96. Doppelgänger

Yesterday morning and for the first time in my life, I experienced aggressive prejudice and abuse because of who I am.  I became the subject of a form of atheophobia.  If you have never come across that word before, you will find out what it means later.  

I was at Sainsbury’s, where I go only whenever I have to buy the coffee we like. Coffee is kept about 120 yards from the lift that brings shoppers up from the underground car park. 

By the time I got back to the lift, after 20 minutes of walking around the huge arena that most supermarkets seem to be these days, every arthritic joint in my left leg was aching agonisingly.

I pressed the -1 button and slumped over the trolley, trying to take the weight from my leg and then waited for the door to close.  After 20 seconds it started to shut but I could see a man, who looked to be of Pakistani origin, pushing his trolley towards the lift.  I put my walking stick in the way of the sliding door and that caused it to open again so that the man could enter.  He reached behind me and pressed -2.  I went back to leaning on my trolley.  The pain was becoming intolerable.

At last the door began to close again and I felt better in the knowledge that in two minutes I would be sitting in my car.  But no, because a mother with a toddler sitting in the trolley approached us and I stopped the door once more.  I was getting desperate.

When the door began to close for the third time I could see another man, also of Pakistani origin, some 20 yards away and walking towards us.  I did nothing and allowed the door to close.  At last!

I can see now, that to the man and the woman in the lift with me and perhaps to you too, my action appeared selfish but they had no idea of the pain I was in.  All I could think of was getting to my car and sitting down.  All the same, I was surprised by what followed.

“That wasn’t Christian,” the Pakistani standing next to me said.

“I’m not a Christian,” I said.

“What are you?”

“Nothing.”

“Then you’ll go to hell,” he said with some venom and conviction.

I just shrugged and wished that I had a good response.  Five seconds later, I left the lift at -1 but he stayed on to go further down to -2.  As I hobbled away he shouted after me.

“I hope there’s a bomb under your car!”

Now you know what atheophobia is.  It’s a hatred of atheists.

Think of all the misery and horror there is around the world that has religion at its heart and cause.  A few years ago, on American television, I watched a studio debate in which one Christian of a particular denomination told another Christian of a different denomination, that she was no better than an atheist for not believing in the same way she did.

The Centre for the Study of Global Christianity has estimated there are 43,000 different Christian denominations around the world.  I suppose that must mean that Christians of any particular denomination believe that 99.998% of other Christians are no different from atheists. 

If you add together all the different Islamic sects as well as the different types of Hindus, Jews, Taoists, Sikhs, Rastafarians, Mormons and Druids, and add to those all the thousands of folk religions around the world, it means that statistically and to all intents and purposes, most people who believe in heaven and hell think that virtually everyone else is doomed.  They can't all be right can they? 

I don’t much enjoy science fiction films.  They require too much suspension of belief for me.  If I have to believe that a man can fly or travel through time in order to get pleasure from a film, then I won’t.  A science fiction film that I did quite enjoy, however, was Doppelgänger, a movie released in 1969.

The plot is fairly simple. Travelling through the Solar System in 2069, an unmanned probe locates a planet that lies on the same orbital path as Earth but is positioned on the opposite side of the Sun.  Because of its position, we here on Earth 1 had been completely ignorant of the existence of Earth 2 until then.  A manned joint European-NASA mission to investigate the planet discovers that Earth 2 is a mirror image of our Earth.

Everything on Earth 2 is a mirror image of Earth 1.  For example, instead of 11% of people being left-handed as they are here, 89% are left handed on Earth 2 and consequently on Earth 2 they write in what appears, to us, to be mirror writing.

In 1969, before Voyager began its journey, I could almost believe that such a planet could exist even though I realised that its presence would have been detectable from the effect it would have had had upon the orbits of other planets.  That was how Pluto was discovered.  The American astronomer, Percival Lowell, thought there might be another planet somewhere near Neptune and Uranus because he noticed that the gravitational pull of something large was affecting the orbits of those two planets.  That large something was Pluto.

Suppose though that there were such a planet; a planet of the same age, size and physical characteristics as Earth.  Life forms on that planet could have evolved exactly as they have here on Earth.  There would be human life forms identical to us and at the same stage of development as us.

