My mouth goes dry. I forget everything I was going to say and reach gingerly into my pocket to retrieve my notes. My hands are shaking, and as I hold that paper it quivers like an autumnal leaf in the breeze, creating a subtle rustling sound that seems deafening in the muted silence.

Petrified. And yet I do it all the time. Admittedly, after doing it for a bit, your body will normalize to the levels of stress hormone cortizol, and you’ll get less scared, bit by bit, but you’ll still be scared.

But I love it. I chase it. That thoroughly irrational adrenaline is an elixir to me.

Perhaps the fear is not irrational. Perhaps it is an important evolutionary trait.

Fear is experienced in the Amygdala

As we evolved, and there were elders who told us what to do, we developed the habit of obedience. They had to be wise – and a mark of wisdom is the ability to continue to be wise while under stress.

People who stutter and shriek and change their mind and ask for opinions and succumb to their fear are not the kind of people you would follow out of a flooding ravine. They panic and make bad decisions based on fear, or worse – they fail to decide at all.

What you want from a leader is someone who makes their choices calmly, speaks strongly and instructs you to do things clearly – even when under duress. Those are the tribes that survived.

So the link, in my mind, is this: By evolving to have a stifling fear of talking to groups, we eliminated the possibility of weak people becoming leaders, because public speaking is, by it’s nature, the primary element of leadership. Only those who can master their fear and speak calmly and clearly to a group will be heard. Being afraid of speaking means that people who suffer from their fears don’t rise to power.

And we all look at confident orators and think ‘Wow, what a guy!’ – regardless fo whether they’re plotting genocide or discussing art. There’s a part of our brain that compels us to listen to a calm and compelling speaker. That is why the only people who become really successful are good speakers, and that is a bloody good reason to master your fear and speak up.

That’s why it’s scary. Why is it scarier than death? I dunno. Because death is abstract and unknown, until you’re dead. Public speaking happens again and again until you give up or get it right.

Other Blogs: Take a deep breath

And: How to talk so people listen

Technorati Tags: evolution, religion, speech

My problem with life in India is that it’s simultaneously too hard and too easy. The easy bits are getting main roles in films, getting into A-list parties, and staying out of jail for drunken, unlicensed, uninsured, helmet-less motorbike riding only costs about 6 Aussie dollars. But the stress and frustration associated with something simple like buying coffee or getting dressed can cause me to vibrate and clench until I pop a valve.

I just went looking for Sony Pix to do an audition. I plugged “Sony Pix Mumbai” into Google maps and got a hit:

So I rode to the designated dot with the help of my occasionally awesome but frequently annoying GPS guided phone, to find the dot was on a big pile of crappy nothingness.

I checked the map again and again, and came to the reluctant conclusion that someone had actually bothered to go to Google Maps to place a marker, but had not bothered putting it in the right place.

I rack my brains every time this happens, trying to deduce the mentality that leads someone to make such an effort with a result that is worse than had they just done nothing (I fixed it).

On my way home, I stopped for coffee at Baristas. I pulled my bike up to the curb, kicked out the side-stand, switched it off, got off, pulled my helmet off and when I started walking away the security guard, who’d been sitting there watching me the whole time said: “You can’t park here”

Surely my intent to park the was apparent from the moment I pulled up, or perhaps more obvious when I kicked out the stand and leaned the bike over, but definitely when I turned off the engine, and I absolutely don’t plan on re-parking it anywhere after I’ve stood up and got off – but no. He waited until I’ve removed my helmet and started to walk off before he said something. Exactly the same thing happened only yesterday – it happens so often. I try to laugh it off but often fail and sound like a manic pirate: “Haha-har-harrr-arrgh!”

Pull this handle.

