Hello, Amiga!

Some of you will recognise the familiar look of Workbench in this photo (for the benefit of youngsters, that’s the operating system from the now obsolete Commodore Amiga computer, which was the machine to own in the early nineties). So, what are we looking at here? An Amiga emulator running on a PC, displayed through a TFT monitor? Au contraire, this is an actual Amiga running on a TFT monitor!

Those who have fond memories of this computer may remember how difficult it was to get it to work on a monitor. Most of us used them through our television sets. It was possible to buy a monitor adapter for the computer, but unfortunately many PC monitors didn’t feature the necessary hertz to show a picture. However, success could be obtained by attaching a device called a ScanDoubler to your Amiga’s monitor socket (bottom right of photo). Mind you, I’m talking about old CRT monitors here; try to hook up a modern TFT monitor, and you’re completely sunk. Nevertheless, with a little careful online research, I managed to find one (and only one) model of TFT that has the right range of hertz: the Eizo FlexScan.

So, what’s all this about, anyway? Well, when I move house shortly, I’m planning to have a Creativity Room - a place where I go to make things, whether it’s writing fiction or composing music, or whatever. This room needs to be free from distractions. That means no TV and especially no internet. The Amiga is the perfect computer for this purpose. I’m planning to have very little software on it. Just a word processor and a few music apps.

I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a few vintage synths from eBay, as an alternative to all these virtual synths you can buy for your PC - real knobs instead of virtual knobs; real analogue sounds instead of virtual analogue sounds. One of the most frustrating things about modern music-making on a PC or Mac is that you have to wade through hundreds of poorly made virtual instruments in order to find good ones for your songs. I think it would be a different experience using genuine vintage music hardware; memory was at a premium back then, and every instrument had to count. Anyway, this is still at the “thinking about it” stage. I need to get my new novel edited and published before I start diverting my attention to other things.

My 13-year war with doubt

There’s a certain type of atheist that lets out a big guffaw and says something like, “What kind of a person believes in God these days? I mean, come on. Some people just haven’t got a clue.” I can’t stand a person like that. Not becuase he’s an athiest, but because he ridicules the most intense and frustrating debate of my entire life. I’ve struggled with the question of God’s existence on and off for thirteen years, and this guy is basically saying I’m an idiot for not getting it straight away.

Literally days after I became a Christian (aged seventeen) my beliefs came under immediate attack by my best friend, whom I suddenly discovered held pretty strong athiestic views. Still in my spiritual nappy, I was no match for this guy, and within a few days, my faith was snuffed.

But it didn’t stay dead for very long. I discovered that many of the apparent contraditions in the Bible could be resolved. But sooner or later, something would come along to make me doubt again - some big whopper of a contradition that I couldn’t ever imagine being solved. As a young Christian, the learning process was a difficult one. I sometimes envied less intellectual people, wishing I could be more like them. Wishing I could just accept things without the need for evidence. I was the kind of person who needed to act on what he had learned. I could not simply shelve information in my brain and act on it at a later date. If I found out something that made me doubt the validity of Christianity, I needed to act on it now.

Those early years were torturous. I would become anxious that I was throwing my life away, believing in a pipedream. I would go out walking at night, praying that God would let me know for sure that he was real. And then the lack of any answer would only serve to increase my doubts, and my anxiety. Christianity is, after all, something which affects your whole life - that is, if you’re prepared to become more than just a typical churchgoer whose religion amounts to two hours on a Sunday. If Christianity was true, I wanted it to be real and vibrant and life-changing. If it was false, I wanted nothing to do with it. I gave up Christianity and re-affirmed it again so often that my mates used to say, “Sloan’s away on another trip again,” when I’d start believing.

As for the later years, looking back, I’m aware of something that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Sometimes my reasons for abandoning Christianity were not based on reason at all, but on emotion. Sometimes my religious life would become so agonising, for one reason or another, that I looked for a way out. All I had to do was take a look inside my head and grasp hold of a few unresolved arguments against Christianity. They weren’t hard to find. Presto! Instant agnostic. Then, after a while, the agnostic life would get me depressed, and I’d look inside my head for a reason to believe again. I would find it, and presto! Instant Christian. I’m probably over-simplifying things here, but it’s worth noting this dangerous and deceptive trend that our brains are capable of.

Let’s cut to the chase. Now that I’ve been a solid Christian for about three years, I feel some justification in finally closing the book on that massive period of doubt in my life. So, what is it that makes things different now?

Well, what I finally learned to do was to take a step back from all the noise of all the debates, and take a very simple look at the universe and our place in it. On the one hand you have earth, teeming with life, beautiful and complex; on the other you have the rest of the solar system and beyond, vast and lifeless (insofar as we have discovered, of course). Now, I don’t want to minimise the wonder of the heavens - astronomy is fabulous - but there is a contrast here between earth and the universe that people need to be more aware of.

