For What It’s Worth…

…here’s my 2c on the current PZ vs. Rationalia mud-flinging debacle that has even dragged in Michael Nugent, who really only just wants us all to get along while we further the true causes of the atheist/skeptic movement.

Rape is not a joke. I personally don’t find jokes with rape as the subject matter funny, nor do a lot of other people. Intellectually I understand the irony of the Nirvana song “Rape Me” but the subject matter leaves a terrible taste in my mouth. This is ok. Some people find those kind of jokes funny, and that’s ok too.

For anyone who’s out of touch with these slightly-on-the-fringe events, a guy called Pappa on Rationalia.com forums created a thread asking “Would it be immoral to rape a Skepchick?” Then PZ Myers picked up on the thread, and posted a crude condemnation of not just Pappa but the forum as a whole on the back of this thread.

The Trouble With Porn…

…is that even smart people like to misrepresent and attack it. Taslima Nasreen says “Pornography is exclusively for men’s pleasure” and that she is against pornography in that she is against abuse and degradation. She is, however, for erotica and provides the contrasting definitions of pornography and erotica, attributed to Diana Russell.

Pornography: Material that combines sex and/or the exposure of genitals with abuse or degradation in a manner that appears to endorse, condone, or encourage such behavior.

Erotica: Sexually suggestive or arousing material that is free of sexism, racism, and homophobia, and respectful of all human beings and animals portrayed.

In Focus: The Bible

A lot of the time Christians will point to the Bible and say, “look, Jesus said if we believe in Him, and accept the rest of the stuff regarding how we live our lives etc… we’ll be rewarded with eternal life at His side.”

If I took you aside and said, “Look, I have this magic door, okay? Now, imagine the most utopian situation you can. Naked, buxom women everywhere, money, fame, whatever you like. Right, now if you just believe in me, when you walk through that door, it will all be waiting for you there.”  You get that look on your face like it’s all far too good to be true, but your reticence is tempered by your imagination and desire. You hum and haw and you spend a few minutes trying to peek behind, around and even through the magic door but all to no avail and so then you cunningly ask me what the catch is. To which I smilingly respond, “Well, if you don’t believe in me and you walk through that door, you’ll find eternal pain, torment, damnation and suffering with no hope of any form of reprieve. Ever.”

This is Christianity’s offer. Would you seriously consider it? Seriously…? Or would you realise that it is not quite the “offer you can’t refuse” it appears to be and simply tell me to go fuck myself?

Peace,
dj357

Objectivity means caring about Truth

This, however, has clearly flown right over the head of Fr. Vincent Twomey, a retired Professor of Moral Theology. He prepared a series of course work for Hibernia College, a teacher training college in Dublin, and his course notes in the religious education module dealing with non-religion made claims such as “What bothers very few of its latter-day exponents is the fact that atheist humanism produced the worst horrors history has ever witnessed, namely Nazism, Fascism and Marxism…” and “Atheism has had, historically speaking, a negative effect on society.”

Listening to this clip of Mr. Twomey speaking with Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland, one may notice that Mr. Twomey makes a large effort to try and claim that both his course work and Catholicism in general are, indeed, objective. As the title of this blog post says, however, being objective means caring about truth and claiming that “atheist humanism produced the worst horrors history has ever witnessed, namely Nazism, Fascism and Marxism…” means throwing truth out the window, thereby discounting any form of objectivity.

As mentioned by Michael in the audio clip Nazism, Fascism and Marxism are all unique ideologies entirely distinct from both atheism (itself not an ideology) and humanism. Furthermore, humanism is an ideology that is exquisitely focused upon preventing large-scale suffering, which is completely at odds with the results of Nazism and Fascism. I won’t delve into the issue of atheism in Nazi and Fascist parties and states as Michael covered enough relevant examples in the audio clip and in many of his recent debates, but I will reiterate that neither Stalin nor Hitler committed their crimes against humanity on the back of a lack of belief in God/god(s)(aka atheism).

To be objective one must favour truth and fact above all else, and Mr. Twomey’s thinking is cleared clouded by his Catholic education. It would be hard, I’d imagine, to be a Catholic Priest and a Professor of Moral Theology and be wholly objective and critical when discussing religion.

Peace,
dj357

C.O.D. Modern Warfare 3 Review

Having read reviews of MW3 and finding a few of them (and a lot of internet people) saying that it was shit because it’s no different than the others I decided I would check it out for myself and try to be objective about it (in so far as that’s possible for an opinionated gamer such as myself).

