Capricious Pedantry

I know I should have learned my lesson long ago and I promise to stop responding to Parabiodox’s baiting after this post… (At least I will try).

Previously, I made a post about Christian humour in which I commented that the expected answer to a ranting comment would be “Atheists (agnostics etc)” rather than the Abrahamic religions I previously claimed. Now, I never meant this to imply Atheists were the same as agnostics, and if anyone did take away that impression from my (lengthy) post than I apologise wholeheartedly.

I am fully aware Atheism is not Agnosticism, and personally I do not find “agnosticism” a reasonable viewpoint which can be counted as an opinion. Agnosticism is (remember this is my personal viewpoint!) a good point of view for something about which you have no opinion. I am agnostic as to the existence of life on a planet orbiting Beta Canis Major for example. I am not agnostic about the existence of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Leprechauns, Pixies, Elves, Orcs, Gobilins, Demons, pink Unicorns or all manner of imaginary nonsense. What on Earth gives a particular religion special privileges about it’s claims to the existence of one (or more) deities? I will return to this.

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Posted in Philosophy, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dr Who – Alien meets 24

Another pretty good Dr Who episode tonight.

Visually, Dr Who is getting better and better. There was better rendering (a good space ship and a bubbling sun) and more interesting lighting (red and blue on the face close-ups) than we’d expect from normally cash-short British tv.

Altogether, it had the look and feel of “proper” sci-fi. Racing headlong into the sun is par for the course. (Solaris, and the film where Bruce Willis has to destroy an asteroid.) So is being trapped on a space ship with an unknown evil entity. (Alien, 2001.) As well as being stalked by a mechanical humanoid figure. (Predator, Terminator, Judge Dredd.) The computer female voice that keeps giving out unemotional messages of the pressure of time (can’t think of a reference sorry, but it seems standard…)

The main visual influence seemed to be the Alien movies (with a nod to Das Boot, but maybe that’s just me.) Both male and female technicians looked like the crew of Alien (vests, combat suits, artfully arranged sweat) . The ship also had the same sort of look and there was an intense claustrophobic feel to the plot, as well as to the sets.

This episode was called “42”, with a nod to Douglas Adams (the “answer to the universe”) and to “24” (the episode was supposed to be in real-time and there was a 42 minute timer countdown providing constant pressure).

So, a bit of an art-house-for-nerds episode. This series is shaping up to be the best one ever. Although this is from someone who loves sci-fi clichés. And who thinks that the very first Dr Who series – with that weird Quatermassy feel and the old man with long white hair – and the mainly-played for laughs Tom Baker Dr Who were the only really good bits, out of what was often dire.

[tags]42, dr-who, episode, rave, sci-fi, sci-fi-cliches, television, tv, BBC, Douglas Adams[/tags]


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Posted in Raves, Television | Tagged , , , , , ,

Dishonour killing

There’s an interesting site, though it’s such a depressing topic, called Gendercide that has some intelligent discussion of so-called honour killings, as well as a fair amount of other information about killings where the gender of the murdered person is a main factor.

Sometimes, men are also killed for being men, as in Iraq under Saddam, where Kurdish men were seen as potential future fighters and killed.

In fact, whether you are male or female, Iraq must have been close to the worst place to live on the face of the earth for a couple of decades now. (This appears to go double if you are Kurdish.)


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Posted in Rants, Society | Tagged , ,

Two Quick Follow Ups

First off, Parabiodox has responded to my “Do Christians Have a Sense of Humour” post and it seems the answer is “yes, just a bad one 🙂 .” When I asked “Do Christians have a sense of humour? … or was he just all cut up over the death of Jerry Fallwell…“” the response was:

No. It means I can go back to watching Teletubbies again with a clear conscience.

Can’t say fairer than that, can I?

On a more serious note, following up on the sad story of the crazy “honour” killing, there is a post on anthropology.net which examines some of the issues from an anthropological view point (Heather, Take note). For the stronger viewer, the video footage is available from that site, although I have not watched it my self and can not comment. As an aside, if you had asked me a few years ago I would have been stunned to even think of considering Anthropology (or any social science) as a science, but I am learning to change my ways.

