MarkW

As I've had a few people ask me offline why I changed tack so quickly from religion to photography, I'll explain myself. I do believe in an unseen benevolent force that has the power to influence our lives: he's called Rennie, and I sensed the icy finger of death hovering over the 'lock' button. My position, though, has not changed: no special treatment for any ideas or the people who hold them. Instead, a level playing field where all ideas - religious, scientific, political, moral or ethical - are equally open to scrutiny, ridicule and even contempt, and in which the respect we show one another is derived from our common humanity rather from our personal beliefs - or lack thereof. On the off chance that anyone is interested, this old article by AC Grayling makes the case very succinctly: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/oct/19/acgrayling I'm big enough to take any criticism, but please, don't call me a Guardian reader.

Take no notice of these peasants mate. This is my current desktop background, which I never got round to framing: I took it one night on Ile de Re as the owners were having a barbecue on the beach behind the dunes. Luckily I had the old Miranda flash gun and coloured filters I got in the 1980s at the bottom of my camera bag, so I opened the shutter (I think it was about a 10 minute exposure if memory serves) and scuttled round painting the colour in with multiple flash bursts. It's OK, but I didn't have a lot of time to work because I didn't fancy having to explain to a drunk Frenchman what I was doing scrabbling about under his car in the middle of the night!

And make it snappy Okay, we get the picture. And see what develops. I'm sorry - I'll get my coat

My wife must owe me a lot of coffee... I'll let you know when I'm coming down - would be good to meet. I was talking to a magazine photographer a few years ago who said this was the 'age of the lost photograph'. He said that years ago, when you only got 36 shots on a roll of film and every press of the shutter cost you money, there was the incentive to frame carefully and consider what you were doing more. Then when you got your prints back they'd physically be in your hand and you'd look at each one in turn. Now with digital you can machine-gun a scene in the hope that one of the shots is OK, and then every so often you transfer 5,000 images to the PC, wipe the card to start over, and never look at them again. I know I was a bit guilty of that... Now I've gone back to film almost exclusively, although this one was a quick grab shot on my X100S. My eldest is only 10, and he's totally into film too - no interest in digital whatsoever. We're converting an unused room at the office into a little darkroom, so he can finally print some of his images - can't quite manage that in a changing bag!

Thanks! I'm always a bit wary of showing my stuff to proper photographers: my neighbour is a pro, and I cringe every time he comes in and sees my stuff on the wall. Good point re resolution: I guess if it won't blow up to a print size it'll make a decent desktop background... Interesting about other stations on that line: I need to get back down there and check them out!

Now then [mention]learningtofly[/mention], let's stop being a pair of tools and let me have your honest opinion on this: Having seen the stuff on your site (which is great, by the way) I thought you'd be a good person to get a second opinion from. At the time it looked kind of cool - a bit Art Deco and ethereal, but now I can't decide if it's interesting enough to get framed or if it's a bit, well... naff. Go on - let me have it...

What trenchant criticism. Move aside Voltaire; step back into the shadows H.L. Mencken - there's a new kid on the block. I'l take that as a compliment You're most welcome, sir.

What trenchant criticism. Move aside Voltaire; step back into the shadows H.L. Mencken - there's a new kid on the block.

I dunno Ian, the discussion seems relatively civilised at the moment. And there's no reason why it shouldn't remain that way. So far all we have had is the bizarre spectacle of a 'devout atheist' pre-empting any offence the religious members of this forum might take by taking offence on their behalf - something I would find presumptuous and patronising in the extreme.

I'm too insubordinate to work for anyone else. It was either self-employment or unemployment.

To start with your last point, whatever I may or may not think about religious beliefs, I do at least do the people who hold them the courtesy of assuming they can speak for themselves. The issue is not one of picking out extreme elements of a belief system, it is about whether or not you care about distinguishing good ideas from bad ones, and whether you think that there are some types of bad idea that should be given protected status and thereby be made immune from criticism. Let's look at this another way. I'm a scientist, and in my earlier days (before I renounced academia and became a capitalist pig ) I would publish my work and present it at conferences. And in both those environments, had I presented something outlandish - say that I believed the universe was actually assembled by a novel genus of invisible weevil that we had to worship dutifully or risk being nibbled for eternity - and then presented no evidence whatsoever to support it, I would have been ridiculed, pilloried, and my research would have been denounced as contemptible. What you appear to be saying - and correct me if I'm wrong - is that equally outlandish ideas with no basis in fact (creation, virgin birth, resurrection, life after death etc) should be treated with more deference merely because they are religious views. What I'm saying is they shouldn't. The fact that people may find criticism of their beliefs offensive is no justification for not criticising them. There are plenty of people out there who will kill you, and think it their holy duty, for doing so. They require no apologists.

