things i have been doing in my laboratory that i should not be doing at my age:
1. refusing to get off my wheeled desk chair and instead using the walls as kick-off points to propel myself across the room to the waste bin
2. building ten-can stacks of Pepsi cans
3. logging on to as many of the hundreds of terminals as i can in a vague attempt to satisfy my curiosity as to whether i can DDoS my own network with local access rights
4. laughing at these guys
5. forgetting to turn the lights on, so that Security turns up on its rounds and sees me sat alone in the dark, bathed in the glow of five flatscreens like some sort of mad professor, giggling, and has to see my University ID before it'll believe i actually work here and am not some sort of insane swipe-lock-cracking meth-swigging hacker hobo
ah, the holidays, the bane of my entire existence. i can't believe people like these things. this is another one of those progress report posts, just to convince anyone i've sent here that despite being roommateless for a good few weeks now, i have not been committed, arrested or hospitalised, and i have not killed myself. nor have i gone on an insane rampage and gained administrator access to the med campus in order to create my own twisted modifications of human beings so that i may amass an army of soulless beings to take over the world in the name of atheism and computer science.
i think i'm dealing with it quite well, actually.
Lepht
ed. today is Friday the thirteenth! sit back and watch as ordinary bad events happen, which will then be blamed on the date by woos of all varieties. oh, the meatspace is such fun. - L
recently i've been yammering a fair amount with a creationist; to my utter disappointment, this man proved entirely unable to give me a reason for faith. like James Randi, for several years i've been waiting for someone to give me a good reason for faith, and none of the believers i've talked to ever can.
thus today's thing. here are five things that i just can't make gel with creationism, and not even the young-earth version: the simple "god done it" excuse.
1. "purpose". one of the canards i always get from christians is that if god didn't make the human race, and it's (unthinkably) just an unusually introspective and intelligent species, then obviously we have no purpose. my response is always this: if god did make sapiens sapiens, then according to you guys' magic book our sole purpose is to worship it. what kind of life is that? you only exist to serve the whims of a callous, capricious deity, who created you to be played with and manipulated at its discretion?
2. fossils. either they're wrong or the bible's bull: which is it?
3. evolutionary residuals, like the rudimentary hipbones on a snake or the tail of a human. if we didn't evolve, why the fuck would a god put those there to make it look like we did?
4. the idea that god is needed for the big bang ("because something can't come from nothing"). for one, science has moved on from the bang, and there are several world models that don't require a singularity at that point, the best of which was derived by Hawking. for another thing, if something can't come from nothing, where the fuck did your magical deity come from?
5. nasty organisms. there are parasites that turn crabs into "zombies" to look after the parasites' own young. there are spiders that nest inside human legs. there is the ebola virus, there are cancer cells, there is alzheimer's disease. why the fuck would a just god create these things? what possible sense is there in that?
i open the debate with this: occam's razor disagrees with theism.
Lepht
