My colleague Dale Ferrario (with whom I travelled to Hyderabad and Bangalore) is now blogging. Hey, Dale: if you need a picture for your template, I have plenty from the SeeBeyond party…. 🙂
Author: geoff
Good idea, but the analogy is too concrete
Alec blogged a link to Brent Rasmussen’s DarkSyde’s What It Feels Like to be an Atheist with the comment “One for Geoff”. (Thanks, Alec.) Here’s Brent’s DarkSyde’s intro:
“I’m amazed everyday of my life that everyone isn’t an atheist like me. But they’re not, I have no idea why that is, but it is reality. And based on many questions over the years it sounds possibly hard for someone who is not one to understand it. So follow me for a bit if you can. And I’ll try to describe the world as seen through atheist eyes.”
As rants go, it’s a real tour de force, and it’s definitely worth reading. However in the final analysis it didn’t really work for me. Rather than tackling theism head-on, Brent DarkSyde offers an analogy:
“Say they believe in Santa Claus; beard, the big red suit, the flying reindeer, the sled loaded with a billion gifts, the North Pole Workshop, Mrs. Claus and the elves; all of it. But in this fantasy world, they’re not content merely to believe in Santa Claus, they want you to publicly agree all the time that you also believe in Santa, in their specific version of same, and they pressure everyone else in numerous ways to pretend that they’re not strange or childish for believing in this.”
While many of his subsequent points are effective, the Santa Claus parallel falls down in two important respects. First, it is too damn specific, too concrete. Different people use the term god to mean totally different – and grotesquely incompatible – things, from concrete physical phenomena to vague psychological or emotional tendencies. On the other hand, Santa Claus is pretty much defined by a handful of 19th century stories and carols and an avalanche of Disneyesque Hallmark products.
Secondly, Santa Claus doesn’t have all of the baggage that the various god-ideas are encumbered with. The importance of this is not that passages like this are a stretch:
“Just two or three-hundred years ago it was totally SOP to take folks, men, women, children, who didn’t believe in a specific version of Santa and stick red-hot steel objects into their rectums and vaginas, boil their limbs, beat them senseless with padded clubs, tear them apart with teams of horses, cut open their stomachs and rip out their intestines while they’re still alive in front of their loved ones, or slowly burn them alive in public; all in the name of Santa’s good will and often on the mere anonymous allegation from some two-bit ten-year old kid or a crazy deranged nutcase suffering from schizophrenia that you once said you don’t believe Santa can really fly.”
No, the problem is that the Santa Claus analogy misses one of the key aspects of being an atheist: the sheer head-spinning contradictions and hypocrisy that we encounter all the time in believers. For example, I simply don’t understand why liberal Anglicans don’t rip out the pages of their Bibles that glorify ethnic cleansing, rape, pillage, and stoning to death for just about everything, or why Bible-belt footballers violate the Sabbath rules set forth in what they view as the word of their god. I guess tradition and tribal identity are more important than intellectual honesty these days.
Brent DarkSyde followed up this piece with one on why he’s an atheist. This was less interesting. Since he claimed he’d been an atheist since he was a small child, he should perhaps have called this one “ideas that sustain my identity as an atheist”. No big deal.
UPDATED 20-Nov-05: As Brent pointed out, the original piece (and follow-up) were written by DarkSyde.
"What kind of humanist are you?"
A nice little quiz from the New Humanist. Rather specifically English, which has led to some confusion.
Handholder
You go out of your way to build bridges with people of different views and beliefs and have quite a few religious friends. You believe in the essential goodness of people , which means you’re always looking for common ground even if that entails compromises. You would defend Salman Rushdie’s right to criticise Islam but you’re sorry he attacked it so viciously, just as you feel uncomfortable with some of the more outspoken and unkind views of religion in the pages of this magazine.
You prefer the inclusive approach of writers like Zadie Smith or the radical Christian values of Edward Said. Don’t fall into the same trap as super–naïve Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge who declared it was okay for clerics like Yusuf al–Qaradawi to justify their monstrous prejudices as a legitimate interpretation of the Koran: a perfect example of how the will to understand can mean the sacrifice of fundamental principles. Sometimes, you just have to hold out for what you know is right even if it hurts someone’s feelings.
What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.
(Via Majikthise, who got the Hairshirt card.)
Texhnolyze
On a previous visit to Colorado, I mentioned that one way I spent my evenings was to watch anime on DVD. One of the first series that I collected, serial experiments: Lain, is regarded by many as one of the finest works of its kind: exquisitely animated, with a compelling (and deeply disturbing) story. Some of the same team then produced Haibane Renmei, which situated the same kind of transcendent visuals and intense narrative in a magical world reminiscent of Miyazaki’s work.
