Birth of a Rationalist.

On the last day before she was to fly to visit Elvis in Las Vegas, the package she'd been hinting at finally arrived in my letterbox. Later that night, after Monsterman had gone to bed, I opened it and to her delighted squealing, put the DVD that was in the package into my DVD player. In spite of the lightness of the material and the writing I was transported - entirely due to the setting for the movie. The movie? Outsourced.

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Those that know me, know I have a rather unfortunate tendency to haunt various debate style forums and discussion groups - particularly of the political, religious and philosophical variety - to the point of finding a place in such groups in discussion boards that are ostensibly about anything but . It is something I have been queried on with moderate regularity. "Why do you waste your time with that?" "How can you get any pleasure out of arguing?" Even, "Why are you so driven to prove yourself right, or convince others you're right and they are wrong? What gives you that right?"

The reasons are varied, though as far as posting in such groups goes, most have to do with a form of disconnect from a great deal of pop-culture, or from an unwillingness to engage too greatly in those that deal with certain sub-cultures. In a couple of venues specifically, it is very much a case of the latter. In a more general sense however, it is more a matter of there being an audience of (generally) my peers to discuss such things with. I do the single-dad thing, with little in the way of fixed income, but rather a mish-mash of part-time casual jobs that revolve around the most important role (to me) of being a parent. I live in a small town in an area with some of the lowest post-secondary school retention rates in the entire country. The state the town is is has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. And though I was born here, I grew up on the Big island, so I'm not a local.

The opportunities to talk about much more than sport or how our kids are doing at school is rather minimal to say the least. The opportunity to share my thinking on a wider range of subjects, or to learn from the knowledge and experiences of others is even more meagre.

I like to think. I like to question and puzzle and ponder. It might be argued I have far too much time to do so, but it is among my favourite activities regardless. And many things I encounter in my day-to-day plod-along existence spark off all sorts of random thoughts and questions. Sometimes, they are peculiar in the extreme, sometimes perversely personal, sometimes they are on subjects that affect only me and at others they are thoughts or questions to do with the lives and experiences of great numbers of people. These thoughts I track down and find as many answers as I can, from whatever sources I am able.

Every now and then, some of those thoughts or questions requires an audience where answers can be teased out or tested for their fit, and on occasion I come across the questions or comments of others that some of my prior pondering might find its fit with.

Now the sub-culture thing is something I rarely comment on because in the main, my connection to that sub-culture is a somewhat mild one that I feel my personal take on it (and partaking in it) is pretty much that: personal. Where it isn't, I find that I generally take a position that might be deemed somewhat combative or at odds with the bulk of that sub-culture. Instead, I view it as a resource: for like-minded, fun or inspiring individuals, ideas and insights, things to avoid or to enjoy. What I like, I hang onto, what I don't I discard or ignore. For the most part.

Possibly the thing I dislike most is also, in an odd way, the inverse of the reason I partake in those distasteful debate forums. It is the sense of superiority or uniqueness of that sub-culture, and I just can't find it in me to roll with that mind-set. Even that mind-set alone is not unique to that sub-culture - I'm sure Trekkies and trainspotters and stamp collectors and dog breeders and teenagers all share that same outlook. What is also obvious to me is that each person in that sub-culture has their own narrow experience and take on it and that in many respects, these people are also right - theirs isn't a world that is experienced by the bulk of people, and the doings within that sub-culture has little impact outside of it.

This is where the inverse comes in. In one way or another, we've all been affected by or experienced and interacted with people and matters political, social, philosophical, religious, historical, biological, mystical, artistic, practical, cultural, economical, psychological, physical, medical, chemical or spiritual. Regardless of who we are, where we live, what we do in our private or public lives, what we believe or what we know, we all experience and are affected by these things.

Outside of me and mine and getting through each day, these are the things I think most about. And, because of that commonality of experience, are also the things I tend to be more inclined to write and talk about in discussion forums, and even among friends (though with friends there is also a lot more inane banter and fun and joking and general bullshitting and silliness).

There is one other reason I give thought to such things and I think it is a product of the country I live and have grown up in. Australia is one of the few countries where voting is compulsory. It may even be the only one - I've never thought to ask about that. There's my next search for information taken care of. Because of that, I hate the idea that my vote might be wasted - that because I chose not to be informed, what I vote for might be entirely counter to my preferences, beliefs or ethics. So I seek to be informed as fully as I know how to be. The unfortunate downside of that is of course that it can bleed out into other areas of my life at the most inopportune times.

The world being what it is, being informed about politics also requires that one be informed (or even better, gain understanding) about every other possible subject I mentioned back up there and then some, for each one either effects or is effected by matters political - and, by extension, on the lives of me and mine.

Alternatively, it could just mean I have no life.

