Well, following the little gem I found with my last Technorati Tag search, I thought I would give it another shot and see what comes up under the God Delusion tags.

It certainly was rewarding (again). Going to the “more posts” bit on Technorati, I found these two sites which have done wonders to reset the balance.

First off, an article by Sam Harris on www.patzivota.com, titled “God’s Enemies Are More Honest Than His Friends.” Sam Harris wrote the book “Letter to a Christian Nation” which is certainly worth reading and, as you can imagine this blog post is well worth reading. I especially like the way Sam Harris has explained why he feels he is not an “atheist” and why the term shouldn’t be needed:

As I pointed out in my subsequent book, Letter to a Christian Nation, we do not have a term for a person who rejects astrology, nor do we need one. If legions of astrologers sought to bend our public policy to their pseudo-science, we wouldn’t need to dub ourselves “non-astrologers” to put them in their place. Words like “reason,” “evidence,” and “common sense” would suffice. So it should be with religion.

There is more of his writing on http://www.samharris.org/ and it is also worth taking a look at his “Ten Myths and Ten Truths” article.

In addition, and trying to move away from the public (almost professional) Atheists, there are some personal blogs which I found very endearing. In The God Delusion – First Impressions, “Harry” (a final year BioMed student applying for Medical School) writes:

[about Dawkins opinions on the excessive respect “religion” gets] and thus his staunch atheistic standpoint seems to me, a little too staunch …

Dawkins is, despite his claims to the contrary, an argumentative old man. While I agree with Dawkins that too often people can claim a belief as a shield against criticism, “Harry” is quite right with his other points that persuasion can yield a greater effect than provocation.

The main issue I have with this equitable approach, is that it is very, very one sided. People who are devoutly religious will often be very offensive, even threatening, towards Atheists as the lack of belief seems to carry the attendant lack of automatic respect. It strikes me that religious people could learn quite a bit from the Atheistic moral code…

It seems like a daily visit to the Technorati Richard Dawkins Tags is going to provide a constant supply of entertainment. At the moment, there are around five blog posts a day with that tag and while two or three of them seem to be this one (at the moment) this is not always the case 🙂

Anyway, today I was rewarded with a post on the Chris Street Blog, which reprinted a New Scientist magazine article. The article is a “review” of The God Delusion by Mary Midgley.

Now, as Mary Midgley is a long standing and well known “opponent” and critic of pretty much everything Richard Dawkins writes, I am intrigued as to why New Scientist got her to write a review of the book. I suppose they were hoping that she would be able to provide a solid “counter argument” to most of Dawkin’s writings.

Sadly, while Midgley is certainly arguing against Dawkins, it is not a review of the book. In her article she talks about how Atheism gave birth to Nazi Germany, a fallacy (Hitler at least claimed to be a Catholic in his letters to the post, and the vast majority of those who committed the atrocities were Christians) which Dawkins exposes in the book. Surely if Midgley had read the book she was reviewing, she would have been able to pass comment on how Dawkins explains the fallacy rather than repeat it.

The remainder of her review is better and she does (occasionally) make some good points about Dawkins. Most of her valid points though are not as part of a review of the book, but about Dawkins’ attitude in general. It is a shame she chose to use a “review” as an opportunity to take a shot, it does no one any favours.

One last point. Throughout the article, Midgley seems to imply that there is a form of “knowledge” which stems from religious belief. I find this unusual to say the least. She objects to Dawkin’s creating a specialist definition of “religion,” yet she is more than happy to create a form of “knowledge” which can not be verified, tested or even seen.

A couple of days ago I made a post titled “Atheist Resurgance” which was written after I had been meandering around the results of some technorati tag searches.

One of these links took me to a blog titled “Sub Ratione Dei: A Balanced Victory” where I read some of the comments made about Richard Dawkins, and his book The God Delusion. In the post, I made the following comments:

A theology student who feels that, as a theology student he is more placed to talk about God than Dawkins. This is interesting as the God delusion is not about the Christian deity per se, but about the implications belief in a divine being have on humanity and the biological evidence which contradicts those beliefs. Maybe the author of Sub Ratione Dei feels that as a theology student they are more placed to discuss evolution and creationism than Dawkins.

