Mumbo Jumbo

Because of all the controversy about that cartoon of He-who-must-not-be-mocked-unless-you-want-to-be-the-target-of-a-violent-mob-(peace-be-upon-him); and Tony Blair suggesting to Parky he expected to be judged by God over the Iraq war; I decided that my next book-I-haven't-read-yet ought to be...

How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered The World

by Francis Wheen

I really am itching to read this one. I am increasingly dismayed (to put it very mildly) at the way the world seems to be sleepwalking back to the dark ages. The widespread bad attitude towards science and the embracement of superstition and mysticism is just lazy-mindedness - so many people just seem to love wallowing in their own ignorance. The majority of the American public, for example, seem determined to reject any presidential candidate who can be labelled with that most insulting of all c-words: clever. No-one likes, let alone trusts, anyone who is cleverer than them. The Republican Party have grasped this and for several decades now have put forward the dumbest schmuck they can find as their candidate. Indeed, if Clinton hadn't had the advantage of appearing too stupid to keep his dick in his pants and Jimmy Carter hadn't seemed like a dumb peanut-farmer, the right-wing would have been in power over there for more than thirty years. Meanwhile, here in Britain, Tony Blair is happy with the teaching of Creationism in schools, leaving me to wonder if he's secretly a religious fruitcake, and why filling children's head full of c(lapt)rap isn't classed as child abuse. ...However, when I picked Francis Wheen's book up, I saw this on the cover: 'HILARIOUS' JEREMY PAXMAN - and that reminded me of another book I meant to read several years ago but didn't, and which caught my eye in the library recently:

The English

by Jeremy Paxman

See? That's the most dangerous thing about books you haven't read: they gang up on you and multiply until one day you find yourself hopelessly outnumbered by them. You realise they are looking down on you from the full-to-bursting shelves (and up from the piles on the floor) eating up more and more space and leaving less and less room for air - slowly suffocating you in revenge for your neglect. I think religions use a similar technique: they spread themselves insidiously through society until suddenly you realise that they are in power - by which time you find they have taken you to war against some other bunch of religious nutters.

The trouble is it's much easier to be lazy-minded than to get to grips with evolutionary biology. I'm making one last attempt to read Evolution in Four DImensions by Eva Jablonka and
Marion J. Lamb this weekend, but it's heavy going. While another book nearing the top of my to-be-read list is...

Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Evolution and the Meaning of Life)

by Daniel C. Dennett

...and there is an interview with Daniel Dennett in The Observer today. It seems his new book Breaking The Spell is all about religion - the institutionalized superstition that wrecks so many lives - and how it evolved. Brilliant. All we need now is for Michael Moore to write a biography of Cowboy No.1. Carrying the 'fight' to the 'enemy' is imperative - because there's no doubt that the Christians are mobilizing: the copy of Darwin's Dangerous Idea I have on loan from the library had a pretty postcard inserted into it, courtesy NPN, describing evolution as a "theory-tale" and 'explaining' how "only an intelligent creator could design a complete system of co-dependent life forms, none of which could survive without the other."

It's enough to make you wonder sometimes if you're on the right planet.