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She called me again today from the land of Elvis. Very faintly in the background I could hear slot machines and crowds of people losing money. Last night she got to see Cirque du Soleil for the first time. She had been transported somewhere magical, and in her re-telling I was cut into six pieces, for I too was transported back to when and where I first saw one of their overwhelming performances. As I was only two nights previously, I was once more lost somewhere else on this ball of mud. I was simultaneously in Tasmania, in Las Vegas, Portland, San Francisco, India and Japan. I was lost in a world filled with difference and magic and wonders.

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Some time after that as I was browsing through some of the forums I participate in, I came across a link to this debate in one of the religious debate forums. Whether you watch it or not doesn't really matter (though it was quite an interesting debate), what matters is it got me thinking.

I realised that while I identify these days as an atheist in the milieu of spirituality, and while I would dearly love for our political and educational institutions to be secular, I would hate to see religion disappear entirely from the face of the Earth.

Oh without doubt there are certain expressions of religious thought and belief I would gladly do without; but to lose it entirely? No. That I don't want to see. The reason is that there is so much richness and diversity of human cultures that have and do come out of it - just as much as there is oppression and bigotry and suffering.

Just over a year ago, my son and I had the opportunity to see something rare for this little burg - our Hindu neighbours performing a blessing on their new car. For both of us it was fascinating, and for Monsterman, a source of puzzlement, amusement and lots of "why?" questions. We talked about it with our neighbours, and I talked some more with him about my friends Vin and Charles and their family. We dug out books and looked at things online until the "why?" questions finally began to peter out. It was one of his first glimpses into the world beyond the natural sea borders of Tasmania and his very western anglo way of life.

Many years earlier, I had the opportunity to go with Vin and Charles to visit their extended family in India. Not being able to raise the funds in time to do so may be one of the very, very few regrets in my life. Whilst I know that I will have the opportunity to visit India at some point in the future, the chance to have done so with my friends, to stay and live with locals and submerge myself into a culture so different to my own has gone.

What would my experience be if I were to go there and religion had somehow vanished from that world? I can't imagine it would be anywhere near as rich. Even without visiting India with them, my experience and encounters with their immediate family - their mother and father, their borther and his wife by arranged marriage (as their parents had been and both brother and sister-in-law and mother and father were unmistakenly in love with their partners) showed me a care for others and a joy in life that was wonderful to be allowed to be part of.

Some seven years ago, I visited Japan. I'd scored a bit of a study/work based junket and had the chance to board with families in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo. Religion was everywhere and nowhere. It wasn't outside the culture, it was the culture. Tucked away in tiny, narrow Tokyo side streets were countless small shrines, well maintained with devotion over hundereds of years. The phenomenal tranquility and beauty of Nara and its ancient temples took me out and away from the rush and press of the modern day. Sitting on the edges of a Zen garden in Kyoto I lost myself in the swirling patterns that had been painstakingly drawn in the loose white stones by an elderly monk with a rake in his hands.

Spending the time with my hosts, I came to realise that while they did not allow the tennets of Shinto or Buddhism to dictate the terms of how they lived their lives, their very behaviours were shaped in no small part by it. And they, and every individual I encountered whilst there, were impecably considerate and exceptionally peaceful, helpful and polite.

Would that I could say the same of my experiences with many who profess a Christian faith. Yet even in good and proper white Anglo Christian centric Australia, religion and spirituality helped shape the person I have come to be. In rejecting Christianity very early on, my hunger to find answers for all the how and why questions in my head had me reading about Buddhism and Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, Taoism and the pantheons of ancient civilizations, ghosts and sasquatches and UFOs and yetis and bunyips and narguns alongside books on biology and geology and physics and history and geography.

In amongst all that, a photo of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto captured my imagination, leading to a fascination with all things Asian - from Japan and China, through Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, Tibet, Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. I was undone. My world had been opened up and there was never again going to be a chance to shut me back in to the obliviousness of one small nation or culture. The birth of a humanist began on the day my father sent the school a note to excuse me from religious instruction.

It lead me into the martial arts, which in turn, lead me into traditional Chinese medicine. In spite of it being based entirely upon a form of Taoist mysticism, this, alongside my love of biology and history and the variety of world culture, was to be the penultimate building block in my move away from mysticism towards rationalism. The reason behind that was that in studying Chinese medicine, we were also required to study orthodox medicine alongside the medical students of the local university. For three years, as I studied qi and meridians, acupuncture and herbs, massage and daiji, the five elements and qi gong, I also studied anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, biochemistry and pathology.

My world of understanding had expanded exponentially once more...and so had my questions.

Once more, back into the books I went, and back to asking any I could find who might be knowledgable enough on a given subject to do their part to feed the hunger of my curiosity beast.

The final shift was the result of two people. One was someone I had in my late teens thought of as a friend and a mentor (in the more widely accepted meaning of the word), the other a co-worker.

