It is not often that a blog gets specifically mentioned here, rather than just being added to the blogroll, but today I came across a blog with such a funny “about” section I couldn’t resist.

About this blog

People die for it. People kill for it. They ignore fact to support it. They champion ignorance to defend it. And worst of all they teach their children to do the same. Faith is a disease; a dysfunction of the mind and of society as a whole. Faith is a dangerous irrationality that has cost millions of lives and will cost millions more. In a world in which we hear so much about respecting others beliefs this blog is a stand against that idiocy. Faith deserves no respect. Faith deserves to be cured.

If that is not enough to make you want visit, [Deity of Choice] knows what will do the trick.

Tags: Atheism, Atheist, Blogroll, Links, Religion, Society,Philosophy

For those who are interested, the debate between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan is continuing. You can catch up with Page 4 (the most current) or start from the beginning.

Currently, it seems to be getting a bit long winded and part of the problem with this sort of “online blog-war” style of debate is that each post contains a number of points, but with a few exceptions these are overlooked. The responses on both sides seem to focus on one salient point that the other has made, then build in another 10 – 20 spin off points of their own.

It might have been better if the combatants in this particular war were forced to keep each post to a single point and there was some moderation to focus them. Both are excellent writers and both are more than capable of “spinning” their viewpoint to the extent that onlookers (myself included) can see the logic and “reasonableness” of what they are saying. I really do think this is a debate which will never, ever end.

Before anyone gets started, this is not science. This is a debate about faith on a website called Beliefnet. You still can not do science by debate :-).

[tags]philosophy, society, Religion, Sam Harris, Andrew Sullivan, Blog War, Debate, Faith, Religious Tolerance, Atheism, Religious Moderates[/tags]

Chip and pin cards can be hacked. Well, there’s a surprise, who would have thought that a piece of technology wouldn’t be intruder-proof? And that the prospect of free money would ever tempt a thief?

It’s on BBC tonight but as nothing short of a lobotomy would allow me to watch Watchdog, here’s a link to the Register story on it. Cambridge University researchers got the card details as a payment was made and transmitted them to a card cloner.

According to the Metro (free bus & train paper) the card companies said this was unlikely to ever be a real threat as it would need there to be a dishonest shop employee with an accomplice outside the store.

Clearly, it is an almost physical impossibility for there to be a dishonest shop employee. And for them to know another person – the odds aginst that must be billions to one.

Tags: cards, credit, crime, chip and pin, BBC, fraud, technology, society.

For months now, this blog has had “issues” with Technorati, and sadly it is like banging your head against a wall. Fundamentally, nothing that this blog complains about is going to make Technorati change they way they do things (and we are aware of that), but we do feel that by highlighting it there may eventually come the time that enough people have the same problem – which may then get them to change.

The problem is a recurring one. Technorati is erratic in how it indexes blogs following a ping. For example when you look at the most recent posts from this blog, the last two posts (Intemperance and AJAXification) are conspicuous in their absence. According to Technorati, the most recent post is the Charlie Brooker one, made 23 hours ago now (and an hour before the last two).

Broadly speaking this is not a massive problem. The posts are there. Any one who visits the site will see them and other indexing services have picked them up. The problem is Technorati. Technorati is probably the most popular blog search and using tags to find blogs is truly an excellent idea. Rarely do we at Why Dont You search for content, we search for tags. Finding posts tagged with the words you are looking for is often a much better way of getting information.

Given Technorati’s problems though, there is no way to know what is being missed. As an example, if the one true AJAX tutorial is out there, it could be tagged AJAX on an indexed blog, but Technorati may have decided to capriciously ignore it.

At the moment, I don’t think there is a solution. As previously mentioned Google seems to have a better index and is a much faster (and more reliable search) but it doesn’t use tags – which are (IMHO) quite critical regarding blogs. I suppose I still wish I had the skil, and server capacity, to make my own blog search / indexer.

