Sol Invictus

The late George Carlin did a deservedly well-known comedy routine spelling out why religion is bullshit and as such, why he worships the sun. And Joe Pesci.

One of the main benefits that the sun has over the "invisible man in the sky who loves you, but will sentence you to an eternity of unimaginable suffering for breaking his Iron Age Middle Eastern rules" theory, as George said, is that you can see the sun.

Not that often if you live in Yorkshire, but nonetheless you can see it and feel it from time to time. You certainly notice its absence for months and months on end.

However, you can also see a statue with an elephant's head (under certain conditions) and right now I can see a cup of tea. So while it may be necessary, visibility is not a sufficient condition of divinity.

Our "primitive" ancestors clocked that the sun does a few other pretty awesome things as well:

• When it's not in the sky, it goes dark, increasing the likelihood of being eaten by wolves.
• If the sun is around too much or too little during the crop-growing season, there's less to eat over winter and you and your family die, and get eaten by wolves.

Amongst other scenarios, most of which also conclude with being eaten by wolves.

In Sir James Frazer's monumentally tedious book "The Golden Bough", a simple theory as to how magical thinking developed into religious thinking is outlined.

I paraphrase here a work of several thousand pages – something Sir James' editors singularly failed to achieve:

Early man is faced with a world in which shit happens to him, and he tries to take control of it.

Magic – if you do certain things, other consequences follow automatically. The only real difference between science and magic is that the relation of causality is true in the case of science and false in the case of magic.

Religion – having discovered that magical practices don't do anything, early man concludes that things are actually controlled by spirits or forces that have to be asked nicely to produce the desired results.

Which was a pretty disastrous conclusion to reach, as evidenced by the best part of human history from that point onwards.

How different society might have been had only our ancestors alighted on "you're doing it wrong" as the solution to the failure of magic as opposed to "an invisible man will make it happen if you stab a goat for him".

In general, I find most references to "ancient wisdom" rather tiresome. If the ancients were so bloody clever, how come so many of them got eaten by wolves relative to people today?

Nevertheless, I suspect that they alighted on the right answer here, but drew the wrong conclusions as to what to do about it. They didn't realise there was nothing they could do about it.

The sun, of course, would have remained resistant to all efforts – magical or religious – to influence its behaviour. As George Carlin says, you're more likely to get things done by offering your prayers up to Joe Pesci. But that didn't stop pretty much every culture ever from, at some point or another, proclaiming it a god.

But were they wrong? Maybe not.

It seems to me that there are two main categories into which "things you have to do to be a god" fall:

1. Things relating to creating the world, life and whatnot, and allowing those things to continue to exist (or not).

2. Things relating to how to behave and what's good and bad.

And that's broadly it.

I'm afraid that the sun falls short on 2 – unless "always wear a sufficiently high-factor cream" is taken as a moral injunction and sun burn as an instrument of heavenly retribution.

However, from a scientific (or magical) perspective, the sun is pretty much responsible for all those things under 1.

It is only because of the sun's gravity that the chunk of rock we call home orbits at the precise distance that supports life like ours.

The sun provides the only input of energy into the earth's closed system (entropy!) without which everything would run down pretty quickly.

It's a fair bet that the sun played some kind of role in (i) the creation of life and (ii) evolution from that point.

Even people as mad as Colonel Gadaffi don't dispute that crops grow, trees produce oxygen and we don't all freeze to death immediately courtesy of the sun. You don't have to be on hallucination pills to recognise that.

OK, the sun didn't decide to do all these things because it was bored or lonely. The sun doesn't care, because it is a giant ball of gas – much like some of those who claim to speak for the gods here on earth.

I reckon it's fair to say that bringing about the conditions under which life can come into existence and remain in existence is as close to creating life as you're going to get. If those conditions didn't exist, someone or something else creating life would look rather silly shortly after doing so.

And certainly, the sun can't take any of the credit for creating the rest of the universe – but why do you need one god who's responsible for everything? Give me radical decentralisation and a local god any day – very Big Society. The Greeks had a god whose remit was beekeeping and cheesemaking, so the fact that the sun is only the god of the solar system is hardly a knock-down argument.

What's good about the sun as a god in other respects is:

• The sun doesn't care what you get up to – so there's no hell to worry about.
• The sun does not require you to praise it – it is not insecure like that.
• The sun is going to rise anyway – so you don't have to get up early on Sundays or give it a tenth of your earnings to encourage it.
• Occasionally, the sun moves in mysterious ways – capriciousness is important for reminding us who's god.

This is not an argument for the non-existence of god. If you want that, then read something by Richard Dawkins – although prepare to be thoroughly patronised with a lot of comments like "you don't need to understand that".

No. All I'm saying is if there really is a god, it's up there in the sky – but not in the way they say in church.

And if the sun disappearing is a sign of divine displeasure, then god hates Yorkshire.

Bankers are not the only wankers

It has probably been about 25 years or so since the first cash machines started to appear in British banks – at least in the kind of provincial towns I grew up in.

And when I say "in" they literally were inside the banks, which was not terribly convenient given that banks closed at around 3pm on weekdays and didn't open on weekends.

This was not a great inconvenience to me, as being ten years old at the time, I rarely had a call to withdraw money from the bank.

And yet how I longed to have a card I could put into that machine, press the specific keys for different amounts of money (for 'twas not a numberpad in the early days) and receive shiny new banknotes in exchange.

Indeed, the very thought of receiving banknotes without having write a thank you letter afterwards was pretty exciting back then.

Anyway, I digress.