I think one explanation for the general theme of this directionless drive to do could be the notion of ‘dharma’ – which is your life’s purpose, doing what you’re meant to do. Dharma doesn’t care how efficiently you do something, it relates more to being in a continual state of doing whatever it is you were born to do, as well as you were destined to, until you die. Getting stuff done early doesn’t mean there’s any less stuff to do. If you did do it, then you’ll reincarnate into an even cooler caste with yet another dharma. There’s no escaping it, life after life, and aspiring to escape your destiny within this life is almost disrespectful.

Sure, people break free from the restraints of caste and rise to dizzying heights like the Ambanis, but it is much more common to go down the caste system than up. Climbing takes hard will, courage and lots of luck. Falling is as easy as having cow blood thrown on you, marrying wrong, getting raped or even divorced. In short, acting out of turn is more likely to send you down the ladder than up. In India, innovation is infrequently encouraged.

Pull the other one!

So I went in to buy my coffee and noticed that the glass door has a “Pull” sticker on the outside of the door, and another “Pull” sticker inside – but it’s a swinging door and can go either way, and anyway, neither side has a handle, so in effect neither can be pulled, nor need they be.

Maybe he could have put a push sticker on both sides, it’d easier to do with a coffee in your hand, but why did he bother at all?

Because that was his job. The fact that this swinging door doesn’t need stickers doesn’t change the fact that his purpose in life includes adding stickers to doors.

I was shooting a TV commercial recently, and the costume guys always love to help me get dressed. I assure them that putting on clothes is something I can and do do frequently without them,  but they are determined to help; even if that help consists of them holding my fingers and causing me to fumble as I thread my belt through the loops in my pants, all the while saying:

“It’s fine. No really, I’ve got this. Please, let go. You aren’t helping. You’re actually making it harder”.

But the costume wallah has a purpose. Part of what makes dharma a righteous path is the fact that sometimes it’s a challenge. Many obstacles will pop up to deter you from your purpose, but if you’re born into a job (as castes often are – and named so – Mr. Sodabottleopenerwalla) then you’d bloody well better do it, regardless of how pointlessly irritating it might be.

It must be noted that the excessive amounts of wasted effort do seem to keep everyone rather busy, doing and undone-ing things that took a lot of doing and didn’t need getting done in the first place. It’s a wonderful system that seems to support an unimaginable number of people.

Many Kakapo birds only gets laid once, AND THAT'S WHEN THEY'RE AN EGG! - Zing.

It’s ecological. If one billion people suddenly became efficient, if they only did things that needed doing, and did them right the first time, then I recon an overwhelming number of lovely Indian people would quickly find themselves unemployed and starving to death.

The Socialist Party of India recognized this, and rather brilliantly suggested that India ban English in schools, computers in offices and all farm machinery, which would send it back into the dark ages.

Inefficiency and absurdity might be an evolutionary result of overpopulation, much like how New Zealand’s Kakapo bird, which has evolved in an environment devoid of predators, has dealt with overpopulation by becoming fat, flightless, and amazingly inefficient at mating. Those factors are now sending it close to extinction, a fate unlikely to face Indians anytime soon.

*I must note that my observations are the subject of personal opinion, and in this are predominantly about traditional Indian culture – and are not at all about Indians in any kind of intrinsic, genetic sense. I am also not making a negative value judgment about it. Yes, it annoys me, but that doesn’t make it bad, it just means that I don’t get it. I hope you’re only mildly offended.

Technorati Tags: Bollywood, hinduism, India, People, politics, rationality, religion

He hates athiests and loves hair dye

Archbishop Anthony Fisher today decided to let the world know that he’s rather stupid. He used his inaugural Easter message to blame atheism for the ills of the 20th century, namely Nazism, Stalinism and Pol-Pottery.

What a dull cookie – particularly owing to the fact that he belongs to a church that is currently headed by someone who belonged to he Hitler youth and may have protected child molesters.

The reference to Nazism is regrettable, but it gets worse. He’s been so absorbed in his faith for so long he doesn’t realise: People don’t believe in Christianity because logic seems to indicate that a creator set up an intricate set of rules and laws that govern the natural universe and then occasionally breaks them for us if we ask him; they believe because that makes them feel good.

