WordPress 2.7 upgrade

13 December 2008 · Comments 

Well, I think that was the most painless WordPress upgrade ever.

If you see any problems, please drop me a comment.

WordPress 2.7

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Another christian not quite getting it

27 November 2008 · Comments 

While trawling the interwebtubes, I came across MadPriest’s blog, who has a post about the recent BHA “atheist bus”1 affair.

MadPriest, as he likes to be known, seems to be a relatively liberal type of christian (as most UK anglicans are), but seems to take some exception to the actions of the BHA and its supporters after reading this article in The Telegraph:

I fully understand atheism and possibly spend more time considering it for myself than most agnostics. But these so-called humanists I just don’t get. They are just so destructive - they always campaign for the negative whatever they say about themselves. If they truly were “people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs” they would just STFU and live and let live.

I guess about 5% of the English population is part of the”established church.” The bravest we ever get nowadays is to lecture people about spending too much money at Christmas and to make comments like “the rich are responsible for the rest of us being poor.” In other words, bog-standard humanist beliefs. Our church schools are exactly the same as any 100% state school in respect of the curriculum. They may have very bland and wishy-washy Christian assemblies, but any student can opt out them (although even the Muslim students don’t tend to).

We are not financed by the state. We have one privilege - the right of a few bishops to sit in the non-legislative house of parliament and nobody, except the bishops, give a toss about that. In return our old ladies pay for the upkeep of most of our country’s architectural treasures.

So what are these English humanists after?

Do they think that if they get rid of the Christians their enemy will disappear along with them?

I don’t think so - he’ll just change his name to Allah and then they will have something to complain about.

I won’t comment on the £35k grant given to the BHA for their research as his comment doesn’t deal with it and, besides, eight other organisations were given similar grants for the same purpose, but I did comment on his comment, where I wanted to clear up a few “details”, and which was as follows:

The Telegraph wrote: ‘The BHA says it is dedicated to bringing about “a world without religious privilege or discrimination” and represents “people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs”.

You wrote: ‘But these so-called humanists I just don’t get. They are just so destructive - they always campaign for the negative whatever they say about themselves. If they truly were “people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs” they would just STFU and live and let live.’

It’s rather amusing that you copy (but seemingly didn’t read) the motives of the BHA, but extrapolate their own definition of themselves to create a strawman. Let’s see those two original quotes together:

“[P]eople who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs”… seeking “a world without religious privilege or discrimination”.

Please, just think about that for a moment.

If anything, they campaign is to remove the “negative”: discrimination over the parts of the population by promotion of religion over non-religion, discrimination over the rest of the population by the promotion of your religion over other religions, the ability for the heads of your religion (unelected by the rest of the population) to assume a right to represent/browbeat same, etc.

You’re wrong that “nobody, except the bishops, give a toss about” their being in the HoL; there are plenty of us that don’t care for the church’s special privileges in this regard. Admittedly there are also many of us that don’t care for the unelectedness of the HoL at all, but that’s a separate issue.

As for state finance, churches can, under certain circumstances, receive public money, and of course the CoE has either a reduced of or exemption from taxation (depending on the mode of the finance in question). This can make a huge difference to fundraising. If it doesn’t, I guess the church would happily abrogate its tax privileges, no?

If the “architectural treasures” truly belong to the country as you claim, then why not have the church donate them to the country (i.e. an organisation like The National Trust) and then have the tax-payer provide for their upkeep in the standard way such things are done? I suspect, the church wants to keep these as part of their £5.67 billion portfolio of property and other investments. Considering this sanction of gambling (sorry, how impolitic of me, “good stewardship of assets aligned neatly with the Parable of the Talents”) somehow I don’t think it’s just a bunch of concerned tea-drinking little old ladies keeping the church in eucharist goblets and stained glass. I’ll say nothing of the church’s approbation for lottery funds (PDF) or funding for church schools.

I’m sure the BHA and others of that ilk will happily “just STFU and live and let live” when those of church choose to do the same. Perhaps you could give Slee, Williams, Sentamu and the rest of the talking heads a nod in this direction?

You wrote: “So what are these English humanists after?

“Do they think that if they get rid of the Christians their enemy will disappear along with them?

“I don’t think so - he’ll just change his name to Allah and then they will have something to complain about.”

