Andy's Blog

There are very few rules to be followed when visiting the toilet and these rules tend to be unwritten and, certainly for use of the men’s toilet, more in the form of an etiquette to be followed; such as which urinal you choose and where the eyes should remain focused, etc.

Speaking on the mobile is definitely one of these unwritten rules, and you have to wonder what the person on the other end of the phone is thinking as they hear the background noise to the scintillating conversation the offender is engaged in.

Unfortunately the toilets at my workplace only come in pairs, so I was slighly surprised as the big Indian chap waddled up next to me with mobile clamped between ear and shoulder and proceeded to ‘do the business’ in the toilet next to me…. and chat… whilst, disconcertingly, have his head angled such that it looked like he was having a damn good ogle at my splendour!

Actual Script;

Me       : "Excuse me!?"
Him      : "Yes?"... (moves head to look me in the face)
Sound FX : Plop!
Both     : (look down to see mobile in urinal being peed upon)
Him      : "Shiiiiiiittt!"
Me       : (laugh)
Phonee   : "Hello?"

My previous stated Atheism may have to be revised, as I now believe there *MUST* be a God after all

For the longest time, whenever a census came round or a questionnaire required filling in, I always wrote “Christian” in the box labelled “Faith”.  This was always unthinkingly and without giving much consideration as to what this meant.  I wasn’t muslim or hindhu, I had very little idea what it meant to be agnostic and I thought I believed in something; so couldn’t be athiest.

However over the last couple of years I really started to think about faith and what it meant to be “Christian”.  The problem was in the fact that I just didn’t believe there was some omnipotent being ‘somewhere’ in space watching everything I did.  I also believed that when I die, I would be worm food, rather than transcend my body into heaven – and what was wrong with that?  Worms need to feed too!

I started to, privately, label myself as agnostic.  I thought I believed in something, just not the faintly ridiculous God that would be preached to me on the odd occassion I did go to Church (baptisms, marriages, deaths, etc).  In fact on a number of these occassions I felt I had wandered into a Monty Python sketch;

Ooooh God, you are so big,
so absolutely huge,
Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you.
Forgive us, O Lord, for this, our dreadful toadying…

However, in the past month I have come to the realisation that I am neither of these but am in fact an atheist.  There, all said and done!  So I can happily walk around without having to justify ridiculousness such as intelligent design, extreme pro-lifers, women and homosexuals being some form of ‘sub-human’, and the list goes on…

A lot of these views have been cemented (notice the boldening, it was only a cementing not a conversion) whilst reading “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, which I found to be a bloody good read, when not wandering into the realms of Fundamentalist Atheism in some places (..also I think he is bidding for entry into the Guiness Book of Records for the most use of the word “zeitgeist” in one of the chapters).

Anyways, I have now “come out of the closet” as it were and trying to understand how this plays out with the work I do with the Scouts… after all, the main promise for the scouts is;

I promise to do my best, and to love God

How can you love something that does not exist?  Interesting times (..and my longest post to date!)