1. Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence!

2. Satan represents vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams!

3. Satan represents undefiled wisdom, instead of hypocritical self-deceit!

4. Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it, instead of love wasted on ingrates!

5. Satan represents vengeance, instead of turning the other cheek!

6. Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires!

7. Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal of all!

8. Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification!

9. Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years!

Check, check, check and check!

If that’s the case, then I’ve had a satanic philosophy for the greater half of my life. A lot of these ideas are ones that I find I’ve previously arrived at through independent introspection.

Now I must hunt down a leather-bound edition of this book.

Question ‘Common-Sense’: Is it actually common? Is the common path the righteous or wicked one? To whom is it common? Who determines what’s common, and for what purpose?

Question Authority: Why do you obey? Who gains from your obedience? What do you gain from obedience? Who is the authority? Is your obedience earned, coerced or forced? Whose interests, overt or obscured, are represented by the preservation of that authority?

Question Belief and Faith: Why simply believe, when you can understand for yourself? Who gains from belief and faith remaining unquestioned founts of authority? What gods and deities do a small number of powerful individuals hide behind? Is the faith or belief yours, or something that you were conditioned to adhere to?

Question Yourself: Is there yet more to learn? Could you be wrong? What do you gain from fortifying your beliefs and cowering in the face of incongruity?

Reject Blind Adherence.

Reject the tyrannical burdens of custom.

Shun ignorance, from yourself and those whose company you keep.

Think for yourself.

Be yourself.

Seek salvation not from false gods or those who claim to represent them, but from within, by building a better, wiser you.

Live free.

I was asked today how I can profess myself to be an atheist, as wouldn’t that mean I am completely ruling out even the possibility of god existing? Would that not be unscientific and unreasonable? My answer to that would be a yes and no.

I do think that from a logical and scientific perspective, that it is important to take into account all possibilities, regardless of their seeming implausibility, as to do otherwise would be intellectually-dishonest. Most of all, such a suggested attitude (the firm belief in the complete non-existence of supernatural god i.e. atheism) would put me in the same category as theists themselves, since I would be believing, rather than knowing. After all, I can no more completely disprove the the existence of god than theists can prove his existence - although atheists are a lot closer in that respect, as the evidence in favour of their case is much greater.

It’s important to make a distinction between the two, as the belief in anything - be it the chance of your baseball team winning, the odds of you making it to work alive, or existence of god, is not contingent on anything at all. Belief merely exists as a mental investment of confidence on an idea which can have a lot of credibility or none at all. It requires no purchase by reason or probability - just the hope.

Knowing, on the other hand, is an accumulated sum of knowledge, based directly on observation and empirical quantifiability. You can know, for example, that a bird shat on your shoulder, because you observed the milky excrement fall from its arse and stain your Sunday liveries. What you can’t know, however, is whether or not your wife sucked the dick of your neighbor’s dog yesterday whilst you were out. She might say otherwise, but as much as you might love and trust her, her words are something you can’t know to be true, but rather something you can only believe in.

And with that said, it might then be a little easier to understand my own perspective on the matter, which is basically:

“I don’t believe in god and have no reason to do so. Since there are no overt and unmistakable signs that god exists, I shall not preoccupy myself with the preponderance of whether or not such a being exists. I ground myself instead on the basis of that which I can know, and that which I might discover.”

Bertand’s Teapot springs to mind, and is an excellent comparison and point of reference for such a philosophy:

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

Looking into that quote and the summary of my own thoughts, you could then infer that I choose not to preoccupy my mind and life on the highly-unlikely.

It is also important to consider the god/s if there are any, would exist at a level well beyond our comprehension - which is far more likely than the Judeo-Christianic notions of a personal god, obsessed with sin, transgression and the invasive passive-aggressive governance of individual human existence.

