I am an angry man. This anger doesn’t necessarily manifest itself in physical acts of rage: I’m not much of a shouter – I tend to whine at high pitch rather than bark at people –but unfortunately most of the time my anger is mitigated by a set of nine trigger-happy typing fingers and two sledgehammer thumbs.

This anger has caused embarrassment on two occasions within the last month or so. The first manifested itself in a review of a website. Well, I say review, it was really an absolute trouncing; I tore this website a new digital hole and spared no blushes. Then, not content with having shat on someone’s work I attempted to ram the pile of virtual faeces down the designer’s throat via message board.

This, understandably caused a great deal of resentment on the part of the designer, who being only 15 years old was, not unduly concerned that I had scuppered his chances of further work. I should point out that obviously I had no idea this kid was 15, and I would never want to trample over a young mind’s eagerness to learn and grow. But I did, and quite simply I let the anger get the best of me.

A few weeks prior to that I’d received an automated message via the microblogging site Twitter, from a robot claiming I lived near a blogger in Birmingham. The robot was a piece of software written by a guy who was experimenting with the Twitter platform to see what information could be pulled from it, but because it was a bot and his message looked like spam, the red mist descended and I shot him a very quick and very unfriendly message back. There are a lot of spam bots using Twitter, but this felt different because I felt it was trying to infiltrate my world somehow.

“Oh for the anonymity of the Web” I thought as I settled back down to work, having sated the beast’s apatite for the time being. That was of course until I met the bot’s creator a couple of weeks ago, at a meeting of Birmingham’s blogging community. Thankfully I’m not a coward and I admitted and then apologised for my mistake, having seen that he was really quite a nice chap, very intelligent and really quite friendly. I couldn’t stop apologising through the night but I have to admit, I doubt very much that I’ll learn from it.

A week or so ago I had a discussion with Danny Smith, a “friend of the show” and one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known. We were discussing religion, a subject upon which I can spout a lot of bile. I hate religion, and have no respect for it, but when questioned about this I couldn’t come up with a very good reason for these feelings. I was raised catholic but never forced into it by my parents; I didn’t go to a “fail school” and I’ve never been groped in a vestry. I’ve never done anything in a vestry come to think about it; does that mean I’ve lived a sheltered life?

Anyway, I digress. The point is I don’t know where these feelings of anger come from. I know I used to think of the faithful as weak and if I’m honest there’s some truth in that. I think people rely on religion when it suits them. “Oh God, please help me win the lottery” followed by “Wow, wasn’t that a lucky win?” Surely if you believe in God, luck has no part to play. That’s a crude example I know, but this stuff really gets me hot under the collar. I know that God doesn’t exist in the same way that I know unicorns don’t exist. Yes it’s impossible to prove a negative but no-one’s done a very good job of proving the existence of God short of Photoshopping Jesus into a picture of a bagel to shift a couple of papers in some backwater town in darkest Texas.

And because I know that there is no such thing as God and that the burden of proof lies with them, it makes me want to shake them by the shoulders, slap them around the face and say “wake up!” It’s something I honestly can’t wrap my head around. Maybe it’s because I am by trade a programmer: I think logically and can solve problems methodically. I deal in 1s and 0s and I know that’s a cliché but I really think it informs your thinking, especially when you’ve been doing it for as long as I have. Because I deal with absolutes: I know that 1 + 1 will equal 2 and if it doesn’t I’ll get a message telling me why it doesn’t, so I can fix the equation, but the equation I can’t fix is man + faith = beardy chap in the sky who does magic; the numbers just don’t add up.

I’m someone who has a set of stock phrases, and I’m quite good at spotting the other phrases people draw out of the bag whenever they need a quick response in an argument. My stock phrase on religion used to be “I don’t have a problem with belief in God; it’s religions like Catholicism that I hate”, and I genuinely thought that was true. But after sitting here and thinking through the process I know that’s utter guff. Blind faith makes me angry, and I think it’s because I can’t connect the dots because the entire point of faith is that it is mutually exclusive to logic.

I once had a chat with a programmer and physics buff who believed in God. This to me is as bovine and moronic as you can get. He truly believed in the existence of the beardy chap, complete with fat little cherubs, the dude nailed to a plank and the gent with the pitchfork. He got offended when I ridiculed this – as he would be if he listened to this diatribe – but I have to take issue with his mindset, which is essentially that the big bang happened, evolution goes on and aliens almost certainly exist, but that God made them all. Now is it just me, or is that not just the biggest contradiction imaginable?

If you believe in the Bible – and he did – then you subscribe to the view that God produced light, humans, earth and sky in 7 days by magic. You simply cannot subscribe to both theories, and you can’t pick and choose which bits of the Bible you want to believe and which bits you think “nah, they were probably wrong about that bit, but they’re definitely right about us all being related to each other.” Either dinosaurs existed or the earth is only 6,000 years old. Man up, and make a choice.

In almost all connotations I am the bigger man in life. I’ve a large frame, a big voice and, I’ll be honest a pretty big heart. And I should really be the bigger man in this situation. I know they’re wrong, but what harm are religious people doing me? I still participate in Christmas under the universally accepted “yeah, but Jesus did exist, so there” clause. Get it, clause? So I’m happy to sing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen when it suits me, or when there’s a glass or two of sherry going, so am I just a massive hypocrite? I honestly don’t think so. Buddhists can celebrate any religions as long as they’re based on love, after all.