I was at the police station this afternoon complaining about bureaucracy to Khan, my friend and mechanic. Khan had found my motorbike at the police station, it’d been stolen a few months earlier – and we were trying to get it back. I was having difficulty proving that it was my bike, and the police were having difficulty explaining why they had it in the first place.

When I was done whining, Khan had a go: His hands had developed arthritis which was making it very difficult for him to twist spanners and all that jazz, so I suggested he eat more fish. He said he couldn’t cook it nor afford it because his wife’s recent cesarean section had put her out of action (so no cooking and no job), which meant he had to cook for her with his bung wrists. I asked why his wife’s mum didn’t cook (she lives with them) and he told me she’d recently fallen and was now paralyzed from the neck down, probably for the rest of her life. He had to look after her too.

Khan hadn’t slept properly in two months, because his two month old C-section son was very ill and crying and needed constant monitoring. I suggested he take a few days off from his workshop to look after his family, but he explained that he’d lose customers, and without the income from his workshop, there wouldn’t be enough money for the various medical expenses he had to pay for his wrists, his wife’s antibiotics and dressing, his son’s medicine, and his mother-in-law’s everything. Plus, they’d all go hungry – those four, and his nephew (who he looks after since his brother died), his older son and his daughter. He now looks after all eight of them (I’ve forgotten one, probably another niece) single-handedly; they live in a room that measures about four by four metres in a shitty part of Mumbai. I’ve visited him there – it’s dank, smelly and cramped.

‘Uppar wale ka hath mein hai’ he said to put me at ease when I’d run out of helpful suggestions and had resorted to apologising like it was all my fault. It means ‘It’s all in God’s hands’ or more specifically ‘the upstairs guy’.

That’s why he has faith – because it gives him strength to keep going in the face of incredible odds. Were he an atheist, he’d be inclined to believe that he’s in a rather unwinnable situation – with his ability to earn diminishing, and a brand new expensive son to add to his already huge burden, he’s kinda fucked. Belief in intercessory power (a god that intervenes) is all that gives him hope.

I’m an atheist of luxury – I don’t need god to solve my problems, because my problems involve trying to figure out who I’ll need to bribe at the impound so I can get back my fancy, shiny, noisy, penis on wheels. I’m an asshole.

So I wonder – even if it is a fantasy, perhaps his fantasy is helping him more than I am.

Perhaps you could offer Khan a seat?

But then I have a lurking suspicion that faith put him in his helpless situation, that if we chose to live as equals without irrational beliefs there would not be such incredible inequality; that if he could wear condoms he wouldn’t have had yet another child; that the poor, the uneducated and the downtrodden like him are used as fodder for the power-hungry elite like Fisher; and that if the Catholic Church really gave two shits about anyone at all they’d stop being such money-hungry child-molesting festering puss-filled weeping wounds on the backside of humanity.

Christians who wear the bracelets and chant the mantra “What would Jesus do?” Listen up: He’d come here and kick ass. What did he do? He was a wonderful man who tried his hardest to destroy a harmful religion because he saw it sucking the life out of humanity. He was worldly, educated, and brought a lot of Hinduism into Christianity.

He only got angry when he went to temples because they were money hungry, he hated the exclusivity of Judaism so he opened it up for the Gentiles, he hated the idea of eternal suffering so he offered the hope of salvation, and he thought bacon tasted nice. He stood against everything that Judaism stands for, if you ask me.

If he came back he’d be Luke Skywalker, and he’d light-saber this evil Senator Palpatine, Hitler Youth prick who’s spreading aids in Africa, and he’d love Khan even though Khan’s a Muslim, because Khan is nice and cares about people and he looks after my bike.

A video of me and my penis on wheels:

Technorati Tags: atheism, christianity, hinduism, India, religion

"A burning bus? Perhaps over there."

