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Please bear with me if you see some repetition of theme in my recent entries. I’m thinking around this one theme, and want to capture each step.

 You’ll occasionally hear on the radio that a singer was ‘blessed with a God given voice’, and it was their duty to make the most of it. There is something fundamentally appealing about this kind of declaration, and in a moral sense, there is. I have been gifted with drawing skills that I seldom use, and feel appropriately guilty. It is indeed a waste not to use them more.

But what does a ‘God given voice’ actually mean? There are many ways that a supernatural being might achieve this. He might have endowed you with this voice in your childhood. Or it might have been there from birth.

This makes me wonder whether God did indeed actually make me. But what exactly does that mean?

One of the reasons many theists believe in God is because the sheer magnificance of live on this planet cries out to our senses that it was designed rather than evolved. Even to me this is true. The World just feels too organised, too wonderful, too rich to have simply mechanically evolved without any coordinating party. But I have sufficient understanding of the theory of evolution to rationalise my feelings as simply that.

The crucial aspect of these feelings is that life on the planet feels designed. I emphasise this because there is an enormous difference between design and manufacture. Manufacture is often much less glamorous than design - the construction of my body, one cell at a time would be a highly protracted process.

If God made me, then he presumably constructed my cells and got them working together. But exactly when did he do this? You see, ‘me’ is not just the me that I am today, but it is the me that I was 10 years ago, and will be in 10 years time (if I last that long). I am a constantly changing ‘work in progress’. So either God made me at egg fertilisation time, and let nature take its course, or God is somewhat more involved, working on me as I evolve from an egg to an embryo to a baby and so on.

I want to ask a Christian this question for two reasons. One, to see if they had pondered the subject at all. And two, to see what their answer would be.

You see, the ‘God given voice’ was only operable some years after conception. Did God set the embryonic development in the right direction to result in this voice, or was He more involved? God cannot take too much credit for the former, since embryonic evolution does the work for Him.

If God is involved with us during our own life, working on every cell in our body on a second by second basis, where does He fit in with the mechanical aspect of cellular life, where genetic code governs cellular behaviour? And if He is that involved, then He is actively involved in creating cancerous cells and all manner of other problematic biological shortcomings.

Life gets pretty complex for most of us. There is often too much to do in too little time. So we have evolved mechanisms that prune a lot of the unnecessary away. The information from our senses is heavily filtered by our brains to what is most pertanent at any one moment (alhough disorders such as schizophremia are evidence of reduced filtering). When we are in a crowd of people, we do not need to know the hair colour, clothing choices, and a myriad of other details about these people. We are just in a crowd. We may choose to focus in on someone who catches our eye, but in general, our minds are more atuned to our shopping list, or other matters.

Beyond sensory filtration, there is also sensory manipulation. We may see a beautiful lady, yet the next man may see her as ordinary. Yet it is the same lady. Our brain flavours what we perceive, so we really do not see in a very objective, ‘real’ way very often.

There is another mechanism that our brains uses to manage the complexity of life. It regularly imposes a limit to the depth of our thinking. This frequently happens because time is at a premium, and we must make snap judgements. But there is a danger that beyond the horizon of this limited thinking there often lies a very different truth.

This concept was brought sharply into focus by the excellent “The Atheist Universe” by David Mills in his discussion of Hell. He portrays the punishment meted out by God for a minor theft as 100 years in Hell. Or maybe, 100 years. No, 1 million years. Well actually, since a failed life is met with an eternity in Hell, each ’sin’ in your failed life is matched by a proportion of time in Hell - a proportion of Eternity, and hence entirely unreasonable.

The horizon in thinking is that theists do not go much beyond the mere concept of Hell. They may ponder the flames and smell of sulphor, and the desire not to be one of the many who apparently go there. But they tend to skip over the bit that you are there for eternity. They may say that you deserve to rot in hell for all time, but they do not actually think about what they are saying. There is simply not enough time. Or rather, we move on before we give ourselves time to think.

