God. I want to say something about God. And religion.

I very much want to say something.

I hate the way the world has all this strife going on often in the name of religion and even more often obviously between religious groups but without ever mentioning religion as the cause.

I hate the way the world's people slavishly follow all these religious leaders supposedly in possession of some special knowledge that gives them a right to tell other people how they should live, what they should do, how they should think, what they should believe, what they should wear, who they should hate and kill.....

I hate the way friends and relatives turn to religion and then begin manifesting a kind of behaviour I find difficult to describe: something about sending bible quotations all around, praying for me, adopting a moral high ground, assuming a pose of superior knowledge, manifesting an apparent belief in spurious or doubtful writings.....

I hate the way scientists - so many - seem to have adopted a jeering attitude towards all religions and believers.

And I have a long history, from my earliest childhood, of interest in and close emotional and intellectual connection with the writings of the christian bible.

So I have something to say and I want to say it.

But I don't know how.

Every time I try it all comes out disjointed and almost incoherent.

I can't put together a book, nothing remotely like it, I can't even put together a pamphlet, I can't even put together a cogent argument or even an interesting sentence it often seems to me.

But I've got to do something so I'm going to do it. Here. And now. At least make a start.

All I will be able to do, I think, is put down disjointed thoughts as they occur to me.

So here goes, here's the first one:

* Of course there's a god. A God. In fact there's nothing else. The discussion can only be about the nature of God, not about the reality or otherwise of God.

That's all I can think of at the moment. I've got mundane matters such as looking after a toddler to attend to.

Back later.

Labour intensive - Attention Intensive

Kids are not just labour intensive, they're attention intensive, too, aren't they? They're 'high maintenance' in every way.

You can be fully occupied and working hard, really hard, doing something physical, shovelling dirt, say. That can be back-breaking, literally, you can cripple yourself with it, put your back 'out', as they say, bugger yourself for life. Shovelling dirt. Hard. Crippling. Very labour intensive without a doubt.

But not 'attention intensive'. You can let your mind wander. You can think many thoughts, follow a line of reasoning, mull things over, ponder things, enjoy yourself imagining things, flights of fancy... It is generally easy to pay sufficient attention to the task. Not that it doesn't take some attention, it does, put the dirt here and here, just like this, just like that, turn the spade this way or that way, grip the handle like this, put the feet here and there....

It is a task that requires and develops some skill, requires some coordination of mind and body.

But it leaves plenty of time for freedom of the mind.

In fact it develops freedom. It develops a poetry of motion. A harmony of musculature and skeleton, enjoyed, appreciated by the mind, engaging the emotions and including the lungs, the breathing, the senses of smell and sight and sound, the tactile sensations enjoying the rough, the smooth....

It becomes like a dance. There must be smooth translation of weight from here to there - to interrupt the smooth flow is to make a jarring, to make a sudden unpleasant increase in weight, force, strain.....

One develops a smooth flowing motion that loads the shovel, lifts the weight and moves it through space in a smooth flowing motion, an arc, that pivots over the feet without ever overbalancing the body or extending the limbs too far.

A motion that reaches an end and discharges the load from the shovel as part of the same action and coils back on itself like a rubber band relaxing from tension.

A motion that seeks to repeat itself in smooth cadence, like dancers moving to the music in rythm.

The whole body, including the mind, the emotions, the reason is engaged upon this activity, it is all-inclusive, it catches the whole of one's being in a rythmic dance which is a greater dance than the entertainment activity for this dance includes the external world, interacts with the external world, manipulates, changes the external world, meets, confronts, challenges the world, finds difficulties and the unexpected, smoothly adapts to them and overcomes them or finds a way around them...

Smoothly, with poetry, force and exertion are directed with a maximum of strainless efficiency to effect the manipulation of the inert disordered external world to where you want it to be - changing that into this.

A work which clumsily done would quickly exhaust a person, perhaps in five minutes can be performed for hours, is performed the whole of the day by some, because done in this manner, with beauty, with feeling, with delicacy feeling for the optimum way amongst the multitude of forces, leverages, balances inherent in the human body and load extending out from the hands and arms on that shovel.

It becomes a song, a poem, a dance and yet remains a work, a solid expression of force, power, strength, mass.