Following my post here, the author of the Sub Ratione Dei blog has made the following response:

Update: This post has generated a little comment over on Why Don’t You … Blog? For one they are maybe taking me a bit too seriously (alway’s a mistake). However, I am perhaps more worried by the implicit message that I am a creationist!

Now, this isn’t the first time I have been challenged over an apparent mistake I made in a blog post, and it is unlikely to be the last, so I want to try and set the record straight here.

I didn’t think I had taken the Sub Ratione Dei post all that seriously and it was meant as humour then I apologise whole heartedly for my mistake. I never thought my post had made any implication about belief in creation, it was put in there with the evolution bit.

Critically, my comments about the Sub Ratione Dei blog post were quite minimal, I only pointed out that the Theologist felt he was better placed to discuss God than Richard Dawkins and that he was critiquing a book which he hadn’t read. The rest of the entry was a cut and paste from the original site. The God delusion book is not about a specific religion, although there are obvious Christian overtones, the principles made are equally sound if the religion in question was Zoroastrianism, Norse Gods, Roman Gods etc. Richard Dawkins may well be a “grumpy old man” but I am not so sure he has no idea what he is talking about.

Anyway, this post and the previous post, were not made with the intention of insulting anyone or starting a blog version of a flame war. I was simply aiming to highlight the disparate views which blogs with a certain tag can generate (in this instance it was Richard Dawkins). If I have caused any offence, then I do apologise.

Well, as the lightbox seems to have worked so well, I thought it was time to make the most of it and get some more photos online 🙂 Needless to say, I am going to be looking over Technorati to see what else lightbox turns up 🙂 Sadly, this is not a “high traffic” tag term, and only gets about 1-3 posts a day. Still, times may change.

This is a photograph of a house next to the stones at Avenbury.

These are some photographs of Farleigh Hungerford Castle taken in July 06.

Over time, we will look at editing some of the photo collections at Why Dont You… and showing off the results here. Feel free to get in touch and let us know what you think – or if you have a similar blog and want us to link to you!

As part of Admin’s site overhaul, I have been trying to add some of the cool word press widgets to the side bar here. So far, they have pretty much all turned out to be fairly pointless so the current crop are somewhat, erm, minimal 🙂

I did find what looked like an excellent widget to install (the cool looking “Flickr Widget“), and was duly pointed to the repository at http://www.redalt.com/External/plugins.php?p=flickr-widget. This is where things went wrong. The redalt site (which incidentally, lots of links point to for downloads) is totally unresponsive. Not only is it slow to use but none of the links actually result in downloads. Sheer madness.

However, there is another place you can find the widget – http://svn.wp-plugins.org/flickr-widget/trunk/ – and as of right now, this is working fine 🙂

By the way, it is an excellent widget!

Aside – Whydontyou has a new blog style – please let us know what you think. The current style is based on http://wpthemepark.com/themes/fallseason/ but it may change again as we are experimenting with several options.

WhyDontYou has added a few new features to it’s posts – the main one is a “light box” for inline images (note: this does not include the images on Flickr and the like).

To see how this works, click on these images:

CompuSkills web design service has put together a “customer service” blog which will provide advice, information and responses to frequently asked questions.

Definitely worth checking out over the coming weeks and months. If you have any questions you would like to have answers please get in touch with CompuSkills and see what can be done.

It might just be me, but my recent surf through technorati philosophy blogs (mentioned here first and then here) turned up some interesting results. In addition to the topical ones I have already mentioned, there seems a massively disproportionate number of MySpace blogs on the topic.

Seriously, pretty much nine out of ten links I have followed (the list was sorted by “freshness”) have been to MySpace blogs. Some are serious and relevant (for example this one about law and freedom – valid points even though I support banning smoking!) but by and large they are the “philosopical musings” of bored teenagers (even when written by apparent adults like this Wonder Woman religion post….).

I wonder if that pretty much sums up MySpace….

On a technological note, Technorati is still annoying. It is taking 20 minutes to index posts here, which ensures that when they do arrive in the index they are very, very far down the list in a busy topic like Philosophy. What are the other (generally MySpace) sites doing to get indexed within a minute or two?

