Three days' climbing. Yes yes! But now everything hurts! Total systems failure! I know just the thing...an hour's Thai massage!

Therebefore, am reaquainting myself with the Real World in Ao Nang, where they have roads, vehicles, shops, and a MacDonalds. And Cheese! And pizza Quattro Formaggio!

And the new Kate Bush CD (for 100 Baht, or about one pound fifty; version 1.pirate). I can't play it because I've 'upgraded' my mobile travel listening system from CD-man to i-pod, so anybody reading please let me know what she's up to in her latest incarnation. What I can do is muse over the sleeve photos, and remember how I once yearned futilely and agonisingly to somehow comfort the lovely but troubled goddess who gave us This Woman's Work, which sends even more shivers up and down my spine than This Charming Man by The Smiths, and is therefore the best song in the whole world ever. For today, anyway.

Which leads us, in yet another seamless transition, to the next installment of...

What Afterlife...? I was trying to keep it descriptive, but in this case the subject matter lends itself to one or two judicious comments...
Q3. What about...Creation?
Christianity: Six days' graft, job's a good un. Welcome to the the Working Week.
Hinduism. Hinduism wins again in the colour and imagination stakes. Hindu creationism sees the current universe as one of a series of cyclical Creations, in which Shiva's Dance of Death signals the end before a new Universe is created from the old. Several creation myths then, including one involving a navel (Vishnu's or Brahma's, I forget) turning into a lotus flower that spawns Shiva, if I remember rightly. Even weirder is the Churning of the Sea of Milk (as illustrated in an Angkor bas-releif, a pic of which I posted previously), which goes like this: under Vishnu's direction, Mount Mandara, home of the Gods, is encircled by the giant multi-headed serpent (or Naga) called Vasuki. Vasuki acts as a string that spins the mountain when pulled to-and-fro, by Gods and Asuras at either end of Vasiki's body. This spinning goes on for 1000 years, mixing up the cosmic sea or Sea of Milk, while an avatar of Vishnu in the form of the giant turtle Kurma supports the mountain from below to stop it sinking. Eventually all the animals and plants and other stuff are created from the churned Sea of Milk. Meanwhile, the Gods vie for its elixir of immortality, or Amrita, so they can carry on being immortal. Whether Hindus really believes these myths, or whether they are thought of as allegorical, I cannot yet say but I'll be asking around.
Buddhism. No creation myth. The question of creation is pointless, apparently, because our senses fool us and we cannot believe that the world around us really exists in any way outside our own heads. Well, we are turning out to be an elusive religion, aren't we? Might we just be a philosophy, instead?

Hinduism seems to break from the norm again by having multiple creation myths. The Sea of Milk myth strikes me as equivalent to that favourite straw-man of Christian creationists: putting all the bits of a clock in a box and shaking it for a long time. And that will never work, right? Wrong, I say, if a) you have infinite time on your hands and b) you choose exactly when to stop so you don't shake the clock to bits again. In the case of the Sea of Milk, the added Vishnu factor presumably cuts the time down to a manageable span. Many observers have commented on the similarities between Hinduist cycles of destruction and creation, and Big Bang theory.

The Buddhist dogma of the subjectivity of everything amounts to a denial of Science, refusing as it does to allow objective truth, or falsification by scientific method. Also it's no fun, as pointless questions are usually the most interesting ones.

In many American states, Christian creationists have won a battle to teach distorted misrepresentations of conventional biology, and pseudoscientific constructs supporting creationism, some of which are quite deliberately false and misleading. They call this Intelligent Design. Modern evolutionary theory soundly based on Darwinism and mutable self-replicating molecules is a well-established theory. Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. In any case, only deluded people think that all theories are equal. It seems to me that if you're capable of believing in creation by any one of a number of postulated greater forces for which no evidence exists, or in fabricated and falsifiable evidence supporting them, then you're capable of believing in anything at all.