How did the contest come out, Luke?

The Berlin Fotomarathon? I had a lot of fun, but now my body aches all over. I was cycling for about 14 hours. Not constantly, but when I wasn’t cycling I was laying or crouching or standing or leaning over to take photos. At about 10:30pm I got cramp in my toe, and then later in my calf.

About 400 people took part, and each person enters 24 photos. The judges have a lot to look through! There is an exhibition of all the photos in July, and the top 10 winners are announced then. I won’t be about in July to see the exhibition, but I think they put all the photos on the internet. I didn’t enter to win, but now that it’s over I’m curious to see if I win a prize. I know all my photos were technically very good, and I explored the main theme of “Time Travel Berlin” very well. As for the 24 individual themes for the photos, that you receive as you go along, I got really lucky with some, and completely copped out on others.

I started with zero inspiration, and nothing prepared. All I knew was that I wanted to do something different with my photography during the Fotomarathon, and not just go with my normal style. You’ve seen my photography… I just take photos of things I see. It’s not often I have a theme or a plan. I mean, I knew I wanted to take photos of swans the other day, but my favourite photo from that trip was the dog in front of the hospital, and that was the one photo I took that I didn’t plan!

So, the theme of the first photo was “Witnesses”, and it also had to include the paper with your number, so your photos can be identified from the first one. I was thinking “Maybe a security camera…” The next theme was “No man’s land” and I thought “Maybe the door of the ladies WC…” but knew those ideas were completely uninspired, and said nothing about the overall theme of time travel. Then I rode past a flea market, and spotted these two wooden dwarfs. They had funny eyes, looking off to the side, as though doing something naughty. I took a photo.

The photo looked a bit like this:

Then I thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to buy these right now, and they can be my models for the rest of the day.” I looked at the themes, and worked out a rough story that I could tell with the two dwarfs. It involved one killing the other, then going back in time to correct his mistake. Thankfully the later, unknown themes worked well with this. The last three were “One the edge of time”, “Nightowls” and “Berlin 2020″, so after they make friends again, I knew they would do a final time jump forward to 2010. Of course, I could only plan this after I found out at 9pm.

At some parts in the story the dwarfs had to look at photos of themselves in the past, so I took a photo of the back of my DSLR with my iPhone, zoomed in a bit on the iPhone screen, and showed them looking at that. Here is an image I used when one dwarf was showing the other how he teleported through time and space:

I chatted to some other marathoners along the way, saying “I’ve got to have a dwarf travel through time, and I don’t have a time machine! A phone booth would be good, but they don’t exist any more. Maybe I’ll create some kind of special effect on the spot.” Later on, I remembered the special effect above. You do it in camera. Hold the zoom lens, and make sure the eye is in the middle of the frame. Make sure you have a 1/30 exposure. Hit the shutter and turn the camera, not the lens, at the same time. Result: swirly time travel scene! The photo above isn’t the one I used for the final image, but it was the one that looked best on the the iPhone screen.

The favourite parts of the day, and the story, was when something happened spontaneously, and I made it part of the story. For example, at one point the red dwarf was going to spot the green dwarf across a fountain, after the red dwarf chasing the other through time to meet find him. The theme was “I spy with my little eye.” But a tourist turned the green dwarf round, for her husband to take a photo of her standing next to it in front of the fountain. First I thought “Damn tourist! Can’t you see I’m taking photos here?” Of course she couldn’t, as I was laying on the ground in on the other side of the fountain, trying to get to the same eye-level as the dwarfs. I was waiting for her to finish, when I realised the story would be better this way. Red would see green, but green wouldn’t see red. That way red could follow green for a while (the next theme was “moving”) and they could meet in a more personal way.

Also, on the second to last photo, I dropped one of the dwarfs for the first time. This resulted in a completely different ending to the story than I imagined. Better or worse, I can’t say, but certainly more abrupt than I imagined.

Overall, I had a really good day. I found out new things about photography, and about creativity, and about myself. Who knows, maybe I’ll do more of this kind of photography?

