h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There but for the grace of ...

Take a walk to "needle park" or some other part of (your) space and (your) time where life's derelicts congregate. This is not ostensibly your world - not your way of life - but there they are - people who live, eat, drink, drug, breath, hope, fear, dream and go to the bathroom. They inhabit a place that God has forgotten. However hard you might try to deny it you live there too!

There but for the grace of ...

In the street, nearly every day but especially at weekends I am approached by seemingly needy people some of whom I have discovered park large comfortable cars before they assume their position on the corner near the Lotto Office or the Post Office or outside the Supermarket TO BEG. There are frauds and cheats living among us. This fact does not negate the reality of the poverty and misery which must be admitted and cannot be denied.

Do we see it or do we imagine it?

In this sordid world, so heartless and duplicitous, we function, knowingly and unknowingly, in a ideological duality, where "rich" has no meaning less there be "poor". If the dirt smeared, homeless, bag-person does not exist then the Midas rich, Master of the Universe, has no lower parameter by which to define himself. No fear to power his upward mobility

All of you who consider yourselves clever should perhaps consider that there is no such thing as stupid just some people are momentarily less clever than others. There is no such thing as rich only some people are less poor. There is no such thing as bad sexual intercourse ( I 'm thinking in the vernacular) just that some sex is better than others! There but for the grace......

With the "book and its cover" adage to guide us we are all just the same - a mystery until opened - the garbage collector who quotes Shakespeare, studies Mandarin Chinese, has a minor obsession with the "Fatima Prophecy", eats only organically produced food and is almost a vegetarian - like an onion has many layers of being most of which would pass completely unobserved but for the grace of ...

I have not seen ghosts but in several paranormal experiments I have channelled the spirits of people long since dead: one a young boy soldier who marched beside the Standard beating a tattoo on a side drum. He was so young and yet he gave not the slightest sign of being afraid. When the Standard bearer fell he simply picked up the colours and marched forward beating his drum one handed till his turn came to die. He announced that his name was Willum, he was an orphan and thought that he was about 10 years old. A veteran of three years soldiering - he broke off contact and marched off back into the smoke. I was spared the trauma of his passing. You will be pleased that I shall refrain from recounting similar episodes unless asked that is (?).

Much is made on this thread about Atheism (3rd on the "Belief System" table of adherents). By my way of reasoning it one half of the coin i.e non belief, demands that there be belief on the other. What this produces is the need for choice. In the Bible which passes as 'fairy tales" for some and "holy scripture" for others there is mention that the Jews were/are the CHOSEN people. This epithet plus other minor factors like the crucifixion, being clever with money etc. has placed a curse on anyone lucky enough to be born into that tradition (6th on the "Belief System" table of adherents) - but I digress a little. What I should like to put forward for you comments is this - what if the Jews CHOSE rather than were chosen. Perhaps like Son Of Sam they heard a voice and the "In the beginning..." simply followed their vocation?

Today we are Christian, Muslim, Jew as much as we are Black, White or Brindled by an accident of birth. What happens next is the inculcation/education and propagandising which clouds rather than clarifies our real choices. Hormones and hot blood lead to tests of virility and a MY GOD IS BETTER THAN YOUR GOD situation occurs which runs contradictory to the tenets that each sect claims to be their guiding ethics and moral code. Once upon a time the "Children of the Book" were safe from any attack by the Children Of Allah"........ times change but choice still lingers on - to do the right thing or... to do what is easy!