But if you do think about this, you are then obliged to question the an eternity in hell can never have a matching crime on earth since our life here is very much finite. It is impossible for God to be perfect and yet mete out such disproportionate punishment.

The point here is not so much Hell itself, but the shallowness of thinking on matters that deserve better.

From 1978 to 1983, I used to work as a professional Broadcasting Engineer for BBC radio, based in Broadcasting House, London. It was a richly rewarding job, even though I was pretty inept at the work. We would have fun playing as ‘Disk jockeys’ (as they were then called) on night shift, and have the Concert Hall all to ourselves. We would play ‘Going Underground’ by the Jam at a dangerous sound level. I say that with some assurance - at the top of each speaker was a yellow warning sign, symbolised by a man with fingers in his ears. Too loud and your hearing would be damaged.

And I used to play in goals regularly for the BBC 4th football team. We had a great camradarie, travelling across London, playing against stupidly rich companies such as Glaxo, who had amateur pitches like bowling greens. Our main striker, Shaughan Feakes, played football like a chess game. Not surprising when you realise that he played the real game of chess at a high level.

This was a quarter of a century ago, and I wondered if I could find him via the Internet.

Lo and behold, and to my surprise, I was swiftly able to identify his relatively unchanged visage on a recklessly designed web site. And today, we met up, and chatted about past times. I merely walked the 15 minutes to town to rendezvous, Which is odd since I live in Cardiff. It transpired that his whole department was uprooted in 1991 from London to Cardiff.

Meeting with old friends is a mixed experience, with worries on both sides that time would diminish any common ground.  But this was not the case with Shaughan. And this was probably the longest conversation we ever had.

It was fun to meet up with Shaughan ‘Sniffer’ Feakes - and I will meet again at one of his Mensa meetings. I learned today that he has been in the grand final of the Times Crossword competition. Since I can rarely get one clue right, he has my admiration.

I play the board game called Go on the Internet thanks to a Go game server called KGS (Kiseido Go Server). It allows players from around the World to play friendly and rated games against each other. It is a fine, free facility. The default games room on this server is called the “English game room”, so named so that players can converse during games in English.

Except that, by being the default room, it gets big. Most players stay because it is better populated than the other rooms, where Polish, French, German and other Nationalities are specifically catered for.

As time has passed, the liklihood of a meaingful chat in English has all but disappeared. Couple this with a strange, but very common tendency by some of the kind of people who play Go to ignore any thing that the opponent writes, and the best thing to do is simply say ‘hi’, play Go, and then type ‘thx’. A kind of primitive grunting in effect.

But I have a big problem with this common sense route. I can understand it - I have written the above of course - but emotionally, I repeatedly have an urge to both chat, and then get incensed when there is either no response or one in a language I do not understand.

Why is it that I, and other people, repeatedly get too irrationally emotional? It is as if one part of our mind will simply not learn how the real World operates, hanging on to ideals that simply cause emotional grief. I can tell myself to just not chat, but I am impulsive, and I have typed in something before I even know I have done it. And then I hang on anxiously to see if it solicits a response.

It is very much like when I am in conversation with a particular type of person. Someone who just remains poker faced when you say something. No reaction - just a firm stare. In these situations, I rephrase, with more emphasis to try to coerce a response. Long enough in such a one sided dialogue, and I get exhausted with a bad head.

Again, my emotions cannot cope with how the World is. OK, that person is probably being a bit rude, or simply too slow to respond to what is said, but what is gained by my spiralling emotional state? How do I stop the desecent into exhaustion?

Maybe, in both cases, I should just remain calm and match their quietness. But somehow, I do not see myself capable of sustaining such a behaviour for the rest of my life…

After spending most of last week fighting an ever more oppressive headache and growing tiredness, I got to the point yesterday afternoon where my batteries were pretty well run down.

I slept for at least 9 hours, and awoke today electrically alive. The contrast is beyond words.