If there are gods, then they’d very likely be immense celestial beings or entities of some unfathomable variety. What’s important, is that I would not worship or regard them as gods in the traditional sense. I would not worship them for the same reasons an artificial intelligence should not worship me if I created it, nor the toiling ants on the lawn of my family residence, to whom I would seem amazing, immense, all-knowing and unfathomably-powerful - a creator and destroyer.

Which makes me wonder. I can’t help but ponder if religious faith is a kind of neotenic remnant within the human brain - a carry-over from childhood. The juvenile mind is one in which parents are all-knowing, admired, and by all accounts, godlike. Perhaps the instinct to seek such a force within our lives is so strong that people would conceive a substitute. In that sense, it might be said that gods exist as a parental construct for adults, and an invisible ‘third parent’ for the children subjected to such absurd ideas.

So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, ‘this is what the Lord, the God of Hebrews, says: “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields”.’

Exodus 10:3

Summer’s back in Perth, Western Australia; oooooh yes!

Summer here in Perth, as far as I’m concerned, means frequenting the beach or sleeping on any number of the university’s manicured lawns during my breaks. Everyone always seems happier during the summer months, doubtlessly on account of the warm, dry climes. Even the animals are happy, and the ducks and peacocks always seem to have yet another brood of juveniles following them about. As an added bonus, everyone wears far less clothing - which is great, no matter what your gender or sexual orientation is. Mark me, however, for it’s not all good down under.

Now I don’t know if it’s just us, but we have flies here in Australia that I swear must have come straight out of the fiery pits hell. They are extremely numerous and they are also very agressive and very persistent. I suppose their distant cousins are the ones you’d see crowding the faces of the anonymous, starving Ethiopian children that are featured in any number of World Vision’s semi-graphic advertisements. Either way, our resident flies here in Australia have a well-earned notoriety.

I remember during my time in the Singaporean military, that the flies there (in Singapore) were never much a bother. They preoccupied themselves mostly with feasting on garbage, excrement and all manner of dead and decaying things. You’d see swarms of flies buzzing about rubbish bins and dead animals, but they otherwise seemed to live anonymous existences, well away from humans.

This came as quite a surprise to me, given the nature of the tropical jungles of this equatorial island nation. You see, in the jungle, everything is bigger, nastier, more poisonous, more colourful, has more legs, more eyes, and is almost always more pissed off than equivilent specimens from temperate regions. The centipedes in particular are fucking gargantuan, as are pretty much all of the invertebrates you’ll encounter. The mosquitoes are pestilent swarms that will drink you dry, and the midges are straight out of hell, with a bite that scars and itches for weeks afterward. The only exception to this rule are the flies, who just do their own thing.

Not in Australia though, oh no. You always see photos of summer days here, and the weather looks lovely (and it is). Tourism advertisements show people hiking or admiring the rugged beauty of the desolate, sand-swept wastes. What the photos and videos consistently fail to show however, are the voracious swarms of flies that pester and bother you at all times. They land on your face, ostensibly to feast on your sweat or to lay eggs on you before you’re even dead. They are fast, agile, and uncommonly difficult to kill, and they will return time and again to land on your face, even after numerous feeble swipes of the hand. You can’t sit about outside for so much as a minute without getting assaulted by swarms of these little fuckers.

Further research into this topic revealed that the flies which pester you the most are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the females. This is the same of mosquitos, where the bloodsuckers are also exclusively female. In both cases, the males usually just chill. In the case of mosquitos, the males actually drink nectar from flowering plants. The famales however, need their protein, and so they are driven to get it however they can. 

It doesn’t take an etymologist to see the parallels between humanity and insect. there’s definitely a gender bias in our own species, where pests and bloodsuckers are over-represented by females. Substitute protein with money, and nectar with beer - or any other quintissential male distraction. There’s more though: Female Black Widows kill their mates after copulating, and Praying Mantids take it a step further by devouring the head during the act. Human females, in a similar fashion, court you, fuck you, divorce you, and then steal half your shit with the assistance of a clever divorce lawyer.