Here’s Adam’s submission:

Here’s mine. I made the joke before anyone else:

Rym wins, with this topical entry:

I had to put earphones in an listen to something else while watching the Germany v Australia game, just to blot out the noise of those damn vuvuzela. The England USA game was bearable, because I watched in a full theater, and we made our own noise. But vuvuzela result in zero atmosphere inside the stadium, as portrayed on TV, and means I’m probably not going to watch another game unless I can turn the sound off.

Also, here’s a vuvuzela’s take on the world cup.

Last night I decided to sort through and count up all the foreign currency I have at home. I travel a lot with work, and visit a lot of countries. Often the local businesses will accept dollars or euros, and sometimes pounds. Other times I’ll just use my various cards. But sometimes I’m going to spend a few days in the country, and might go on various adventures. The last thing I want to do is be stuck somewhere without enough money to do something spontaneous. More importantly, I never want to be stuck without enough money to hire a cab back to the cruise ship in an emergency.

So I often change too much money, or get too much money out of an ATM. And just as often, when returning to a country, I forget that I have that currency at home, so change more the next time I am there. Do this for three years and one collects quite a lot of cash one can’t spend at home.

I guessed I had about €700 of foreign monies. I counted it up last night, and spreadsheeted it this afternoon, and it turns out I have €891.87 in 29 different currencies, plus four kinds of coin and one note I can’t identify. I think some of it is Russian, but others have even less recognizable alphabets.

In case you are wondering, 5.10 in Slovenian money equals €0.02, 210 in Tanzanian money equals €0.12, and 160 in Icelandic money equals €1. Some of biggest chunks of money are, handily, in more useful currencies. US dollars (€117.73), UK pounds (€78.98) and New Turkish Liras (€115.58) I’ll be able to use no problem, as I plan to visit all those places by the end of the year. Israeli Shekels (€47.69) won’t be that handy though.

And I’d like to admit I’ve unknowingly broken the law in India by taking too much money out of the country (€69.37).

The single largest currency is Norwegian, after getting enough out of the bank to pay for various trips for two people at Nordkap and Svalbard last year, only to have the person I was traveling with to cover all the costs with his credit card (€366.76). I think I’ll just change that back into euros.

So, it seems I have more money than I thought. This is good, because I just spent a lot of money on my new laptop. Thankfully, now that I have my new laptop, I can’t think of a single thing I’d like to own that I don’t already own, so this money is going into the savings.

Or maybe an iPad.

You know what I hate? All vandalism. If the result is some kind of image, it doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t have to clean it up or pay for it. I hate to call it art of any kind, because that in some way imbues it with a quality that it doesn’t deserve. Some people go on about the democratization of art. I see it as the monopolization of the visible public spaces by a law breaking minority.

Sure, some 0.000000001% of visual vandalism looks good. I own a book of Banksy’s works, and it’s highly amusing and thought provoking. I would, however, be happy to give up on all of Banksy’s body of work, and all other interesting visual vandalism, if it meant I never had to have the 99.99999999% of visual vandalism forced into my face every time I walk down the street. Banksy is good, sure, but he legitimizes (in the eyes of some) that 99.99999999%. He’s like the soup kitchen provided by catholic nuns to the sodomy of Irish orphans by catholic priests.

No, scratch that. It isn’t just about seeing all this vandalism while walking down the street. It’s having it on my front door. And not just on my front door. Here’s a photo I took this afternoon:

That’s my FUCKING BACK YARD! Only me and the guy next door have access to this yard, and we use it during the summer to sit outside and relax, have barbecues, entertain guests. Everyone else in the apartment building looks out into the yard too, so we try to keep it relatively tidy and pleasant to look at.

And some fucker climbed over two walls and scrawled that crap all over the place. Who did he think that vandalism was for? Did he think the people in my apartment building wanted to see it out their window every morning? Like fuck we do. Was it to make us think? Was it to make a political point? Was it to democratize art? Was it to make my back yard more culturally vibrant? Of course not! Nobody is going to ever see it!

Then, as you can see, my landlord decided to paint over it. Sure, the white paint looks a bit shit against the unpainted wall, but it was far better than the vandalism that took place. Then what? Some other fucker decided to do the same thing again! The second vandal could obviously see that the work of the first vandal had been somewhat unappreciated, due to the fact it had been painted over. Why could that person have thought “Actually, my vandalism isn’t going to go down very well around here. Maybe, I dunno, I shouldn’t spray paint all over this wall?”

