Mere Distractions

 

          Sometimes, when you put on a different jacket, you find a surprise in the pockets – a tenner, perhaps. Last week one such pocket yielded up, not a bank note, but a post-it note that I had plucked from a lamp post in St. Ives two months previously. On it was a shakily written message, “Bingo! You have won me! (saucy winking emoji) tel. 07597 777 3660.” I slipped it into my pocket, though to what purpose, other than curiosity, I cannot say. Since I don’t really need to win a person, I have not called the number and, come to think of it, I now feel rather guilty for having deprived someone else of the opportunity.

           In any case, it’s just another distraction from the world’s troubles. When the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last week declared a “code red” climate emergency, it occurred to me that the likes of Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, the WWF and others might justifiably put up a few banners saying, “We told you so”. Thus far, however, they have refrained from smugness, perhaps because people don’t like it. But they might have calculated that this is good time to ram home their original message. In October, the UK will host the COP 26 climate conference (hands up whoever heard of the previous 25), where, in the light of the IPCC report, politicians/fossil-fuels lobbyists must surely abandon the smoke and mirrors they have previously deployed to dodge their responsibilities.

          On a mundane level, those of us who have until now imagined ourselves exempt from the consequences of the climate catastrophe may also wish to reconsider our plans for the future. I, for one, am regretting having just had a new garage door fitted. If the sea rises by half a metre, the expense will have been wasted. I console myself with the possibility that disaster will be avoided at the last minute by a combination of corrective action and technological fixes of the sort described in works of science fiction. In such a dynamic world as ours, inevitability is not a given. Which reminds me of my now deceased uncle, Albert, a staunch Jehovah’s Witness, whose certainty concerning the imminent demise of humanity was unshakeable. Believing that Armageddon was due in 1975, he eschewed the notion of owning a house or any other substantial property – with the notable exception of his piano. A ghost of Uncle Albert appeared to me last Monday in the form of a proselytising circular, unconvincingly faked personal letter from another JW, Liz Turnbull. JWs have given up on predicting the exact date of the End of the World, since it didn’t work out for them on previous occasions, but they haven’t abandoned their plan to save us all from damnation by recruiting us to their ranks. This latest pitch from Liz is an appeal to logic that falls down on…logic. Her first line poses three questions about faith: What is it? – a discussion point; Do we need it? – debateable; and Who should we put faith in? – a jump to the conclusion that we do need it and there is a candidate and, as is stated in the next sentence, he is called God. I considered, briefly, writing back to Liz to point out the flaw but experience tells me that JW reasoning starts and ends with their beliefs.

          It always seemed beyond uncle Albert’s comprehension that I was not seeking a god to grant me an afterlife or to serve as a substitute for a convincing explanation of the mystery of the universe. For me, faith is a blind alley, another distraction from the world’s troubles. Unequivocal evidence is more useful, as in when it demonstrates that if we all go up in smoke, it is we who are responsible, not some vengeful god.