Tags: Search Engines, Technology, Technorati, Software, Code, Blogs, Blog Index, Tagging, Weblogs

Apologies because this blog has been a bit intemperate recently (not in the drinking and sleazing sense, I’m afraid, just in terms of presenting too vitriolic a stance.) Spending too much time on the Internet can do that to you. You can end up in a sort of ranting bizarro-world version of the religious fanatic’s brain space. It’s easy enough to let enthusiasm tip into fanaticism. That’s part of the problem surely.

We aren’t really obsessive ranters at WhyDontYou blog. Well, maybe you have to replace really with only.

All the same, there seems like something of an encroaching tide of unreason that we have to deal with somehow. There is another Guardian article by Mark Ravenhill (You can see I got my money’s worth out of the paper today, for a change.) The title is Can we really let students skip drama classes on religious grounds? It’s time liberals fought back The drama classes focus is a bit specialist for me, but Mark makes some very strong points about liberal rational values and how they need defending.

I was seeing the consequences of the culture wars that have played themselves out across American society for the past 20 years. The social conservatives, closely aligned to the churches, have fought – and in some places defeated – a perceived liberal bias in the media, arts and the entertainment industry. And liberals, who had come to see their own values as simply common sense and the inevitable result of human progress, have realised that those values have to be fought for.

He concludes with a rallying cry for universities, as liberal institutions, to defend their liberal values, rather than allow students to opt out of activities they claim to contravene their religious beliefs.

Culture wars, so long avoided in the UK, are brewing. Liberals are going to have to fight hard. There should be no opt-outs when it comes to culture. We believe in our values.

I am not sure that I can go along with this argument completely, given that it seems to focus on drama students being unwilling to act in plays that contravene their moral codes, which must be an issue that affects less than one in a few million people. However, I think the point that those of us who assume that our values are intrinsically rational need to examine those values closely. Looking at the truth of things is a strength that can stop us becoming fanatics without us losing the will to defnd our values.

Self critical thought; teasing out the historical development of our values and examining how they our beliefs might just serve particular interests in society. These are strengths integral to rational thought. Our moral codes rest on more than just being told that a superior being decided certain actions are right or wrong. That shouldn’t make us feeble. It surely makes us stronger. If we believe that this world is the only one that exists and that our time is finite, we should actually care about what happens in our lives and societies and act to defend rationality wherever we can.

Religious Intolerance, Liberal values, fanaticism, rationalism, philosophy, society, social,

Nearly a year ago, there was a bit of debate on this blog about the difficulties finding good on-line tutorials about AJAX. Things have certainly not changed. Still today a search on a famous search engine produces little of value. It seem that a lot of the AJAX furore was just a version of web-based-Vapourware. Who would have thought it.

Even today, the idea that putting AJAX onto a site is a “GOODTHING®” holds sway on lots of web designer magazines and websites. Part of me thinks this is total nonsense, and I have yet to see a compelling example of how AJAX can really benefit websites. I mean, does it actually add value, or is it like rounded corners – just something which looks cool? All the demos I can find fall into two broad categories. One type have some implementation of Google maps with cool little pointers telling you things like the most likely place to get mugged. Nice but of certainly limited value. The other type (this blog included) make use of AJAX to do “cool” things like show images in floating boxes (try it here!), again light boxes are undeniably cool but it could be questioned how much value they really add.

Despite this, I am still trying to learn it. There is the off chance that I can come across something which will change my mind and make me think it is all worthwhile. Even though I am far from a JavaScript newbie (I even have the certificate to prove it!), finding tutorials is not an easy thing. Multiple web searches find either examples which are so trivial it is embarrassing that someone has posted them, or examples which seem to show the creator does not really have a good idea what AJAX can be used for but wants to make a tutorial about it! (These tend to involve meaningless sorting of lists and the like).

Does anyone know of a good AJAX tutorial?

Charlie Brooker is unfeasibly funny. This is just great on the Mac adverts on tv at the moment. He says it all. You can read the column online.

