dress code…
One of the things I couldn’t help noticing on religious forums is an obsession about what everybody wears to religious services. The threads I’ve seen have all turned snarky, if not outright vicious, very quickly.
From my point of view, it’s yet another strike against organized religion. What is more important - what you get from or contribute to a service or what you wear? Likewise, those that get their knickers in a twist because somebody doesn’t meet their fashion expectations should really take a step back and examine the state of their spiritual progress. Get a life, in other words.
The only times I set foor in a church is in the context of either a wedding or a funeral and I will wear whatever I would for the occasion in the first place. In other words, I don’t have occasion to scandalize.
In general, the reasons given in these threads strike me as disingenuous and hypocritical. It is clearly an issue of dress code and few are honest enough to put it in these terms. Most of the supporters of the dress code realize that nobody should be prevented from group worship unless suitably dressed, so they resort to making it an issue of disrespect against the deity. This boggles my mind. An omnimax deity that gives a damn about what’s on people’s skin, as opposed to what’s in their hearts? After 2000 years, the staunch believers have to dig in their heels about such petty issues?
All I can say is that religious forums are a great tool to preserve or even cause atheism. 
Friday, February 25, 2005
disk defragging
Since the answer is a bit too long for the shoutbox, here goes.
Your disk is just a long list of individual storage buckets. Since these buckets are too small for many data files and not something a user would want to work with, you actually use a layer of abstraction (called a file system) to hide the gory details. Thus, the file system keeps track of what parts of files are where; in the Windows world, FAT and NTFS are the two primary file systems used.
Some file systems are smart about where they place bits and pieces, others are not - like FAT. For these, rearranging the pieces in a more efficient manner (defragmenting) is required routine maintenance. For some file systems, it’s not necessary at all. Thus, a religious issue.
Tech support is often script-driven, mainly because neither the staff nor the users are particularly computer-literate. So, as soon as the user mentions the word ‘slow’, TS will likely tell them to defrag their disks first, even though it’s a solution doesn’t match the problem.
Clear as mud?
When it’s okay to commit a hate crime.
As Dahlia Lithwick discusses on Slate.com, there is a trend in the country, fueled by conservatives, towards taking out sexuality as a category of hate crime:
This week, the Montana legislature killed a bill that would have added crimes motivated by the victim’s sexual orientation to the state’s existing hate-crimes law. Opponents worried that such a provision would be used to target religious leaders preaching against homosexuality from their pulpits. Last week, a state lawmaker in Pennsylvania introduced legislation to remove language about sexual orientation from the state’s hate-crime lawlanguage first inserted only in 2002. His bill was inspired by the arrests of 11 evangelical protesters at a gay-pride festival last fall. All charges were dismissed last week, but some of the defendants are now suing the prosecutors for bringing charges under Pennsylvania’s hate-crimes or “ethnic intimidation” statute. And in Sweden, a pastor who’d been convicted under a broad national hate-crimes law for a sermon describing homosexuality as “something sick” and comparing it to pedophilia and bestiality was acquitted by an appeals court last week, which declared his words were protected by the country’s free-speech laws. The Swedish hate-crime laws were amended to include homosexuals in 2003.
In the new push-me-pull-you of hate-crime legislation, gay-rights groups are winning victories by having crimes motivated by sexual orientation added to state laws, and conservative groups are just as quickly stripping it out based on constitutional claims of free speech and religion. There is a strange counterintuitive argument heating up across the land, based on the strange theory that it’s not OK to hate based on race or religion, but that hating gays is somehow materially different.
Or in other words, it’s not okay to commit a hate crime against someone because of their religion, but it’s okay to commit one because of YOURS.
As Lithwick points out, hate crime legislation simply applies to the punishment of a crime that was committed anyway. Determining whether that crime was committed based on the hatred of a particular group that victim belonged to shouldn’t be based on whether it’s popular to hate that group. Hate a group of people if you want to; you can talk about it all you want. But if you commit a crime based on that hatred, no matter what the group is, I think you should be punished more severely.
On the other hand, if someone wants to argue against ALL hate-crime legislation, I can take that on. You could say that a crime is a crime is a crime, and you don’t see why someone should be punished more severely for beating someone up because you don’t like his ethnicity than, say, because he was banging your wife. Or that prejudice is too tough to determine as a motive. Fair enough.
But if you’re going to entertain the concept of punishing a hate crime, I don’t think you should limit the groups protected by it, with a weaselly argument to protect your particular hatred. Is it simply bad for members of the Church of Smee to go around torching farms because their god teaches them that farmers are evil, but worse if they torch Christian churches for the same reason? Limiting the groups to be included DOES, in my mind, afford them a special protection. Arguing for exclusion just exposes your tendency to support hatred of that particular group. If we’re going to punish hate-based crimes more severely, we have to do them all.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
The gift that keeps on taking.
