I read a very sad story today. A young man died following an accident, because he refused the blood he needed to survive (Jehovah’s Witness teenager dies after refusing blood transfusion)

He preferred to die because to accept blood would have meant exclusion from his social circle, his “family” of Jehovah’s Witlesses. To accept blood would have meant excommunication and to live the rest of his days feeling tainted, dirty or somehow diminished in the eyes of his “god”. So he preferred to die.

I hardly know what to say about this. One’s initial reaction is to seek a remedy, to prevent lives being wasted like this ever again. But we can’t police everyone, or everything. Perhaps we should congratulate ourselves for having a society that allows us to die, so long as we claim it’s what our god wants.

But this boy, Joshua McAuley, was just 15. He could not vote, or drink, or smoke or have sex. But he could die for a fiction. Should we allow children – no doubt infected with the lies of their parents – to die in this manner?

So, we survived Christmas. Just.

Christmas is kind of nice, in theory, but it has some troubling aspects:

• It’s supposedly a religious festival, but we’re all atheists now.
• Families are forced together for an unnaturally long period of time.
• Christmas is an ugly orgy of conspicuous consumption.

Fixing Xmas

How can we fix Christmas?

• Make it illegal to mention Xmas prior to 1 December.
• Make it illegal to sell anything Xmas-related prior to 1 December.
• Take Christ out of it and call it “Xmas”, “Chrimbo” or “Festimal”.
• Encourage families to replace the usual drawn-out dinner with Flash-Xmas, which is lots of fun and only lasts 30 minutes.
• Encourage families to replace the traditional shower of gifts with a universal Secret Santa program, wherein every man, woman and child buys and receives one gift.
• Tell children that the ‘nativity scene’ is the ‘famous shed incident’ in which homeless people were given soup in an ancient shed.

To a child, a church’s pointed steeple can look a lot like a rocket. I know this because my son excitedly points them out, shouting, “ROCKIT!”.

I thought this was very sweet, and I gently explained that the ‘rocket’ was actually a building, a building called a ‘church’.

Then it occurred to me how very different churches are from rockets.

Rockets are used to power our exploration of space, to seek out new frontiers and to answer the mysteries of our world.

Churches, and the religions they house, are relics of fear and superstition. Religions are places to hide from the big questions as well as systems for dodging our fear of death.

Of course, rockets are also used to carry warheads. But we all know religion’s chequered past when it comes to making war.

Do other religions have special underwear?

I wonder what happens if you pray to Mormo without the special knickers on?

We’re all going to die!

Sorry… in the first of my series of nice ideas and general acts of intelligence, I present a series of stickers by the Existential Resistance Army. Intended to interrupt daily life with messages designed to create cognitive dissonance in the minds of the mindless, these stickers should help us all remember the urgency of the need to live!

You can download a PDF version of the full sheet of stickers here.

The messages include:

• This jacket will not make up for the emptiness you feel within.
• The money you spent on this bag could pay for education, health and social care of a child in the third world.
• Volunteering would have brought you more joy than this tawdry display of  sartorial one-upmanship!
• How many bags will it take before you feel o.k. again?
• One’s wealth is measured by the people who fill our lives not by the accumulation of expensive objects.

Feel free to print the stickers and insert anywhere that they might bring about an existential awakening. (I believe the stickers were created because of these people: Benrik.)

The British Humanist Association have taken on Ariane Sherine’s idea and set up a fund for atheism advertising.

Now, thanks to a rapidly growing pool of donations, the views of atheists will stand aside those of the religious. Well, specifically this view:

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

At the time of writing the fund was over £50,000 – a heart-warming sign that people who live without clinging to a  voodoo crutch are happy to back their lack of belief.

God bless Amen Hurrah for atheism!

I’m not a big fan of greetings cards. People buy them automatically, at prescribed times, regardless of whether they want to or not. People buy meaningless, sentimental, mass-produced cards from jumbo tat emporiums, write something meaningless inside and send it off to join the meaningless pile.

I take it all back

Now, they’re not always a waste of time. I’ve received some funny and touching cards in my life, and I’ve been very happy to receive them. What I object to is the millions of cards sent without thought, just because there’s an occasion that society has deemed to demand a card.

Writing something special

Having explained my animosity towards greetings cards, I’d now like to discuss my inability to write anything meaningful in said cards. Perhaps it’s because I dislike our card-giving culture that I can’t usually think of anything good to write in them.

Corporate nightmare

Once, when I worked for a large company and there were endless birthdays and retirements to commemorate with cards, I resorted to writing ‘Good luck’ in every card that passed my desk – mainly because I couldn’t face the frustrating wait for something meaningful, witty or wise to come to mind.

But you’re a copywriter!

My partner cannot understand why I’m so bad at writing messages in cards. She thinks that because I’m a copywriter and I spend most of my time writing things for my clients, I should be better. But writing for clients is easy – it’s just cards that leave me dry.

Happy Apocalypse!

In light of current events, I’ve been working on some new greetings cards, which I’m sure we’ll all be sending each other soon enough:

* Sorry to hear about your enormous carbon footprint
* See you after the cold war
* Happy irreversible climate change!

How do you cope?

How do you feel about cards? Are you a slave to greetings-card culture? Do you find it easy to write messages in people’s cards? Do you know the trick to writing warm or witty messages in cards? Please answer these questions in the comments section below!

(Picture courtesy of Chatiryworld)

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