Technorati tags: Charlie Brooker, PC, Mac, ads, television, funny.

Is there ever good journalism?

Today’s Daily Mail, always an example of the moral outrages of the UK…, has a front page expose about how 8000 police officers in the UK are on limited duties but being paid full rates.

Basically, when a police officer goes on a long period of sickness and then returns to work they are intially kept doing limited duties (phones, manning CAD, co-ordinating patrols, helping with background work and paper work etc) until they get back into the swing of things. This is the only course of action available to a responsible employer.

Now the Mail is complaining that this is costing the taxpayer £243 million a year and is not helping to keep crime off the streets. Seriously. This is what it says:

But, despite playing only a limited role in protecting the public, they receive their full salary – an average of £30,000 a year.

What madness is this. I am even more gobsmacked by the comments made on the newspaper article (mostly “pay them sick pay like everyone else”), which goes a long way to highlight how the UK seems to have divorced itself from reality.

The paper rounds this off with some good old fear mongering and false authority fallcies:

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance pressure group, said: “Some officers will obviously have to be on restrictive pay but when the numbers get out of hand, taxpayers are getting poor value for money and public security is put at risk. This problem needs to be sorted immediately.”

What on Earth does he know about running a police force?

These are police officers. Fortunes have been spent training them. They are often injured doing their job protecting the public and have to recuperate. While they are recuperating they are not going to be as effective on the streets. But equally importantly, since when has doing the work back in the police station been a “limited role.”

It really is insane, but then again it seems the Daily Mail has suffered some kind of mental disorder over the past few years anyway.

Shame on them.

Tags: Police Officers, Police Forces, Daily Mail, Society, Nonsense, Sick Leave, Home Office, Home Affairs

Well, in the last post about .net magazine we made the promise that normal service would be resumed – it now seems that was too hasty and the magazine has escaped the brunt of criticism this month (partially down to the crazy people who worship their invisible friends I suspect but never the less it has escaped).

Now, before accusations of “going soft” get bandied about, I have to highlight that the reason .net gets off “lightly” is the magazine is very bland this month. It is hard to criticise what they say, when they don’t really say anything. The main sections are how to make money from your site (which basically says sell thing well… duh!) and the pro tips which pretty much say “AJAX and Flash are the Future.” Not exactly stuff to get fired up over – even if they do repeat the tired old mantras about how this year is the year flash becomes dominant (now, I wonder if that has ever been said before…)

The showcase sites, while looking good in a graphic art magazine, generally show unusable (often incomprehensible) sites whose designs are totally at odds with what is advised in the tutorials etc. No change there then. The focus on “badges” is comical – a whole page about how putting a little “sticker” on your web page is the coolest, best thing in the world. If you don’t know what they mean by “badges,” an example is on the Zookoda.com website – where it says “Yeh. It is free.” Seriously. This gets a whole page with comments about how this particular badge “cuts through the visual clutter and delivers a crucial message.” Amazing, isn’t it?

This theme continues into the bland tutorials which range from extending phpBB to using CSS to get rid of tables (what year is it?). The only bit worthy of a rant is the evidence that there is still abysmal editorial oversight and quality control on their articles.

In the expert advice section, Paul Boag is responding to a writer who wants a print stylesheet to have a page break before or after the div tags so the text remains together. The advice given is:

… two CSS properties will help: “page-break-before” and “page-break-after.” Attach these to your div tags from within your stylesheet and you can control whether a page break is inserted before or after the div. So, for example DIV { page-break-before: always} would add a page break immediately after each div.

I think I can work out what he is trying to say here (the writer had multiple divs, one after each other) but in reality, what he is saying is the opposite of what will happen. CSS is often viewed as a dark art at the best of times. Nonsense doesn’t help.

Tags: .net Magazine, Web Design, Technology, CSS, Stylesheets

And I mean breathtaking.