You would think that after 25 or so years, there would be fewer people around who have NO BLOODY CLUE what they're doing when confronted with a cash point.

Let me explain in case any of you are reading:

1. Put your card in. The one that has the bank's name on it.

2. Enter your PIN. It's four digits for god's sake. If you can't remember a four digit number, you probably shouldn't be allowed to handle cash.

3. Follow the BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS instructions that appear on screen.

4. Take your money and GO. Put it into your wallet AS YOU WALK AWAY, NOT WHILE CONTINUING TO STAND IN FRONT OF THE DAMN MACHINE.

Point 4, indeed, applies at supermarket checkouts as well. Tidy up the myriad of vouchers, receipts and loyalty cards in your purse AFTER YOU HAVE MOVED AWAY FROM THE TILL, so that the cashier can start putting through my stuff. You big silly billy.

I will admit that there is one ambiguous instruction that most cash machines give you – although I doubt it will be what is causing the bewildered rustics I usually find myself standing behind to be baffled.

If it says "enter the sum you wish to withdraw as a multiple of £10" and I want to withdraw £50, the correct thing to enter is "5" – not "50". And yet, no matter how long I remonstrate with machines for, they never accept the ambiguity.

Praise the pinlock!

I bought a new crash helmet last week, and it has one significant advantage over my old one – the visor doesn't steam up AT ALL.

It's a Nolan N103 and while it is packed with groovy features – like a flip-down sun visor, space for the installation of a Bluetooth system, flip face – what I have to tell anyone who cares, and indeed those of you who don't, is that if you don't have one already, get a pinlock attachment for your helmet immediately if not sooner.

It comes fitted as standard in the N103, but you can buy them separately for other helmets. I didn't believe that it would work and I have no idea how it works, but no matter what the temperature, no matter how heavily I breathe, I can't get the visor to steam up.

My old helmet – decommissioned after one of West Yorkshire's legion of uninsured drivers knocked me over and sped away back in November – forced me to practice yogic breathing while driving.

It was of Japanese manufacture, and so perhaps the focus on remaining calm at all times was a deliberate feature. It certainly made you hold your nerve when speeding up or increasing the depth of your breathing immediately resulted in zero visibility.

Rather than risk death by concentrating exclusively on my breathing rather than the road ahead, I generally rode around with the visor up – in rain, in snow, whatever. I'd put it down when I was eventually blinded by the elements, and put it up again when I was blinded by my own breath.

I just rode in to Leeds for the first time in my new helmet and it blew me away.

OK, the sun visor steamed up when I put that down, because it's not double-glazed like the front visor.

And ok, there is an advantage in having your visor up for a good proportion of your journey time, because while the pinlock stops the visor steaming up, it does not stop the atmosphere inside quickly becoming like the depths of a tropical rainforest.

A rainforest that smells of one's own morning breath, I might add. I still have to open the visor from time to time to dry my face off.

But it's a small price to pay, particularly as I like the wind in my face. And the rain, and the snow, and the fumes, and the gravel. If you value my opinion and you ride any kind of motorbike (a vanishing small segment of the population, I appreciate), get yourself a helmet with a pinlock TODAY.

Fantasy league of nations – part 1

On one of the trains I frequently catch to and from work, there's usually a group of three "blokes" who stand around and talk endlessly about football.

Tedious at any time, I hear you say, and I agree. But these three are particularly tiresome, because they're not even talking about actual football. No, they are talking about fantasy football. So, day in, day out, they discuss how they "got" Gerrard then got rid of him and more shite that I can barely even be bothered to relate.

Yes, they're talking about the effects of things in the real world (man kicks ball) on a little imaginary world of their own (their made-up team scores points). Jesus wept.

Now, as if any more evidence that football is in fact an esoteric financial instrument rather than anything that exists in reality were needed, the development of a derivatives market around it (fantasy football, in case you're not following) is surely the clincher.

My dislike of football will be documented in a future post – it's too detailed to cover here.

However, if it's ok for grown men to make-believe about the exploits of thick chavs – whose evasion of a life split between the pub, the JobCentre and various baby-mothers' councils flats is due solely to the pure fluke of having an innate talent for a fundamentally pointless activity – then why don't we also play pretend governments and political systems? If people didn't imagine political alternatives, the world would look rather like North Africa three weeks ago.

So, here we go. First off, my imaginary UK is a republic with an elected but largely apolitical president. Sorry Mum.

But who better to fill that role than Sir David Attenborough?

He's been around almost as long as the Queen, and I don't know anyone who has anything other than respect for him.

OK, in the black and white days, he did kidnap animals from the wild for zoos, but hey, it was a different time back then. And OK, today, he is a bit of a climate change bore in the quasi-religious vein.

But, he would be the perfect "father of the nation" figure. Hell, I'd even accept him as king if it was a deal-breaker.

My second appointment is Justin Fletcher as education minister. "Who?" says everyone who doesn't have pre-school children.

Yes, when Roger Jr first started watching CBeebies, I detested Justin and Mr Tumble as any sane adult would. Of course he comes across as irritating to someone whose mind is not geared towards the thinking of toddlers. As I came to understand child mentality (or regress, as you prefer), I came to grasp that this is a man who gets kids – and whose work does nothing but good and with whom no one can really disagree. So he's the perfect person to take responsibility for the Youth of Today.

Yes, I realise that this burst of positivity is uncharacteristic and not entirely in keeping with the general tone of this blog. But I don't care. Only he who has high hopes has the right to be cynical when he sees them frustrated.

More appointments to the government will be announced in due course.