If someone can come up with a single justification for the acts of this trespasser, I’d love to hear it. Until I’m convinced, I’d really appreciate it if everyone would do everything they can to stop all vandalism, no matter that it results in some kind of visual adornment.

Many people are talking about privacy issues on Facebook, and I agree with most of their points. I’m not unhappy with Facebook or any privacy issues, because I’ve always considered everything I do or say or put online to be 100% public immediately. I’ve always used my own name when signing up to any internet service, so whatever I do can alway be tied back to me.

But then again, I don’t have a real job, so have no work colleges or employers to find out about my strange hobbies. Nor do I have children, so I don’t have any worries in that direction.

Anyway, there’s been a lot talk about controlling the privacy of each update, photo or comment someone posts on Facebook. Controlling who can or may or will see that post is impossible, and Facebook switched the default from “Only friends can see this” to “Everyone can see this.” No wonder it is confusing.

There have been various discussions about alternatives to Facebook, including the crowd-funded Diaspora. On TWiT, a pundit talked about controlling who sees what in a hypothetical social website by using ever widening circles of trust. On one extreme there is “everyone” and at the other extreme is “Just my closest friends.” In between would be “other friends”, “work people,” and maybe “stranger I met in a bar, made my friend, but can’t work out how to unfired them.”

While this is a simple idea, I think it is slightly too simple to be useful. What I’d like to see is “Social Venn.”

The idea is that each time you click a “Submit” or “Post” button, a window opens with a colorful Venn Diagram. Who can see the post depends on where you click the diagram.

The above image is what my Social Venn would look like based on the groups I put my contacts into on Facebook. To be clear, those not in the Friends segment aren’t people who I don’t consider friends, but if I wanted to send out a message about something personal, I’m not sure if the listeners to my podcast are the right target.

So, you see this diagram, and click the parts of the graph who you want to see what post. Not just one part, but two or three or four parts.

Alternatively, you can “Select All” and then (maybe) right click to pick which sections of your Social Venn will not, nor ever, see what you post. A post might go to all of your closest friends, but even if one of your work colleges is your closest friend, if you say “Not for work people” they’ll never see that post, even if it goes to all your other friends and they are discussing it among themselves like mad.

That’s my idea.

Making and displaying the Social Venn would be a fun and simple coding project, though not one I’m particularly interested in doing myself. The idea is actually one Facebook could implement, as it uses tagging and not folders to organize friends. If Facebook or Diaspora want to pay me to consult on their platforms, I’d be happy to take your money.

Or maybe this could be tied into a third party program or service, and aggregate your posts out to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. I’d love to have this kind of control over my social internetting. If you are working on something like this, I’d be happy to take your money too.

I actually listened to all the music in my library again last November and December, not sorted in any way, I just made sure I listened to everything within a month.

Over the past few weeks I did something similar, and finished this morning. I listened to my iTunes music library, sorted by track length. I had a lot fun, certainly more than the previous times I’ve listened, as I’ve deleted all the duplicates, and got rid of lots of music I actually didn’t like.

At the end of my post about this last year I said: “I think I’ll now do it again, but sort by track length. I’ll start with the longest tracks, and end up with the shortest.” I forgot I wrote that though, and started with the shortest.

Some notes:
- The first track was a 5 second piece of silence which I use in my show.
- The last track ran 12:44, Slow Movement from the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack.
- Lots of short tracks are used on albums as filler bits between other tracks.
- Indie bands often have a minute long piece of music on an album.
- Sound track music can be any length. The final ten tracks were all sound track pieces or classical music.
- Techno, drum and bass, and other electronic music hardly showed up until I got to 5 minute-long tracks.
- Final tracks of albums are often artificially long, with a few minutes of silence before a “hidden” track.
- This method of sorting created a far more random mix that sorting by track name.

I don’t think I have much else to say about it. It’s just a fun project, and I recommend you do something similar. Album by album is good, but this way different tracks stand out.

I thought about it for a few seconds before replying: “Exactly ten years ago today.”

Which, to be honest, is only half true. Ten years (and now ten days) ago I didn’t know I wanted to be a professional juggler, but I knew I wanted to be a juggler.