That wonderful source of philosophical magic that is MySpace has continued to come up trumps. This time it has a post by “jennandahalf” which defies any rational understanding. She is obviously distressed about the Blasphemy Challenge and writes: (emphasis mine)

Okay, I’m not here to preach to anyone, but I hope that this means something to you.

About a month ago, a video was posted on YouTube by an Atheist group encouraging people to use blasphemy against Christianity and the fact that there is a God, Son and Holy Spirit by posting a video. The reward? Having an unforgivable sin on your slate and getting a free movie called ‘The God Who Wasn’t There.’ Woo…

Upon watching this in church this morning, I started to cry. It’s so sad that so many people don’t have faith in anything at all. It’s absolutely astounding! There are young kids, former Biblical counselors, and older nonbelievers. There was even a girl I recognized from Christian Club. What compels people to give up faith? Many of the people state that Christianity is close-minded and not ‘fun.’ Nothing could be farther from the truth! Christians should be accepting, loving, and get the most out of life! But that’s a different story…

Also featured on YouTube is an interview with one of the originators of The Blasphemy Challenge, as it’s commonly called. Fox news did something right for a change and asked why the Atheist community that sponsors the challenge is sucking kids into a world of no hope and disbelief.

I encourage everyone to reflect on this. Visit YouTube and watch the videos.

There is talk that Christians are planning a rebuttal by posting videos declaring the name of Jesus Christ.

Amazing. I hope this is a satirical post.

First off, she is pretty deluded if she thinks all atheists dont have “any faith in anything at all.” This is a oft argued topic so I will leave it for now and concentrate on the second, best bit.

Yes, Christians should be accepting so why can’t she accept that not all people are Christians? If they made videos saying they had converted to Islam would she be as upset? Some times I am truly amazed by the nonsense Americans can put out when they think their faith is challenged – and surely if they have faith, they have nothing to worry about.

The last point was addressed in a previous post here.

Tags: Idiot, Religion, Fox News, Philosophy, Blasphemy, Blasphemy Challenge, Society, Christian, Christianity, Islam,Atheist

imaginaryfriends,
originally uploaded by DiscoWeasel.

Well, some people may well be. Personally, given the comments about Atheism I have been reading today, I am not sure I care.

Is it acceptable for “theists” to complain about Godless Atheists but unacceptable for a godless atheist to mock the theist?

Personally I think not.

Take this picture any way you want 🙂

Or is that just insane? There is an excellent post on Effect Measure today which chronicles some of the nutcases who can get on TV as long as they are praising their Lord.

All the good, pertinent points have already been made over there, and it is late here so I wont write too much.The post begins with a bit of background when a family complained about too much prayer in their children’s school (what ever happened to separation of Church and State in the US?):

This week [Austin Cline] discusses a Paula Zahn show on CNN that begins with a brief vignette about couple in a small town in Mississippi who complained to their son’s public elementary school principal about time spent in bible study and prayer. Yes, his public elementary school. For their trouble they became outcasts. No one would speak to them or let their children play with their children. When it was later revealed they were atheists, the father’s boss got calls complaining he had brought an atheist to town. People drove parked in front of their house and stared at them as if they were animals in a zoo. They left town.

This on its own is shocking enough, but the rest of the transcript takes it to a new level. I can’t do it enough justice here, pop over to Effect Measure and see it for yourself. The panelists are barely coherent in their urge to insult and denigrate Atheists. So much for Christian compassion – they would rather you worshipped Zeus than no God at all. The comment “I’m Jewish, but I recognize we’re a Christian country and freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion” really made me laugh. What idiocy.

Makes you wonder, when the Land of the Free shows the same religious tolerance as a fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship…..

Just to let you know we have added the Atheist Blogroll to the site now – this is a frequently updated link to loads of great blogs. Well worth checking out and if you have a blog of your own – Join Now! It doesn’t have to be an Atheist Blog as such, but you can find more details out from Mojoey’s site. What are you waiting for?