There exists in Mumbai a nearsighted and rather unpleasant bunch of radicals who revile my very existence within their beautiful city. They want foreign actors out of Bollywood (that’s me).

They are the Shiv Sena – Lord Shiva’s Army  and the MNS – political groups by name, violently quarrelsome by nature.

It behooves a writer to remain apprised of the legal ramifications of writing anything at all in India, because sedition laws are arbitrarily enforced and rather ambiguously defined as anything that “excites or attempts to excite hatred contempt or dissaffection“( - Wikipedia)

If anyone reading this gets excited or feels a smidge of contempt, then I’m going to jail for life – so please don’t. Sedition, in my opinion, is the most dangerous law in India – for exposure of real wrongs often leads detention or expulsion, as was the case with my friend who wrote of the Dalit murders in Gujarat and was summarily deported.

Let’s be mindful of that and carry on…

Bal Thackeray started the Shiv Sena and ran for a while a respectable right-wing, religious political party concerned with supporting the local Marathi people in whose state Mumbai stands. He was about ensuring jobs, health systems, pensions and education exclusively to Marathis, his ‘Sons of the Soil’.

They have a hard-line Hindu and regional agenda, and dislike all things non-Marathi – including shop signs spelled in English.

The Shiv Sena love whacking day

Bal’s son Uddhav Thackeray took over the Shiv Sena which used to riot against migrant workers from other states, bash North Indian rickshaw drivers and the like, pelt stones at police headquarters, voice support for accused Hindu terrorists, they’ve smashed shops and torn down billboards and generally caused a ruckus in order to get in the media, at which point they invariably react against the channel for the negative coverage. It’s a wonderful self-perpetuating cycle.

The Shiv Sena started going mainstream to gain support from a larger nationwide Hindu party, the BJP – which meant they had to stop bashing migrants (but not necessarily Muslisms). As a result, Bal’s nephew Raj Thackeray started a splinter organisation seeking more radical reforms – they are called the ‘Marathi Manoos’ – the MNS.

So now there are two crews both seeking votes from the same people, they attract attention to themselves by engaging in more and more brazen public displays of brute power – often leading to in-fighting between the two groups.

The BJP: Perhaps education should be higher on their agenda

Then the BJP lost a national election, probably because they were corrupt and their policies were near-sighted and focused more on oppressing Muslims than running the country…

So the BJP and the Shiv Sena rioted against Australians for being such prejudiced and bigoted violent morons. They were helped along by the Indian media, which much prefers to be spoon-fed its sensationalist propaganda rather than doing real reporting (probably for fear of sedition laws).

Funny thing that only a few months before, the same group were beating North Indians for migrating to Mumbai, and now they’re upset because North Indians are being beaten in Australia. The group that revile outsiders and assault newcomers are also angry when degenerate, disorganised, drunk youths in Australia do exactly the same thing. Are they scared their jobs have been outsourced?

Now they’re back to being racist: The Manoos want all us foreign actors out of Bollywood – get this: Because we’re stealing Indian jobs. I have not yet met an Indian that can do my job, because my job is to be not Indian. I’m not a particularly exceptional actor, I’m not wildly attractive, I’m not even that skilled, I don’t dance or sing. I’m a single-threat: I’m just white. Who’s job do I steal?

Make up your minds, which do you despise: Racism or foreigners?

Their current claim is against Hazel Crowney because they claim she’s dancing in a provocative way that Indian girls wouldn’t, and tugging at the threads of Indian moral fibre. It’s clear that they know this already, but you might not: Indian movies don’t show sexy white girls flouncing about because Indian girls won’t do it, they show foreigners because that’s what Indians like to watch. The women watch it and think: “Ugh, sluts” and the men pitch pants tents – behaviour neither gender like to associate with good Indian girls.

