Not Much Better

I've been reading, "A Question of Truth" which is primarily about homosexuality in the Catholic church and references to it in the Bible. It has a lengthy, careful but very easily read introduction, explaining many things to do with currently held views, the difference between the acts from intents, the damage it does to people and carefully describing the different aspects of sexuality, separating all the issues well and does a reasonably good job of describing the difference between intensional and extensional usage.

A lot of this is Bible study 101 - the modern ideas like love, homosexuality, marriage, property, slavery, and so on have moved or did not exist when the Bible was written, so what people often read into it is not the original intent - not that I would say that the original intent is much better - and that's the real problem.

The book effectively reasons around all the major passages that people use to treat gay people badly. However, in the course of the reasoning, it just seems to move away from from treating homosexuality as sinful to refining women's historical position in society.

For example, the infamous Leviticus and men not lying with men passage is reasoned to mean not the act that is wrong but that a man shouldn't treat a man like a woman. Another is the story of Lot and our friends the Sodomites, which again is about offering up your daughters for hospitality reasons and the suggestion is that Sodom was destroyed because they humiliated them not because of any need for gay love.

There's a sentence or two along the lines that no modern Christian would treat women in this way (or have slaves?) which I thought rather undermines the whole point of the exercise to me.

LOL (List of Links)

• Hamcrest integrated in JUnit 4.4 and above (JMock like expectations). Also allows Popper theories (the link in the release notes is available through archive.org). which are similar to TestNG's data points. There are also some examples: here, here, here and here (using Groovy).


• Window Licker an interesting approach to Swing testing. See the Calculator example and XP Day 2008 presentation.


• The bushfires are retribution for the damned. Apparently, God waited 5 months (or maybe he was too busy appearing in toast) to smite those Victorians down. The most annoying part of this is the fuzzy thinking. Instead of considering that it might be poor fuel management practices, bad advice on whether to stay or leave or global warming it's actually about abortion. If you can speak of a real Christian attitude, the people of North Queensland donating their flood relief money straight to the Victorians seems more along the right lines.


• Haskell book to read and buy. Luckily in that order.


• SemWeb project VoiD a simple vocabulary for linking and describing different data sets.


• A couple of ways of fixing the billion dollar mistake using Java Rebel or maybe Maybe Monad (using Java 5 for loops even). Speaking of which: Monoid fingertree (trees in Haskell) and JQuery is a Monad (apparently that makes it slow). I also realized that Void is a valid type in Java Generics which is helpful in the dreaded Visitor pattern.


• Bill Moyers on Gaza and Dr Izzeldine Abuelaish sharing his grief on Israeli television. More information is available from ABC's Foreign Correspondent story, "The Doctor and his Daughters" because the wikipedia page has been deleted.


• The Poppendieck's on Lean development as to balance Martin Fowler on Scrum.


• Straight Skeleton as a way to generate a skeleton from a polygon.


• RESTEasy JBoss' REST framework.


• Microsoft's terrible vengence, Songsmith. If you love music don't click here.


• And What's up for Java in 2009?

Jesus Camp

This seems like quite an amazing depiction of American fundamentalists. It seems as if bigotry and fundamentalism is being turned into a competition with the Middle East. If you don't like to be scared about American evangelicals look away.

• Harry Potter is the Devil - JESUS CAMP - the one that started it all - kinda weird but interesting.


• Bill Maher on Jesus Camp - talks about this (from last year).


• Jesus Camp Bush Insanity (or Child Abuse). Your call. - laying on of hands to a cardboard George Bush, the mixture of religion and politics - very scary.


• Oprah Denies Christ - she tries to reason that there must be more than one way to go to heaven - but of course her audience members don't allow her to get away with that one. Scarier.


• CBC Interview with 'Jesus Camp' Filmmakers - scariest.

Ricky Gervais Explaining what's Wrong with Evolution

Link.

4:34

I was struck by an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. In it she says a moderate version of Islam cannot exist without disregarding parts of the Koran (and without thinking, questioning and debating). I'd always assumed this was true and thought it wouldn't bother me but I was surprised when it did. About half way through the interview she was prompted to give support for her claim that Islam does promote violence. She says there is a criteria for determining whether something is true and she quoted Sura (4:34). Without dancing around the subject it says when faced with a disobedient wife: shout at her, ignore her, and finally beat her. And as far as I can tell this is not up for dispute. It's a bit hard to describe and I'm sure I'd heard it before but for some reason it finally got to me.

So like, Timothy 2, 12 this is a religious statement, without allegory, that is clearly in conflict with modern laws and morals (assuming that morals can exist outside of religion).

