This is from yesterday’s Dilbert Blog entry:
A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren’t real. And that’s the best case scenario. Atheists would say all three have some explaining to do. And atheists are the minority, which is the very definition of abnormal.
Hm… is computer software “real”? 😉
Religion is like computer software, 1.0 was a good product, but then other developers took over and released buggy versions, 😉
That’s why, as mentioned many times on the blog, it’s often much better to write computer software yourself rather than using some pre-packaged application that someone else has put together. Although it takes more work, the final product is tailored to your needs and you learn so much in the process of creating it. That doesn’t mean you can’t base your application on an existing one or take good ideas from other apps and put them to use in yours. What it does mean, though, is that your app will have so much more meaning to you because of the work you put in, and it will teach you lessons about coding that you can use later down the road.
True. Speaking of which, I wonder what it would take to write a wifi stumbler that uses GPS or at least cell tower triangulation for my phone? WebOS is a little tricky this way though, I’d probably have to make it use a real Linux program under the hood; and thus make it only homebrew, at least until the native SDK “PDK” is officially released (meant for games and used by a few big game houses so far), though there is a good homebrew community for WebOS.
I prefer to base my programs on code prior to 1.0. The 1.0 version sometimes gets overly organized, and you don’t learn nearly as much as with the earlier, less polished version. 😉
Or, if you are a fan of ignosticism (yet another flavor of “religious discussions are mostly BS”), you might decide that not enough information has been presented to determine how many organize their lives about what is real. For all we know they might just be having vocabulary issues along the lines of the blind men and an elephant.
Interesting concept, “ignosticism.” I’d have to say that my world-view agrees with it, as it’s described in its Wikipedia article: I certainly reject the anthropomorphic version of God held by children and popular organized religions, while holding that there’s indubitably more to the universe than the mechanistic view that atheists champion.
I tend to agree with Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, although I don’t agree with everything he held, that the main reason why most atheists don’t believe in G-d is because popular concepts of G-d are idolatrous (idolatry is just anthropomorphism taken to an extreme) and they’re really saying they’re against idolatry.
Sorry, I don’t buy it. As someone who went through an atheist stage, the reason I didn’t believe in God was two-fold.
First, the Christian portrayal of the Deity (as it was repeatedly force-fed to me as a child) was somewhere between the ridiculous childish anthropomorphic one and an even more ridiculous self-contradictory one (“You’re worthless and God is jealous and vengeful, you have to follow his rules perfectly and beg on your knees for forgiveness for the inexcusable sin of being born or HE’LL SEND YOU TO BURN IN HELL FOREVER… but he LOVES you!”).
Second, in my pursuit of truth I started learning about other religions, and discovered that Christianity outright stole most of its ideas from earlier religions, while dismissing them as mere primitive superstition. For instance, the whole three-part “father, son, holy spirit” crap, which never made much sense to me (what the f*** is a “holy spirit”? No one was ever able to explain that to me in any way that made sense), made a lot more sense in its original context as an attribute of a goddess: maiden, mother, and crone. Women go through three markedly obvious life stages; men (and presumably all-masculine gods like the Christian one) don’t.
It took years for me to shake off the Christian image of God and see that underneath the tons of BS there really was a valid idea, and one that could explain a lot of edge-cases. Hard-core atheists like to claim those edge-cases don’t exist, that people make them up or misinterpret things and they get exaggerated from there. And there’s a lot of evidence saying that’s what often happens, but I’ve noted a few that are so well-documented that they just can’t be explained away. “Miraculous” medical recoveries, for instance, that completely baffle science.
Science is an extremely useful tool, and I think it will someday be able to prove the existence of what I think of as God. But science has some pretty severe limitations in what it can and can’t do, and I don’t believe it deserves to be treated as a deity, as many atheists do.
Sorry, I know someone who’s not a patient hates to get a diagnosis ;-), but that first reason fits what Rav Kook said completely well. Anthropomorphism is considered to be a form of heresy (min) in Judaism by Maimonides (though a dissenting commentary where Maimonides says this in his code is offered by the Ra’avad, who himself did not have an anthropomorphic conception but said some righteous people held that view so wouldn’t condemn it). Rav Kook meant that much atheism in the 19th and 20th century (by people like the secular Zionists is what he had in mind in particular) was against this sort of “old vengeful man in the sky” imagery, precisely what you were saying was a reason.
I’m not a follower of Rav Kook, but what you just said isn’t at all contradicting what I mentioned, unless you restrict it to a definition that limits it to believing statues are deities and the like, which I doubt is what he meant when he said that.
By the way, Maimonides and others directly rejected the stereotypical “old man in the sky” concept of G-d, and understood any and all references to anthropomorphism and even attributes in the Tanakh (OT) as anthropomorphical. I suspect Xtianity has a bit of a problem with that, considering they believe in incarnations of an infinite being, so perhaps it’s natural that the popular mind associates G-d as little more than a giant superego / old man in the sky and rejects or accepts it on that basis.
I meant “as alegorical” it’s late. 🙂
Ya think? 😉
Seriously, I don’t have anything against Xtianity, or most other religions (with the exception of child sacrifice and the like 🙂 ) as long as they don’t force it on anyone else. Problem is, historically Xtianity is not a mind-our-own-business kind of religion. Same with Islam really, in fact, at least theologically but not sociologically, I have less of a problem with Islam, but the problem is haters (from such religions) are going to hate. 😉
I’ve stated the same opinion a number of times in the last decade, publicly and privately, to many Christians. Most understand and accept it, but I’ve gotten arguments from some that their religion demands that they convert others. As a way of getting more followers (i.e. reproducing so it will outlive its current ones), it’s inspired. As a way of pissing off everyone who’s not open to conversion, it can’t be beaten… though I’m tempted to try beatings on occasion, just to find out. 😉
I’ve never had to deal with Islamic missionary-types, so all I know of the religion is what I’ve read. From that, I gather that Islam’s main problem is that anyone with nothing better to do can drop a soap-box on a streetcorner and start preaching (as with Christianity), but that people will accept his version even if it diverges radically from the Koran. At least with nominal Christians, if you refute things by pointing to passages in the Bible, they can’t ignore your arguments. Unless, of course, they’ve inserted their own books into the work, as with at least two common sects I’ve heard of.
Sunni Islam has both the Koran and the Hadith, sort of taking the role (l’havdil) of our Torah and the Talmud (written and oral law), except a lot more harsh from a Western perspective, and the Hadith, rather than being a scholarly dialogue, is in the form of biographical vigenettes attributed to the life of Mohammad. Shiite Islam, on the other hand, has the Koran and their leaders, the Ayatolas and before that, hundreds of years ago, the Imam, which is sort-of an Islamic Pope.
They do pay attention to what’s in the Koran I suppose, but the Koran has a lot of ways to be understood I guess, some of which are morally repugnant to most non-Muslims. (i.e. Islam-or-death, etc.)
As you can see, I’m trying to say this nicely. 😉