Back in April of 2000 I’d only attended two conventions, both of them a Chocfest, a one day event in York. I’d had a lot of fun at both, but hadn’t made any effort to go to any others.

In 1999, the British Juggling Convention visited Durham, just a few miles from where I lived. I drove down to Cornwall instead, to go surfing.

In 2000 I lived in Scarborough, attending university, and could go surfing more often. More to the point, I’d got far more interested in juggling by then too. I discovered the BJC would be in York. And Anthony Gatto was the big name guest.

How could I not go?

So I went. The weather was terrible, so I slept in my car. The parade was awful too. But those were my only two complaints. Apart from that, I had a really, really good time. I have lots of good memories, but two are relevant here.

1: I saw Anthony Gatto training in the gym. He had the whole gym to himself, and did about two hours of juggling for the hundreds of people watching. I had my camera, so stated filming.

He equaled or broke a number of juggling records right there in the gym, without even trying hard. The only reason these records became official world records was the fact that I videoed them and sent the footage to the JISCON. 9 balls and 7 clubs are the ones that stick out in my mind.

2: I saw my first big convention show. And I mean it was a big show, not just for a big convention. Even to this day it is one of the best juggling shows I’ve ever seen, and I don’t say that just because it was my first.

Sure, Anthony Gatto headlined, but I’d seen him do more in the gym the day before, so while it was amazing, it wasn’t the best part of the show for me. Other things acts that stand out:
Ben Richter/Ben Smalls. He did two acts, one with balls and one with clubs.
The Gandini Juggling Project. Due to having a large group from performing daily in the Millennium Dome, Sean put together a two 12 person acts.
Jamie Fletcher, doing his classic 3 ball routine.
Curious Eyebrow, doing a hilarious random-prop-based comedy routine.
Feeding the Fish, with the first ever public performance of Aerotech’s programmable glow clubs.

The audience went crazy for the show, just as they had for Gatto practicing in the gym. I thought “I want to get that reaction!” Not that I want to be the center of attention (though I sometimes do) but I wanted to get good enough at something to be able to get that reaction.

At the end of the convention I set myself two goals:
1. To break a juggling world record for myself.
2. To perform in the biggest juggling shows.

And that’s what I did. In 2003 I set a new world record with Ben Beever, and passed more objects between two people than anyone ever had before. The record of 18 balls stood until we ourselves broke it in 2008 by passing 19 balls.

As for performing in the biggest shows, I did that too. In 2004 I performed in the BJC gala show. That year I also performed in the gala shows at the Nordic and Austrian conventions, headlined the Dutch convention gala show, was the final act in a huge EJC open stage show (though I’d also done that back in 2002), and won the Peoples’ Choice Award for my various turns on stage at the IJA summer festival. I’m probably forgetting some other appearances in 2004, but it was that spring and summer when I made the transition from “juggler who also juggles on stage” to “performing juggler”.

To me, these were the ends, but they became the means. Getting good enough to break a juggling world record made me a good enough juggler to become a professional. And when I had acts that were good enough to be booked for national and international juggling conventions, I was good enough to quit my job and take up juggling full time.

It’s been a good 10 years!

Preamble:

Last year I went to TAMLondon, a conference on science and skepticism, with a distinct bend towards their portrayal and communication in the media. The scientists who spoke were awesome, so were the doctors, and the skeptics, and the journalists too. Along with all that was a whole load of great entertainment by some really good performers.

All of the above are experts in their field. Brian Cox is a CERN physicist and a fellow of the Royal Society, plus a TV and radio presenter for the BBC. As the opening speaker, it doesn’t get much better for a science geek like me. Adam Savage of Myth Busters? Great! The Bad Astronomer? Cool! Tim Minchin doing a short set? Again, no complaints. Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh, Jon Ronson… it’s a great lineup. All top experts in their fields.

However, the thing I found quite strange was how many of the speakers talked about atheism and religious matters. And all of them, without exception, presented their views on the matter in a sneering way. Some, like Tim Minchin, did it for comedy effect, but in others that sneering and condescending tone was quite harsh.

At one point during a TAMLondon presentation the speaker said something like “And people who believe this are like stupid sheep… like they have a mental illness.” The audience laughed and applauded.

