Servants

From Luke 12 (NIV):

47 “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. 48 But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows.

I’m so glad that it explicitly says “servant” there. Because otherwise, you just know that some ungodly scoffer would say that Jesus endorses not just slavery, but the beating of slaves.

But as usual, God’s word (properly translated) is crystal-clear on the subject, and of course Jesus doesn’t condone slavery, and hasn’t done so since 1865.

Ironic Story Is Ironic

This Is Plymouth (Devon, UK) reports:

A CHURCH worker whose job was to protect young people from abuse had thousands of indecent pictures of children, a court heard.

Married father-of-four Christopher Jarvis, aged 49, advised the Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth how to keep youngsters safe but had more than 4,000 pornographic images of children, Plymouth Magistrates’ Court was told.

At this point, I’m suffering from irony fatigue, so supply your own punchline in the comments. The winner gets… oh, I don’t know. How about if I transubstantiate an item of baked goods into the deity of your choice?

On a more tragic note, the thing preventing me from simply pointing at a bunch of hypocritical fucktards and giggling is the fact that Jarvis appears to be a victim himself:

Jodie Baker, for Jarvis, said he had been the victim of abuse. She said he was abused aged 11 by a family friend through a church social club.

Miss Baker said: “At the age of 16 or 17 he admitted to a priest that he had a homosexual encounter and he was then abused by that priest.”
…

She said that two suicide attempts which led to Jarvis being arrested and produced in custody were ‘half-hearted’ and a ‘cry for help’.

Is there anyone the Catholic church hasn’t fucked up? (*cough*LouisCK*cough*)

And could someone tell me why anyone still remains a Catholic? It’s not like there aren’t other churches out there. In the US, at least, it’s a buyer’s market and always has been.

Does Symmetry Exist?

Well, duh, yes.

But is symmetry a thing? Well, no. Again, duh.

The reason I bother to bring this up in the first place is that I’ve stumbled on the festering swamp of pretentiousness that is Edward Feser’s blag

One thing that annoys me is the way he constantly reifies ideas, and acts as though that Means Something.

Take a look for instance at this bit (he begins by summarizing a physicist’s post about philosophy):

Arguments for God as cause of the universe rest on the assumption that something can’t come from nothing.  But given the laws of physics, it turns out that something can come from nothing. 

Here was my reaction:

Is this guy serious?  The laws of physics aren’t “nothing.”  Ergo, this isn’t even a prima facie counterexample to the principle that ex nihilo, nihil fit.  That’s just blindingly obvious.  Is this guy serious? 

In other words, what Feser is saying is that a law of physics is something. Is this true?

So let me back up a bit and look at symmetry (for simplicity, I’ll just consider mirror symmetry). Some objects, like cue balls and 2×2 Lego bricks, look the same in a mirror as they do by themselves (plus or minus however much we care about; if we care about the specific positions of atoms, a cue ball isn’t symmetrical; if we don’t care about the number indicating the point value, an “M” tile from a Scrabble set is symmetrical).

This fact can be expressed in multiple ways. In English, it feels natural to say that an object has symmetry. In another language, such as French, one might say “this object is symmetrical”. In yet another language, the most natural way to express this (or indeed the only way) might be to say “this object mirrors-without-changing” or “this object endures mirrorily”.

Whether the idea is expressed using a noun, an adjective, a verb phrase, an adverb, or even as a mathematical equation, it doesn’t change what the object is. People from any country can look at at the object and agree whether it has this particular property.

So what is “symmetry”, then? Presumably it’s some data structure in the mind of an English speaker that gets excited when she thinks of an object that looks like its mirror image. An artifact of the way that person processes information about the world, that happens to be implemented as a noun.

But just because there’s a noun for something, that doesn’t mean that that something actually exists out there in the world.

And a law of physics isn’t a thing. It’s a statement about how things behave. In fact, it can be expressed as an if-then statement: “if certain things existed and certain conditions held, then such-and-such would happen”. For example, the statement “if my refrigerator had a mass of 100 solar masses, it would collapse into a black hole” is true even though my fridge doesn’t mass anywhere near that much, due to the way that implication statements work. So a statement like “all masses attract through gravity” can be expressed as “if there were any masses, they would attract” and would thus be true even if there weren’t any masses in the universe.

But in the end, a law is a statement about how things behave; it isn’t a thing itself. And when people talk about the universe starting from nothing, they’re generally wondering how all this stuff came to be here in the first place.

Now, it’s certainly fair to ask why stuff in the universe behaves the way it does, and whether the laws of physics could have been different, whether there are other worlds where they are different, and so on. But when Feser says “The laws of physics aren’t `nothing'”, he’s projecting the way his mind works onto the universe and trying to make that someone else’s problem. It’s as if he had asked the name of the man in the moon, or asked why two holes don’t repel each other, since they have negative mass.