The first thing I have to say is, yes, it is no different from MW and MW2 and in a lot of ways no different from any other “AAA” FPS in the last 5 years. The story isn’t terribly immersive and the characters, while pithy, tend to spew over-used cliches. It works for the whole ‘action movie’ aspect of the Call of Duty series but it can be a bit grating at times. The other major thing I have to say is shame on Activision and Infinity Ward. The Gaming Liberty‘s review of MW3 says:

“The story is hardly inspiring, the characters are as transparent as ever and it’s just as throwaway as you think it is, but who cares?”

They then go on to give the game a score of 9/10. I’m sorry but the story and characters in a game are worth FAR more than a measly 10%. If the story and characters of a Legend of Zelda game or an Uncharted game or any other game worth spending hours and money on were worth that much then they would not be the great games they are. Story and characters are there to immerse you in the world, without that you are simply working some buttons and levers to achieve some random objective which may or may not be fun. Even cutesy, small-scale games like Patapon and Mad Blocker Alpha have the story and characters being far more than a measly 10% of the entire game as that pretty much IS the game.

World Atheist Convention: Day 2 (Super, Super Late Edition)

As I haven’t been blogging for months, I completely missed the fact that I never actually posted this piece. While it’s remarkably out of date (back in June for cripes’ sake!) it’s still got enough content in it that I can’t leave it sitting in my drafts. Enjoy!

[08/06/2011]
Unfortunately due to a lack of internet access and other things during the weekend I wasn’t able to keep hugely up to date with blog posts on the conference and I also missed the early sessions on Sunday morning, which is a shame as I missed the awesome Maryam Namazie who I hear was on form as ever, but I’m here to add my voice to the many others reporting from the event.

Why Do We Believe?

It’s been a long, long time since I blogged, so I think it’s time I got back into the swing of things. Let’s start with a deep question, why do we believe?

Why do we believe that a 2000 year old jew lives on in some sort supernatural plane of existence and interacts with us on a daily basis? Why do we believe that there will come a day in the near future when the entire world faces judgement at the hands of the Abrahamic God and only the worthy will be ‘saved’ while the rest will suffer eternally? Why do we believe that there is a life after death?

Often times it’s said that it comes down to where one is born and raised and the pre-existing beliefs of one’s friends and family that defines what we believe. While this certainly tends to shape the flavour of our beliefs, I think the belief itself pertains far more to an internal requirement than any external factors. A lot of people tend to proclaim “well, you have to believe in something, right? Otherwise, what is there to believe in?” This seems to speak to an internal requirement that there be something greater than ourselves to believe in. In my travels and discussions and internal ramblings it seems to me that this is far more indicative of having a belief in something supernatural than merely place of birth and upbringing.

This has only recently become a coherent thought in my head, and it needs time to develop so I may revisit this in the future but I felt it was necessary to get it out there and potentially get feedback from others on it. So, what are your thoughts?

Peace,
dj357

World Atheist Convention 2011: Day 1

Aloha and greetings from sunny Dublin! Unusually warm and sunny for Ireland despite the time of the year but rather nice to start off the weekend of the WAC 2011!

I’d like to just stick my oar in on a topic that came up and piqued my interest. It’s the issue of why do we have a gathering in the first place? Surely all we could talk about is our shared lack of belief. It conjures up a rather dolorous image of a group of people twiddling their thumbs and constantly asking each other if they believe in God yet. The simple answer is because we are the minority. The wonderful point was made that in a society where most everyone collected stamps and thought it was a moral requirement, there would be groups of aphilatelists popping up discussing how to live their lives well while not collecting stamps. The same is true of atheists. The long answer is that in a world that is primarily religious, a world where the common consensus is that religion of some form is a necessary foundation for a moral life, a world where people are assumed to be religious, a world where social and legal policies greatly reflect the religious beliefs of the people and their elected members of government it is vital the people who don’t collect stamps stand up and say “Hey, hang on a second. How dare you accuse us of being amoral when you impose a pre-existing, socially conceived moral framework onto your religion and then try to pass it off to us as having its origins in your delusion of choice.”

That is why we have conventions.

Some Favourites

I figure it’s time for another personal post so this one is just going to be a small group of my Top 5 Somethings.

This post will be my Top 5 Vocalists:
Randy Blythe – Lamb of God
Bjorn ‘Speed’ Strid – Soilwork
Rob Halford – Judas Priest
Mikael Åkerfeldt – Opeth
B. Dez Fafara – Devildriver

Bjorn Strid has to take the crown as his range is insane, from wailing heights to make any female gospel singer envious to the crisp, clean depths of utter death metal growling. And yet he never falls prey to the common traps of brutal death metal where everything is guttural and incomprehensible, his growls and screams are all pristine and quite often are paired with delicate and engaging melodies. If I could sing like anyone else it would have to be Bjorn Strid.

