Katie Taylor's gold medal god

God trains her hands for battle, makes her feet nimble as a deer and shields her from the punches of her opponents.

Katie Taylor believes that her god was largely responsible for her winning a gold medal at the Olympics.

Ms. Taylor is a member of the Pentecostal church. The Pentecostals or Born Again Christians believe that their god communicates with them by speaking in tongues.

They also believe that Hell is a real place where all non-believers and members of all other religions are doomed to spend an eternity.

Catholic militant David Quinn believes that his god was responsible for Ms. Taylor’s victory but, confusingly, he seems to be aware that he is destined to spend eternity in hell.

In fact, ‘born-again Christian’ Christians take their name from the New Testament and especially the passage where Jesus tells his followers “I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again’.

Is Mr. Quinn thinking of changing gods?

Journalists Maeve Sheehan, Eilis O’Hanlon and Claire O’Sullivan also believe that Ms. Taylor’s god hands out Olympic medals to the chosen ones.

Eilis O’Hanlon in particular went a bit berserk as a result of the religious hysteria following the gold medal ‘miracle’.

She condemned Irish citizens for their laziness, greed, lack of discipline, lack of self-respect and for living off the fat of the land.

She condemned the Irish Times for failing to mention Ms. Taylor’s god in its reports.

She condemned the ‘twisted logic’ of those in favour of family units other than the traditional Christian male/female model.

She condemned liberal minded secularists.

Since reading Ms. O’Hanlon’s fire and brimstone sermon I’ve made several offerings to the Great Zeus in thanks that Ireland only won one gold medal.

Any more and half the population would have been burned at the stake.

Breaking news: Sharks safe after human infestation goes wrong

The headline read:

Naked fisherman rescued from shark-infested waters

This is incorrect:

The definition of ‘infested’ is:

To inhabit or overrun in numbers or quantities large enough to be harmful, threatening, or obnoxious:

Far from infesting the oceans of the world sharks are actually living in perfect harmony with their environment.

That perfect harmony, which evolved over hundreds of millions of years, has only recently come under threat with the appearance of the most deadly, most threatening, most obnoxious animal of all – the human.

The definition of infestation as the overrunning in numbers large enough to be harmful, threatening and obnoxious perfectly describes what humans have done on land.

That infestation, due to a combination of over population and technology, has spread into the oceans where the mindless destruction continues apace.

For example, over 50 million sharks are murdered by the obnoxious humans every year, many of them die just so that humans can indulge their taste for shark fin soup.

Here’s how the incident was reported by the shark world media:

Sharks safe after human infestation goes wrong

The serene and natural life of some of our fellow shark citizens has again been interrupted by the ruthless and primitive humans.

Apparently, while out hunting innocent members of our community their machine capsized resulting in two deaths.

A third human was rescued after been hauled onto a floating machine assisted by some flying human machines.

Catholic militant Mary Kenny exploits passing of Maeve Binchy

Irish Independent columnist and Catholic militant Mary Kenny just couldn’t resist exploiting the death of Maeve Binchy to push her Catholic agenda.

Unlike most Irish writers, according to Kenny, Binchy was not anti-clerical and anti-Catholic and didn’t include the cruel Christian Brother or the paedophile priest as ‘stock baddies’ in her books.

The underlying message here, of course, is that cruel Christian Brothers and paedophile priests are nothing more than the invention of fiction writers.

Kenny also suggests that Binchy was an upstanding Christian because she didn’t write explicit sex scenes.

The greatest insult of all from this so called friend was the claim that Binchy, a life long non-believer, was really a Catholic saint.

In this weeks Irish Catholic Kenny further insults Binchy by claiming

That she always held the deposit of faith and values transmitted to her by her parents.

Soul reaping Catholics like Kenny seem incapable of accepting that many victims of Catholic child (abuse) indoctrination eventually manage to escape from the clutches of its superstitions.

Maeve Binchy article

I read the following article by Maeve Binchy in a library and got some odd looks as I tried to suppress my laughter.

Contraceptive conversation

February 16th, 1981 Maeve gave her opinions on Haughey’s Contraceptive Bill to a horrified fellow bus passenger.

TODAY I had an argument with a stranger, a real live argument with a woman I’d never met before as we stood at a bus stop for what seemed a considerable length of time.

“Very depressing kind of day,” she said. “Grey,” I agreed. “But it might cheer up later.”

“Nothing much to be cheerful about, though, is there? Look at the papers,” she said.

Obligingly I looked at the front page of The Irish Times. Compared to some days, I thought the news was fairly neutral.