At the end of the day Catholicism is fundamentally flawed. It’s outdated, hypocriful – pot, kettle anyone? – and not based on love at all, but fear of Hell rather than love of Heaven. Churches shit money and harbour child molesters, and almost everything that Catholics believe in today from Exodus to the ascension was decided by committee.

So “let them have their fun” is surely the attitude I should take. I’m well rounded enough not to believe in magic – unless God can do that cool card on the other side of the window track; that thing’s cool! – but the problem is that I’m just too angry, and I shouldn’t be, because religion has done nothing to me.

Neither did the 15 year old lad who designed a shit website, nor the nice man who wrote a Twitter aggregator.

No-one has done anything to offend me here, yet I assault, accost and assail people with my opinions when, most of the time they’re just not welcome.

So I decided to start a podcast. Now who’s the righteous one?

The problem with anger is that it can often start from frustration and snowball into something more dangerous. Illegitimate political parties like the BNP are using the frustration that a lot of working and middle class Brits are feeling, and turning it to their own ends. If you’ve ever seen Do the Right Thing or the more recent This is England, you’ll probably have an idea of how fairly balanced – and not necessarily stupid – people can have their frustrations fed and watered until they blossom into fear, then to hate ending finally in anger. Do the Right Thing demonstrates this system in violent microcosm ending in bloody, fiery death, whereas This is England is more of a slow burner, showing us how a charismatic leader can manipulate his weaker, disaffected flock. It’s set in the 80s and draws frightening parallels between the Falklands conflict and Bush’s recent crusade against his Axes of Evil.

Yoda was right you know: fear does lead to anger and thence to suffering, and we see that all too clearly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush traded on America’s fear after 911 and used that to fuel support for the plans drawn up by the people who put him in office and to whom he is now answerable.

I mentioned the BNP earlier because I genuinely worry that, the more party political broadcasts we see, the more they will play on people’s frustration with immigration, housing and employment and use the financial fear so many of us are feeling at the moment, combine them and turn them into anger through intelligent, well written but inherently evil testimony. After all, you and I both know what happens when a powerful orator takes up an argument that strikes a chord within us. Or am I just engendering unnecessary fear myself?

Many people will label this undammed torrent of ill-informed opinion as a rant, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that that’s not fair. Why can I not just have an opinion, however strongly held? Why was the Sermon on the Mount not called the Rant on the Dung Heap? “Yeah, we all know, the Greek shall inherit the earth, but what about climbing off your high horse and getting on with the photocopying?”

The Sermon on the Mount was essentially a man putting the world to rights in a loud voice, so what separates a rant from an argument? I think the key here is preparation. The Sermon was, like many sermons today I guess, well considered and well written. It can’t necessarily be well-informed – this is religion after all – but it can be educated and the argument well phrased and garnished with at least some semblance of balance.

So why, when we’re simply positing an opinion do we so often get accused of ranting? Is it simply a word very much in vogue? It is after all a very useful mechanism for communicating your weariness with a particular one-sided conversation, but altogether overused I feel.

The problem with ranting is that, I think it fuels rather than alleviates anger. Because you rant when you’re at your most exasperated, you’re unable to form a cohesive argument and so you reach for words that are quick to hand and sharp in tone. You can’t hit the backspace on a rant like you can with a blog post, or temper your next sentence based on the feedback from your counterpart like you can in an argument. Because you’re using sharp words these have an effect on your body and mind, releasing hormones that only exacerbate your frustration, whereas if you could take the time to write a measured, well-phrased argument you can say all that needs to be said and thus control your body’s reaction. If you don’t, the anger and frustration you feel will almost certainly turn into stress, and that’s much harder to overcome.

I’m starting to think about exercise as a way of alleviating stress. I don’t exercise nearly as much as I should, and I think that has a massive part to play in how I feel. We all know the spiel about how exercise releases dolphins or something that make you feel better afterwards, but I’ve always edited that bit out, thinking about exercise purely as a way of losing weight.

As I’ve already mentioned I’m a fairly heavy chap – somewhere in between Tyrone from Coronation Street and the actor Ian McNeice – so exercise for me has always been a necessary, but largely ignored evil in the battle of the bulge. But what I never thought about was the stress-relieving properties of a good 30-minute workout. So, because I seem so innately against any kind of physical excursion I’m going to get myself a Wii, complete with fitness package on the recommendation of my brother. Although I don’t envy the people who live in the flat beneath me, subjected as they no doubt will be to my heavy footfalls as I jog to catch up to some 2D cartoon character on my TV.

I was watching an episode of Nip/Tuck the other day, which featured a woman so fat and lazy she hadn’t moved from her sofa for three years and whose skin had subsequently fused with the sofa’s fibres. She’d lived in her own shit watching TV for months on end and was finally carried out of her home – which had to have a wall knocked out – by over a dozen pole bearers. She crashed not even halfway through an operation to separate her swollen gangrenous legs from the furniture and died after requesting not to be resuscitated.

Now I’m more than a few fish suppers away from that, but it’s always a helpful image to carry around in your head, however extreme it may be. Anything that galvanises you into action is never a bad thing. But another, possibly more relevant image is that of Michael Douglas in Falling Down, holding up a fast food restaurant because the burger he’d ordered doesn’t resemble the ad, or kicking the living shite out of a group of muggers. He was quite a slim chap, so maybe exercise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?

Well that just about wraps it up for me I think. I hope this has been on some level entertaining if not totally abhorrent. Until next time, thanks a whole massive bunch for listening to me prattle on. I’m off to soak in a bath of lavender and listen to some whale noises.