Following the previous post and a helpful comment from Nullfidian, I found the school website, which is depressing enough. It seems it is a “foundation school.” This got me wondering what a “foundation school” was anyway. Teacher net has some sort of explanation of the types of schools. D’oh. Did I say explanation? I meant list. Because the definitions make minimal sense and just got me ranting.

Apparently a foundation school is what used to be a “grant-maintained” school (which used to mean half-private, but subsidised by the state in exchange for taking a few non-paying kids. Now it appears that they run themselves but the DES pays x amount for them. hmmm.) I’ll say no more about this on-the-face-of-it silly school. It doesn’t seem to offer much except to people who don’t want their daughters to mix with boys so it’s pitching itself at the Islamic parent population,

Some of the other categories seem baffling. I suddenly remember I’m paying my taxes for these:-

Couple of categories of religious indoctrination units schools. Oh good. I love the idea that I am paying for kids to be isolated from people who haven’t been brought up to believe the same stuff as them. (Note for the slow-witted, that was Sarcasm)

Other wierd categories of “specialist” schools. These seem totally daft in concept to me. How fair is it to base a secondary education on whether kids are good at music or sport? Or, Rhiannon forbid, “business and enterprise”? Arghh. Maybe someone can explain to me why these exist but, to be honest, I am not interested so don’t bother. I prefer to deny their existence,

But the category that totally freaks me out is the three categories of child jails. From Secure units to the three truly menacing sounding 365 -days -a-year Secure training units. Quote:

Secure Training Unit (STCs)
There are currently three STCs in operation, they were set up under the Private Finance Initiative and are operated by private providers under contracts managed by the Home Office

They take kids from 10 to 17 (ten???) Are there really enough ten year-olds so dangerously disturbed that they have to be sent to child jails? Three of them, even with all the other units that exist. Thor forbid I or any of my blood ever come across one. All the same, surely kids that damaged and dangerous need some really heavy-duty assistance. Like somebody looking at what their parents or “carers” have done to them? Or why the rest of us aren’t concerned to prevent it?

Private Finance Initiative? Group 4? Securicor?

Doesn’t this seem too Dickensian for words to anyone else? Now on this one, I really would welcome some explanation. If anyone who works in one or has been in one reads this, can you explain what happens in them and what purpose they achieve.? I would be extremely grateful.

Tags: Schools, Education, Private+finance+initiative, Crazy Schools, education, Secure training units, STCs, child jails, Faith Schools, Specialist Schools

Another entertaining link courtesy of the Nullifidian Blog. This time it is Professor Alister McGrath who comes under the spotlight. Claiming his two doctorates (molecular biology and theology) as a ground point, Prof. McGrath is about to publish a book called the Dawkins Delusion – a not even subtle attack on Richard Dawkins.

That title alone is enough to show that the religious-right struggle to grasp the concept of humour, not to mention the issue with the fact that Dawkins is not God. Dawkis is not the Prophet, or Pope of Atheism. Will the religious crusaders ever grasp what the concept of Atheism means? It is not worship of some hitherto unknown deity. The God Delusion presented arguments about why worship of God was a mistake, and God probably does not exist. If the Dawkins Delusion is going to try the same tactic it will be funny. No one worships Dawkins and he certainly does exist!

The Nullifidian blog nicely deconstructs most of the nonsense and woo surrounding the book (and Prof McGrath) but one bit I could not ignore:

[Prof McGrath] continues: “When I was an atheist, I sounded like Richard Dawkins. I focused only on the things that fitted my theory. One of the things that made me stop being an atheist was realising things are rather more complicated.”

Now that was funny. Belief in the invisible friend is more complicated than working out how life forms evolve and adapt to their environment. Amazing, isn’t it. Yeah, “God Did It” is such a complicated concept to try and hold in your head. I love the way Prof. McGrath refers to him self as an ex-Atheist. That really tickles.

There is another side swipe a Dawkins, saying he “refuses” to debate with the anti-Dawkins Prof McGrath. Remember, Science is not Guided By Consensus. Debates are meaningless.