It is a complete and all-engrossing thing. Not something nothing. Not a triviality.

And yet it allows in the midst of all that a free happy wandering of the mind. Often it in fact increases the joyous wandering of the mind, perhaps encourages the mind to wander in this direction or that....

But children! No. They demand physical attention and at the same time they demand complete intellectual attention. They take everything. They leave you with nothing.

You cannot tend to a child's physical needs throughout the day and yet let the mind wander and follow its own course. You cannot string together two coherent thoughts many a time.

Again and again there are periods when you do not get two consecutive minutes without a demanding interruption of your thought processes.

They will chatter and bang and make noises even when they require no other attention. It seems to be an inborn device, the young constantly make a noise so's the parent always knows where the young are.

That's from one end. From the other end the child always wants to know where the parent is and, it seems, always wants to know it has the parent's attention. They are attention seekers. We all know that and assume idly that it means the 'look at me' phenomenon where a child displays a new trick or a new toy or something.

No, it means more than that. It means they want your attention 24hours a day for no other reason than to have it. Not to show you this or that but just to have. So's, in effect, you can't have it.

Sit in a room with a child and try to read a book. Everything's fine, the child has no need of you until you try to read that book and then suddenly the child has to pester you minute by minute, frequent interruptions. Or perhaps even a continual never ending pester until you give up.

The child is upset by your attention going elsewhere.

But also the ordinary physical tasks that the child is not perhaps so responsible for in any emotionally or psychologically directed way, just the sheer animal tasks that are required to maintain a child in our culture - dress them, wash them, feed them, attend to their toilet needs.

It is almost impossible to maintain your own inner life - your inner thoughts, your train of thought, your own personal inner dialogue - whilst doing these things.

Because they are not inanimate beings. Of course. Seems obvious, right? But it is more than that. Dogs and cats are not inanimate beings, either, but your can disinterestedly or abstractedly attend to similar needs for them whilst pursuing your own intellectual life. You can groom a horse and contemplate anything you like - holiday plans, romantic kerfuffles, taxation loopholes, academic studies, whatever....

You can't do that with a child.

The More You Give The More They Take.

What do you think about that? I've formulated the opinion that the more you give, the more the takers take, and take with demands and menaces, eventually.

It seems to be a born-in trait of the human race.

Children take all you can give and the more you give the more they expect and the more they get the more they get angry if their expectations are not met. So's they finish up being spoilt, greedy, selfish, imperiously arbitrary, tyrannical brats.

How on earth can that be natural, I thought, how could that be? Surely evolution wouldn't let that happen. If children were naturally like that then early tribes would have walked away from them, left them lying on the ground, dashed their brains out....

Children, it is well recorded, you'll get no argument from anyone who knows children to even the slightest degree, enjoy being ornery, awkward, recalcitrant, mischievous, devilish, downright destructive, deceitful.

How could that be? How could such traits have survived?

There's no good in children at all. They are born lumps of hungry flesh. Devoted, not without reason, to devouring as much as possible as soon as possible in order to grow as quickly as possible. However that growth is constrained to certain inexorable time consuming path.

So in order not to get their brains dashed out they come fitted out by the quirks of evolutionary happenchance complete with certain charming traits that cause parents (and others) to 'love' them. They feel comfy and warm and nice. Until they start squirming and pooping and peeing and screaming.

In essence they all fail to pass the 'test'. That is: they are not nice enough to survive. Their demands are too great. They want too much and give too little in return and are too aggressive and downright nasty. That's apart from the constant nuisance they are, the constant drain on resources, on attention, on your own life force.

Essentially they all fail this test. Some quite obviously. Distraught parents dash their brains out, or drown them, or throw them away, or stab them to death or beat them to death.

This is true, today, you'll find an instance in nearly every day's newspaper, certainly every week's newspaper.

And the vast body of them escape similar fates only because of an immense amount of self discipline and community discipline and training. Fear of the law. Fear of the relatives and friends. Fear of original sin, i.e. fear of wrong-doing itself. Fear of failing one's own view of one's self - an irrationality I wouldn't expect to have been present in primitive man.

So there's no doubt that from the very earliest age children are literally awful, shocking, disgusting, annoying, repugnant, troublesome, irritating, demanding, frustrating, objectionable and so on........ not worth having around.

