I have had cause to return to a thought I’d been having a few years, and it’s all thanks to the American TV program, C.S.I. New York, which was on last night.

It all started with two pathologists discussing the cause of a hapless victim’s demise. One of the pair commented that the corpse’s alcohol level was “just above legal”, which furnished Jo and me with two opposing assumptions about the lifeless woman on the slab. I thought she had imbibed a fair quantity of alcohol, because if you’re above you’re therefor over the legal limit. There are, after all, only two states of intoxication that count when it comes to the Law: legal and illegal. So, being above the limit must presumably mean the limit of one state has been overstepped, and enters the other state.

Jo, one the other hand, believed the woman to be within the legal limit, as if one could plot alcohol consumption on a y-axis graph, with sober being a 10, the legal limit being 0, and completely arsed being -10. Thinking in this way, being just above the limit implies a 1 on the piss-o-meter.

This whole incident could have been avoided by the exclusion of the word “above” or with the replacement of it with “within”. But it wasn’t. A word can launch a thousand thoughts.

If I’ve explained this well enough we can continue to the crux of this entry, which is to demistify and refute the Christian faith, along with other religious beliefs and philosophies, and still make it home in time for tea and biscuits.

It is a human trait to group adjectives into opposites (tall and short, fat and thin, black and white – oh, how we love to categorise), yet that is its very downfall. For most of these adjectives we simply take the average (or ourselves) as the norm and base everything around it. There is nothing especially tall about Jo’s brother (almost 2 metres) except in comparison to other people. If I were to saunter in to a pygmy village on a brisk Saturday morning there would be many inhabitants agog at my size, though a quick visit thereafter to a basketball match would diminish my grandeur, and my ego, substantially.

I think this is where the problem lies, that we subconsciously piss-o-meter everything, meaning things naturally get placed in one of two opposite states (minus or plus). Being sad is no opposite of happy. Neurologically it is just a different mixture of chemicals being squirted around the brain, and has nothing to do with anti-serotonins or the like.

If we were to instead erase the “normal” 0 score and place everything on a scale where 0 is at the bottom (severely depressed?) with incremental grades of being less sad, neither/nor, happy and ecstatic (bad examples, I know) it may give us a completely different perception of the states of feelings.

This paradigm shift kicks sand in the face of Taoism (yin and yinger?) and backs up Conversation with God’s idea that there is only Heaven, and Hell is just there to frighten us into obedience.

I cannot actually be bothered to write any more on this subject, since I have unwittingly fried my brain with my own thinking. I’m sure there are numerous flaws to this theory (not least the complete lack of biscuits), though I am still quite proud to have explained thus far.