All posts by Andrew Arensburger

Holy Mother Church, Repository of Christian Moral Teaching, Incorporates Child Abuse into Orientation-Day Ethics Training Materials

File this under “about goddamn time”:

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis’ sex abuse commission has scored a victory within the Vatican: Members have been invited to address Vatican congregations and a training course for new bishops, suggesting that the Holy See now considers child protection programs to be an important responsibility for church leaders.

Commission members praised the development as a breakthrough given that bishops have long been accused of covering up for abusers by moving pedophile priests from parish to parish rather than reporting them to police. For decades, the Vatican too turned a blind eye and failed to take action against problem priests or their bishop enablers.

It’s nice that an organization that considers itself the authoritative source of morals has finally figured out that hey, maybe raping kids is enough of a bad idea that it’s worth mentioning during orientation.

The article goes on to mention that pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a handful of bishops. But it remains to be seen what the church knows about child-abusers still in its ranks, or within its purview. The Vatican loves its mysteries, after all.

Pretending You’re Doing Good

The following email message was sent to an address I gave when I downloaded a Bible-reading app:

[…]right now there’s an unprecedented opportunity to see precious lives transformed in Africa!

These are children whose lives have been devastated by poverty and violence. They’re hurting, many are orphaned, and they need to know
that someone loves them.

Your support today will help place Bibles into the hands of 150,000 at-risk boys and girls, and share with them the Good News of Jesus Christ.

And thanks to a $10,000 Challenge Grant, your gift will go even further!

It costs just $5 to place a Bible in a child’s hands. But when combined with the Challenge Grant, your gift will provide two children in Africa with their very own copy of God’s message of love.

So please give generously now to help transform these kids’ lives with a Bible.

Yours in Christ,

I’ve cut out links, but the highlighting is as in the original.

Religion is often blamed for giving people false hope, or for giving the illusion of doing good, and this message is a perfect example. Kids who are hurting or orphaned need food; they need medical care; they need a family. What they don’t need is Bibles.

On top of which, this organization’s two-star rating from Charity Navigator is less than impressive, especially considering that even Answers in Genesis managed to get three.

Will There Be Faithless Electors in 2016?
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Trump’s hairpiece in the wild. Photo by Valerie G. Bugh.

You may remember that during the run-in to the 2016 Republican convention, the #NeverTrump people were trying desperately to come up with some way, short of dynamite, to put out the dumpster fire that the conservative movement has been feeding lo these past three decades, and is now threatening to consume the GOP.

At the same time, it was pointed out that the Democrats didn’t have the same problem, in part because they had nominated a human being rather than a Monster From the Id, and partly because of superdelegates, party officials whose vote counts way way more than that of regular delegates from your state.

As universally-reviled as superdelegates are, at least they act as a firewall: if the ordinary people had nominated an obviously unacceptable candidate, like a bowl of granola, for instance, the superdelegates could have overridden the will of the people.

Which brings me to the general election: the way presidential elections were originally set up in the US constitution, we don’t actually vote for president: we vote for a guy who’ll go over to Washington, find out who the best candidate is, and vote on our behalf. In many states, electors are not bound by the popular vote and can, in principle, vote against whomever the people chose: so-called faithless electors. Apparently there have been two of them since 2000.

But this election feels different. Trump is not your run-of-the-mill Bad Candidate. Even high-profile Republican insiders consider him not just suboptimal, but unacceptable, even dangerous. So I wonder whether we’ll see any faithless electors in January.

In practice, it probably (hopefully!) won’t be necessary: if Clinton wins in the standard way, the electors will be able to go about their voting as usual, in relative obscurity and irrelevance. But if Trump wins, there’s that safety valve. It’s also possible that he’ll lose, and throw an epic temper tantrum such that not even the electors will want anything to do with him, and might change their votes in protest.

As usual, when dealing with predictions, I expect to be proven wrong about a lot of this. I’m not psychic, you know.

Nigerian Scammers Are Good People

Via Slashdot comes an IEEE Spectrum article about a new scam from Nigeria. In brief, instead of asking you for money directly, they redirect your business email. They wait until someone orders something from your company, then rewrites the bank routing numbers and such so that the client sends money to the scammers’ account instead of yours.

So far, so bad. Technically interesting, ethically very bad. The moral of the story, as always, is be careful where you type your password, and if something looks hinky, think about it.

