Tom Lloyd

What with trying to teach someone with no experience in contracts how to be a contracts manager, starting my new job as the last nail in the coffin for professional authors, ahem, I mean contracts manager at a publisher, everyone but me getting very excited about organising a wedding (don’t get me wrong, I’m excited about the wedding itself, but I don’t like organising one bit), accountant stuff and a few other things I can’t even remember, I’ve been a bad blogger. Especially when there’s stuff like this going on that I should be getting angry about. Don’t even get me started on religion in general, but when did rational people of faith stop getting on with important stuff like life and decide that everything must be resolved with their faith and because this book can’t possibly be wrong or made up in any respects, the rest of the world must be wrong and changed to incorporate it?

Reading the History of Hell as research for Ragged Man, a fair part of it is devoted to the need Christians have felt over the years to have everything conform to a universal theory of religion, more so than any other religion as far as I can tell. This isn’t the only thing I’ve read on the subject I might add, just a recent one. They’re the anxious, needy little kids of the religious world, the Niles Crane of theology. The astonishing level of contradictions don’t appear to matter, only the ‘correction’ of science that doesn’t conform to what at times constitutes the ramblings of some severely mentally ill men on a power trip. Wars have been fought over stupid little points of doctrine that would have had Jesus (the Jesus of the bible whether or not he was the son of god or a philosopher with some good simple ideas that clever people have spent years dicking with as a means to controlling the ignorant masses) sighing and shaking his head at the utter idiocy.

But then again, in a world where people ring 999 to ask for a postcode I must despair of the idiocy of humanity in general. But it does really annoy me that religion still has the power to blind people to reason and consideration, that a priest gets the authority to tell people how to think because they’ve spent a few years studying a book. I’m not given such respect on either international relations or fantasy novels, but sure, give someone a dog collar and suddenly they overrule intellect on minor matters of morality and science.

I’m not even going to comment on the reports that now Sharia law has some legal footing in Britain. I’m not going to say anything about the men being prosecuted for domestic violence who effectively got off with just a telling-off from community elders and certainly won’t speculate about why the wives ended up going back to their abusive husbands and dropping their prosecution.

But anyway, these are a few of the things that have been really annoying me this week. It all however pales into insignificance at times like last night when, while watching Match of the Day with me, the little lady starts sniggering at the sentence ‘Stoke are going to have to come from behind’. How could I not want to marry someone like that?!