I'm a devout atheist personally, but I still draw the line here (excuse the redaction, but I've hopefully retained your meaning). I don't really understand how intelligent and rational people can also have faith/religious belief, but I certainly don't hold those beliefs in contempt or subject them to ridicule. Personal belief systems are the prerogative the individual, and tolerance is a kind of fundamental requirement IMO. In fact, it's lack of tolerance that's got us where we are now, which all things considered is a pretty shitty state. Everyone is entitled to believe what they like, but they are not entitled to demand that their beliefs are taken seriously by everyone else, or that their beliefs be made a 'special case' and exempted from the ridicule that similarly outlandish and totally unsubstantiated beliefs attract. If you stand up in public and say you believe Elvis is still alive, or that aliens traveled light years across the universe just to abduct you and subject you to an anal probe, you will immediately pay a price in the form of ill-disguised laughter. Why should equally ludicrous religious beliefs be any different? And where those beliefs are morally outrageous, as they so often are - the genital mutilation of children, the subjugation of women, or the edict that condoms are worse than AIDS, to pick three random examples - our contempt is the very least they deserve.

Can I nominate a "nob of most days"? If so, it would have to be my neighbour, who always parks her car on the street directly in front of her house, even if it means parking in the middle of a space big enough for two cars.

Religion is just a symptom of a more fundamental issue, which is an inadequate relationship with reality. There's a huge spectrum of human irrationality that goes from putting on 'lucky' items of clothing for job interviews at one end, through the middle ground of crystal healing and astrology, to believing that we are being watched over by benevolent supernatural beings at the other. And most of us are on the spectrum somewhere: we're all human, and we're all susceptible to the limitations of our pattern-seeking primate brains, our superstitions, and our primitive fear of the dark. Where we have to be very careful is in saying that religious beliefs are different to any other belief, and that they should be treated with special deference or respect: that's a very dangerous path to go down. Bad ideas are bad ideas, regardless of how long they've been around, how popular they are, or how much meaningless ceremony and mystical woo they are dressed up with, and they should be open to equal ridicule and contempt.

I'm half with you there: I respect anybody's right to their beliefs, but I have no respect whatsoever for the beliefs themselves when so many of them are such an outrageous affront to logic, reason, morality and human rights.

He is Australian, you know! His Oscar Pistorius routine made me laugh: "Of course he shot her through the door - he's one of the few people who couldn't have kicked it down. Boing!"

Are you dissing Mr Potato?

Well tickle my tits: my bloody youngest has joined in now and decided that I need a pet, so he made me my very own pet potato in school today. My cup truly f*cking overfloweth...

No idea, but I'd put money on No 2 never having had sex with anyone. Well, not with anyone who was conscious at the time...

Plenty of pets on show so far, but very few shots of the actual pet-lovers. Let me fix that right away: Nope - nothing remotely odd about you lot!

One of my favourites:

"Every mountain, every rock on this planet, every living thing, every piece of you and me was forged in the furnaces of space. Every atom in our bodies was formed not on Earth, but was created in the depths of space, through the epic life-cycle of the stars." - Brian Cox The reality of our universe and our place in it is truly so much more beautiful and wondrous than any manufactured version.

Sounds as though we have a fairly similar approach: I couldn't care less what people believe, as long as they leave me out of it. And by 'me' I mean by extension anyone else who doesn't want to play, or who is too young/old/frightened/infirm/near death to make rational and informed decisions for themselves. Unfortunately it's when people are at their most vulnerable that they are most susceptible to this stuff, and the religious dingbats know it. I'd say my kids are atheists though, because the absence of belief is the default position at birth, and they haven't moved away from it. But like you, I'd rather they came to a completely contradictory view to mine from their own intellectual efforts than just blindly follow me: my job is to teach them how to think, not what to think. Prayer is a very weird concept. I can understand people worshipping the dear leader in places like North Korea where you risk being tied to a stick and machine-gunned for failing to be sufficiently deferential, but for free people in a free country to voluntarily grovel at the feet of an imaginary master is an insult to human dignity, not to mention unbelievably arrogant: "Lord, I know you are omniscient and have a plan just for me, but I have a different plan that suits me better, if you wouldn't mind...". And as for the trivial stuff they ask for: does any football fan who prays for their team to win genuinely think the creator of the universe gives the tiniest shit which bunch of wallies kicks a ball in a net more than another? A lot of people say that religion provides consolation, but if it's false consolation it's worthless. A few years ago I was talking to someone who lost a child to cancer, who said that they took comfort from the fact that they were looking down on them from heaven. Although obviously I said nothing, I couldn't think of anything worse: imagine if one of your kids was in heaven, surrounded by complete strangers, separated from the home and family they loved, able to see and hear you but completely unable to make contact... I don't know how any thinking person could draw any comfort from that - it would be an almost unendurable mental torment. But the worst thing about heaven would be that I'd be surrounded for eternity by every religious nutter I'd ever encountered, except now they'd know they were right!