Imagine the first manned spaceflight to Mars. The mission will take several years. Four or five astronauts will be shut into a small metal box for month after month, speeding towards the red planet. They've done all the training, they have their assigned tasks to perform, and yet very little can prepare them for being, to all intents and purposes, imprisoned in a capsule with absolutely no way out. So they'd better really know how to live together for long periods of time.

Day three or four arrives - the first few days were a rush of non-stop instrument checks and putting the spacecraft into 'cruise mode' for this immense journey of millions of kilometres. The crew settle down for the long haul and finally they have time to relax and chat for the first time. They all talk about what they will miss most about Earth. For one of them it's good food, for another it's walking in the woods back home. They all take their turns.

"So Bob, what will you miss most about good old planet Earth?" one asks.

Bob smiles and says, "I'll miss preaching the word of the Lord to the sinners and the blasphemers and the atheists. I'll miss knocking on the doors and witnessing to those poor helpless souls about the power of Jeeeeesus and the evils of saying that the universe is older than 6000 years old - lies, all lies. I'll miss praising God's mighty creation and cursing the wickedness that the evolutionists tell our children."

He adds, "But at least I have you guys to share the wonders of God's awesome universe for the next couple of years. Come on, praise Jesus our Lord and Saviour with me. Come on, don't be shy now."

Such a shame that on a routine check of the airlock Bob becomes the first man to perform a space walk without a suit. You'd have thought that God would protect him.

Moral: mission to Mars good, missionary to Mars bad.

---

Footnote:
If Jeebus comes back for the Rapture how does that work with the people up in space anyway? The Bible is strangely silent about what happens to anyone caught in the International Space Station when the rivers of blood start flowing.

I've just finished eating a clementine, which is a type of mandarin, and according to the label 'intensely sweet in flavour' and 'high in vitamin C'. Shipped all the way from Morocco to my mouth. Marvellous. Meanwhile the apple I'm now eating is a Cox variety, 'rich and fully flavoured' and was grown in Kent, known to some as 'the garden of England'. I eat a lot of fruit, and there's a banana with my name on it waiting downstairs when I've finished this blog.

So why am I telling you this? Just because I want to, I suppose. But also perhaps to hint that writing about 'stuff' on a blog isn't the only thing I enjoy doing. Today I walked the 2.5 miles into the city instead of using my car, had a walk around the huge new shopping centre there, went into precisely two of the shops, and bought a couple of books from one of them. I walked back the 2.5 miles back home, was repaid with a big blister on the sole of my foot, and realised there was definitely a reason I owned a car. That reason seems to be to avoid walking at all costs. Later I watched the soaps on TV (that's another story), had a lovely dinner of prawns with stir-fry Chinese vegetables, and watched 'The Terminator', realising that special effects weren't as good as I remembered they were back in 1984. That was pretty much my day and those are 24 hours I will never have again, but I'm not too unhappy about spending them in the way I did.

And again, I'm telling you this because I'm in the mood to do so.

Most of this blog, and most of the videos I make for YouTube revolve around atheism and religion. It's what I am known for, and perhaps you wouldn't be here if I made videos about Formula 1 racing, which I also enjoy but which doesn't overlap greatly with atheism. I write and make videos because I enjoy speaking my mind about subjects which are important to me. If you've been around these parts for long enough, you'll have seen periods when I was no longer interested in doing this, and so stopped. My recent videos have hardly been what you might call religion-packed - I've been reading stories and poems and you haven't actually seen me personally in a video since the end of 2007.

From time to time people tell me they are disappointed that I am no longer making 'serious' videos like I used to. Some people have unsubscribed because I am no longer the <IRONY> atheist philosopher </IRONY> I once was. Are these people important to me? As individuals, no. I have over 3000 subscribers and have never met a single one of them. And 3000 is, in the grand scheme of things, a drop in the ocean, so if one goes away this is not in any way a concern of mine. The fact that there are 3000 more isn't that important either - the first video I made was recorded when I had no subscribers at all, so obviously I was motivated to make it with few prospects of any sizable audience. But I did it anyway, because it was something I wanted to do. I am of course grateful that 3000+ people decided to subscribe to my channel, but I am stirred to nothing more than a simple 'thank you' to this amorphous group of people I don't know, perhaps because I myself am subscribed to over 200 channels and they probably don't give a toss about me.

I used to take making new atheist videos very seriously, and churned them out on a pretty regular basis, maybe 2 or 3 a week, but now I kind of think I've said all I want to say in video form, and while I will be making more videos, they might not be about anything to do with religion at all. Or they might - the last one was, so who knows? I prefer to write in this blog, as and when I feel the urge, and the urge has today urged me to write this, for some reason.

The atheist videos, and this blog, have always been made solely for an audience of atheists. At first I used to reply to every message I received from Christians, and, rarely, a few Muslims, but for anyone who hasn't worked it out yet, this is actually pretty pointless. The only theists who contact you are the ones who are so set in their ways that they will never change, and it isn't as if there is much of a grey area - they believe in God, I don't, and there is no middle ground, no compromise to be made. Neither side listens, because both sides have heard every counter-argument before and it's the nature of religion - beliefs (or lack of them) do not change simply because someone has a more elaborately constructed argument.

So I write, I make videos, and they are for atheists. Even when I appear to be addressing Christians, what I'm really saying is, 'this is what I think of Christians and Christianity'. I don't actually seek to engage in any kind of debate with them because it is pointless. And like the 3000 subscribers who are not actually known to me, the Christians and Muslims who want me to respond to their comments are just faceless accounts on YouTube. They simply don't matter to me - I don't want to change their lives so very much that I want to spend time responding to their quotes of scripture, or threats of hell and damnation. These days I pretty much block and delete such people and their comments. They are free to debate with themselves on their own channels, but nobody gets the last word on mine these days. All this I do because I choose to do so.

If you like getting into arguments with religious believers, go for it. If you don't, stay well away from it. I'm of the latter persuasion, and I'm just here to churn out more of what interests me on the day. There's no big plan, and no real need to do it if I don't want to - as I've said, I have periods of varying length when I really don't want to be bothered with it at all.

I enjoy blogging and making videos, but I have a life beyond this. Some people would call it a very dull life - no mountain climbing or sky diving, nothing like that - but nonetheless it's a life which is stress-free for the greater part of my day. Most of my day isn't even remotely connected to atheism, and to be honest I'd like to think that you spend very little of your time reading my blog and watching my videos, because while you're sitting at your desk right now, you too could be eating a sweet, juicy orange or apple, or, if you're not a fruity person, a huge slab of cake. If you don't have any cake you could always bake one - it's not difficult, and it's better than watching some creationist rambling on about the nothing-at-all he knows about evolution. If you find yourself doing such a thing, ask yourself why you are bothering and what else you could be doing with your life - the one life you get, remember.

Talking of rambling on, this is exactly what I'm doing, so if you're wondering when this blog is ever going to end, stick with it for a few more sentences. Then get as far away from the computer as you can and do something less... religious with your life. You may thank me for that suggestion, but don't worry if you don't, we are neither of us important to each other, at least not as important as the 'real' people we know. Just do the things you want to do and be happy doing them, and I'll give that philosophy a try myself now and again. Starting with that banana. Good things often start and end with a nice piece of fruit. Or maybe cake.