I just sat there, feeling quite uncomfortable.

And what’s worse is that all of them, without exception, seemed to have a very, very shallow view on Christianity, belief, faith, and spirituality. Shallow view? Maybe not the right way to put it.

What I mean is that the way they spoke about such matters betrays a complete lack of understanding on what it means to be Christian, and why people believe what they believe, and why they adhere to the notion of a real God.

To these New Atheists (I guess I can use that as a kind of collective noun), the only question that matters is “Is this claim true?”

If yes, then good. But if not, and such is the case with most religious claims, then that claim is WORTHLESS and anyone who believes said claim is STUPID, or at least NOT AS CLEVER AS US, and need to be told THEY ARE WRONG.

I’m using caps here to demonstrate the vibe I get from these people. It isn’t pleasant.

And worse than that, many had ideas on how to deconvert people from religion which relied almost exclusively on saying “You are wrong to believe in God, and here’s why.”

The spiritual experience.

The individual claims of Christians and other theists, and if they are true or not, simply don’t matter. They are very important to those who hold them, but which particular belief they might hold isn’t important. It isn’t particularly important to the Christian, and it shouldn’t be important to the atheist who wants people to become more rational.

Don’t get me wrong; I am an atheist. But before I became an atheist I was a Christian. One of the reasons I was a Christian is the most obvious; I was brought up in a Christian home.

The second reason, the reason I stayed a Christian, is because to me, just like to many other Christians I know, I had spiritual experiences. These were real experiences, and even to this day they are some of the most profound experiences in my 30 year existence.

So let me share some, and later I’ll get back to why particular beliefs, and if they are true or not, isn’t what’s important to many religious people.

Example number 1:

I remember, aged about 8, deciding to really become a Christian myself, rather than just assuming I was one. I said the sinner’s prayer. Even at such a young age, this was a big deal to me. Afterward I felt different, as though I’d taken a step closer to God, and that God was closer to me.

The reality: It was the first time I’d ever made a big decision about anything. Really. That young, nothing you do or think really matters. Not really. This decision was about my eternal soul. That’s a BIG thing. It wasn’t that God had actually accepted me, and Jesus hadn’t come into my heart. I’d just grown up a bit, and saw the world in a slightly different way.

If I lived in a developing country, and realized I had to go out to work aged 8 to make sure my little sister didn’t starve, I’d go through a similar transformation. Thankfully I lived in England, and I never really had to grow up in that way.

Example number 2:

Aged 12, I had a near death experience. I got stuck underwater, and couldn’t reach the surface. To cut a short story even shorter, I gave up trying to save myself. At that point I had a huge realization: I was going to die, but I had no problem with that, because I knew I was going to heaven.

There were no shining lights or voices from the sky. Just a complete peace, a strange sense of happiness, and complete faith in myself and what I believed.

Needless to say, it was that sense of calm that made me stop panicking, take stock of how I was actually stuck underwater, and work my way to the surface. I’d probably only been underwater a few seconds, but my life was different after that it was before.

The reality: I was, of course, completely wrong. If I died, I’d have just spoiled everything for all the Boy Scouts on their trip to Wales.

However, and this is the key, I was convinced that what I believed was right. I didn’t even think of it as something that I believed, it was more powerful than that. It just was. I was a Christian, I was going to die: I’m going to heaven. Case closed.

Twelve years later a friend of mine said “These Christians all know it is bullshit. If you put a gun to their head and said ‘I’ll kill you if you say you really believe it’ all of them would deny God.”

I told him the above story, to explain how wrong he was. To many Christians, belief doesn’t come into it. I was only 12 years old, there was nothing rational about my position on Jesus and heaven. It just was. To the point I was happy to die, knowing how right I was.

Example number 3:

The first time I strongly experienced the Holy Spirit. I can’t remember how old I was, maybe 13 or so. I went forward during Jesus-Camp-like meeting, and preachers and other people prayed for me. It was really great! Fantastic! Loads of people, standing in a circle, all laying hands your head and shoulders, praying for God to bless you. Who wouldn’t feel something?

I fell over, and was lowered to the floor gently, and people stayed to pray for me until I got up maybe half an hour later.

