Daily Archives: Mon, 4 February, 2008

Flickr – Change at the Top

Posted on by

Since my last post about my pictures on flickr things have changed.

The most interesting, most viewed and most favorited haven’t changed (sadly), although there was a small flurry of extra views on the images I posted in this thread – thank you to the people who bothered to look at the picture 🙂 . The biggest change is the sudden appearance of a new “Most Commented” picture.

Devon Church

Even though this picture hasn’t been on Flickr long, it has already outstripped all opposition with regards to the number of comments it has attracted. While I like this picture, and think it is nice, this is not totally down to the picture quality. In reality, this picture was subjected to a lot of “tactical” pool posting – aiming to get the timing right and selecting groups which are pretty good at generating comments. I am in no doubt that if was only visible in my photostream it would have about six comments…(*)

Is this a sign of the reality of web 2.0?

—

(*) It is worth noting however, that flickr is much, much better than this blog for comments and visits. Taking yesterday as an example, my photostream had 354 visits, this blog had 302. My photostream had 96 comments, this blog had 1… It sometimes intrigues me that only 1 in 300 visits results in a comment or trackback – is it something we say?

The “atheist gods” delusion

Posted on by

Today’s New Statesman goes to town on the topic of God.

Sholto Byrnes makes a barely comprehensible argument that is summed up in the subhead as:

For most Europeans, a belief in God may have given way to a belief in democracy, law and human rights. But the Almighty remains the source of our secular freedoms

Huh? Even without reading further, this fails to make even the most minimal amount of sense.

I think the first sentence is what a more philosophically erudite blogger might call a category error. I’ll try for some definitions to see what these already totally distinct ideas have in common. Hmm. Democracy is system of government. Law is a set of social rules. Human rights are socially agreed standards that we all hope get applied to us by our rulers. Maybe he’s referring to the fact that we invest these different ideas with an element of idealism?

We don’t think they made us, let alone the universe. We don’t pray to them. We don’t hand over big money to people who claim they can intercede with them. We don’t believe they gave their only son to be crucified for us. We don’t feel obliged to prostrate ourselves before them several times a day. They aren’t known for healing the sick or making the lame walk. We don’t have to assemble once or more a week in a temple to Human Rights and listen to dull readings. We certainly don’t believe that they will take us up in an almighty rapture.

in fact, they are such poor gods that even the smallest of Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods would knock them out with a single raised eyebrow. There is no sense in which belief in these ideas equates to belief in a god.

I’ve laboured this screamingly obvious point because it encapsulates a whole flawed current line of argument – that the social and political ideas that still remain to us from the Enlightenment are just another form of religion. They bloody aren’t. So there :-p

How else to explain the new religions that we have created for ourselves? A religion of science, whose priests make proclamations imbued with a certainty that their empirical branch of learning cannot justify; a religion of rights which, however much we may instinctively agree with it, has no more coherent proof than that it is “self-evident”; and now, perhaps, a religion of ecology whose ministers thunder as self-righteously as any 17th-century Puritan preacher.

Rubbish, for so many reasons that it’ would be too boring to labour them any more here (although the blog reserves the right to do so, more entertainingly, I hope, in the near future. Sorry. I’m just annoyed at this right now.)