Indian girls will do a multitude of things to get their beautiful, sensual bodies onto the big screen – and dancing provocatively definitely comes under that broad and intentionally ambiguous banner. Rakhi Sawant started the protest, but clearly her interests aren’t value-based:

Hazel Crowney: They're calling for her head

Rakhi Sawant: Principled instigator

Tell me again – which Indian values were they protecting?

The Shiv Sena recently charged onto the set of a shoot for the film ‘Crooked’, and demanded to see employment visas from the 136 foreigners on the shoot. I know every Bollywood Gora that has a visa – and there ain’t 136 of us. Bollywood runs on making its scenes exotic and foreign with cheap tourist labour extras. It can’t run without them.

These riots will serve to send more films overseas to shoot to avoid them, taking money right out of the pockets of all Mumbaikars who drive and light and serve chai and food to those who paint sets and clothe Bollywood. Their campaign would be short-sighted and flawed, if it were legitimately aimed at improving the lives of Marathis – but it isn’t, it’s aimed at getting publicity – and it’s working.

I love this country – but sometimes it gives me the shits (pun intended).

Perhaps it is me.

Perhaps my desire to become a part of the Indian fabric is mislaid. I had always seen India’s best values were the welcoming and inclusive nature of the people, how peaceful they are. I’d always felt that the laid-back, near-enough’s good enough, slow life seemed more ecological than ours – far more interested in things like a good laugh, an engaging (and intrusive) conversation or even silent company. They’ll stare, they’ll care, they’ll help even if they can’t.

This country holds the greatest potential of all on this earth. With some tweaks to turn the knowledge based education system to teach skills, a good corruption enema and a bit of cultural progression (in terms of womens rights and that stuff) – it will be the next superpower. Indians almost always speak more languages than you do, speak English better than you do, they wrap their agile brains around new languages, new concepts and new ideas with envy-inspiring speed, they have open hearts and kind minds, and there are a billion of them.

That was what I thought India was about, generosity, hospitality and intelligence – but apparently these guys are the last word on what’s Indian and according to them it’s all about the violence, stupidity and racism.

Perhaps it’s time for me to move on.

Technorati Tags: Bollywood, foreign, hindu, India, maharashtra navnirman sena, mns, politics, racism, religion, shiv sena, thackeray, white actors

The danger with emotional beliefs is that they are rarely questioned with reason, and yet they are defended with passion. Their hidden value is their demonstration of how wonderful we humans are.

It seems as if the harder the idea is to hold with reason and logic, the harder it must be gripped with fanaticism. You’d think we’re the opposite – but us humans aren’t very rational.

There is no way of categorically knowing whether there is life after death. I think that belief is a selfish and self-serving notion, and doing good to secure a better afterlife is even more selfish.

I think that there is no life after death. I think we are all part of an organism we call Earth, and we live on through the goodwill we spread during our lives and the nourishment we offer the worms when we’re dead.

That seems to me to be a reasonable reason for doing good, but that’s not why I do good. I do good because it makes me feel good because evolution has a preference for niceness and that’s why it selected me (and you too). The species’ that had a penchant for murder and incest were dispatched by the law of natural selection.

When I share my rather dull and ill-formed thoughts, people get angry about a matter of opinion. Why is that? Because they want to believe so much they mistake that desire for belief.

Actual beliefs are debated dispassionately, emotional beliefs cause emotional reactions.

Samuel Hahnemann: Alchemist

This dude, Samuel Hahnemann came upon the idea of treating conditions with more of a substance that causes those conditions. It spawned from the observation of how vaccines and snake anti-venom works.

It was a meritable musing, but under lab conditions he found that giving someone stinging nettle when they already have a rash just makes the rash worse.

He’d clearly mused for long and hard about how famous and remarkable this discovery would be, and was rather invested in the idea of it being right. When his results showed him that more nettle causes more rash, he decided to mix the nettle with water.