I had many similar experiences over many years. It’s called being slain in the spirit, among other things.

Once I fell backwards, and nobody caught me. I slammed into the ground, as you would expect. I just bounced a bit, but didn’t hurt myself. I hardly even noticed I had fallen over.

If it wasn’t for the Holy Spirit looking out for me, how could I have fallen over like that and not hurt myself?

The reality: I had never been to a big rock concert. I had never been part of a tribal ritual. I had never been to a hypnotist. There is all kind of psychology going on at a revival meeting, with loads of suggestion of what to do in the situation, what is expected, what is safe, what isn’t, how long it should take before you fall over, how long to stay on the floor afterwards.

The connectedness you feel at a big concert, of being part of something bigger than yourself, is familiar to many people, but just wasn’t something I knew. Not back then.

Back then, the church had a monopoly on all group-based emotional experience. It did in my life, anyway.

Any time I felt something profound, it was in the realms of a Christian church service of some type. So, of course, I presumed such feelings came from God.

Now I have had all kinds of “Peak Experiences”.

Getting a standing ovation at the end of a show. Performing a difficult juggling routine dropless. Breaking a world record. Telling a joke and having 3,000 people laugh. Various sexual encounters. Getting into a fight. Catching a big wave while surfing. Finishing the last page of a novel.

My list can go on and on. I’m a “Peak Experience” kinda guy.

And since 2001, I’ve found that I don’t associate any with God. Before then, especially before about 1996 or 1997, every big emotional experience was dominated by my Christian surroundings.

Example number 4:

I used to help lead worship in church. I played keyboard and guitar and sang in the band, and helped other people have spiritual experiences. I felt God and the Holy Spirit guiding me and the music I played. And when I followed what God was wanting me to do, it got results. People would start speaking in tongues and falling over.

Especially when I played the keyboard.

The reality: I slowly became a good musician. At least passable. I mean, my university degree is in music production…

What I thought was God using me and my musicianship was really just the power of music itself. But again, the church and my Christian upbringing dominated my musical knowledge and experiences. I thought that people only felt a certain way when certain music is played because of God moving through the music, when, in fact, human response to music is near universal. Music is just what us humans respond to best.

Do you see a pattern emerging with these examples?

In every case I experienced something profound, but didn’t know these experiences were something that EVERYONE can feel, regardless of faith in God.

And, importantly, these experiences fulfilled a need. Many needs. Going back to Maslow; the whole top half of the pyramid, even the ones way down from the peak.

The Rational Approach

Next question: how many discussions or conversations or arguments did I have with atheists that helped me shed my childhood faith?

If you think the answer is higher than zero… buzz! Wrong.

The answer is zero. None at all.

I had a very complex view on christian theology, and remember (with fondness) taking part in and leading bible studies about salvation (Romans 6 and 7 was a favorite topic of discussion).

However, the basis of my faith wasn’t the minutia of theology, nor of the nature of God, nor of the actual truth of the claims of God. What I had were the real experiences.

One early step to my deconversion from Christianity was the erosion of the lower levels on that Hierarchy of Need. There was a not entirely peaceful breakup of my Christian fellowship, which sort of spasmed through quasi-cult like stages before falling apart. A fellowship that is no longer a fellowship doesn’t really fulfill that fellowship need. I’m not going to get into this point more here, but for completeness I had to state it.

The more important step is having those peak experiences elsewhere, other than in church. I mentioned some examples above, but here are some specifics particular to my deconversion.

Example number 1:

1998 to 1999, I played in a band. Jamming and performing with a group of like-minded musicians is a great experience. And it was a non-christian band! And the feeling I had were comparable to those I had when leading worship.

As in, when I played a song I wrote on my keyboard, and the singer sang the love-ballad-like lyrics, it made girls cry.

Examples numbers 2, 3 and 4:

During one trip to Cornwall in 1999 I got really, really, really stoned. I thought I was going to die. This is sort of an anti-peak experience, but it was stronger than anything I’d felt in church. It was also the total opposite of getting badly drunk.

Same trip, I watched the complete solar eclipse. Awesome.

Same trip, I caught a perfect wave while surfing. At least it felt perfect, and went on forever.