I strongly suspect that the europhic feelings I have on a day like this are only accessible to most people via drugs. Or put another way, I would have no need for any drug now, even if offered with no side effects - I feel stunningly alive (yet, always, always, unbelievably, always with a headache on top), and can take on anything the World has to offer. It is Saturday, and sunny outside, but I chose to do some computer work this morning - to make the most of a searingly capable state of mind.

For those of you who do not enter the hyper state, you are missing something special. Yet, curiously enough, I have read about the hyper state, and, from experience, it is actually not healthy. I feel as alive as I could ever wish to hope, yet the extremeness of this state is its downfall. The only hope I have of getting a good night of sleep this evening is if I meditate for at least half an hour - to try to put the breaks on my runaway brain.

Do you have any experience of this state you can share with me?

It’s a pretty long story, but a combination of an overly sensitive and reactive nature, and a sequence of traumas some 13 years ago started a series of headaches that persist to this date. I have spent hundreds of hours working out why they remain, and still do not really know. Various traditional and alternative medical methodologies have failed to placate them at all. A brain scan revealed no physical cause, and I have long since realised that they are ’simply’ tension headaches.

But they are contradictory. I can, and often do awake entirely relaxed from a good solid night of sleep, and drift in and out of sleep in a relaxing way. Yet my head is fixed in tension. Relaxed enough to fall asleep yet tense. Very odd. If I have a mild headache and shut my eyes, and gently meditate, the headache always gets stronger. Sometimes 5 or 10 times as strong. Then when I come out of the meditation, it is often weaker than before I started.

The headaches are ever present. All day long, every day, for at least 10 years now, although of varying intensity. At best, I feel pretty normal, with a vague tension that is just a bit uncomfortable. At worst, they are probably much weaker than migraines, but distressing and making me long for the day to end. The debilitating things are their omnipresense, and unpredicatable nature. I have been unable to work full time since 2001 because of them.

But they are of course invisible, and it is tedious reminding people that they are always there, so people forget and make no allowances for them. I would do the same. In fact, I do - a friend suffers similarly, but looks fine, so I treat him as if he is free from discomfort.

Working part time in a way that earns a reasonable wage is not so easy. I do part time work at home and I photograph Weddings. At least for now. So I go from a solitary place of work to a people infested situation. Except that I do not know these people, so am still lonely. Much as you might be at a party where everyone is having fun, but you do not feel you can relate to them.

Anyway, this is a long preamble to the theme of this post, so I’ll get to the point.

During the last deceade or so, I have both prayed to and chastised God for my plight. I am very capable at many things, but can plan very little because of the highly limiting nature of my headaches. This is so intensely frustrating. For example, the night before all but 3 of the 40 Weddings I have photographed, I have slept poorly with anxiety and awoken very tired with a bad headache that makes photographing someone’s special day very arduous indeed.

My attempted contacts with God have yielded nothing obviously tangible. So maybe God is doing his ‘working in mysterious ways’ thing. But God is all knowing, so knows that I do not know his plan, and lets me suffer with a condition that is helping no-one. At least if I were tired because a daughter or son kept me awake at night, at least there would be some meaning behind it.

After enough years had past, I decided that my attempted contact with God was fueled by conditioning, even though I have never claimed to be religious. Decades of hearing the virtues and validity of the Christian view of life and beyond was so very very rarely balanced by a counter view that God and Religion are both man made edifices designed to comfort us in a harsh World.

So deep grained has my conditioning been that I am unable, even, to stop myself saying ‘Bless you’ when someone sneezes. So strong that I feel a compunction to respect any exposure to religion. This is especially true at Church Weddings.

Gradually, though, I drew up enough courage to remain silent during the Lords prayer, and hymn singing (as a child, I sang hymns with deep passion, but this was for the sound, not the meaning). And the more I read the counter arguments, such as in Dawkin’s ‘The God Delusion’, and various web sites, the more I realised the depth of my conditioning, and that to uncondition myself would take some time and effort.

