Humanism, atheism and other freedoms

Belief that isn’t based on evidence and rationality is a dangerous thing. And yet a desire for the magical, fantastic or the comforting can lead us into believing some very strange things indeed.

My new novel, Black Project, is all about the strange things people choose to believe. It centres on two characters: Dick Kennedy is the UFO reporter for a supermarket tabloid, the Weekly World Inquisitor. He’s desperate for contact with the numinous, but his intelligence just keeps getting in the way. And Kate Macmillan is an engineer working on super-secret government projects, although she has some rather dark secrets of her own.

They both come face-to-face with something strange and inexplicable. Their responses are guided as much by their desires as their intellect until, eventually, they can’t avoid facing the truth.

In the meantime, the US around them is descending into totalitarianism – masked as homeland defence and customer service – as a fundamentalist President is controlled by sinister forces.

Oh, and by the way, it’s also very funny.

Black Project is available now from WebVivant Press in print, Kindle and Apple iBooks editions. And you can read the first three chapters for free – online or as a PDF download. Find out more »

You have to pity people who suffer from anatidaephobia. This, according to many websites, some of them serious, is the irrational fear that, somewhere, a duck is watching you.

Scary? No. Funny? definitely.

It would be hard to take seriously. There’s some poor soul quivering in terror at the thought of being stalked by a small, feathered animal and all you can do is laugh. And it’s unreasonable to trivialise someone’s deeply held fears in this way. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe this fear is so ridiculous that it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

But wait a minute. Is a fear of duck surveillance any more ludicrous than the idea that we are being constantly watched – and judged – by some big, bearded bloke in the sky?

Actually, the duck thing is less ludicrous. We know ducks exist. We’ve seen them. Bred them. Eaten them. Why shouldn’t we fear something we know is real? It’s fearing something for which absolutely no evidence exists that’s silly.

God is a fiction. But then so is anatidaephobia. It’s a made-up phobia with its origins in Gary Larson’s The Far Side (a bizarre world that also makes far more sense than religion).

Still, if I have to believe I’m being watched by something, it clearly makes more sense to believe it’s a duck.