This strikes me as sloppy thinking (and related to the use-mention error). And I see it all too often when I read Sophisticated Theologians™. Which is one reason why I have as little respect for that occupation as I do.

Meta-Social Code

I had an idea the other day, and I’m not sure why no one’s implemented. I suspect that either a) someone has and I don’t know about it, or b) there’s some fundamentally-unsolvable problem. If so, please point this out in the comments.

At any rate, the idea is this: as a site owner, I want to make it easy for people to link to my site. I want a wall of social-site buttons on every page, with every site from AOL to Zynga.

But as a reader, I only have a few sites that I use to link to places. I don’t want to wade through row after row of useless icons just to find the one that I want to use to share the URL.

So it seems the obvious thing to do would be for some entrepreneur (not me) to offer “social site button bar as a service”. The site owner adds some markup to the page to say “this is something that can be recommended/liked/shared”, and include a JavaScript script that takes care of the magic behind the scenes. Something like:

<html>
<head>
http://social.com/siteid12345/api.js
</head>
<body>
<h1>This is my page</h1>
<p>Hello world</p>
<social:button-bar/>
</body>
</html>

The script can take care of adding additional <script>s to load additional APIs from whichever social sites are being loaded, and add a DOMContentLoaded listener that’ll replace <social:button-bar> with a series of other elements, like <g:plusone> and <fb:like>.

The end-user, meanwhile, can visit a configuration page and decide which social sites will appear in the button bar. This can be saved in a cookie.

I’ve consed up a quick and dirty prototype, and was surprised that it worked. I haven’t tested it extensively, though.

The obvious objection (aside from “but how does one make money off of this thing?” But they said that about Kozmo.com too. So there) is that this seems like an engraved invitation to cross-site scripting (CSS) holes. And privacy leaking, and who knows what all else.

A related question, which I haven’t answered, is who can see the cookie? If the JavaScript code comes from social.com, then social.com needs to be able to see the user configuration cookie to know which buttons’ code to serve up. But if the reader is looking at content.com, there’s no good way to get a social.com cookie and pass it along. It might be possible to set a content.com cookie, but of course that won’t help when the user surfs over to othersite.org, where we want the end-user to see the same button bar.

I confess that I’m not entirely clear on the policies that govern which sites/scripts can see what data. So it’s quite possible that I’m missing something glaringly obvious.

Josh McDowell: Atheism Wins in a Fair Match

This piece in the Christian Post caused me much amusement:

Atheists and skeptics now have equal access to our children as we have, which is why the number of Christian youth who believe in the fundamentals of Christianity is decreasing and sexual immorality is growing, apologist Josh McDowell said.
[…]

“The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have… whether you like it or not,” said McDowell, who is author of two books on Christian apologetics, More than a Carpenter and New Evidence that Demands Verdict.
[…]

“[…]I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that’s exactly what has happened. It’s like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance [of information] has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field [giving equal access to skeptics].”

Yes, folks, McDowell is saying that Christianity can’t compete on a level playing field. That if people are exposed to both Christians’ and atheists’ arguments, that the Christian ones fail. And if that’s not an admission that Christian apologists don’t have any good arguments, I don’t know what is.

But of course he’s right to worry about skeptics speaking out. Skepticism is all about how to figure out what’s true and what’s not; what sorts of methods of inquiry tend to yield valid results and which don’t.

Then, for some reason, the article turns to the topic of pornography.

The Campus Crusade staff also said around 90 percent of the 16-year-olds, according to the latest statistics, had viewed pornography. And 80 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds had had exposure to hardcore pornography. In a recent study, teenagers were asked if pornography was acceptable, and 67 percent of the men and 59 percent of the women said “yes,” he added.

Interest in porn is nothing new, and I don’t know any guy who hasn’t found a copy of Playboy or Hustler in his father’s nightstand (or something similar), so these are numbers without a context. There’s not enough information here to conclude that the Internet has turned us all into sex-crazed horndogs; it’s quite possible that we’ve been that all along. I also suspect that society has mellowed over the past few decades to the point where many more people are willing to admit watching porn.

At any rate, I’m not sure what this has to do with Christianity, except insofar as every major religion tries to control its members’ sex lives. (Hey, I said “member”, so it’s like a cock joke. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and tell me I suck.)

Bottom line, I think McDowell’s worried that his church isn’t the only game in town anymore. And with good cause. But unlike him, I don’t see that as a problem.

(Update: Oops! Forgot to give credit to Jesus & Mo for pointing me at this story.)