It’s just occured to me: I don’t think I’ve ever seen passive-aggressive fatwa-envy before. Should I give you props for that?

I’ll mention it again seeing as it doesn’t appear to have registered: “a world without religious privilege or discrimination”. This is hardly the same thing as “a world without religion”. Christians are not their enemy, christian (and other religious) privilege is what’s of concern.

By the way, they’re the British Humanist Association. And, if they really are a bona fide “religion” (in which case they should receive the same privileges as other religions, should they not? Either that, or denigrating humanism as “just another religion” as some of a theistic bent are wont to do on occasion [as exemplified in some of the comments here] simply undermines the assumed supercilious position of their own religion) then please direct me to their articles of faith, their scriptures, their dogmas and diktats, their traditions, their places of worship, their high priests and all of the other trappings of religiosity. I’ve obviously missed them in my travels.

Hopefully he’ll think about this a little and reconsider his attitude towards the BHA and other secular organisations. He seems otherwise like a rather reasonable christian.

  1. how I dislike that term [↩]

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Pedro deals with the “one in a million” fallacy

3 December 2007 · Comments 

Pedro over at Way Of The Mind has recently posted about the fallacy often used by creationists to argue that “life could never happen by chance”. Go and read it, then come back, and I’ll give you my take on it.

Back? Ok.

One of the things that Pedro didn’t address is his post was the notion of the passage of time. He’s quite correct in saying that rolling a dice however many time to get 66666666666666666666 is extremely unlikely in any realistic lifetime, but that’s if we think that all life came about because of a lucky of a one-time hit. Thankfully, that’s not what evolution (in the timescales offered by the evidence of geophysics, palaeontology, cosmology and the other long-time sciences) predicts.

So, carrying on with Pedro’s dice analogy, and written using simplified terms from the language of biology, I decided to knock-up this little Ruby program (because it’s relatively easy to read, even for a non-programmer) to demonstrate this:

AVAILABLE_GENES = (1..6).to_a
WINNING_GENES = [6]
SUCCESSFUL_GENERATIONS = 15
@genome = ""
@generations = 0
 
while @genome.length < SUCCESSFUL_GENERATIONS
  @generations = @generations + 1
  @point_mutation = AVAILABLE_GENES[rand(AVAILABLE_GENES.size)]
  puts "Generation #{@generations}: " + @genome + @point_mutation.to_s
  @genome << @point_mutation.to_s if WINNING_GENES.include?(@point_mutation)
end
 
puts "Successful genome #{@genome} took #{@generations} generations."

I’ll explain a little about the program works here:

AVAILABLE_GENES is the range of possible “genes”, including both “good” (aiding to survival and reproduction) and “bad” (no surviving offspring) mutation possibilities (in this case, the range of values from 1 to 5)
WINNING_GENES is the list of “genes” that allows a generation of offspring to survive and reproduce (in this case, just 6)
SUCCESSFUL_GENERATIONS is the number of generations of surviving offspring that we want
@genome is the “genome” of the current generation
@generations is a counter to see how many generations that we’ve tried so far

When we run this program, it adds “mutations” (in the form of dice rolls) to a “genome”. If the new mutation is advantageous (i.e. a ‘6′) and aids in survival and reproduction then the gene is added to the genome. If the gene is bad (not a ‘6′) then that generation dies without reproducing, and the current genome remains the same.

Each generation, it tries to “reproduce” with a new gene mutation, the successful survive and the unsuccessful remains the same

Of course, this program is (deliberately) incredibly simplistic (it doesn’t take into account populations, retrograde mutations, what constitutes a successful gene, predators, environment, etc.) but it should serve to illustrate the basic point that a successful genome can be arrived at quite easily over time given enough opportunity to reproduce.