Okay, here’s a novel story on CNN.
A woman apparently kept the sperm from a blowjob and used it to inseminate herself, unbeknownst to the man. She got pregnant, had the baby, and then TWO YEARS LATER sued for child support, which is when he found out about the child.
Phillips sued Irons, claiming he has had trouble sleeping and eating and has been haunted by “feelings of being trapped in a nightmare,” court papers state.
Irons responded that her alleged actions weren’t “truly extreme and outrageous” and that Phillips’ pain wasn’t bad enough to merit a lawsuit. The circuit court agreed and dismissed Phillips’ lawsuit in 2003.
But the higher court ruled that, if Phillips’ story is true, Irons “deceitfully engaged in sexual acts, which no reasonable person would expect could result in pregnancy, to use plaintiff’s sperm in an unorthodox, unanticipated manner yielding extreme consequences.”
The judges backed the lower court decision to dismiss the fraud and theft claims, agreeing with Irons that she didn’t steal the sperm.
“She asserts that when plaintiff ‘delivered’ his sperm, it was a gift—an absolute and irrevocable transfer of title to property from a donor to a donee,” the decision said. “There was no agreement that the original deposit would be returned upon request.”
In my opinion, what she did was heinous—if he had been trying to avoid getting her pregnant, and she used the opportunity to spit (into a Thermos? what?) instead of swallow, and had the baby in secret without giving him the chance to waive his paternal rights and responsibilities, then she has no right to dun him for child support for a child he never would have agreed to have.
This wasn’t just a “transfer of title.” This was making unauthorized use of his genetic material and forcing him into a lifelong financial (if not emotional) obligation, a responsibility for another human being. I don’t see engaging in sex (especially in an act that specifically prevents procreation) as a blank check given to the other person.
It would be interesting to hear Consi weigh in on this issue ... 
Well, there’s a way of looking at it.
We wont even mention that the top-grossing movie of the year (though made entirely outside the Hollywood system) was yet another assisted suicide movie, ғThe Passion of the Christ.
We won’t even mention that the top-grossing movie of the year (though made entirely outside the Hollywood system) was yet another assisted suicide movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”
—Jim Emerson, editor of RogerEbert.com, on the complaints by conservative film critics about the current Oscar-nominated movies touching on euthanasia.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Pope Quote of the Day.
It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.—in his new book Memory and Identity
He is, of course, referring to the issue of gay marriage.
Human rights AGAINST man? AGAINST the family??
This is just so wrong on so many levels, I can’t fathom it.
(And which side do you think he’s on: FOR or AGAINST human rights?)
“Ideology of evil.” Well, now he and Bush have a little more in common. Gaaaah.
I’m a Believer.
A true, honest-to-Deity miracle occurred last night.
Pookie was sick in the middle of the night and Elwed got up with her for a few hours ... AND I SLEPT THROUGH THE WHOLE THING.
I would fall down on my knees and worship someone, if only the right deity would come forward and take credit for it.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
dodging cops
They stake out the access road to a highschool and the elementary school our daughter attends. It’s not that I’m ever speeding on that particular road, but it made me happy to see them from afar and drive so slowly that he didn’t even bother to train his radar gun.
As I father used to say (who signed off on a number of speed limits around the county), you can tell they lie about the public safety aspect with speed traps when people that pass by a certain stretch of road can afford to take their chances.
HD: Atheists and Wiccans Together
When on a roll… Here’s another article from Heathen Dawn that got me thinking.
What happens in online forums is a caricature of real life - that is to say, while these virtual communities do no accurately reflect real life (I hope!), they tend to exaggerate the “good” and “bad” stuff - not necessarily in like proportions.
Most of the forums tend to home in on the differences - be that philosophical, theological, political, or any combination thereof. In the battle about positions, it is easy to forget what it takes to physically coexist with people that think differently. I’ll admit that this statement is more than a bit tongue in cheek for a non-rightwing-nor-Christian living in the US, where it takes a certain amount of gritting one’s teeth.
Fundamentally, I’m inclined to agree with HD’s assessment. It’s not safe to generalize, but in terms of their outlook on life, atheists are likely to have a lot in common with Wiccans and of all the mixed-faith relationships I can immediately think of, atheists and Wiccans seem to have the fewest obstacles in their path. As always, YMMV.
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) and I’m having a bad remote maintenance evening ( 
). On top of that, I have to stay up for another hour or so until I can take Nyquil ( 
).