I guess I'd always assumed people ignore bits that don't make sense. But as someone reading Timothy said, "What do you do when you are confronted with a finding in scripture that either goes against what you've always believed or at least contradicts what you would like to believe? There are really only two choices. Understand it, accept it and conform to it or reject it and go on doing whatever you want."

Thank Goodness

THANK GOODNESS! About Dan Dennett's recent brush with death.

"Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now."

"Do I worship modern medicine? Is science my religion? Not at all; there is no aspect of modern medicine or science that I would exempt from the most rigorous scrutiny, and I can readily identify a host of serious problems that still need to be fixed. That's easy to do, of course, because the worlds of medicine and science are already engaged in the most obsessive, intensive, and humble self-assessments yet known to human institutions, and they regularly make public the results of their self-examinations."

"One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institutions I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are trying to do what (God says) is right, that is all anyone can ask. Not so in medicine! If you are wrong—especially if you should have known better—your good intentions count for almost nothing. And whereas taking a leap of faith and acting without further scrutiny of one's options is often celebrated by religions, it is considered a grave sin in medicine. A doctor whose devout faith in his personal revelations about how to treat aortic aneurysm led him to engage in untested trials with human patients would be severely reprimanded if not driven out of medicine altogether."

"In other words, whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!"

Wired on Religion

So. Many. Letters "We would have sworn that our November cover story on New Atheism was going to generate a firestorm of reader criticism, delivered with a side order of brimstone just for good measure. Wrong. You all just started calmly talking. And talking. And talking. We got more responses to this article than to any piece in memory. Brimstone quotient: low."

"So we posted every last letter to our website."

Good Models - My Super-Turtle is Better than Yours

• Standards and Pseudo Standards from Celebrating OWL interoperability and spec quality. Can a standard be based on a pseudo standard? Another posting also points to "An Investigation into the Feasibility of the Semantic Web" about the feasibility of integration using ontolgies.


• Beyond Belief 2006 Session 5 includes Paul Davies (asks why the universe should even be understandable to human beings, why he's no longer a Platonist and levitating super-turtles) and Session 9 on why religion may have a place.


• Agile Atheism "I am not agile because I don't believe in the agile religion and I don't accept its dogma. I like the engineering and planning practices that agile teams use - in the same way that I like people who do nice things (even when they do it because of fear of divine retribution). The difference is I don't want to be constrained by dogma into only doing those sensible things which are prescribed by agile. In the same way I don't like being prevented from doing sensible social things because of religious beliefs."


• Jane's Rule for Loading Dishwashers "Compare this to test-driven development. There may be a little more effort when writing code, because you are writing programmer-tests to drive writing that code. It's an "unnatural" process, like sorting silverware into sub-bins when loading the dishwasher. But the true benefit comes later in the project (possibly just minutes or hours later), when you can rely on those programmer-tests to make refactoring safer. And since you fixed bugs during TDD, you have much less work fixing bugs later when it comes time to ship your product."


• How can I get financial market information updated automatically to my spreadsheets?


• 10 most intelligent / least intelligent dogs My dog is apparently the stupidest breed with regards to obedience. I'm not sure I'd call obedience a sign of intelligence (the complete opposite really).

The Search for the Levitating Super-Turtle

Atheists: The New Gays "Prior to 9/11, it would have been career suicide for a public figure to come right out and say God is a fairy tale. Now it’s a feature of popular culture. You can see it on cable of course, in shows such as BullSh*t, Real Time, The Daily Show, and Southpark. But it’s also a feature of network TV. The main character on House is written as the most brilliant human on the planet, and he’s an atheist."

"Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately."

A good preview of Dawkins book is here.

I've recently finished reading both "The God Delusion" and "The Goldilocks Enigma" and I found both books quite good. Seeing as though so many people commented last time I thought I'd post a bit more about what I think this time.

Much like the disappointment of revisiting old television shows of your youth, Dawkins' book is great for pointing out how truly bad those stories taught at Sunday school were, including Noah, Lot and Abraham. Although I must admit, even as a child I found the story of the flood and "The A-Team" both rather unbelievable. There are other interesting topics, like coming up with morals without religion, but I think these are better covered elsewhere.

One of the main things I got out of this book is that progress is about conscious raising. Most improvements have come about when a society becomes aware of a problem and goes about trying to solve them. Historically this includes human rights, more recently global warming and ones to fully take hold like animal rights. The other thing I got out of it is that I don't have as many problems with religion as Dawkins.