Running the program, what do we see? I’ll save the full listings, but I’ll run it a few times to see what we get (further runs are truncated for space):

Desktop:$ ruby dice_simulation.rb 
Generation 1: 2
Generation 2: 4
Generation 3: 6
Generation 4: 66
Generation 5: 661
Generation 6: 663
Generation 7: 664
Generation 8: 661
Generation 9: 661
Generation 10: 661
Generation 11: 662
Generation 12: 663
Generation 13: 662
Generation 14: 661
Generation 15: 665
Generation 16: 662
Generation 17: 665
Generation 18: 666
Generation 19: 6661
Generation 20: 6663
Generation 21: 6666
Generation 22: 66662
Generation 23: 66666
Generation 24: 666666
Generation 25: 6666664
Generation 26: 6666664
Generation 27: 6666665
Generation 28: 6666666
Generation 29: 66666661
Generation 30: 66666661
Generation 31: 66666661
Generation 32: 66666666
Generation 33: 666666661
Generation 34: 666666663
Generation 35: 666666666
Generation 36: 6666666665
Generation 37: 6666666664
Generation 38: 6666666661
Generation 39: 6666666663
Generation 40: 6666666664
Generation 41: 6666666666
Generation 42: 66666666661
Generation 43: 66666666663
Generation 44: 66666666663
Generation 45: 66666666664
Generation 46: 66666666664
Generation 47: 66666666664
Generation 48: 66666666661
Generation 49: 66666666665
Generation 50: 66666666664
Generation 51: 66666666663
Generation 52: 66666666666
Generation 53: 666666666665
Generation 54: 666666666664
Generation 55: 666666666665
Generation 56: 666666666666
Generation 57: 6666666666663
Generation 58: 6666666666661
Generation 59: 6666666666664
Generation 60: 6666666666662
Generation 61: 6666666666666
Generation 62: 66666666666661
Generation 63: 66666666666665
Generation 64: 66666666666661
Generation 65: 66666666666662
Generation 66: 66666666666665
Generation 67: 66666666666666
Generation 68: 666666666666661
Generation 69: 666666666666662
Generation 70: 666666666666665
Generation 71: 666666666666666
Successful genome 666666666666666 took 71 generations.
Desktop:$ ruby dice_simulation.rb 
Generation 1: 3
...
Generation 7: 6
Generation 8: 62
Generation 9: 63
Generation 10: 65
...
Generation 16: 66
Generation 17: 665
...
Generation 27: 666
Generation 28: 6663
...
Generation 42: 6661
Generation 43: 6666
Generation 44: 66664
Generation 45: 66662
Generation 46: 66665
Generation 47: 66666
Generation 48: 666662
...
Generation 55: 666666
Generation 56: 6666662
...
Generation 62: 6666666
Generation 63: 66666664
...
Generation 78: 66666666
Generation 79: 666666665
Generation 80: 666666662
Generation 81: 666666666
Generation 82: 6666666666
Generation 83: 66666666663
...
Generation 90: 66666666666
Generation 91: 666666666663
Generation 92: 666666666665
Generation 93: 666666666666
Generation 94: 6666666666664
...
Generation 97: 6666666666666
Generation 98: 66666666666664
Generation 99: 66666666666662
Generation 100: 66666666666661
...
Generation 107: 66666666666666
Generation 108: 666666666666665
Generation 109: 666666666666662
Generation 110: 666666666666666
Successful genome 666666666666666 took 110 generations.
Desktop:$ ruby dice_simulation.rb 
Generation 1: 6
Generation 2: 61
Generation 3: 66
Generation 4: 665
Generation 5: 665
Generation 6: 666
Generation 7: 6662
Generation 8: 6662
Generation 9: 6666
Generation 10: 66662
Generation 11: 66665
Generation 12: 66666
Generation 13: 666663
...
Generation 23: 666666
Generation 24: 6666662
...
Generation 31: 6666666
Generation 32: 66666663
Generation 33: 66666666
Generation 34: 666666663
...
Generation 42: 666666666
Generation 43: 6666666664
...
Generation 48: 6666666666
Generation 49: 66666666663
Generation 50: 66666666666
Generation 51: 666666666665
Generation 52: 666666666666
Generation 53: 6666666666662
...
Generation 75: 6666666666666
Generation 76: 66666666666664
...
Generation 84: 66666666666666
Generation 85: 666666666666662
...
Generation 88: 666666666666666
Successful genome 666666666666666 took 88 generations.

As we can see, each time we run this, we get different numbers for how many generations it can take to get a successful gene, and sometimes there are 10 or 15 generations without a successful mutation. However we can also see that, eventually, there are successful mutations that add to the genome.