[tags]Yazidi, Murder, Death, Kill, Religious Intolerance, Christianity, Humour, Evil, Barbaric, Parabiodox, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Insane, Cruel, Anthropology[/tags]


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Posted in Philosophy, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Perils of Faith

Well it seems Toutatis does indeed work in mysterious ways. After reading, and responding to a post which chastised this blog and Atheists in general, for concentrating on attacking Christianity, I stumbled upon an article in the Daily Mail which managed to shock even my jaded mindset.

On the off chance some of you are faint hearted, I should warn you the original article has a some pictures which could be construed as quite shocking although given the subject matter they could be worse. If you visit the Mail article please be aware of this and don’t come crying to me afterwards.

The Daily Mail carries an item about a 17 year old girl who was beaten to death (in Northern Iraq) by her family, while “hundreds” [according to the Mail] of onlookers cheered and shouted support of the murderers. In typical Daily Mail writing style the article begins:

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Posted in Philosophy, Rants, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Do Christians have a sense of humour?

It is never easy writing blog posts on a Friday, too much to do in the run up to the weekend, so please forgive the “easy” targets today. Yesterday I took a cheap shot at a post on the unique Parabiodox blog. I knew it was a bait post but I was bored and couldn’t pass up the chance to poke fun at what came across as a very self-important Theist post.

Parabiodox has responded to my comment and seems to damn me with faint praise (more of that later), but oddly seems to continue the “self important” tone I thought the original post had. Do Christians have a sense of humour or was he just all cut up over the death of Jerry Fallwell…(*) Anyway, trying to claw my way back to seriousness, in a nutshell, Parabiodox (paraphrasing the luminary Ayn Rand…) asked a question about which faith/belief system spends it’s time attacking others to hide the fact it has nothing to offer. It was fairly obvious this was a poor attempt to attack Atheism (agnosticism etc) and that is the answer the Theist wants to get.

The reality is far from the truth (for example, Atheism is not a faith nor is it a belief system) so, I pointed out that if you are not a follower of the Abrahamic myths, then they seem to spend a lot of time attacking others in an effort to mask the fact they offer nothing of value. The irony of the very question did not go unnoticed here… How does Parabiodox respond?

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Posted in Philosophy, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

2.2 Upgrade Completed

As mentioned previously, we were intending to upgrade this site to WordPress 2.2. This upgrade has now been completed and everything seems to be running fine. If you encounter any problems or inconsistencies, please let us know.


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Planet Atheism

Over on the Planet Atheism Blog, Dehumanizer has written a post letting people know the “State of Planet Atheism” and it certainly makes interesting reading. If you haven’t already visited the Planet Atheism site, you really should check it out. Basically it aggregates feeds from atheist-related blogs and combines them into a single, easy to read, source.

According to this post, PA is only 4 months old and it is already getting over 200 hits a day, with another 100 feed hits. This is very good going and shows it is not just a niche blog. If you are already a reader, why not spread the word? Add a few links to PA on your own blog.

If you have your own blog, and you think it would be good to have your posts collected on PA, have a look at the Way of the Mind pages for details on how to join. It really is easy. If you have an atheist blog you really should get on Planet Atheism and the Atheist Blogroll. You wont regret doing either 🙂 . Apart from anything else, these two sites (services?) go a long way towards creating an international “Atheist Community” which certainly is a good thing.

Speaking on behalf of this blog, I would like to say a big thanks to PA, it certainly drives a lot of traffic this way (at the moment around 50 hits a day come from PA which is good going) and it provides an excellent resource. It is free so anything people can do to help keep it this way would be great.

[tags]Planet Atheism, Blog, Software, Aggregator, blog-aggregator, atheism, atheist, atheist-blogroll, society[/tags]


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Posted in Society | Tagged , , , , , , ,

Plugin Admin

In a previous post, I wrote:

Secondly – I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Following that post (and it was only a few hours ago), I removed the plugin but it did not help speed things up with the site. Add to this a couple of comments made which drew my attention to the problem still being there and I have had a ruthless clean out of plugins.