I found Dawkins the least convincing when he diverges from his areas of expertise especially when he tries to cover cosmology. This is especially apparent when you compare his counter argument against teleology (things look like they were designed therefore there must be a designer). Dawkins explanation in relation to biology is clear and concise but for cosmology its rather glossed over and there seems to be a bit of hand waving. He doesn't provide a good argument why evolution on a universal scale is well founded. This is where Paul Davies' book provides some better arguments for a rational creation of the universe.

Davies is actually a little bit more open to the idea of God than Dawkins which, when he chooses a different explanation, makes his arguments more convincing. The possible explanations of the universe he discusses include: absurd (no real cause), unique (there are no free parameters for the universe to be the way it is), the multiverse (String theory), intelligent design (God or Gods), the life principle and the self explaining universe. He says he prefers the latter two explanations. I found the most interesting explanation given is the self explaining universe. It uses quantum mechanics, casual loops and the requirement for the universe to understand itself.

The last chapter of the book is certainly the best and I wish he spent the whole book on the ideas in it instead. His description of the infinite regress as the levitating super-turtle is great. He also describes how Platonism is incorrect, especially at the beginning of the universe, and how the laws of physics have emerged over time.

I'm Sick of the Anti-Thor Rhetoric

The flying spaghetti monster "Why do you call yourself an atheist? Why not an agnostic?

Well, technically, you cannot be any more than an agnostic. But I am as agnostic about God as I am about fairies and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You cannot actually disprove the existence of God. Therefore, to be a positive atheist is not technically possible. But you can be as atheist about God as you can be atheist about Thor or Apollo. Everybody nowadays is an atheist about Thor and Apollo. Some of us just go one god further.

When you're talking about God, are you really talking about the God of the Bible -- Yahweh of the Old Testament?

Well, as it happens, I am because I have an eye to the audience who's likely to be reading my book. Nobody believes in Thor and Apollo anymore so I don't bother to address the book to them. So, in practice, it's addressed to believers in the Abrahamic God."

More provactively, "My sense is that you don't just think religion is dishonest. There's something evil about it as well.

Well, yes. I think there's something very evil about faith, where faith means believing in something in the absence of evidence, and actually taking pride in believing in something in the absence of evidence. And the reason that's dangerous is that it justifies essentially anything. If you're taught in your holy book or by your priest that blasphemers should die or apostates should die -- anybody who once believed in the religion and no longer does needs to be killed -- that clearly is evil. And people don't have to justify it because it's their faith. They don't have to say, "Well, here's a very good reason for this." All they need to say is, "That's what my faith says." And we're all expected to back off and respect that. Whether or not we're actually faithful ourselves, we've been brought up to respect faith and to regard it as something that should not be challenged. And that can have extremely evil consequences. The consequences it's had historically -- the Crusades, the Inquisition, right up to the present time where you have suicide bombers and people flying planes into skyscrapers in New York -- all in the name of faith."

Agile Bigger than Jesus

Software Development: It's a Religion "But software development is, and has always been, a religion. We band together into groups of people who believe the same things, with very little basis for proving any of those beliefs. Java versus .NET. Microsoft versus Google. Static languages versus Dynamic languages. We may kid ourselves into believing we're "computer scientists", but when was the last time you used a hypothesis and a control to prove anything? We're too busy solving customer problems in the chosen tool, unbeliever!"

Dog vs Cat

So maybe killing other human beings in the name of religion is bad, but at least people can defend themselves, I came across, "Dogs in Islam", which says, "Last Ramadaan, I wrote an article highlighting the phenomenon whereby misinformed Muslims took their dogs (and/or cats) to the animal hospitals or mobile clinics during Ramadaan, to have them put to death by lethal injection. The reason given by the majority of these Muslims was that Islam forbids them to keep a dog."

"Healthy, happy animals belonging to Muslims are also brought in to be put to death. This is a very disturbing and un-Islamic action..."

Not that Christians are much better, the most famous being Descartes and his views that animals can't feel pain. His views were used to justify cruel experiments that were performed on animals. At the same time he is said to have had a pet dog that he appreciated, I always thought "Descartes' Dog" would be a good title for a book.

Dog's saliva has a bactericidal effect on E. coli and S. canis, whereas cat saliva can cause Cat-Scratch Disease. Of course, they both eat rather suspect things and don't brush their teeth so it's not all good.

Also, dogs and cats can make their own vitamin C. Does that show a bias or just a cunning plan? The point of my initial Googling was to work out why my dog's food had all kinds of ingredients but not vitamin C. I came across these other interesting facts in the process.

Left Behind

Anne Provoost Interview "BILL MOYERS: There are so many questions come to one when reading In the Shadow of the Ark. But there was one question that halts me in particular. I mean, can you trust a God who doesn't get it right?