“…let us call this entity God”

tl;dr summary: a ranty rant about theology. Read More

But ID Isn’t Creationism, Nosirree!

IDists’ favorite pastime, apart from slagging evolution, appears to be distancing themselves from young-earth creationists, even though the differences are legion:

Age of the Earth:

YECs: 6,000-10,000 years old.

IDs: No comment.

Identity of the designer:

YECs: Jehovah, god of the Bible.

IDs: No comment.

Scientific merit of ideas:

YECs: Evolution is just as much grounded in faith as the belief in a magic man in the sky, so the two are equally valid.

IDs: ID is just as scientific as evolution, if not more so. Is too!

Does evolution occur?:

YECs: Only to a limited extent.

IDs: Only to a limited extent.

Common descent?:

YECs: Only to a limited extent. But there’s no way humans can be related to any other species.

IDs: No comment, though humans almost certainly aren’t related to any other species.

Resolving difficulties: how do you explain X?:

YECs: Evolution doesn’t explain X!

IDs: Evolution doesn’t explain X!

See? The two are worlds apart! There’s no way anyone could see any similarity between the two, unless maybe they had a few pounds of pattern-matching circuitry between their ears.

So anyway, a few days ago, the ID the Future podcast promoted a new edumacational web site, TrueU.

Which seems like the right time to bring up Dr. Sidethink’s corollary to Murphy’s Law:

Anything Labeled “Truth” contains more bullshit than stuff labeled “Bullshit.”

At any rate, the reason IDtF was promoting TrueU is that Stephen Meyer is one of the authors, in addition to being the director of the Disco ‘Tute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, ID’s main faith tank.

If you poke around TrueU, you’ll see that it’s mainly concerned with kids heading off to college and losing their faith (and selling DVDs in the process).

Oh, did I mention that it’s also a project of Focus on the Patriarchy, an explicitly-Christian, right-wing, homophobic organization?

Yeah, this is the sort of thing that makes it really hard not to crack up when IDiots claim not to be creationists, so I won’t even try. It’s like they’re saying “Sure, he’s fucking me in the ass, but he’s standing on the floor, so technically we’re not in bed with each other.”

Fun With Barcodes

If you have an Android phone, odds are that you have the Barcode Scanner app. And if you’ve looked in the settings, you may have noticed one called “Custom Search URL”.

This is, as the name says, a URL you can fill in. Once you do, you’ll get a “Custom search” button at the bottom of the screen when you scan a barcode. A “%s” in the URL will be replaced by the numeric UPC value, and “%f” with its format (which is displayed next to the code when you scan one).

It seems to me that this can be used as a poor man’s plugin API. You can use http://www.mydomain.org/barcode?f=%f&s=%s, and make barcode be a CGI/PHP/whatever script that looks at the format and code and decides what to do.

For instance, $EMPLOYER has barcoded asset tags on all inventory items. So today I was able to scan a machine’s code and be redirected to the inventory web page for that machine.

Likewise, if it’s an EAN-13 code that begins with 978 or 979, then presumably it’s an ISBN or ISMN, and you can look it up at Amazon, your library, or wherever.

As far as I know, you can’t recognize that a UPC corresponds to a CD or DVD, without having a table of every CD/DVD publisher, but there’s nothing that says your script has to only do redirection; you can present a list of links to the user. So anyway, for CDs, you can construct MusicBrainz or Discogs lookup URLs. Or perhaps you can parse the code, get the manufacturer, and based on the user’s choice, remember what sort of item that manufacturer corresponds to. Over time you can build up a “good enough” database of the things you scan most often.

I wouldn’t mind having a properly organized library of books, CDs, etc. Which is kind of the point of looking this data up on the net in the first place. But while a phone may make a serviceable barcode scanner, it’s no good for lengthy data input. So really, what I’d like would be for the script to remember what I’ve scanned, along with a quick and dirty readable reference (e.g., “ISBN such-and-such: The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett) and stash that someplace so that I can later go back and import the data into Koha or whatever I’m using.

Of course, since it’s a web page, I’m guessing you have access to the full range of goodies that people put in browsers these days. I’m thinking of geographical location, in particular. So the script could in principle behave differently based on where you’re located at the moment (e.g., at home or at work).

There are lots of possibilities. Must. Explore.

Who Needs Morals, Anyway?

The most-often-asked question when debating morality with theists is, “but where do you get your morals?” Of course, if the theist says “I get my morality from the Vedas/Quran/Bible/Dianetics”, that doesn’t help, since it just raises the question that Matt Dillahunty posed at his debate at UMBC: let’s say some being comes along and says, “I am a god. Here’s a book with my moral system”, then so what? How do we decide whether the system in the book is any good?

