In Which I Render God Speechless

Robots. Whilst not yet able to disguise themselves as innocent-looking assault vehicles which drive themselves, make ghastly jokes and lay waste to entire cities & provide fodder for truly reprehensible motion pictures, robots will one day be our oppressors. To attempt in some small way to understand our eventual machine overlords (and perhaps locate a weakness that can be exploited) before the inevitable enslavement of humanity, I recently went to this website: http://www.titane.ca/concordia/dfar251/igod/main.html and had a chat with a rudimentary AI which has been named God. I decided to treat it as the all-knowing all-seeing creator of the universe, whom you may have encountered as a central character in a series of very popular books.

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The Space Opera That Never Was

Yesterday I wrote a cool sentence. Well, not actually a sentence - more of a statement. Well, not even a statement - more of a descriptive title to what I thought could be a chapter in a science fiction novel. Look, whatever it was, I was very proud of it. It was so conducive to creative thought that I actually began to write the introduction to a science fiction novel (it was here that the author decided that the makers of Word for Windows were the most annoying bastards in the entire world. Every time he began to write the word "novel", he'd get to the first 'e' and a little box would pop up next to the with "November" in it, implying that he didn't have the intelligence or presence of mind to put a capital letter at the start of a proper name. Naturally, being an educated person, he would have put a capital "N" if he was going to write "November". But he wasn't going to. He was about to write "novel", because that's what he started to talk about and he wasn't planning on writing "November" until the bloody programme starting annoying him by suggesting it every time he started to write a word with N, O, V, and E as the first four letters. Damn programmer geeks think they're being so bloody helpful, popping up little squares every time you type something, thinking they're helping you get things done quicker…it'd be a lot quicker if they didn't keep implying that you don't know what the hell you're doing all the time. And if they're so smart and so helpful, why couldn't their programme have figured out that it would've been completely out of context to write "November" in that position: "…a chapter in a science fiction November…"? Now, because of those well-meaning, over-cautious but more likely bloody-minded programmer bastards, not only has most of the introductory paragraph been taken up by a bracketed and completely unplanned rant about an annoying little "help" function, the author has ended up writing "November" six times when he didn't intend to mention it at all unless it was relevant to the story, which it was never going to be [stardates don't use Earth months, as any decent science fiction writer should know]). Ahem.

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On Church and State and Stuff

In the USA today, there is a small but highly vocal (some would even say “strident”) movement dedicated to enshrining certain of their religious values in the laws and Constitution of their nation. Many of this movement proclaim that the Constitution and the laws of the United States are already this way; that the law of the land is based on Judeo-Christian principles and that separation of church and state is an illusion, never happened and even if it did happen was never intended by the founders of the nation and is some kind of liberal invention designed to make the US more vulnerable to suitcase bombs, atheist summer camps and movies about Charles Darwin which don't paint him as the eugenicist spiritual father of Hitler. This is, of course, in stark contrast to the reality of the situation: the Constitution makes no mention of God, Jesus or the Bible (except for a nameless “Creator”); the Constitution itself proclaims that “no religious test” shall ever be required for a citizen to hold public office and that Congress shall “make no law” either establishing a religion or restricting the right of a citizen to worship as they please (as atheists hadn’t been invented yet, noone thought to include “the right to not be religious”, but it’s assumed, probably safely, that freedom of religion means, or should mean, freedom from it as well). It is also well-recognised that the Founders were framing the establishment of the new nation to be a shiny, free, glorious example of the humanist, rational values of the Enlightenment, the new Age of Reason which was making its presence felt across Europe in the 18th century. Some scholars speculate (compellingly) that Constitution chief architect Thomas Jefferson and many of his ilk, far from being Christians of any flavour, were even deists – but I must point out that their religious beliefs are irrelevant to their democratic intent and rationalist stance, which I suspect was meant to be the whole point. Many dominionists in the US have argued against this alleged separation, pointing to the “One Nation under God” line in the Pledge of Obedience Allegiance. Leaving aside the odd ritual of swearing fealty to a flag, that little line used to read “One nation, indivisible,” until religious pressure forced the addition of the “under God” bit. How about “In God We Trust”, which appears on US currency? That was added in the 1950s during McCarthyist hysteria as a counter to alleged “godless” communism (a political hysteria peculiar to the US which persists no less strongly today, as evidenced by the bizarre behaviour of the tea-baggers, birthers, deathers and other assorted pithy signwriters who, in textbook Pavlovian manner, protest anything President Obama does, be it being black or making a harmlessly dull “kids, do your homework” speech on TV and who refuse to nail down exactly which particular political evil – fascism, socialism, communism, anarcho–syndicalism - Barry O allegedly wishes to impose on them by trying to make sure they can see a doctor without selling a kidney first, the heartless bastard).

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This much I know: AC Grayling

Today I share a few pearls from philosopher AC Grayling, writing for The Guardian. A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long. You need to make some time to think how to live it. The democracy of blogging and tweeting is absolutely terrific in one way. It is also the most effective producer of rubbish and insult and falsehood we have yet invented. When I was 14 a chaplain at school gave me a reading list. I read everything and I went back to him with a question: how can you really believe in this stuff? Christian churches and Muslim groups have no more right to have their say than women's institutes or trades unions. The government has actively encouraged faith-based education, and therefore given a megaphone to religious voices and fundamentalists. Science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty and therefore a mark of maturity. It embraces doubt and loose ends. I'm not sure it is possible to think too much. You don't refresh your mind by partying in Ibiza. That single sentence: "science is the outcome of being prepared to live without certainty..." says more about my own views than an entire caffeine-fueled screed ever could. It's said that brevity is the soul of wit; those nine words illustrate that it can also be the soul of wisdom. Certainty seems to be the single most important thing that separates the devout believer from the atheist, the agnostic, the deist & the doubter. It's fine to say "my god, and my way of worshipping my god, will see me rewarded in the afterlife." I have no issue with that claim on the surface. But you can't be certain of it - certainly not certain enough to damn or pity people who disagree with you or dare to shine lights on the holes in your story. I can't be certain my direct ancestors had opposable big toes and could manufacture their own vitamin C or that our universe is thirteen billion years old, but that's the direction in which the evidence points - convincingly, with a giant pointy finger. No, I'm not certain at all, but that's where I'm putting my money. The holes in those converging storylines are not nearly as glaring as those present in the many, certain alternatives - and they're getting smaller all the time. All those from the "certainist" camp can do is rationalise (ironically enough) the size, shape and positioning of their holes - or look at their stories from such an angle that the holes aren't visible. Well, I prefer a story that makes sense no matter how you look at it.

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