Randy Blythe is an extremely close second however as, while he can’t quite match Bjorn’s wide range, he more than makes up for that in fully developed sounds in his lower ranges. He can go from high, punchy throat-wrenching screams all the way down to deep and punishing growls that are drowning in rich bass tones. I’ll never quite reach the full range of Bjorn but I do a mean Randy and Lamb of God are one of my favourites bands to f**k s**t up to!

Rob Halford needs no real description as one of the founding members of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal that brought us genre-defining greats such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden which still to this day influence many, many metal bands. While Bjorn has an awesome range, Rob Halford owns hands down in that regard bringing high-pitched to all new heights while maintaining a powerful low-end that brings great flavour to Judas Priest’s palette of sounds. He’s also helped define the metal look of leather and motorbikes and doing all that while being super camp is something you truly have to respect. Something that all youngsters unsure of themselves can look to for support.

B. Dez Fafara is just plain awesome, every song he sings sounds so brutal that you can nearly imagine blood pouring from his tattered throat but he pulls it all off with such skill and colour that I personally listen to so-called “black metal” and come away shaking my head in confusion.

Last, but far from least we have the inimitable Mikael Åkerfeldt who like Bjorn, another Swede, manages to have an astounding range and depth to his voice that gives his clean vocals a passion and emotion that is not always as easy to find as one would imagine and yet his death metal vocals are truly deserving of their name. Treading a finer line between B. Dez and Randy Blythe at their most brutal, Mikael manages to give a classic death metal sound a refreshing upgrade.

So, that’s my Top 5 Vocalists. I know my choice is really limited to the world of metal but given my wide range of musical taste, I personally find that metal vocalists, when they know what they’re doing are truly some of the best vocalists in any genre. The level of skill needed to pull off the sounds that Bjorn, Rob and co. do is really high and it lends itself automatically to any other genre. This is why you end up with bands like Within Temptation, Nightwish and Epica who have highly trained vocalists, even if metal wasn’t where their training was focused.

Peace,
dj357

Communication in the 21st Century

This is yet another post that his been lingering in my drafts during my absence from the blogosphere but still quite relevant, just not recent as mentioned in the post

[15/05/2011]
Having recently read an article in Red magazine about the sea change of modes of communication over the last 20 years since the advent of email, SMS and tweets i feel the need to make my voice heard.

The article, written by Liz Fraser in Red magazine May 2011 edition, tells us:

Of course, ‘Yours sincerely’ would sound far too stuffy and heavy-handed these days, but ‘xxx ;-)’? When did that become okay when asking your boss to approve budgets?

Well, first of all, unless you work in a very informal setting with few total employees, it still isn’t okay. Her initial premise is flawed, however, as ‘Yours sincerely’ or my preferred ‘Kind regards’ is far from “too stuffy” in a business setting. Even if you are bosom buddies with your boss, you really should be keeping informal speech to informal settings.

Worse than this, which it could be argued is a minor point and highly subject to context and interpretation, she then goes on to point out that communication is 20% the words you say and 80% how you say them, making face to face communication the most effective method of communication. This important 80% is missing from most electronic interactions, she rightly points out, however she claims that to make up for this it is totally acceptable and reasonable that we use emoticons or smileys to add the tone and emotion that is missing from these interactions.

While this may be correct in the informal world where text messages become minefields of potential misunderstandings without smileys to help differentiate between serious and sarcastic, playful and pissed off, this is most certainly not the case in business. If hundreds of years of multilingual literature can evoke crystal clear imagery and unambiguous descriptions and definitions solely through the use of well constructed syntax why then should we say that we have magically come to a point now, in the 21st century, where words are not powerful enough to be unequivocal in their meaning?

Peace,
dj357

A male perspective on women, clothing and feminism

(a little disclaimer: apologies to transgender and intersex folk, I am not ignoring you, this article is just aimed directly at the social conventions around the prototypical gender roles. It’s regressive and it sucks but that’s life it would seem.)

Spurred on by an internal discussion with myself on the topic of the French ban on burkas etc… I’d like to offer my own perspective on how women, and their clothes, are perceived in society. It’s admittedly a male opinion, but a largely unusual one given the standard of stereotypical male thinking.