Just to clarify the second paragraph above, out of the first fifty links tagged “Philosophy” on Technorati, only ONE was not a MySpace blog… Blimey.

It seems I posted the last article in haste as there is a new contender for the most “off the wall” philosophy tagged blog.

Take a look at this blinder (from Enigma, another MySpace user…)

As a Buddhist, I practice Nichiren Daishonin’s buddhism. I’ve been quite open about it up until a few months ago. Where I work, there are a few other people who I recently found out practic the same type of buddhism. However, there is one person – who I don’t know at all who has been imposing what I can only describe as anonymous guerrilla tactics to get other people to become aware of this practice. They have been posting magazines to the work place, which has annoyed some members of staff and leaving books around to people with messages like ‘lord knows, you bloody need it!’ That sort of shit. Not necessary. I have tried to find out who it is but to no avail.In this practice, it is through forging genuine friendships with people and showing some sort of example yourself as a human being that you introduce others, not by force or by some underhand tactics or other. It annoyed me…

ps – Anyone have any questions about Nichiren Buddhism, just ask me….:)

That is it. The wonders of MySpace seem to prevent me from looking at any other posts made to try and put this into context.

It really has left me stumped as to what “she” is going on about.

Well, there seems to be a continuing trend for my blogs now, innocently I click on a Technorati tag search and see what happens. When the results surprise me, I end up blogging about them. I wonder when it will cease to surprise me.

Anyway, the most recent one is the Technorati Philosophy blogs. Now this is busy. When I looked at it just now there were over 370,000 blog posts with the tag and the last 30 days have added around 1500 a day.

Obviously this means a lot to someone…

Strangely, most of the ones Technorati took me to today were much more biased towards “religion” than philosophy per se, but I assume most people have the two concepts closely linked. (It is not a requirement though).

Also a massive proportion of the blog posts seem to be the musings of religious-“spiritual” people in their late teens. Again, this panders to a few stereotypes and is a shame, as Philosophy is really a legitimate, serious subject with ramifications across lots of subject areas. An example of the slightly off the rails religious approach and an example of the late teen approach (Ok, she is 20 but my point remains) are available! It is worth noting that both sites have “Religion and Philosophy” as a single category.

Throwing a contrast, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science presents a very different perspective and is well worth visiting for the free content if nothing else. It is not “easy reading” of the manner of the previous two, but if you are interested in science, it is certainly worth working through.

Now, after the “sane” examples we are left with the rest of the bunch. This is always an entertaining stage of blog surfing. The word Philosophy seems to drag them out of the woodwork – I may try “Religion” when I have more spare time….

This is a priceless one. In a post titled “Saddam Hussein & Feast of Sacrifice (Muslim Holiday)” (this alone should highlight the potential crank content) we get such gems as:

Dont be fooled by Western Propaganda and Middle Eastern “Statesmen” that kiss the United States Ass!! Saddam Hussein is Christ Manifest. In The Bible It Tells You That Christ Will Return As A King of Terror. The Reason Why I Say This Is Because I Am Saddam Hussein!! Saddam Hussein is Zeus!! Saddam Hussein is Me!!

Blimey. Is this meant to be satirical? After a bit more ranting and incoherent babble, the post finishes with this:

Shiites and Sunnis Dont Believe In Allah, Kurds Dont Believe In Allah; Dont Believe In God That Is Why They Got Their Asses Tortured By Saddam Hussein. Why Is It That The Devil Wants To Divide Heaven, Be A False Provider Of Freedom. Human Beings Dont Need A Petty Constitution To Tell Them That They Are Free…..That Is Why God Created The Sun.

