Who hasn't believed in something crazy at one point?

Are some of us just hypocritical Canberra pots, calling this miscellany of out-of-towners black?

Here I own up promptly to being a typical university-educated, well-off, science-respecting, fully-vaccinated, government-obeying, irritatingly smug Canberran who has done his share of the aforementioned scoffing.

And yet, honest knowledge of my own usually finely-tuned mind's sometimes daft shenanigans make it impossible for me to unkindly judge others who have eccentric notions.

Of course I am not saying all irrational beliefs are of equal importance. For someone to have daft anti-vax beliefs may have health, life and death ramifications for innocent others.

Meanwhile, someone's sincere beliefs that, say, the Earth is flat, that the moon controls menstrual cycles and that a full moon on election day makes people vote Liberal, that there is a mob of unicorns in the National Arboretum (I used to sincerely believe in those unicorns until, after my cataract operations I realised my eyes had been deceiving me) do no harm to others.

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But my point is lots of those quick to scoff at the convoyists for having daft beliefs would find it salutary, humanising and perhaps empathy-stoking to take a good hard look at their own minds.

For example surely it should behove every Christian who is scoffing at the convoyists' beliefs to remember just how much of his or her faith depends (for this is what faith is) on beliefs that are unscientific and quite uncontaminated by reason.

My point is so many of us have ideas that are dear to us but that are lack-of-evidence based. Indeed it occurs to me, out of the deep regard I have for our honourable prime minister, that when he made so many people angry by being so temperate and mild-mannered in his remarks about the convoyists' in Canberra that it had occurred to his open and kindly mind lots of the things the convoyists believe are no more weird and ridiculous than the beliefs (for example that Jesus will return any day now, that Satan is real and that we bump into him everywhere) of his, the prime minister's, dear Pentecostalist bretheren and sisteren.

Although my cupboard of irrational and unscientific beliefs no longer contains any Christian ones (but how I miss them, for atheism is a miserable plight one would not wish on anyone) that cupboard bulges with other varieties of them.

One of them is my eccentric certainty that what we call Shakespeare's plays were in fact written by a woman, Emilia Bassano. There is no more hard, irrefutable, scientific proof of this than there is of any of the core beliefs of the Convoyists and of the Pentecostalists, but the case for her authorship of the plays both persuades and beguiles this columnist.

And my deep attachment to the belief is so unshakably strong that it gives me an insight into how nothing - nothing - can change a convoyist's made-up mind.

When one wants to believe the Earth is flat so-called 'photographs from space' contrived and photoshopped to make our pancake planet look pomegranate-shaped are laughably obvious fakes.

I am saying those possessed by irrational and unscientific beliefs are not the aliens we like to scoff that they are.

Let he who has never had a wild, abandoned, batshit-crazy belief cast the first stone.

In another column I expressed disappointment the snowball fight is not an event at these current Winter Olympic Games, up there with the bobsleigh, the figure skating, the skeleton.

Another disappointment, also echoing my theme the Winter Games are impossibly hard for the snow-loving ordinary citizen to identify with, is there is no snowman-making event.

Snowman-making would lend a creative, aesthetic, artistic dimension to things, with every nation making Olympians of its most gifted sculptors. Is there an Ashleigh Barty of Australian sculpture, waiting to bring us Winter Olympics glory?

The panel of judges would be proven aesthetes used to presiding at the world's great art prizes held by the top art museums. While snow would be the primary material artists would be free (like all of us who ever build a snowman) to augment their creations with creative uses of any found objects, in this case things found in and around the wintry Olympic Village.

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The making of giant snowmen might be encouraged for the wow! factor this would have for a worldwide TV audience of billions (Michelangelo's wow!-stoking David, 497cm or 16.3 feet tall, might be suggested as a size model). Judges would be looking for originality and audacity and surreality. Angry, feminist, satirical snowmen seething at the male sex and its shameful foibles, would be actively encouraged.

I commend this deep and crisp and even brainwave to the International Olympic Committee.

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