How could this possibly be? It is not evolutionarily sound.

I wondered and wondered and wondered about this. I just couldn't see it. It seemed impossible.

Finally, however, the penny dropped. I'd been so well conditioned I was incapable of thinking rationally. I had assumed my own behaviour to be evolutionarily rational. I had assumed I, we - parents and citizens everywhere - were 'right' and 'natural'.

I was seeing child behaviour within an environment, inescapably, and I was failing to consider the nature of the environment, I was assuming it was valid.

But it is not. The environment is not valid. Not evolutionarily valid. Evolution did not create this parental or community environment. Man did. We did. Generic 'man', I mean, includes women. It is a political construct, manifestation of psychological imbalance and irrationality - i.e. social ills such as war.

The madness of mankind causes it to attack itself. This has an evolutionary component, of course and evolution has constrained this sickness within certain bounds so that the species manages to live with it. Mainly, historically, by splintering and hiding each from the other.

The self injury is bad enough but manageable. The species survives and can continue along an evolutionary path, guided simply by blind evolutionary forces - i.e. not directed by the mind of man.

But what happened is that the demands of warfare together with the rise of communication skills caused the rise of 'leaders' able to command followers and issue complicated decrees and organise hundreds and then thousands.

And then individual lives became the property of someone else - of the rulers. And then evolutionary trends and practices such as dashing the brains out of a noisy child became 'forbidden' by man. Because other men needed that child to grow into a property, a slave, a belonging. Nearly all men were once slaves until very recent times. Bonded to the land, owned by the owner of that land, not free to wander, not free to choose their own life.

And this situation evolved itself until the present day. A handful of centuries of rearing children and putting up with what should properly be considered unacceptable behaviour have led to where it is now the norm - and I don't know how quickly such traits can be spread through the population and bred into succeeding generations but I feel it is probably very quickly. I feel psychological traits such as greediness, anger, madness spread far quicker than an evolutionary quirk such as a disappearing tail.

So there's the answer. It is not that the children are not evolutionary explainable. It is that our own behaviour is evolutionarily inexplainable without factoring in the 'evolution' of man's thinking and social organisation.

If I - and you - were true to our evolutionary breeding we'd not put up with this crap from our kids. They would be left by the side of the trail. They would be dropped off cliffs. They would go without food and drink. They would go without attention. They would be smashed in the head. They would have their bad traits weeded out in record time.

It is our own unnatural self restraint that is allowing this stuff to continue. Our own falseness.

The irony, of course, is that this falseness is nearly always detected eventually by the young and they frequently have less than optimal reactions to this detection. They despise the deceit they've found or they're shocked in their little hearts to find they're not truly loved, or they decide all of life is deceit and trickery and this is what they must strive for, or they feel suddenly alone in a wilderness....

Whatever reaction the common thread is a break between parent and child, between society and its young.

So that a society develops that is not a human family, not really a human race, but instead is an artificial construct, a collection of injured, crippled beings that shouldn't have been, held together by man's artificial laws instead of by nature.

Such societies have madness not far beneath the surface.

Such societies cannot easily discuss the humanities, care and consideration for each other.

Such societies cannot easily manifest 'happy families' in the sense of joined families all happy... the nearest it ever comes is in large groups of mutually insane as in 'sects' or 'cults'.

Look at your children, or at any children, from baby to teenager or beyond... do they appear unpleasant, impossible, even insane in their demands flouting all sense and reason and tempting terrible retribution but somehow escaping it?

Why is this thing? Consider yourself and your natural instinctive reactions. How true to them are you?

Consider that you, yourself are the result of this flawed upbringing of human young.

The mad leading the mad.

It truly is an insane world.

We could, you know, look back in time and check all this out. Would you like to know how the cave man thought? How his society organised itself and brought up its young? How the stone age man got along with his teenagers? How they dealt with screaming babies?

We could know this. It would be like consulting our elders, wouldn't it? The ancestors. The 'old people'. The humans from before.

A dream? A conceit? No. An easily achievable reality. For a while. For a short while. We have stone age tribes still extant on the earth, from nomads to farmers. We could consult them and ask the pertinent questions. But we never do.