Now, I suppose the randomness of this page served a purpose as it encouraged me to read through more of his site and look at the MySpace profile he has – mainly to see if he was actually insane. Sadly reading the profile has not convinced me this is a nut case, so I can only assume the page is there as a joke. The brunt of the profile seems like a normal person (although choice of books is: “Bible, Quran, Tao Te Ching, Confucious, Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, William Shakespear,Saving Socrates, Call of the Wild, Political Thrillers & Military Thrillers, Romantic Novels, Steven King, Michael Chrichton, Science Fictions, Biographies” which is certainly unusual for a 25 year old male). He also has a picture of GW Bush (Captioned “The Devil without Make Up) and the words “I WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD FALSELY BELIEVE THAT DEMOCRACY IS GREATER THAN GOD’S PROVIDENCE” attached (as if this is Bush’s motive). A similar picture of Adolph Hitler is labled “I WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD FALSELY BELIEVE THAT NAZISM IS GREATER THAN GOD’S PROVIDENCE” so you can only assume some link between Democracy and Nazism, which is certainly a different philosophical point of view…

Just goes to show, no matter how much Technorati annoys me and how bad its set up is and how much it polarises the blogosphere – there remains the facility for it to provide hours of meaningless, pointless but still interesting distraction. 🙂

As lots of people will be aware, Linux is a fully functional, open source, operating system which runs on a massive variety of hardware platforms (from embedded devices to high end servers), comes with all the source code, comes with a massive variety of application packages (massive is an understatement) and generally costs nothing.

One of the other “wonders” of Linux, is the different variations you can have (often called Distro’s or Distributions). Vendors such as Novell (SuSE), Mandrake, RedHat (etc) all make versions. The sheer scale of the different distros is hard to appreciate but take a look at the DistroWatch website to see what is out there, or for a smaller sample, Wikipedia has a shorter list.

Despite this great variety, there is a common theme in that all the distros are – broadly speaking – the same. You execute commands in the same manner, you have a root account in the same manner etc. Add to this the similarity to Unix and you can see why linux is great and this spread of distros is not something to be scared of.

Now, not all that long ago a new distro appeared which while being good was hardly “better” than the others. In fact, this new distro changed some of the fundamental ways Linux used to do things (no root account for example) and created a “learning curve” for people moving from one distro to another. One thing this distro did do which was good, was to ship hundreds of installation disks for free. This distro was Ubuntu.

Since Ubuntu managed to flood the market, it has grown in popularity at an astonishing rate. This is not exactly something I was initially over the moon about (for examples, look at these search results) but it is good to see Linux get more mass market publicity.

However, as time progresses I now think it may not be such a good thing. Months ago, I gave up on PCW because it was becoming morbidly repetetive and the Unix column mentioned nothing but Ubuntu. If this was kept to generic “Unix ways of doingt things” it might not be a bad thing, but it isn’t. It is almost invariably Ubuntu specific things.

Recently I had the chance to read through back issues and the current issue of PCW – including the Unix column – and this trend has remained. The current one should be ashamed to call itself a “Unix” article. The whole section is now Ubuntu articles. Each month the author waxes lyrical about how great the latest distro is and how to work round the weird way Ubuntu does things.

As far as I can see it, this trend carries over to pretty much all the general PC publications, and worryingly is present (in smaller doses) on the more specialist magazines. As more and more people get locked into the Ubuntu way of doing things, Linux as it used to be will cease to exist and the day where Linux is a single OS in the manner of Windows will be upon us.

This is not a good thing.

Yesterday I was somewhat disapointed at the number of Creationist, or creationist-supporter, blogs which were out there attacking Richard Dawkins.

Today I look at technorati and see the balance is returning. It is not yet complete though, as these were the top three:

Sub Ratione Dei. A theology student who feels that, as a theology student he is more placed to talk about God than Dawkins. This is interesting as the God delusion is not about the Christian deity per se, but about the implications belief in a divine being have on humanity and the biological evidence which contradicts those beliefs. Maybe the author of Sub Ratione Dei feels that as a theology student they are more placed to discuss evolution and creationism than Dawkins. This is a quote from the Sub Ratione Dei web page: (all typos etc are as in the original)