Example number 5 and 6:

In 2001 I had a near-death experience. The brakes on my camper van failed while driving down the steepest road in England. It freaked me out.

A few minutes later, while pumped up on adrenaline, I juggled 11 balls for 11 catches for the first time ever. At the time only about four people in the world had done this.

Over these years, from about 1997 to 2001, I had many great experiences, many quite profound, some utterly profound. Each time I reflected that the spiritual peak experiences I craved had been fulfilled outside of a church environment. Some of them had been completely under my own physical control (eg: not at the suggestion of a Christian minister or worship leader), and these drove home the point in an even stronger way: what I once thought spiritual was, in fact, merely human.

It didn’t lessen the memory of my Christian spiritual experiences, nor negate their impact, it just showed them to be one variety of many human experiences possible.

The final turning point, when I realized I was no longer a “real” Christian, was the brake failure of my van in 2001.

Unlike the near-drowning in 1992, I didn’t even think of God or Heaven. Instead of happiness that I was about to meet Jesus, I had a simple regret that if I died, I wouldn’t be able to go traveling in my new van (I’d only bought it three weeks before), and I wouldn’t be able to spend my summer busking and surfing and juggling before returning to university that autumn.

My “final” thoughts when my van flipped onto its roof had nothing to do with my past life as Christian, but regret that my future life of new, non-spiritual experiences might not come to pass.

And that was it. Christian spirituality no longer meant anything to me. I didn’t need it to live a full life. I was no longer getting any kind of fellowship from Christianity, that function was coming more and more from the juggling sub-culture. With university came exposure to much more music, and Christian rock no longer cut it. I also realized that I no longer cared for the morality as taught in church, seeing as I was just as moral, if not more so, than many Christians I knew. I also didn’t believe gays were going to hell.

A few months later, when I went to work for GOD TV, I saw the Christianity=Morality connection dissolve even further, but that’s another story.

For a few years I didn’t really think of Christianity much, or what my world view might be. I just got on with living my life, establishing a new identity as an adult, trying to have as many new experiences as possible.

I got to the point where I was nothing more than a wishy-washy agnostic on the matter of god, or maybe some kind of pantheist. Then I had a conversation with a friend (same conversation as I mentioned above) and he pretty much said “It’s all bullshit. Christianity, astrology, lay lines, crystals. One day someone made something up, told someone, and they believed it. Then the next person believed it too. But at the core, it started with someone making something up.”

While I don’t think the truth is that simple, my reaction to this was the thought “Yeah, I’m pretty much an atheist.”

But the key step was in 2001; the step from Christian to no-need-for-Christianity.

The lesson from all this?

Forget trying to argue with people. It’s not going to work. Nobody rationally decides to be a Christian, so trying to use rational arguments to turn them away from Christianity, or any religion, just isn’t going to work.

And it doesn’t need to work. When it comes to personal beliefs, the rationality or intelligence of the vast majority Christians isn’t the deciding factor in their personal faith or belief.

I agree that less religious adherence is probably a good thing. Being tied to millennia-old moral teachings isn’t a good idea, as it used to justify all kinds of bigoted words and actions. Also I think concentrating on helpful actions on behalf of others is better than praying for their non-existent souls.

However, if these New Atheists actually want to deconvert the masses, they MUST provide two things:

1. fellowship comparable to a church group,
2. an equal number of opportunities for spiritual-alternative peak experiences.

The first is already underway, to a limited degree, with the Skeptics in the Pub movement. The second? I’m just not seeing it.

Seriously, if anyone has any suggestions, send me an email. But really, what does “no spirituality” have to compete with “real spiritual experiences”?

Life requires much more than just “not-religious” or “not-spiritual”. It requires something to replace the human urge to experience euphoria and a sublime connection to the world. I experience these through a variety of measures, none of which have any connection to my “identity” as an atheist, skeptic, science geek or rationalist.

I am all those things, but they are not what make me human.

In this truck:

Meanwhile I’m staying with friends in Istanbul until… well, I don’t know. My next gig is on Wednesday, in the south of Spain, so I hope I can just fly straight there. There’s a place near Malaga I’ve wanted to visit for ages, but last time I was there I had a really bad back and didn’t feel like it.