On the subject of burkas first of all I must admit I’m a little torn. I rail against the idea of enforced dress codes and uniforms etc… and I’m of the opinion that people should be allowed wear what they want when they want. At the same time, however, I’m vehemently opposed to the further oppression of women at the hands of vicious patriarchies in the form of forcing them to hide their bodies in cloth sacks in order not to inflame the lust of men (alongside clearly hypocritical claims that men are perfect and women are the weak gender).

A Crysis on the Homefront

Aloha! Given my recent discussion of FPS games and the highlight of one of my referenced articles being Homefront, I figured I’d give a bit of an update now that I’ve finished playing it and also pair it with my initial impressions of Crysis 2.

The End of Desktop Computing…?

This article from Gizmodo (yes you may be noticing my trend of liking gawker sites) discusses the rise of Touch Computing, in the dominant form of the iPad, and it’s effects upon the heretofore dominance of Desktop Computing from the point of view of heavy content creation.

Lots of lucky people around the world understand the joy and the freedom afforded by tablets like the iPad when surfing the web, watching movies and flicking through photo albums but, equally, a large number of people are bridging the gap between Content Creation on a Desktop to doing the same on a touch-screen tablet. So, is the iPad the beginning of the end of Desktop Computing?

Video Games, Books and Art

Having recently read many articles on the web, particularly on Kotaku, around the ideas of video games as art and how long single player first-person shooters should be I feel compelled to weigh in, in my own space as opposed to waging comment wars with other people on various different sites and forums.

This article speaks about the thorny issue of the length of single-player first person shooters, and the comments highlight some of the diverse opinions on the matter. While I know that, like many of these art-based discussions, ultimately most of this stuff boils down to subjective preference, I think it’s important to look at these topics, insofar as is possible, from objective standpoints.

Before we move ahead, I highly recommend you also check out this article tackling the “video games as art” discussion which touches on a lot of topics I’ll be bringing in also.

Beliefs vs. Fact

This has long been a debate of various sorts and forms in the non-believing community but I think I’ve finally figured out how I want to phrase my argument in relation to it.

We have these things called beliefs, that quite often are not based on evidence, yet are still robust, rational and logical. For example “I believe that peanut butter and jam make a good sandwich filling” is a rational belief as I’m basing it upon my own experience and the experience of others. The problem with beliefs though is that they can quite often be wrong and can also disagree with both established consensus and even reality itself. For example “I believe that I can see Angels who guide me through life and watch over me.” On the one hand, a lot of people don’t share this belief, and on the other there’s no actual evidence for it outside of one person’s subjective experience.

We also have things called facts. These puppies are a hell of a lot more useful. For example “so long as the Earth maintains it orbit around the sun, the sun will always rise the next day” this is an established fact. We can link the rising of the sun to the structure of our solar system and based upon that establish logically and rationally that the above example is indeed a fact. The important thing to note here is the details may differ or change with new scientific understandings or discoveries, for example it could potentially happen that the times we now attribute to sunrise and sunset across the globe could migrate slowly forcing us to alter our current timezone system (it’s not likely, but certainly not impossible) but still the rising of the sun would remain a fact. So too can we say that while the individual mechanics underlying the Theory of Evolution* may change, or more rather our understanding of those underlying mechanics, the theory as a whole is an undeniable fact.

That word “undeniable” is a key one though. With beliefs one simply believes or disbelieves. With facts, however one can accept it or deny it. While accepting it requires no active belief (we don’t believe in gravity, we accept it as a fact of nature) denying facts requires some active belief. To deny a fact such as gravity, one needs to actively believe either that people are wrong and it is not a fact or believe that universe does not in fact function the way the so-called fact would imply.

This important distinction between disbelief and denial is rather profound and it’s effect can be seen in modern parlance. People who doubt that Hitler and his Nazi government put millions of Jews to death during WWII are not called Holocaust-disbelievers. The Holocaust is not a belief to be debated upon such as Deism or Theism etc… it is an established fact of history. To doubt the Holocaust happened is to deny a fact of the world. As I mentioned above, some details may change over time, we may yet uncover secret documents that detail that someone other than we thought was actually signing the orders in Auschwitz for the murders (unlikely) but the overall fact will remain a fact.

With all this in mind I think it’s time we stop asking/responding to questions in the form of “Do you believe in [insert established scientific fact here]” and start demanding that the question become “Do you accept [insert established scientific fact here]“

I do not believe in a God or gods. I do not “deny” God or gods as they are not Fact. I do not “believe” in Evolution, I accept Evolution. These are important phrases and important kinds of phraseology that I think would serve not only the non-believing community well, but mankind in general also.

* – It’s NOT just a theory. It’s a Theory.