By the grace of God as I was browsing the Politics section pondering whether to by the Griffin book there were what appeared to be a kindly elderly couple hunching over the popular science section discussing which of the three Dawkins books was the one he has just written that was causing all the fuss. Mustering up every ounce of self-restraint I pointed out which was the text in question and it is here they I deem the mysterious hand of divine providence to be at work. “Have you read it, is it good?” asked the moment. Ah ha! thought I, an opportunity to save a soul from the ramblings of a grumpy old man who doesn’t really know the subject he is talking about. Needless to say I with utmost respect for the man’s scientific qualifications considered his writing as perceptive on religion as an MI5 report on the existence of WMD in Iraq. After explaining that as a theology student I know a little bit about religion (and hence a little bit more than Dawkins) I suggested that they may want to try a Polkinghorne book I saw in the same section (not read the book but I took an educated guess it would be good). By the infinite mercies of God they agreed to take this book as well the Dawkins one. Not quite the outcome I was hoping for but at least if they are reading both they may have something reading Dawkins alone would be lacking, balance.

Godfight: now this is an odd blog and there isn’t much I can say about it, other than to link to it: http://freaktochic.typepad.com/ godfight/ 2006/ 12/ welcome_to_the_.html. You really do have to see it to understand what I mean.

The last of the top three – “X: Something to Ponder” – is different all together. It is not really a blog “about” Dawkins but mentions him in passing regarding a strange question the author is pondering. This quote is from http://www.sarwark.org /writings/ 2006/ 12/ something-to-ponder.html:

Question: If a Muslim father makes one a Muslim (a claim falsely made by Debbie Schlussel to smear Barack Obama) and a Jewish mother makes one a Jew, if a Muslim man marries a Jewish woman and they have a kid, is the child both Muslim and Jewish?
If so, can we fix the whole Middle Eastern situation through intermarriage?
Richard Dawkins would argue against the frame of the question. In his latest book, The God Delusion, he posits that children can’t truly hold religious beliefs, so a child is a “child of Jewish parents” rather than a “Jewish child.”
UPDATE: As I thought, being a Muslim requires one to submit to Allah. So much for that idea.

Still, these few days have possibly convinced me looking over technorati does indeed have some value.

You can tell the Christmas period is nearly over, the new crop of PC related magazines are all proclaiming (through front page blurbs) about how great Windows Vista is.

Now, before I rant, I have never used Vista and I am sure it is a great operating system.

For those of you who live under a rock, Vista is the latest version of Windows (ie it could also be called Windows XP2 or Windows 2007 depending on how you want to spin a name) and is supposedly an overhaul of the windows code from the ground up.

I have seen previews and read reviews on Vista and it looks like it will be a positive step for Windows, but XP is good. Why spend in the region of GBP160 to upgrade when in effect, you can already do everything it offers?

Now, if we use the cover of PCW as an example, it claims:

IT’S FASTER, MORE RELIABLE AND MORE SECURE
WHY YOU SHOULD UPGRADE AND WHICH VERSION TO CHOOSE

Now, call me old fashioned but I suspect a less than objective review is going to take place here. Sadly, this is nearly always the case when Microsoft churn out something significant and new. The MS PR machine seems to ensure that the PC press will generate page after page of rave reviews. Now I accept this does not happen all the time, but when was the last time you read a bad pre-launch review of either Windows or Microsoft Office?

Sadly, I can remember the run up to Windows ME being released and this was trumpeted (albeit not like Win 95 or Vista have been) about what a great upgrade it would be for the home user, how stable it would be and how secure it would be.

Then a few months later, reality hit and everyone realised what a dog WinME was….. 98 was “great” but only really took off after the service packs and so on. It is unlikely that Vista will be a really dencent operating system until after SP1 has been applied. None of the others have been.

Taking the three PCW points though, still leaves a big so what?

Vista is “faster” if you have a good processor, 1gb of RAM and a decent graphics card. Well, really. Who would have thought it. In the Winter 2006/2007 issue of PCW less than 50% of the PC systems (inc laptops) advertised would be able to run Vista properly. Shocking.

Vista is more reliable? Really? How do they know this? Have millions of users put it through it’s paces yet? Has it been running servers and workstations for months on end?

More secure? Possibly true as general windows security is abysmal. However it is like saying putting a rope in a door way is more secure than leaving it open. I’d rather have a door myself.

Now, is there any point to this rant? Well sort of. You see there is already an operating system which does ALL the things Vista claims and has been on the user market for long enough that it’s reliability and security are proven.