At too many Weddings with deeply religious couples, when the sun shone, they praised the Lord that their day was blessed. When it rained they said nothing. It all started to mean so little - a God arbitrarily blessing some couples and noth others. Or maybe, just maybe, it was just the vagaries of the weather and there was no interfering God.

When someone says they will pray for my headaches, I do not stop them, but do not expect, and never get, any relief. I will try not to ‘convert’ such theists to atheism, since I do respect the comfort that religion brings. But I sense that the uprising of atheism will sooner or later come to a number of heads. Religion relies on dogma, and blind faith, and hurts badly when undermined by the rawness of the reality of life as it really is.

God has had plenty of time to speak to me, to remove these headaches so that I can get on and live a fuller life.

And what about those people with real problems, beyond the discomfort of tension; those with severed or malformed limbs. When will God ever get around to regrowing new legs for these unfortunate souls? Surely his mysterious ways cannot be that consistently inappropriate to us, the people He is claimed to have made and whom He loves with a love beyond any love here on Earth?

The Occam’s Razor entry was written in the early hours of this morning. I simply could not sleep until I got it off my chest. And then I still could not sleep.

But I feel that I have hit a crucial argument that involves the recognition that the Scientific viewpoint is that evolution actually operates at two levels.

1. Lifeforms and species evolve by natural selection
2. Each individual lifeform evolves as it grows and adapts to its environment

These two aspects to evolution are necessarily intertwined - if a life form fails to adapt to its envionment before it procreates, it fails to pass on its genes, thereby affecting the the 1st form of evolution.

The Creationists rule out evolution because they crucially need God to be involved. God is claimed as creating man (in the form of Adam and Eve), but precious little is said about his subsequent involvement. We are all claimed to be his creation, but in what sense?

If He kick started it all off, and let evolution takes its course, then he cannot claim to have created you or I. At least only extremely indirectly via thousands of generations. And this, of course, lets evolution back in.

So He must be actively building every life form, and this hits the problems I described on Occam’s Razor. If it is indeed true that he is actively creating each and every living thing, then he is also creating all the defects, such as malformed limbs, holes in the heart, and the many thousands of health problems we are beset with.

This is hard to handle - with the awesome capability of creating every molecule of every living thing, why would He intentionally introduce numerous flaws?

This makes me wonder about many other things, but more of that later. I am personally very interested in asking deeply religious people if they have thought about any of this at all. I would like to ask what they think God’s involvement in living things exactly is.

Occam’s razor is a very useful general guide that allows for the likely explanation for something to be more readily selected from alternatives. It is generally paraphrased as meaning :

“All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the most likely.”

I am reminded of this when I look at the competing theories of the origin of life in the Universe. The Scientific belief is that life has evolved from primitive unicellular organisms into the vast array of life forms we are witness to, and part of, on this planet. The Religious viewpoint is that the richness, beauty, and complexity of current life forms imply a designer. This is the creationist belief.

The Scientific viewpoint is elegantly, and consistently supported by fossil records, and the underlying mechanism of evolution.

The Religious viewpoint is supported principally by belief. Numerous attempts have been made to demonstrate, from omissions in the fossil records of intermediate stages of the evolution of life, that are taken to imply a supernatural designer.

One by one, these counter arguments are taken apart.

But I feel that there is an aspect of the Creationist belief that is inherently complex, and incredibly implausible. When contrasted with the Scientific belief, Occam’s razor would insist that we adopt the latter rather than the former. It hinges on the very word, Creationist. Namely, that the Religious desire to believe that life was designed rather than evolved is meaningless unless the designs were implemented. That the designs were created.

Design and manufacture are very different processes. I could possibly design a high rise building, but never build one. I could build a computer but never design one. Without evolution, it is obvious that God would have to be able to manufacture complete, complex organisms, in addition to rather simpler bacteria, and the like. God is all powerful, so this is no problem.

The problem, however, lies in one of detail. Even an ant is a staggeringly complex object. Is God expected to be there, assembling every molecule of every cell of the ant? This is a hugely multi-tasking activity. This is the first level of complexity.