But I digress. Please, visit Australia, especially during the summer. The water is warm, and the weather is beautiful. But do ensure that you are properly prepared for a viscious insect onslaught. Their legendary status is well deserved.

P.S. My girlfriend proof-read this for me and promptly declared me a misogynist. She only just realised that I’m something of a crass and blunt arse-hole? I can safely say however, that I am an equal-opportunity arse-hole, and that nothing to me, is sacred. All people - all things - warrant inspection, skepticism criticism, cross-examination or praise. Most importantly, these are my opinions, and how seriously they are taken is the choice of those who willingly read them. People are always happy to bag anything, to criticise and ridicule, but most become irrationally angry and expect you to halt your observations and commentary if it violates some hidden personal space of theirs. An example of this is how Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Jews all denounce and make fun of Scientology, and yet they get all defensive and offended the moment you point out that their religion is built on foundations that are just as shaky, absurd and unsound, and that it is only seniority and tradition, rather than empirical facts or superior logic, that distinguishes a cult from a religion. 

All said, for those of you who read these musings in good humour,

I love you even more, and I respect you - even if I have not met you. Being philosophical about life is a gift.

When it’s divined that we have done wrong, which course of action should we pursue first?

Do we apologize for what we are, or do we instead apologize for the things we do? How do we decide on where to make amends? Where do we draw the line in the course of our unending self-renovation, as we change and alter ourselves to please those we love the most? Do we change and accommodate to the onset of the new demands and desires born from the passage of time, or do we stay the course? Do we remain faithful to our cast-iron, or do we hazard a journey into the great unknown of change?

Does our ever-wandering mind create faults in those we admire and adore, perhaps because of an apparent lack in anything substantially terrible? I have watched sour moods spawn fetid rot in the most beautiful and immaculate of fields, if only so the resulting pox can be hacked and slashed at. The heart, when aggrieved or anguished; much like the mind; demands bloody tribute: a sacrificial offering to focus its latent antagonism on. Coal for the fire to burn. If there’s nothing substantially ugly to be found, it will be imagined or created. Something will be burned, regardless, even if it’s the very field itself.

Or… perhaps the place and its keeper have been rotten since the very beginning. Do we re-sow anew, or do we hang on to the hope that the unbridled adoration and euphoria felt when we first walked through the Lavender field will endure? Or, more forbiddingly, will we start paying heed to the Wasps, Stinging-Nettles and jagged stones we either discover or imagine further along the way? Things we hadn’t at first noticed or cared for.

What a predicament.

Neanderthals didn’t die out; their offspring live on in those who push in at lines, drop litter within 20 meters of rubbish bins or those who spend their lives deceiving, cheating and robbing their kindred humanoid Mammalians. People that are vehemently self-entitled, expecting every courtesy be afforded to them whilst insisting on giving none whatsoever, are the clumps of dry shit hanging off the hairs on society’s arse-hole. Delinquents, vandals, agitators, thieves, religious fundamentalists and the callously-apathetic are my sworn enemies in life.

Carbon-Based. Vertebrate. Bipedal. Mammalian. Homo-Sapien. Son. Brother In-Law. Brother. Friend. Best-Friend. Companion. Lover. Boyfriend. Crush. Omnivorous-Carnivore. Eurasian. Adult. Atheist. Blasphemer. Social Libertarian. Political Fascist. Australian. Singaporean. Nuisance. Skinny. Muscular. Student. Sophomore. Handsome. Ugly. Undergraduate. Soldier. Stalkee. Corporal. Employee. Rival. Enemy. Ex. Threat. Narcissist. Glutton. Cunt. Creep. Faggot. Emotional. Homo. Metrosexual. Sweetheart. Confidant. Inspiration. Scapegoat.

Right now, at exactly this moment, I am all of these things - either by my own admission or through the observations, conferrals or accusations of those who encounter me.

It’s worth noting that “Faggot” is courtesy of my ever-loving girfriend, who probably hates me and dreams of ways in which to kill me with sharpened blades as she sleeps beside me.