1. A dangerous man is one who puts his own safety as less important than his ideas. If any idea is worth dying for it is probably worth killing for, cheating for, stealing for and lying for. I will not die for my beliefs if I can avoid it. I see no reason to kill for them either.

I will spend time spreading them. I will shock and provoke to spread my ideas, I will tell jokes, I will spend time formulating replies. But I will not lie for my ideas. I do not aim to be dangerous, just influential.

A man capable of being a martyr should be treated as being quite literally capable of anything. If that is not a reasonable definition of a dangerous person I don't know what is. Naturally how dangerous such a person is depends on his position vis-à-vis your own, is he in the tent aiming out or outside aiming in?

2. Children are born atheists. They are born without any belief in the afterlife and any supernatural forces; and without the knowledge that their country is the best country on Earth, and their race is the best race. Children are empty vessels, which the parents and the rest of society proceed to fill up with prejudices and unfounded beliefs.

3. I do not believe things in order to be happy. I believe things if I think they are true. If you measure truth by the feelings it generates then you should rate heroin as a truth drug. To my mind euphoria is euphoria and truth is truth; they have nothing in common and no possible logical link. The American disease is the expectation of happiness. There is no way to make yourself happy. Happiness is a fleeting and transitory state of your brain and body chemistry that is pleasing for the instant. There is no such thing as a happy life for precisely the same reason that you can never have everybody scoring above average. It is not sensible to strive for happiness over the long term. A better strategy is to aim to eliminate obvious sources of misery, factors that make happiness unobtainable. With unhappiness minimized there is a chance to work toward happiness.

Unhappiness is a wonderful invention of evolution. Happiness does not exist for the same reason that cold does not exist, the concept is much better explained by the use of the opposite. Unhappiness is a goad to action. Pain makes people act. The anticipation of pain makes people act in a way that avoids the stimulus of pain. As Woody Allen said, "Wealth is better than poverty, if only for the financial reasons." The financial reasons come down to avoidance of frustration. Being poor means being without a viable option that will ease your unhappiness. Being too poor to buy food is a serious loss of choice, it makes suffering unavoidable. Money is a way to buy off unhappiness. When you have most of your material needs covered you move on to other goals. Lack of love and respect can make you unhappy so you try to do things to make yourself and others love and respect you.

4. I know of many people who have studied the bible and even believed in it for years who confirm that it is a collection of stories, histories and myths. No credible evidence exists to confirm anything other than this. The obvious fact that millions of people believe it is the revealed word of G-d matters not one jot. Millions of people were convinced the Earth is flat and that planes are highly dangerous or that capitalism will always see to it that the best of all possible outcomes occurs in every circumstance. People are wrong, often, or even usually. ... Believing in this myth [the bible] and disbelieving in the others is ethnocentric prejudice. I have no such prejudice; I treat the myths of King Arthur, Odin, Romulus and Remus, Satan, Yahweh, Osiris, Krishna and Quetzalcoatl as the same, equal, equally wrong. Just stories told by ordinary people with good imaginations who were listened to by people who respected them. The entire structure of all religions comes down to the weight of history, good story telling and that vague aching feeling inside that there has to be more to all this than meets the eye. Well, there doesn't have to be.

For example...

5. Nobody set out to create a system to communicate pornographic images and inane chat instantly across the globe from individual to individual. The internet we have just developed, some of it was planned, most of it was made up as people went along. Looking back on it gives an illusion of purpose and destiny. We know that the internet was not designed as a mass communication system, we know it because the founders are still among us and talking about it. The model of the people's internet we have now emerged as a growing consensus. We know this. But looking back it is so easy to misread it as an unfolding destiny, or a divine plan. The internet evolved, it did it in our lifetime and it did it without a blueprint or an architect. The real world works like that a lot of the time; complexity out of simplicity, something very big and complicated out of almost nothing.

6. Regarding Mother Theresa ... Thousands of people have witnessed her existence and written about it in newspapers, books and Church records. She is a thoroughly historical character. I also have little doubt that huge elements of myth are being woven about her. I do not see that woman as being anything special. She gave up a life of a peasant farmer to be an International celebrity and Church leader. Considering she was born Catholic and female and became committed to that Church it is difficult to imagine her finding any better way into the public eye; she could hardly be the wife of a dictator could she, for one thing there were no Catholic dictators in Yugoslavia, and the other reason, well, I will not be unnecessarily cruel but she was not exactly a looker was she? Selfless people work hard in their own communities and do not seek attention. There has been a lot of investigation into Mother Theresa which has exposed sides of her that are nothing to be proud of. I have not looked at them myself. However I always mistrust charity workers with an axe to grind. There is always the suggestion that their motives are very mixed.

Martin Willet

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