I thought I’d step back for a moment and ask, what if there were no morals?

Maybe there are no rules, or no one to give them. Maybe there are rules, but nobody knows them. Maybe the rules are known, but they’re ignored, and there is no mechanism for enforcing them, not even a twinge of guilt. What then?

I don’t think anyone has any trouble imagining this sort of world: theft and lying are rampant, people will kill each over a can of beans and not feel remorse. In fact, there wouldn’t be any cans of beans, because the industry required to produce them couldn’t exist without some kind of stable society and the ability to form long-term associations. A world where you’re constantly looking over your shoulder, lest your own child stab you in the back.

Okay, so this vision may not be accurate. Maybe some combination of game theory and psychology can show that there might be amoral societies where life doesn’t suck as much as what I described.

But I think it’s safe to say that the vision of a world without morals that I described above, or the one that you imagined, represents our fear of what would happen without some sense of morality.

If you’re with me so far, then presumably you’ll agree that then morality is a way of avoiding certain Bad Things: living in fear, being killed or seeing your loved ones killed, and so on; and also of being able to get some Good Things: establishing trust, assuring some level of stability from day to day, and so forth.

We may not agree on anything. You might want to security cameras on every street corner, to make the risk of being robbed as small as possible, and I might feel that the feeling of not being watched all the time is worth the occasional mugging. But if we can agree in broad outline that certain outcomes (like being killed) are bad, others (like knowing where our next meal is coming from) are good, then morality reduces to an engineering problem.

That is, it’s simply(!) a matter of figuring out what kind of world we want to live in, what rules will allow us to get along, and how to get there.

Obviously, this is a thorny problem. But nobody said this was going to be easy. Well, nobody who wasn’t trying to sell you something. As is the case with every engineering project ever, not only are there conflicting requirements, but they change over time. Everyone wants to put their two cents in, and everyone thinks their personal pet cause is the most important one of all. Finding a solution requires political and diplomatic negotiation, and convincing people to give up something in order to strike a deal. It’s enough to make your head spin.

But this strikes me as a huge problem, not an intractable one. We can tract this sucker. We have enough history behind us, and enough data collection methods, that we can see what works and what doesn’t, which sorts of societies are worth living in and which aren’t, and try to figure out how to get where we want.

Saying “I get my morals from an old book” is a lazy cop-out. It’s the response of someone who doesn’t want to look at the problem, let alone try to solve some part of it. And if you’re not going to help, the least you can do is stay out of the way of those who are trying to fix things.

I Agree With Bill Donohue

On Friday, BillDo wrote

The Catholic League would like to go further: it’s time to shut down the faith-based program altogether.

and my head went asplodey.

Okay, so we have different reasons for thinking that the faith-based program set up by George W. Bush should be shut down. I think it’s because the government shouldn’t be involved in promoting religion — either promoting one religion over another, or favoring religion over non-religion, or vice-versa — whereas Bill… well, here’s what he has to say:

When Sen. Obama was running for president three years ago, he pledged support for faith-based programs provided they were emptied of any faith component: he opposed the right of faith-based programs to maintain their integrity by hiring only people of their faith.

In 2009, the Obama administration balked: it said it would decide on a case-by-case basis whether a funding request from a faith-based program was acceptable. In 2010, many members of this program pushed to pare back religious liberty provisions that were extant.

When faith is gutted from faith-based programs—when Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox Jews can’t hire their own—we are left with a carcass. […] The goal, obviously, is to convert these religious entities into full-blown secular organizations. It would be better not to let them hijack these programs in the name of assisting them, thus it makes sense to shut them down.

In other words, not only does he want Catholic charitable organizations to get federal assistance, he also wants them to be able to discriminate in hiring. Because hey, what’s the point in running a soup kitchen if the actual soup is ladled by a Protestant or a Jew, right?

That’s the problem I have with religious charities: they’re easily abused to be a tool for proselytizing: offer someone a free meal, but only after they listen to a sermon, or a lecture on the virtues of $RELIGION. In other words, advertising, just like when a business hands out sun visors with its logo on them at the county fair, or when the guy who’s selling time-shares offers to take you out for lunch so he can convince you to buy what he’s selling.

Obviously, the government has an interest in promoting the good done by religious organizations, but too often it seems that the organizations themselves see the good not as a goal in itself, but as a means toward a different end, often proselytizing. Recall that last year, Catholic Charities ceased its operations when it was told that it had to either stop discriminating against gay couples or stop accepting government money.

But if they can’t bring themselves to do good because it’s good, screw them. We don’t need to pump government money into churches’ advertising budgets.