I met my friend on the first day of what was to be my families final posting to Queensland. He was our neighbour, almost exactly ten years my senior, and he was the first person to shake my hand and greet and treat me as an adult.

We found a common interest in martial arts, and in the tenor of our philosophical thought. With one exception - he was a born again Christian. As out of place and angst-filled as only a translocated fifteen year old can be, I clung to the similarities of thought and either ignored or was swept up in the vaguest possibility that some of his claims might be true. And they were wildly impossible and improbable claims; like using his ability to manipulate qi to level himself through a window seven feet above the ground using only one finger, or that the priests attending the ark of the covenant were actually atomic scientists wearing radiation proof clothing, or how long he was able to fuck his wife without cumming.

Though I didn't believe his claims, part of me wanted to believe, and another part simply wanted to maintain what I thought was otherwise a good friendship.

Not long after that, his wife left him and his two children and he moved to Tasmania. I bought my first guitar and a couple of song books from him, and bought him a pair of mock samurai swords as a farewell gift.

Three years later, I had an offer from a fellow student (from the year before me) to work with him in the town I now live in. I bumped into my old friend one day at the local supermarket and we renewed the friendship. By now, he had a new partner, this lovely, lively woman was only a year older than I. He was even more firmly entrenched in the church by now and the grandeur of his claims had also grown. By this time though, I was more confident and comfortable in myself and in my own abilities and knowledge, and we had many discussions where we would respectfully argue our points of disagreement back and forth. Not long before I left for work elsewhere in the state his lovely partner left him, unable and unwilling to put up with his abuse and use of her and the pretense he made of the situation in public.

More years passed and I moved back to the north of the state, this time with the person who was to become Monsterman's mother. Once again, the supermarket was the venue for the renweal of a friendship. This time however I was slightly more reticent and less eager than I had been previously - there was an air of wild intensity about him, a subtly blazing look to his eyes. I was put in mind of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The degree of his intensity and delusion was made evident a few months later.

He called me one day to ask if I would stop by his place to help take a class in meditation, particularly to share some of what I had learned in my Chinese medicine course regarding qi and qi gong.

When I arrived, I found him holding court over a disparate group of awkwardly dressed people, all holding Bibles and notebooks in their hands. The "class" began. I was introduced as a friend who he had taken under his wing and to whom he had, "Taught everything he knows." He began to explain his theories on God and mind and energy and crystals and demons and aliens and partway through this, he dropped the final clunker. He made a statement of something as fact, something as his own discovery, that I knew, knew with one hundred percent certainty had been lifted directly, word for word, from a science fiction novel I had loaned him a few weeks earlier.

I looked at him, astonished at the level of his deception - of himself and his audience.

"So this is how cults begin," I thought to myself. I stood up and left.

When the day came that I was confronted by a masseur claiming in almost the same breathe that: a combination of wormwood oil and electric current would kill the flukeworms that caused cancer and multiple sclerosis and hepatitis and AIDS and motor neurone disease; and that true belief in God and Jesus could cure homosexuality, all the components of my nascent atheism clicked into place. I could no longer idly accept that a person's beliefs were something solely for them, I had become aware that some people acted on the beliefs they held to the detriment of others.

There are many ways in which religious or mystical belief can be and has been damaging, many reasons to chose reason and concrete reality over them, but none of that is quite enough for me to wish for the removal of it from this world. Rather, I would live in a world where our laws and governments were secular and not circumscribed by religious or superstitious beliefs. Where beliefs like that could continue to exist and express their better face without being given the power to enact all that is damaging about them. Just as I would hate to be living in a world ruled by gods and demons with megalomaniacal theocrats dictating how we live and firmly poisoning us against a quest for growth and understanding and mutual acceptance, I would hate to be in a world where some of the fascinating wonder and diversity of human culture had vanished. A world where walking through Mumbai or Wellington or Portland or New York or London or Tokyo or Beijing or Durban orLa Paz offers no more surprise or novelty than walking through the streets of Hobart or Sydney.

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Today, I find my wonder in the small things in life and my awe in the grand and big things. I delight in the chance to take pleasure and enjoy flights of fancy and imagination over such coincidences and occasions of synchronicity that can give rainbows and white butterflies a special and personally magical meaning. I find the delight and wonder and awe as readily in leaves budding on a tree as I do in the growth of my son. I find it in the random acts of kindness of strangers for one another . It is in the acts of extreme daring or courage or wisdom of people adventuring in the most hostile parts of the world or at the furthest reaches of human understanding. It is in music and art and language and joy. It is in the astonishing and wonderous complexity and inter-connectedness of life on our planet and in all the elements of the universe. It is expressed in the amazing feats the human body and mind are capable of and the incredible diversity of the expression of life on our planet. I find it here at my desk, or in faroff San Francisco watching sea lions or in the middle of the bustle of Tokyo watching Cirque du Soleil. I find it in in the love of my boy and my love of Next and the love they return for me.