Another thing to note is that if we increase the range of AVAILABLE_GENES to, say 1..9, it will usually take more generations to see the target genome come about. If, however, we add genes to WINNING_GENES (e.g. [1,6,8]) we will reduce the number of generations required.

In fact, in relation to the one-time hit that I mention above, that’s exactly what the creationists propose, and who could blame them for invoking magic in the form of creator-gods with something so unlikely?

My point? One way we can get to a specific genome is by *poofing* it into existence in one step. The other is by adding a little bit per generation over a long period of time.

While evolution doesn’t deal with trying to achieve a specific genome, I know which situation the science supports better.

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The efficacy of abstinence

3 December 2007 · Comments 

A big /hattip to Fall of Hate for alerting me to this gem from Evil Milk:

Abstinence: 99.9999% effective

B-E-A-utiful.

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Tidying up

18 November 2007 · Comments 

I’ve now settled on a new blog style (comments are welcome - I still need to customise it a bit to my own particular preferences) but during the update to Wordpress 2.3, the tagging (which I used in favour of categories) seems to have been majorly messed up, so it seems that I’m having to go back and tag each post all over again.

*sigh*

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Blog mess

15 November 2007 · Comments 

Please excuse the mess. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.3, and have taken this opportunity to come up with a new theme.

You’re welcome to stick around and watch it take shape, but for the moment, it’s going to look pretty bare-bones for a few days.

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Termites and Caananites

8 October 2007 · Comments 

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Reality and Love Biblically-Justified Genocide.

Christian CADRE (Colligation of Apologetics Debate Research & Evangelism) (sic) show us that old fashioned good-time fire and brimstone love of their old testament god:

Knowing full well that some atheist will accuse me of justifying genocide… they accuse Christians of being the ones who are unable to see nuances in positions, a total disregard of the reasoning that the destruction of entire groupings of people may be morally acceptable when taking all factors into account shows a lack of careful thought that it is appalling.

I just love that [k]nowing full well that some atheist will accuse me of justifying genocide bit.

Well, yes one likely will, because you are. It’s exactly this sort of rationalisation that gives religious terrorists the impetus and perceived justification for them to do what they do (or attempt to do).

Here’s the meat (after a bunch of scripture and some making shit up to justify it all):

Thus, contrary to the assertion of skeptics, the destruction of the Caananites was not an evil. It was the Canaanites who were evil, and it was the judgment of God through the Israelites on the Caananites in those cities were led to their destruction. We can be confident that the people destroyed were irredeemably wicked and unrighteous. We can be confident that there were no righteous people among those destroyed.

Can’t you just feel the certainty, the absolutism that his chosen scripture is such a perfect record of history? There’s no doubt in this idiot’s mind that he might be wrong for taking that dreaded tome as a literal record, nor one shred of compassion, nary a jot of humanity for the victims of this genocide (whether it actually happened or not).

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I despise magical thinking.

/hattip to Steven Carr in his comment on Debunking Christianity.

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The evolution of nullifidian.net

29 September 2007 · Comments 

Since I’ve been tagged by the ever vigilant TW over at Why Don’t You Blog? with the “evolution meme” (I’m sure Dawkins wouldn’t agree with the use of either word ;-D) I thought I’d give it a go an explain how nullifidian.net has progressed since I started it.

While I’ve been a blogger since 2001, I didn’t start blogging properly nor consistently about religion, theocracy and other stupidity until mid-2006, when this blog originally started out as In Defence of Reality, hosted over at blogger.com after I became severely hacked off at Ruth Kelly’s catholic (in both senses of the word) ineptitude. Read more

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Faith schools, why not faith hospitals?

28 December 2006 · Comments 

Atheist Ethicist has written an interesting and thoughtful article about the idea of faith hospitals.

I wonder if/when the UK government, to back up it’s proclivity to support faith-based institutions (as demonstrated in it’s increasing promotion of faith schools), will begin introducing the concept of faith hospitals. We’ll need something to replace the many hospitals that are currently being closed, and the churches seem to have plenty of money to spread their madness.

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New web site launched

24 November 2006 · Comments 

This new weblog is for the purposes of highlighting the nonsense from those who have an unhealthy obsession or compulsion with the “supernatural” or the “divine” that is increasingly threatening to insinuate itself into real life, affecting not just those who chose to believe in such things, but those of us who do not, for whatever reason.

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