It does seem like the “Sphere It” plugin was innocent but I have no removed so many other plug ins I am far from happy about saying it was any of them causing the problem. I removed ones like the popularity contest, the duplicate social bookmarking plugins and some obscure ones which rarely seem to have been used. In my testing here, the site is now loading in about 20 seconds so it seems to have cured the problem. I would appreciate it if people could let me know what they are getting (estimates and approximations are fine, it is what I used 🙂 ).

[tags]Admin, blog, Blog Software, Feedburner, Feeds, plugins, RSS, Site Admin, Sphere, Sphere It, Technology, Upgrade, Web Design, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress[/tags]


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Posted in General | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I need a holiday

Disney Castle at Night

Disney Castle at Night,
originally uploaded by WarAxe.

I look at pictures like this (found on flickr) and it just reminds me how much I need to get away on holiday. The picture is gorgeous and pretty much captures all the Magic Kingdom castle in all it’s glory. If you have never been it is well worth a visit. Seriously. If you have kids, all the better — at least then you get less strange looks…

It has been over two years since I had an overseas holiday, and all I have had in that time is five day breaks to various parts of the UK! At least the breaks have let me take loads of photos of various castles and the like, but I am sure you can agree, it really is not the same.

I am toying with going to Florida for my holidays around the end of September / start of October. Does any one have any local knowledge which could be useful?

Would it be better for me to arrange things like car hire in the UK before I go (and go flights only) or are Fly-Drives discounted enough to make that worth while?

[tags]Disney, Holiday, Vacation, Castles, Florida, Photos, Photographs, Flickr, Disneyworld, Walt Disney, Magic Kingdom, Fly-Drive[/tags]


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Posted in Castles, Photos | Tagged , , , ,

Cant Resist

I know I shouldn’t, but I cant resist a post on the Parabiodox blog. A recent post there reads: (Emphasis mine)

Happened to come across this quote from Ayn Rand and couldn’t resist repeating it.

From Neo-Objectivism at Wikipedia.

“There is nothing wrong in using ideas, anybody’s ideas. Provided that you give appropriate credit, you can make any mixture of ideas that you want; the contradiction will be yours. But why do you need the name of someone (or their philosophy) with whom you do not agree in order to spread your misunderstandings — or worse, your nonsense and falsehoods?” (From “The Moratorium on Brains,” Question and Answer Period.)

Now I wonder who she could be talking about ?

This is really a bit of a no-brainer and is really rhetorical but even so I can’t resist giving you a further clue.

What faith/belief system spends most of it’s time attacking other faiths and beliefs in an effort to mask the fact that it has nothing of substance to offer itself?

Now, personally I think I know where the dig is aimed, but the answer to the question is “Abrahamic Religions (Judaeo-Christianity and Islam)” surely?

[tags]Parabiodox, Christian Nutter, Nutter, Christian, Ayn Rand, Belief, Abraham, Religion, Philosophy, Culture, Society, Atheism, Anti-Atheist[/tags]


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Posted in Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Site Matters

Just a few “site admin” comments to make, so I thought I would make them all in one post.

First off, WordPress 2.2 has been released. Normally we would follow the generic Compuskills advice and wait a while before upgrading but, following some off-line playing, it seems this blog could upgrade sooner rather than later. For this upgrade we will have to delete all the existing files and upload new ones, so there could be a period where this site becomes unavailable or unusable. As, recently, we have been having a fairly continuous run of traffic (around 360 visitors per day) there seems no “low traffic” time to do this. All I can offer is an in advance apology if you get funny page layouts and the like.

Secondly – I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Lastly, as I am about to move house there will be a significant interruption of service. Hopefully Heather will be able to hold the fort, but given VirginMedia’s abysmal service there is no guarantee. Please, feel free to continue to comment or email us. They will be read eventually.

On a related note, if any one is a Sky Broadband customer I would love to know what the service you have had is like and how reliable it is – also is the service really uncapped? (Sky Max). I have my doubts over the veracity of Sky when the broadband thing gives three options – Base (£40 set up, no monthly charge, 2MB bandwidth, 2GB cap), Mid (£20 set up, £5 per month, 8MB Bandwidth, 40GB cap) and Max (no set up, £10 per month, 16MB bandwidth, no cap) – all of which seem amazing value for money.