This contrast is not always seen, due to a sort of “scientific propaganda,” for want of a better term. To a spiritually-minded person, the growth of a plant from a seed is a wonderful mystery to behold. To a scientifically-minded person, it is a process to be probed and understood and catalogued. Too many people in this world think like the latter person, when really they need to learn to think both scientifically and spiritually. The propaganda that I spoke of is when science is allowed to convey the vague idea that mankind now understands the way things work and why they work that way - that life is nothing more than a series of biological reactions. But the truth is, nobody knows why life happens. We’ve put life under a microscope; we’ve observed how things behave; we’ve tampered with genetics. But nobody knows why things do what they do.

Even if someone proved evolution, you are still left with the wonder of why creatures evolve. We’ve allowed science to take the mystery out of this planet, when all it has really done is put labels on things.

All I’m trying to say is this: the big reason why I believe in God (and I mean a personal God, as opposed to some mystical force) is because I’ve finally started seeing that there is something going on here with this planet that is unique and wonderful and unexplainable by science.

You can tell me that life happened here on this planet because all the conditions were just right. But all you’re doing is sticking labels on things again. Even if I conceded that there might be another big blue ball out there somewhere, you still haven’t answered the deeper question: why do the processes of life exist at all?

This clicked with me three years ago. And that is why I haven’t doubted the reality of God since. And what’s really great about it is that anyone, regardless of their IQ, can grasp this contrast between earth and the universe. Even though I’ve ranted for ages, the observation is a pretty simple one. The big problem is seeing through the pseudo-scientific fog we’ve all been subjected to.

The poor man’s dolly

A dolly is a piece of equipment that allows you mount a camera on a set of tracks and push it along, creating super-smooth movement. Naturally, Midnight Pictures doesn’t have one, so we improvise. On the evening that we were filming the closing shot of Don’t Look in the Attic, Andrew brought a big blue trolley to the set. We tried putting the camera and tripod on it and pushing it along, but it was a disaster. The camera was sitting too high for the shot; the trolley’s wheels kept mis-steering; the resulting picture was none too steady.

But sometimes, if you just open your eyes and look for a simple solution, you find one. Smooth floor, not exactly slippy enough for movement, but with the camera set atop an upside-down bathroom mat - bingo! Of course, you’ll hear the mat dragging, so you have to forget about recording the sound, but that can sorted out later during editing. Check out the close of the movie to see this camera shot in motion. I think it worked pretty well.

Interview on Queens Radio

Eddie Mullan, a DJ with Queens University Radio, interviewed me by telephone on Wednesday evening, asking me about my fiction, film and music-making past-times. The interview lasts 13 minutes, and you can download it here in MP3 format.

Saul’s Pupils II screenplay by Michael Quayle

I have the pleasure of sharing with you a screenplay for a sequel to our film Saul’s Pupils, written by Michael Quayle. It gave Andrew and I a real buzz to think that someone out there was impressed enough with our film to dedicate time and energy into the writing of a sequel. There are no plans for Midnight Pictures to make Saul’s Pupils II, but we’d like Michael’s story to get exposure in one form or another. So, you can download the screenplay (it’s an RTF document, which can be opened in any word processor). Readers, we’d love to hear what you think. Please post your comments to the blog.

Ulterior in libraries

Did you know that Northern Ireland has an excellent online service that lets you check the availability of any book in any library, without even getting off your backside? It’s ni-libraries.net. There are plenty of copies of Ulterior dotted around in the SELB area. Click here to see if it’s on the shelf of your local library.

My first steps as a Christian

I’d like to share my Christian testimony with you, but there’s just one problem: I don’t have one. Well, what I mean is, I don’t have a dramatic story about recovery from alcholism or drugs or crime. You see, I was a nice guy, and nice guys tremble at the question “Would you like to give your testimony at the meeting tomorrow night?” because we have nothing interesting to say. When I get asked that question, I usually end up talking about all the stuff that happened after I became a Christian, because it was a rocky road for me. But we’ll get to that later.

In short, I became a Christian when I was seventeen. I did it because I believed in God, and because somebody enlightened me regarding what the Bible says about salvation and damnation. There were no tears of repentence, just a quiet willingness to follow God’s ways and an expectation that something which had been missing from my life was about to fall into place. Before I made the commitment, I asked myself if this decision would mean I would lose out on the best things in life. But I knew the answer was no; I understood that God’s wisdom was perfect, so his way must be the best way to live. I didn’t realise at the time how deep that thought was. You see, I’ve since met plenty of people who don’t grasp it; they believe in God but won’t commit. They say “Maybe next year” or whatever. Aside from the risk you run with your soul if you should die unexpectedly, the mentality behind this attitude just doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t give God proper recognition as the one who knows perfectly what’s best for us. But then, I guess sin is pretty seductive. To my shame, I’ve learned more about that since becoming a Christian than I ever did beforehand.

People like me have one important thing they can say in their testimony: sin is sin, no matter how great or small. All of it is against God. And we are dealing with a God who demands perfection. The small-time sinner needs forgiveness just as much as the big-time variety.

So, this expectation of something falling into place - did it happen? Well, the answer to that is yes, but not in a permanent way. Only weeks after becoming a Christian, a fierce battle began with an enemy called Doubt. And I would fight this enemy for thirteen years before I would win. And that’s a story for next time.