“Do you mean Mike Gibson not playing rugby for Ireland any more?” I asked, not quite seeing anything that would cause gloom.

“Never heard of him,” she said. It couldn’t be the heady excitement of will-we won’t-we about the EMS; she was hardly brought down by the fact that the RUC may have been kidnapping Father Hugh Murphy, since he was safe and well; the talks were continuing in an RTÉ dispute, but that wasn’t enough to lay anyone low. No, it had to be Haughey and the Contraceptive Bill.

“Do you mean about having to have doctors’ prescriptions?” I asked.

“Indeed I do,” she said.

“Well, I suppose it does make us look very foolish trying to legislate for everyone else’s morality and pass the buck to the doctors,” I said cheerfully.

“But then I’m a fairly optimistic person and I’d prefer to regard it as a step in the right direction.”

There was a stony silence. I wondered, had she heard me? After all, she was the one who started the conversation. “So, even though it’s a bit of a joke, it’s not all that bad,” I said cheerfully, keeping things going as I thought.

“Is that your view?” she said.

“Well, it’s not a very thought-out view,” I backtracked. “But it’s a kind of instant reaction if you know what I mean.”

“You approve of all that sort of thing,” she said in a kind of a hiss.”

“Oh yes, I think people have the right to buy contraceptives,” I said, wishing somebody else would come along and stand at the bus stop and shout “good girl yourself” at me.

“And you’d like to see them in public places,” she said, eyes glinting madly.

“Well, not in parks or concert halls or places like that. But on shelves in chemists, certainly. Then, if people want to buy them, they can, and if they don’t, nobody’s forcing them to.” I though I had summed up the case rather well.

“On shelves so that everyone can see them,” she said, horrified.

“Well, they’re in packets,” I said, “with kind of discreet names on them. They don’t leap up off counters and affront you.”

“And how might you know all this?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve seen them in chemists in London,” I said defensively.

“If they’re so discreet, how did you what they were?” she asked, tellingly.

“Well, you’d sort of know. I mean people have to know where they are, for God’s sake. I mean they shouldn’t have to go playing hide-and-seek around the chemists with the assistant saying warmer and colder.”

The woman wasn’t at all amused. “I’m sure you know where they are because you buy them.”

I began to wonder why it is increasingly less likely that I will ever have a normal conversation with anyone.

“I once bought a huge amount,” I said reminiscently. “As a kind of favour to a lot of people. They knew I was going to be in London, and they kept asking me to bring some home.”

She was fixed to me with horror.

All her life she knew she would meet someone as wicked as this, and now it had happened.

“I didn’t know what kind to get or what the names of them were, so I just went into the Boots chemist beside Marble Arch and asked for four dozen of the best contraceptives and a receipt. They looked at me with great interest.”

“I’m not surprised,” said the woman.

“But really, wasn’t I very stupid in those days?” I confided in her. “I mean imagine smuggling them all in for people, and not making any profit on them and not even . . . you know . . . well, getting any value out of them myself as it were.”

She stared ahead, two red spots on her cheeks, and mercifully the bus came. She waited to see if I went upstairs or downstairs so that she could travel on a different deck.

© 2012 The Irish Times

The extremes of humanity

I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!!

This was the Twitter (first from Mars) received from NASA’s robot rover ‘Curiosity’ after successfully landing on the surface of Mars.

Ten years in the planning; cost billions of dollars; travelled over 100 million miles before attempting a landing with zero room for error.

John Holdren, chief science adviser to President Obama, was justified in his response:

And if anyone has been harbouring doubts about the status of US leadership in space, well there’s a one tonne automobile-sized piece of American ingenuity sitting on the surface of the Red Planet right now.

The technology used for the landing was innovative, amazing and very, very risky.

The final stage, which saw the Lander gently lowered to the surface by a skycrane was science fiction turned to reality.

The whole mission is a testament to the intelligence, endeavour and vision of human beings.

The conflict in Syria, on the other hand, demonstrates just how ruthless human beings can be.

What’s happening in that country is just the latest incidence of what humans have been doing to each other since they came down from the trees.

And in particular what humans have been doing on a grand scale since they began organizing themselves into super sized tribes.

Technology is the key.

Humans have made massive strides in the development of technology especially since the Industrial Revolution.

While that technology has enabled the species to travel to the planets it has also, sadly, provided the tools of self-destruction.

It is this imbalance between our great ability to develop amazing technology coupled with our still relatively primitive brains that will decide our ultimate fate.

The imbalance can be compared to giving a loaded gun to a three-year old and hoping that nothing happens.

Or am I being too pessimistic?