Worryingly, when I put in the telephone number for my current address, I am told the only broadband option is Sky Connect (not one of the above) which is 8MB bandwidth with a 40GB cap (looks suspiciously like “Mid” above) but this will incur a £40 set up fee and £17 per month. Why on Earth does it cost over three times as much as “Mid?” Does this imply Sky have headline services and rates (which are very good) but in reality customers can not get them? (Would this even be legal?)

Still, I will for a while give Sky the benefit of the doubt and consider it as an option- unlike Virgin Media which I would, now, only consider if it was free and uncapped…

[tags]Site Admin, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress, Blog, Blog Software, Admin, Web Design, Broadband, Cable, VirginMedia, RSS, Feeds, Plugins, Feedburner, XML, Technology, Virgin Cable, Virgin Media, Internet, ISP, Upgrade, Sphere, Sphere It, [/tags]


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Posted in General, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pressure point

BBC health pages say that

Ministers have bowed to pressure to allow the creation of human animal hybrid embryos for research

(Phew, that’s a relief, then. For a minute, I was afraid that the UK might fall behind in the global “chimera creation” league.)

Pressure from whom? Some scientists apparently. Even if we add the big pharmaceutical companies to the group “pressuring” the government we are not exactly looking at a huge mass of people.

Genuinely enormous numbers of people have opposed the introduction of ID cards, the Iraq war and other government initiatives. That certainly didn’t count as enough pressure to have any impact on our government’s decisions.

Here’s the plan for any opponents of ID / random wars and so on. Just find out the identity of the half dozen scientists and drug companies that wrought this policy change and get them on your side. Easy

[tags]chimeras, democracy, id, identity-cards, politics, pressure, pressure-groups, society, war, science, BBC, UK, pharmaceutical[/tags]


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Posted in Rants, Science, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Silbury Hill to get stuffed

This blog (as a collective being) loves megalithic structures and sites.

So, it was interesting to read on clioaudio‘s excellent blog and in an English Heritage press release that Silbury Hill is being excavated.

Ironically,the half-arsed attempts to nose around in Silbury Hill were what is putting it at risk, after about 4000 years of being pretty solid. It’s a pyramid shaped man-made hill so it was inherently steady.

It was dug into by the Duke of Northumberland, in 1777, and by a Professor Atkinson, in the 1960s. The shafts they dug have made the monument unstable. Hence English Heritage is going in to shore it up with concrete. Hmm.

Continue reading


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Posted in Philosophy, Rants, Society | Tagged , , , , , , ,

Dead atheism :-)

(This turned out to be too long for a comment on “is-atheism-over”)
My Freya (insert deity of choice whose name you want to take in vain). Who’d have thought atheism was a fashion and such a short-lived one as well? “Atheism struggling for breath” etc. Must I say LOL repeatedly (despite having almost been shamed out of it by a funny youtube diatribe against smileys)?

Sometimes you have to wonder if we all live on the same planet or if English has some weird new variant that means that our understanding of others’ words is doomed.

For a start atheism isn’t really an ism, otherwise we would have to have isms for everything that anyone didn’t believe. I am, for example, a devout adherent of my-pc-does-not-wake-at-night-and-play-football-with-the-teacups-ism. I suspect that almost anyone on the face of the planet is one as well.

Granted, it’s not always front page news that most averagely-sane people are also in this group. So, I guess I might have to accept that my-pc-does-not-wake-at-night-and-play-football-with-the-teacups-ism isn’t this month’s fashionable belief system.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that large numbers of people have been converted to my-pc-wakes-at-night-and-plays-football-with-the-teacups-ism.

Maybe it does. I made the mistake of referring to my pc there. It is with the fairies half the time anyway.

[tags]anti-atheist, atheism, atheist, fashion, Philosophy, Rants, Religion, Culture, Society[/tags]


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Posted in Philosophy, Rants | Tagged , , , , , , , ,