But an ant is not born fully grown. So God must presumably be involved with the molecular and cellular growth - the evolution - of the ant in the parental womb, and throughout the life of the ant. This is the second level of complexity.

So God is pretty well fully engrossed in managing every atom of the ant through its existance, not just its ‘creation’.

The third level of complexity is that this kind of activity must be extended to all of the lifeforms on the planet.

Along with all the planets as well. And remember, God is not allowed to just kick start life with Adam and Eve and the other creatures, or evolution will take over - he will not directly have created all His people.

So I ask you, what is simpler - the evolution of independent life forms, from the very simple, over millenia to the diverse complexity we see today, via step by step iterations, or a massively, staggeringly intrusive and busy God concurrently working on every molecule of every living thing?

I’ve just finished reading a book about Self Esteem. And a fine read it was too, with some very practical ideas to implement. Some of the later concepts I struggled with, where it is claimed that there is no good and bad - just things that happen. When you get your car broken into, it is tough to try to see it as just something that has happened.

But the basic concept of accepting yourself is something I am working on. Except that it too is difficult. I stood with a good friend tonight, and the tiredness from a hard day (for once!) made my face contort with the effort of listening. I was far from relaxed, and eminently aware that I may have looked uncomfortable. It is so much easier when I am relaxed, and can talk effortlessly, with animation in my facial features.

I can accept that I was simply tired, and my face was showing that tiredness. But I did not want to be, and did not enjoy being like this. It felt very strained. I can sustain a strong general sense of self esteem, but minute by minute self esteem in situations like this is difficult. It is too much hard work to avoid getting caught up with the awkwardness of the moment, and being down on yourself. Self esteem takes a hit.

In a large sense, high self esteem is often a delusional state - you focus on your basic strengths, and devalue your shortcomings as asides. Self esteem is not supposed to be about achievements, skills, numbers of friends, or anything quantifiable, it seems. It is supposed to be about you being a unique human being deserving respect simply for being you - for being unique.

Can a mass murderer have high self esteem? In principle - yes - his murders are not happening literally all the time, and therefore do not completely define the man. But how can he hold his head high when they are such a factor, unless he is perspective on life is distorted?

I am still unsure what self esteem really means. Maybe, self esteem is indeed volatile (as it feels), subject to the impact of self reinforcing and damning events. Or maybe it is independent of these. If the latter, what can we tangibly base our self esteem upon?

Those that know me are aware of my emotional proneness. To say that I am driven by emotion, however, is a little strong as a generalisation. There are times when I am cool and objective. But all too often, I am indeed intensely subject to the influence of my emotions.

For example, a couple of weeks ago, I emailed a ‘bug’ in the Delphi programming language to my new (temporary) employer - the publishers of this language. I was subconsciousy seeking to impress them. But it backfired - there was no bug, but only a misunderstanding on my part. So I felt stupid.

Or rather, that is how I consciously judged myself. My subconscious, however, went on an all out assault, attacking me emotionally for my stupidity. It compounded the mistake by creating an expectation that I would be swiftly removed from my employment for demonstrating incompetence.

The effect of my emotional reaction to the mistake was literally amplified by this unreasonable future projection. No amount of reasoning was able to budge this emotional judgement, and the emotional state I was swamped in. I went to bed in this state, and suffered further as my mind trawled through the possible ensuing scenarios.

In these situations, I can generally only temper the emotion by distracting myself. Quite why my mind reacts so deeply, and hangs on so long is beyond me. In virtually all cases, it is not doing me a favour. And it is not really even ‘me’ that is doing this. It is the hidden part of my mind that is working against my wishes.

I am often amazed at how little other people react to situations that floor me. It is easy to get jealous, but of course this is pointless. I am what I am, and simply have to accept it. As my friend Caroline regularly points out, the positive side to rollercoaster emotions is breathtakingly sweet and powerful - people with stable emotions are not privileged to experience these highs, these intensely alive moments.