On this trip, I’m finally venturing into the world of Texhnolyze.
I actually bought the first two DVDs of this series more than a month ago, but I hesitated. Unlike the earlier works by this group, Texhnolyze is billed as being explicitly violent: set in “an experimental metropolis buried deep inside the Earth, ruled by gangs, where mayhem and retribution are a normal part of life.” Whew! And those that know me will confirm that I don’t tolerate violence. Indeed, I’ve walked out of films because the gratuitous violence made me feel sick.
This evening I watched the first 25 minute episode of Texhnolyze. Yes, there were three violent incidents, but the impression that I’m left with is of a chaotic kind of peace, not mayhem. It’s very reminiscent of Lain: you’re absolutely on your own, given no help in making sense of the world that you’re presented with, as lost and confused as the characters that emerge from the shadows. I’ve tried to ignore the back-story that was hinted at on the DVD case, and to simply let the film-makers tell their story. I think I’m hooked: theirs is a world worth exploring. More anon.
"The computers are down…."
I’m visiting Louisville and Broomfield in Colorado this week as part of the ongoing Sun+StorageTek integration work, and so I took the first flight from Boston to Denver this morning. I had a couple of surprises. First, I was upgraded to first class for some reason (something to do with rectifying another travel agency screwup). Then when I checked in my boarding card was marked “SSSSS“, which meant that I was pulled aside for the full search: bags, wanding, pat-down, even what the agent called “the TSA back-rub”. The wand was turned up so high that the zipper on my trousers set it off!
The flight was uneventful: I slept most of the way. However when I reached Denver, the Avis reservation computers were down, so they were processing every car rental booking by hand. Eventually I got to the front of the (long) line, was asked “Is a red Ford minivan OK?”, said yes, and was given a contract and a bay number. I walked out to that bay, and found a blue Chevy SUV. Different colour, different make, and – most important – different registration. I flagged down a passing Avis staff member, we hunted around a bit for the Ford, and then she gestured to the SUV and said, “Are you OK with this?” I shrugged, “Sure – it’s got four wheels and a tank of gas”, so she amended my contract with the relevant info. So now, for perhaps the first time, I’m driving an oversized SUV. It has the aerodynamics (and wind noise) of a brick, and the driving position is uncomfortably upright, but it works.
Mind you, having AWD may be useful. They’re forecasting 1-3 inches of snow this evening, with 25-40 mph winds….
You know you're travelling more than is healthy…..
Oh dear. I actually caught myself gazing at this with interest: “For $1500, you can buy this pair of used first-class plane-seats to use as a sofa in your living room.”
The lunatics are running the asylum….
From The Inquirer: US grants patent for anti-gravity device:
“ACCUSATIONS that the US Patent office is giving out dotty patents were given some credence this week after the magazine Nature discovered that the watchdog had just granted one to a bloke who claimed to have invented an anti-gravity machine.
Boris Volfson, of Huntington, is the proud holder of patent 6,960,975, which is for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity.”
No word on whether it has to be constructed from transparent aluminum.
Essential reading on the Sony/BMG Rootkit fiasco
Here’s a detailed account of the incompetence of Sony/BMG and First 4 Internet, the cowboys who wrote the brain-dead rootkit masquerading as DRM (digital rights management). From Mark’s Sysinternals Blog, the bottom line: “Instead of admitting fault for installing a rootkit and installing it without proper disclosure, both Sony and First 4 Internet claim innocence. By not coming clean they are making clear to any potential customers that they are not only technically incompetent, but also dishonest.”
And yes, they try the same trick on Macs too. Scumbags!
Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Tony
So Parliament has handed Tony Blair the black eye that he deserves. From the BBC: “Tony Blair has suffered his first defeat after MPs rejected his plan to allow police to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days. MPs rejected the plans by a bigger than expected margin of 322 votes to 291, before later backing a 28 day limit. The defeat came despite Mr Blair saying MPs had a ‘duty’ to support the police. Tory leader Michael Howard said Mr Blair should resign after failing to ‘carry his party’ but Downing Street says it was not a confidence issue.”
As Enoch Powell famously observed, “All political careers end in failure.” Blair should recognize that this now applies to him. The old Blair would never have allowed himself to get into this situation; one has to wonder whether he actually wanted to be defeated.
Juxtaposition
On the one hand, a row of unsold gas-guzzling behemoths, from One Giant Metaphor, reporting on a “Hummer dealer… in a panic…. year-to-year sales down about 50%,”
On the other hand, a photograph that I took in Hyderabad a couple of weeks ago, of a family of five on a motor scooter:
[N.b. I’ve grabbed a copy of the Hummer pic because linking to the original was unreliable. Hope that’s OK.]