ANNE PROVOOST: That's one of the questions, of course, that Re Jana, she's the main character in the book, is asking. She says, "Well, if your God is going to drown the world, if your God is going to bring a flood, then why don't you pick a different God?" So to me, as, that is the question I want to ask. Why would you trust a God that at this moment, doesn't come back to give us the right book. You know, through history, he's given the Jewish people a book. And he's given the Christians a book. And he's given the Muslim books, and so there's big similarities between these books, but there's also contradictions.

I would think that, you know, he needs to come back and create clarity and not let... he shouldn't let us fight over who's right. He should make it clear. So, my personal answer to your question, "Should we trust," I wouldn't."

"BILL MOYERS: At first you think he's saving a good man from a calamity. Then you realize he's saving Noah from a good God who is also a bad God. This God is one and the same, good and bad.

ANNE PROVOOST: Right. And this God is destroying his own creation. So, you wonder, you know, why do you create something that will turn out to be this bad? And then you're going to probably punish them for it? Maybe there's something wrong in the making.

BILL MOYERS: Not only that, but he chooses Noah, who we thought was a good man. But the moment the flood is over, Noah comes off of the ark, gets drunk, abuses his grandson."

Burst of Links

• As everyone knows OS X's default behaviour is to replace a folder not merge it. Luckily, there's Apple's free FileMerge utility.


• Peter Singer: The Ethics of What We Eat mentioning his books "Unsanctifying Human Life: Essays on Ethics" and "The Way We Eat : Why Our Food Choices Matter" - providing more than one example of the differences between moral and religious. His entry on animals also reinforces this. His essay "The Singer Solution to World Poverty" reminded me of the recent Richard Curtis movie "The Girl In The Café".


• The Asymmetric Web "Then began an awful period - which continues to this day, sadly -- of companies developing intranet applications and then concluding, erroneously, that the application can be deployed on the Web by just flicking the proverbial switch."


• Redux: Enterprise Software Licensing on Life Support "...by 2008 conventional software licenses will account for less than 10% of total revenues for all software companies, and less than 20% for leading enterprise search vendors..."


• Converting Between XML and JSON "In an ideal world, the resulting JSON structure can be converted back to its original XML document easily. Thus it seems worthwhile to discuss some common patterns as the foundation of a potentially bidirectional conversion process between XML and JSON."


• On First-Order-Logic Databases "We have demonstrated an equivalence between dependency statements (or functional dependencies) of a relational database on the one hand and of implicational statements of propositional logic on the other hand." Hopefully this means what I think it means.

Festive Flesh

Reading this about Capybara "The popularity of capybara meat in Venezuela is attributed to a 16th century theological decision by the Roman Catholic Church. Responding to queries by Venezuelan Catholics, the Church declared the capybara meat to be equivalent to fish meat, and thus allowed its consumption during Lent [1]. The decision may have been taken on the basis of incomplete or inaccurate descriptions of the capybara available to the Church authorities in Rome; but it was never reversed, and to this day the capybara is the only warm-blooded animal with that status. (This story should be treated with caution, however, since similar claims have been circulated concerning other semi-aquatic mammals, such as beavers and muskrats[2].)"

Intelligent Design comes to Australia

Intelligent Design "Scientists across the country are outraged.

So what's all the fuss about Intelligent Design?

Intelligent Design or ID, is being put forward as a serious scientific theory. It's even found it's way into some high schools."

They made mention of The Wedge Document which outlines a way to conquer the world. Apparently you need more than a death ray these days.

Maybe some Gerin Oil "dry-out" clinics need to be created. Adam Bosworth recently decloaked an article related to it too.

Richard Dawkins on the War

Bin Laden's victory "Whatever anyone may say about weapons of mass destruction, or about Saddam's savage brutality to his own people, the reason Bush can now get away with his war is that a sufficient number of Americans, including, apparently, Bush himself, see it as revenge for 9/11. This is worse than bizarre. It is pure racism and/or religious prejudice. Nobody has made even a faintly plausible case that Iraq had anything to do with the atrocity. It was Arabs that hit the World Trade Centre, right? So let's go and kick Arab ass. Those 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, right? And Eye-raqis are Muslims, right? That does it. We're gonna go in there and show them some hardware. Shock and awe? You bet. "

"Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for Iraq, but he never posed a threat outside his immediate neighbourhood. George Bush is a catastrophe for the world. And a dream for Bin Laden."

This is so dripping with vitriol. Richard Dawkins has previously written about how religion has caused so many of the world's problems and now he points out that American democracy may also be to blame.