Lo and behold, the lower the amount of active-rash-causing ingredient, the less worse the rash became. He continued adding water until he had mixed it a mind-boggling 10⁶⁰ parts water and 1 part active ingredient, meaning that for a single drop of pure nettle you’d need more water than there is on earth. This process you and I might call ‘dilution’ Samuel rather ironically called ‘Potentization’.

Actually getting the required level of dilution is so difficult (as it requires de-purifying water and then purifying it again) practitioners of this witchcraft use jars that are merely sat near one another, so that the nettle in one jar will encourage H20 particles in another jar to become nettle-like. They claim water has a memory, it’s absurd. What would cause the water to become nettle-like rather than jar-like or bench-like or Samuel-like? Why wouldn’t the water remember back to when it was being a whale’s urine or Jesus’ wine?

He called it Homeopathy, and it works.

It works on dizziness, headaches, stress, sleeplessness and a variety of psychosomatic skin conditions. The healthy living prescribed by homeopaths also cures fatness and other health problems associated with being unhealthy. It also has no side-effects, because it’s water. It’s a placebo that works quite well, because it’s water. It is water.

Gloria's loving parents

It didn’t work for little Gloria Thomas because placebos don’t work if you’re too young to understand what it was meant to be doing.

Her parents were true believers in homeopathy, and rather than test their belief with conventional medicine they watched her worsen for 5 months and then die from a severe case of eczema that lead to an infected eye that killed her. Ouch.

They were rightly convicted of manslaughter.

In a world where a large portion of medication is side-effect ridden and geared for profit rather than health, it’s understandable that people are looking elsewhere.

But what about the upside?

The upside is: Homeopathy is proof of our ability to fix ourselves with the power of thought.

Consider what this mum is saying about the resurrection of her son (who’s been dead for a year) who she starved to death for not saying ‘Amen’:

“Queen said God told her he would come back. I believe it. I choose to believe it,” she said. “Even now, despite everything, I choose to believe it for my reasons.”

- SMH Feb 25th 2010

We believe in emotional things to differing degrees because we feel bad and they make us feel good, mostly because they take control away from us humans (who are fallible and fickle) and gives it to some imaginary higher power, which is always assumed to be benevolent or at least fair. The universe isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to the dinosaurs, trilobites or the dodo. It has been fair to us (so far) because we’re so damn intelligent.

Back when we didn’t know that the earth was round and that the sun wasn’t a flaming chariot; when volcanoes appeared to us as if the sky had turned to fire; and insect plagues seemed too awestriking to be natural; it was understandable that we invented stories to explain these things.

We invented stories to describe the change of the seasons so we could pass on knowledge about when to plant crops, and we invented stories about the bad places that bad people went for doing bad things. These stories kept social order when the truth was unknowable, they became an excellent tool for power.

But now we have a particle accelerator at CERN that’s cracking the mysteries behind the milliseconds after the big bang, the Hubble telescope measuring space’s background radiation to determine the age of the universe, and IBM is moving around atoms on an infinitesimally small scale as a publicity stunt; the answers are now within our reach.

We are now in a unique age when we can start to take responsibility for our own existence, define our own destiny, and debate our own morals. We can do this with an understanding of how we exist within an ecosystem that is symbiotic, and that our actions have an effect on everything around us.

Although all our atoms were once parts of stars that exploded squillions of years ago, the arrangement of the stars in the sky on the day of your birth does not determine your personality type. You choose how to behave every moment of every day, and those choices determine what you are.

Atoms arranged with a scanning tunneling microscope to spell IBM

If you’re annoyingly possessive with your partner, that’s not because your a Sagittarius, it’s because you love them and are scared of losing them because you secretly think they can do better than you. Perhaps they can. They might be able to go and find someone that is in control of their emotions and takes responsibility for their actions.

If your house burned down and you lost everything that was important to you, you might be inclined to say that everything happens for a reason. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it happened to teach you a cosmological lesson in material detachment, but perhaps the reason it happened is because you like smoking in bed. Things just happen, but you can take something positive from every situation, because that’s a choice.