Linux.

Now, I hate Ubuntu but you can get it for free, it will do everything PCW claims are selling points for Vista and will run fast and secure on things other than the top of the range PCs. If you get Vista / Office 2007 you will need to learn new user interfaces and ways of doing things, so why not save yourself a few hundred pounds and get Linux?

Well, after a fairly innocuous first post on the subject, having read The God Delusion, I spent a little time today reading some technorati links regarding Richard Dawkins. This was an eye opener.

Now, historically, I have found Richard Dawkins annoying, irritating and overbearing. I am not a biologist so his remarkable wealth of knowledge on the subject is – largely – irrelevant.

However, reading some of the counter-argument blogs is amazing. The vast majority are blatant Christian / Creationist blogs which are obviously intimidated about the prospect of some one “preaching” (yes, I use this word with a full sense of the irony attached) atheism. Some are just nonsense, and some disguise themselves as being “open minded” blogs – but when you read any of the history they may as well have ©Discovery Institute at the bottom.

Some of the more recently viewed examples are (blatant Christian blog) – http://telicthoughts.com/ which has a YouTube video of Dawkins apparently making a fool of himself. The video is disturbing in many ways, not because of Dawkins error (everyone makes mistakes and it takes a special kind of retentive person to worry about this one unduly), but because of the comments Melvin Konner makes. He is talking about Dawkins (somewhat over the top) claims that Religious Indoctrination is child abuse and he goes on about how it is wrong to tell people how their children should or shouldn’t be indoctrinated (shocking in itself). He brings out the tired old fear that if people are told they cant indoctrinate their children – “Your Children or Mine will be taken away first.”

What madness is this. It is insane. It is pure fear mongering. At 2 mins 15 seconds the camera pans around the audience and you see the suitably concerned woman (with assumptions she is a mother) sitting in the audience looking worried. In the back of my head I can hear the voice from the Simpson’s “Wont anyone think of the children.” It really is shameful that this is presented as a reasoned argument. If you want to see more, but want to avoid the telicthoughts website, then you can watch the video on YouTube. The site appears to have a bit of Richard Dawkin’s fixation which is interesting on many levels. (As examples: http://telicthoughts.com/?p=1141 or more generally http://telicthoughts.com/?cat=35)

On a (much) more entertaining vein, there is a blog called Pavlov’s Cat, which has a post about Dawkins, which I can only assume is meant to be satire. After a long, drawn out introduction we get to the meat of the post:

Voice is also the thing that always alerts me, in the absence of any other obvious sign, to someone’s mental state. When a voice sounds odd to me — a buzz, a drone, a monotone — then what one beloved ex-boss of mine used to call the ‘maddie antenna’ quivers like that retriever’s tail in the Bugs Bunny cartoon. And as soon as Dawkins began to speak I thought Oh my God, he sounds like a Dalek. I mentally plotted him somewhere along the Asperger’s spectrum. The phrase ‘lack of affect’ came to mind.

His voice has a sort of metallic, sawing, plangent edge, its effect reminiscent of paper cuts and fingernails on blackboards. Yet is not in itself an ugly voice, that isn’t what I mean; its timbre, in fact, is rather unusually pure and clear. It’s the voice of a brilliantly played brass instrument. A trumpet, say. A trumpet of an evangelical, military and/or annunciatory kind, of the kind that summons souls on the Day of Judgement, orders Adam and Eve out of Paradise, or announces sternly to the Virgin Mary that she’s pregnant with the son of God and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it.

And it was deeply ironic, I thought, that a man so loudly, insistently and unreservedly determined to pour scorn on any manner of theist, on spirituality of any kind, should adopt so successfully the Biblical modes of denunciation and command: the mode of evangelists and angels, or vengeful gods of any stamp. The mode of a bossy, overbearing, single-minded bully.

Well, it certainly made me laugh.

There were positive examples available though. The “everything is pointless” website had an interesting article about Dawkins, but they may be biased….

Technorati tags: Richard Dawkins, Dawkins, Atheism, Atheist, Evolution, Science, Creationism