Off By One

This is a bit of a catch-all posting; I’ve been entertained by a few of the things I’ve seen recently, enraged by others, and figured I would pass on a few tidbits.

Seen on thursday evening in a restaurant: A little boy, probably a bit over one year old, starts to do that high-pitched attention-getter crying bit, and after a token effort at calming him by his father, the mother pulls out a portable DVD player and sets it up on the table so that he can watch a TV show and shut the hell up.

Overheard this morning in a Starbucks: A couple having coffee together, both looking modern, professional, and stereotypically ‘starbucky’… Talking about playing online RPGs, power-leveling, and gold farming.

In the news: A film, Fitna, that is — as do so many things these days — enraging the religious of the eastern world to the point of sputtering threats. Please note, “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

If you want to while away a few hours, and find out more about one of the more unnerving celebrity-sponsored cults out there, I recommend checking out Operation Clambake when you have some time to spare.

What I get out of this is a low-level sense of fear that the reportage we get on the subject of scientology — or the lack thereof, more accurately — is a reflection of a more thorough penetration of the media by this very media-savvy organization.

And then I accuse myself of being paranoid and move on… but never completely without a care.

Scientology is the one and only thing that makes me glad it is impossible to be elected in the US or Canada without professing to some christian belief system.

This post brought to you as a tiny, tiny shot from the Internet’s side of Scientology vs. The Internet.

You know, I feel sorry for the iconoclasts of the world; it’s not easy to convince people that their particular brand of fixed idealism is a bad approach, and the more religious the adherence the harder it is to combat.

This particular line of thought comes about while reading an essay by Freeman Dyson entitled Heretical Thoughts About Science and Society, wherein Mr. Dyson discusses some of his own personal heresies vis-a-vis global warming. Although he makes coherent arguments, he is doomed from the start not by flaws in his arguments, nor by the unimpeachable truth of the ideas he’s criticizing, but instead he’s doomed to forever tilt at windmills on this subject because — like religion and political orientation — belief in climate change, for or against, is based not on reason but on faith.

So, I feel sorry for Freeman Dyson. I feel sorry for Bjorn Lomborg. I feel sorry for Al Gore (although for different reasons — he’s part of the solution here, and part of the problem there) and for Richard Dawkins and James Randi.

I had a peculiarly disappointing day yesterday. Not the whole day, but a part of it really shook my faith in the ability of people to grow in a positive direction.

I took a bit of time to look up one of my old classmates, call him D for the sake of anonymity. D was one of the people that i attended school with from the beginning through to grad, and I remember always having a fair amount of respect for his native intelligence. We were never great friends, but he wasn’t one of my principal tormentors either.

Now, D has a pretty good life — he’s getting married, owns a business — which I was happy to see. However, he also believes that the world is young, it was made some excessively short time ago at the behest of a supernatural entity, carbon dating is a sham, evolution is wrong (note, not “Natural Selection is wrong” — I got told that natural selection works fine, evolution doesn’t) and, well, you get the idea.

I hate to lose respect for someone like that. But all of the residual respect that I once had is gone now, and I’m left with a feeling of profound disappointment.

“Why Religion Doesn’t Matter”, an article at kuro5hin.org is pretty much guaranteed to piss off the religious sorts amongst my readers. That being said, i think it bears a read, even if the idea makes you wanna hit somebody… There’s not much more i could say that hasn’t already been said in there, but i thought i’d toss this one off anyway - k5 has always been one of the best sites on the net for this sort of thing, and i’m always glad to pass more views off their way. For the tech-inclined amongst you, think of it as the “thinking man’s slashdot”, a place where reason, though it doesn’t rule, per se, it does dominate.

Go forth, and pontificate!

Now, on the religion subject… /me ducks. If i see interest in it, i’ll pursue some of the better links on the subject i’ve found. It can be a fascinating subject, no matter which side of the debate you find yourself on.