When you look at the complexity of life on earth, or the enormity of the universe as you gaze at the stars, you might be inclined to feel purposeless, insignificant and pathetically mortal. Perhaps you are. Perhaps instead you could feel blessed to exist within such an amazing system, and become determined to be an important and powerful influence in the world. After all, the odds really were stacked against you or anything like you existing at all, ever. Perhaps your way of saying thanks is to do some good in ways that are of actual benefit to the world. Even if god exists, he doesn’t want you wasting the resources he gave you on shrines and holy wars!

We can hold opinions and relinquish them dispassionately as new evidence comes to hand, knowing that all the time we are becoming more right, continuing our asymptotic journey towards perfection. Detached from value judgments and superstition we will start to get emotional about things that are real and important.

When we start to look at the world as it is rather than as we want it to be, we become more powerful within it. We take control over our lives and the cause and effect of events that happen within it, and with that understanding comes clarity and peace.

Technorati Tags: astrology, atheism, belief, buddhism, christianity, faith, hinduism, homeopathy, islam, logic, rationality, reason, religion, skepticism, skepticizm

A UTV channel in India called Bindass recently released an advertising campaign which appears to indicate that being an atheist is on par with not being serious about one’s career, doing drugs and being a slut.

What does being Bindass mean to you?

http://www.bindass.com/post/utv-bindass-what-i-am/

Thanks to Manushka for the heads up on this issue:

Manushka: Intelligent eye-candy to stop traffic.

She’s a very dear friend who is serious about her career(s), very chaste and abhors drugs. She’s also an avowed atheist – she doesn’t even believe in a single god. She also shared with me a rather interesting article which showed research has linked IQ with Liberalism, Atheism and sexual exclusivity in men (not women). Nicely done!

The point of the campaign appears to be: “Just because I watch this channel doesn’t mean that I’m a reprobate.”

The channel has named itself ‘Bindass’ after the Hindi word for ‘reckless abandon’ or ‘without restraint’

I don’t see anything wrong with ‘doing’ drugs. It’s a personal choice that can affect your life, so like driving cars, drinking booze, masturbation and surfing, they should be approached with caution and moderation proportional to the danger. Some things, like drugs, cars and booze, are dangerous. Others just sap your energy and time.

Alcohol sends many people to their grave, marijuana has never killed anyone in recorded history.

And before you spurt out some apocryphal anecdote about some stoned guy who thought he was a thought and punched a cloud and then ended up dying because he tried to eat a Cadillac, I will reiterate. Marijuana has never killed anyone, but being a complete moron has been killing things forever. Drugs aren’t bad.

Making drugs illegal is reckless.

It looks like the mountains in Afghanistan! (click for stats

Making plants illegal is absurd, it makes people you would call ‘farmers’ become what we call ‘criminals’ and hands a ready income to terrorism and organised crime.

That’s what funds the Taliban. Look at the pretty picture I made to demonstrate my point (diligent, aren’t I?).

In 2000, the Taliban banned opium production, which caused that downy bit in the middle of the graph. They were really successful, the downy bit indicates a drop in production from 3000 tonnes to a measly 135.

With no supply, heroin prices went uppy (there is no graph for that), and junkies started going clean. This was around September sometime…

Then some Saudis crashed some Americans into two of the twin towers causing three of them to fall down (what did happen to building 7?) and the world fell on our heads, and everyone blamed the Afghans (with bombs), destroyed their economy, and the Taliban decided that poppy production wasn’t so haram (evil) and as of 2008, it was back up climbing over 7000 tonnes, helping them buy AK-47′s and food and Korans.

Ponder this: Our troops are crawling all over Afghanistan looking for imaginary terrorists hiding in imaginary caves, but are walking straight past real poppy fields.