Their science would be exactly the same as ours.  Water would freeze and boil on Earth 2 at the same temperatures as on Earth 1.  The pull and the effects of gravity would be the same on the two planets.

People on Earth 2 would commute to work in cars driven by the same engines as ours have and their aeroplanes would look pretty much like ours. The laws of physics, chemistry and maths would be uniform on the two planets as they are throughout the universe.

Some people on Earth 2 would be religious because there is a basic, primordial need for religion.  But just as we have probably more than a hundred thousand different religious sects or denominations, so would they and they would certainly be different from ours. 

Would everyone on Earth 2 be going to hell as well?  I can’t put it better than Penn Jillette, the magician and the larger part of Penn and Teller:

“If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again.  There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense.  If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and people would find a way to figure it all out again.” 

The next posting I put up will be the one hundredth since I started this blog.

95. Times are hard

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at our online bank statement and as usual I was wondering what we could cut back on.  It would be nice not to be waiting desperately for the next pay cheque every month.  I saw an outgoing that I didn’t recognise:  £5.99 paid to DHC Ltd.  

I looked up DHC on Google and it appeared to be a Japanese cosmetics company. “Have you been buying cosmetics online from Japan?” I demanded of Caroline.  “What’s wrong with Boot’s?”

She said that she hadn’t and also that it was none of my business where she bought anything.  Then, she pointed out that it was my card that had been used.  We had a tense moment or two.

I rang the bank but the woman I spoke to was not much help, telling me that she would look into it for me. Eventually, I discovered that I had bought a large bottle of windscreen wash from a filling station near Cambridge. All that effort and nervous stress for less than six pounds!  Times are hard.

A few days after that the postperson dropped five letters though my letterbox.   I say “postperson” because our regular postman has been ill and off work for three months and most days someone different brings our post.   Sometimes it’s a man and sometimes a woman. 

I was opening the envelopes quickly and as soon as I opened the fourth one, I knew that it wasn’t for either of us.  It was a deposit account statement from a bank that neither Caroline nor I have ever had any dealings with.  

I looked at the address that it was meant to go to.  It was for a “Mr Smith” at house number 6 in a road that I didn’t recognise.  Our house number is also 6.  I could see how the mistake had been made.  I could also see the total amount that Mr Smith had in his account.

It was £2,654,168.89. Two million, six hundred and fifty-four thousand, one hundred and sixty-eight pounds, eighty-nine pence

That is a lot of money.  In fact, that is an absurd amount of money to have in a bank deposit account.  I thought about it for a time, wondering what to do.  I seemed to have five options:

A  Put the statement back into the envelope and then take it to the right address and put it through the letterbox and walk away without saying anything.

B  Take it to the right address, knock on the door and apologise to the rightful recipient for opening his mail.

C  Send it back to the bank with a note telling them that I had received it by mistake.

D  Go and see the “Mr Smith” and give him the benefit of my knowledge of the best way to handle and invest large sums of money.  It’s possible that he could then be so grateful that he might slip me a couple of hundred thousand quid.

E  Destroy the statement and its envelope and do nothing.

I’ve been giving it some more thought.  Yesterday, I drove to have a look at the house that the letter should have gone to. It is nothing special.  It looks like an ordinary semi-detached house, probably with three bedrooms.  

I looked it up on Zoopla and their estimated value of it is £349,000.  If I had more than two million pounds, I wouldn’t be someone who lives in a house like that and I wouldn’t have the money sitting around in a deposit account earning less than 2% a year either.

But the big questions are, 

1. What’s a man with so much money doing living in such a small, nondescript house?

2. How did a man with so much money, living in a small, nondescript house like that, get so much money? and that leads to the next question,

3. Is he a crook?  A drug dealer possibly?

He’s probably not a drug dealer because I know from watching crime dramas on the telly, that drug dealers keep their loot in cash, hidden in the house.  Crooks don’t use banks. 

However, a much more interesting and intriguing question in my opinion is, “Would Mr Smith ring his bank and query an outgoing of £5.99?”  

Seeing that he is gaining around £150 a day in interest alone, I doubt it.  I wonder what sort of sum would make him spend and waste nearly an hour of his time and run the risk of an argument with his wife, checking on it. A lot more than six pounds I imagine.

By the way, I chose option E.