Poppies are easy to find. Unlike imaginary terrorists, poppies grow outdoors, in the sun, and take up 157,000 of Afghanistan’s hectares, two thirds of them in the Hilmand region alone according UNDOC (PDF). If we burned their funding, the Taliban would suddenly become very hungry and their guns would become very empty, our streets very junkie-less, and our jails quite empty. After all, they produce 93% of the world’s opium (stats), it’s their biggest export (CIA Factbook).

We could kill the war on drugs and the war on terror with a couple of humvees and a flamethrower, but we don’t. Why is that?

Yesterday India’s Border Security Force captured 15kgs of heroin crossing the border from Pakistan. Now it’s on my doorstep.

Drugs aren’t bad. Making them bad is bad. Moving on.

Though I kinda wish you did!

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with sleeping around, either. Well, provided you’re well informed, aren’t hurting anyone, and have studied sexual health in school.

The Bonobo are a relative of the chimpanzee, and where chimps use violence to maintain social order, the bonobo use sex.

They use sex as a greeting, for conflict resolution, to relieve boredom and as a method of maintaining a social hierarchy. They are matriarchal and bisexual, the girls growl out and the boys engage in “penis fencing” (no joke).

And they're great photographers.

When a massive patch of food is found that would cause ordinary chimps to become violent and greedy, the bonobo have a crazy orgy and then feast. They’re also freakishly intelligent, far surpassing their dullard chimp cousins. Be more Bonobo.

India refuses to teach sex education in schools. Many government schooled Indian adolescents still aren’t clear on how babies are made and diseases are transmitted.

A Indian politician shared his view on why India refuses to teach sex ed:

“Europe needs sex education because of its declining population rates.” Nawab Malik NCP MLA (Thanks IndiaUncut!)

You are as wise as you are eloquent Mr Malik. Please don’t deport me for calling your stance reckless.

The Mumbai Mirror’s ‘Ask the Sexpert’ column is always a fascinating read:

My girlfriend swallowed my semen while we were engaging in oral sex. Her menstrual cycles are perfectly normal. However, I was worried and surfed the internet and found information there  that suggested that swallowing semen leads to  cancer. Is this true?

Oral sex with swallowing of the semen is a known and common behaviour among many couples.There are no side effects and it does not cause cancer or any other infections. However, it is illegal in our country.

Ahhh… India. Where sex education and oral sex are illegal.

Ahem. Moving on. I’ll skip the one on career, it’s boring.

Well, there’s no arguing that, is there? I think people don’t believe in enough gods.

I mean, most people believe in only one religion, making them mostly atheist anyway.

And really, what are the odds that out of all the religions there were to chance upon, you happened to be born in the right place to the right parents at the right time to be born into the right one? Believing in only one seems reckless.

India has a lovely inclusive nature to all religions, the taxi that brought me here to the airport had both a crucifix hanging from the mirror above a Lord Ganesh on the dash. I say that’s still not far enough though.

If you had all the gods on your side you’d be so busy not eating things, and not doing things that you’d only barely have enough time left for worshipping things, and there’d definitely be no time left for sinning.

You’d certainly never drink, do drugs, masturbate or have sex. Then you’d be truly religious. It’d be a great insurance policy, you’d pay a premium of never doing anything enjoyable, and as a reward, nothing terrible would ever happen to you.

While the rest of us are beset by natural disasters, pestilence, famine, plagues and holy wars, you’d be fully protected from all that suffering that seems to strike the semi-religious world at random regardless of belief.

Then, you could start worshipping your food before you sacrifice it to yourself, and then worship yourself for being you in the process. You could worship stuff that’s not there and thank it for not being there and getting in your way, and worship the stuff that is there for not being not there. You could worship your thoughts for being thunk, and your toes for not being poisonous. You could start worshiping confusion for being what you are now that you’re not not.

So perhaps we could all be a little less serious, more sexual, less violent, more reasonable, more informed and stop fence-sitting on the religion issue. Then we might learn that we’re all pretty fantastic and sexy smart people.

But we should definitely not be reckless.

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