But then there’s this part:

Bettke and Stewart estimate the group they studied has at least 30 members and is likely earning a total of about $3 million a year from the thefts. The scammers appear to be “family men” in their late 20s to 40s who are well-respected, church-going figures in their communities. “They’re increasing the economic potential of the region they’re living in by doing this, and I think they feel somewhat of a duty to do this,” Stewart says.

Let’s just toss that on the pile marked “Religion doesn’t make people more moral”, shall we?

An Ultimate Cause

I’ve run into the cosmological argument several times lately, probably due to the people I’ve been engaging with on Twitter. Roughly speaking, it goes something like this:

  1. Pretty much everything we see around us was caused by something else.
  2. If you follow the causal chain backward, you’ll eventually wind up with something that doesn’t itself have a cause.
  3. Let’s call this “God”.

This is nice and all, but one problem I have with this argument is that it tells us nothing about “God” aside from not having a cause. So I thought I’d come up with some. This isn’t formal; hell, it doesn’t even rise to the level of “hypothesis”.

The universe we live in is subject to various laws, like gravity, the Pauli exclusion principle (that certain types of particles can’t be in the same place at the same time), and so on.

If you look at it mathematically, the universe is a gigantic automaton, where the current state of the universe follows, by certain rules, from the previous state of the universe. Even if the rules aren’t deterministic (e.g., there’s a certain probability that a virtual particle pair will appear out of nowhere at a given time), that means there are multiple possible futures. In any case, our universe is but a minuscule twig on an inconceivably-vast tree of imaginable universes: ones where gravity is slightly stronger or weaker; ones with two dimensions of space and two of time; ones that recollapsed twelve seconds after their Big Bang, and so on.

Go ahead and throw in a multiverse, if you like. Or multiple multiverses with their own possible laws. You can put that inside a meta-multiverse as well, and a meta-meta-multiverse, and so on. It doesn’t matter. It’s all just math. As long as everything is internally consistent, it’s all good.

If you had the hardware (and, of course, we don’t), it would be possible to simulate all this. Not that it matters, because our physical universe is as real to us as a simulated world would be to its inhabitants. Really, what matters is the mathematical relationships between each successive state of the universe.

But of course mathematical relationships don’t depend on hardware, or physical reality: when we say that 1+1=2, we’re saying that if we had an apple and added another apple, then we’d have two apples. It’s true whether the apples actually exist or not.

In other words (and yes, I realize I’m driving headlong into stoner rambling territory), what if we’re all inside a simulation that’s running on nothing? We perceive the universe because it is internally-consistent. Or to put it another way, the universe (or universes) is as real as addition.

So let’s say that some brilliant mathematician figures out that “nothing exists” (in the sense of “why is there something instead of nothing”) is mathematically-incoherent, that it only seems to make sense in English because we don’t see the full ramifications of that statement? That, in other words, something exists because it can’t be otherwise? And from that, all the universes follow.

This theorem, that “there has to be something because it can’t be otherwise” would then, as far as I can tell, fulfill all the necessary requirements of an ultimate cause, a prime mover, and whatever your favorite cosmological argument requires. It’s the first cause, it exists outside of space and time, and so on.

But notice what it isn’t: it’s not a mind. It’s not alive. It doesn’t give a damn about whether you and the rest of humanity live or die; it doesn’t even have the cognitive apparatus to know this. It doesn’t communicate with humans, doesnt’ tell them where to stick their genitalia. It doesn’t respond to prayer. And it certainly won’t send you to hell if you’re not nice enough to it.

It is, in short, something completely different from what most people have in mind when they use the word “God”. And I’ve never seen a sophisticated theologian describe what they mean by “God” in any way similar to the above, so consider this my modest contribution to theology.

So now, if you use an ultimate-cause argument, I’m going to ask whether my theorem-as-first-cause fits the bill; and if so, why I should believe in a Galilean carpenter instead.

Is Peeing A Sacrament?

Erick Erickson has an article with the sensational headline, “State of Iowa Says Churches Must Let Men Use the Women’s Bathroom” (retweeted by the lachrymose Glenn Beck). ZOMG! The big bad government is sending legions of men in dresses to diddle your children in your very churches! And they’re not Catholic priests, even! Be afraid!

The government FAQ linked to says,

DOES THIS LAW APPLY TO CHURCHES?

Sometimes. Iowa law provides that these protections do not apply to religious institutions with respect to any religion-based qualifications when such qualifications are related to a bona fide religious purpose. Where qualifications are not related to a bona fide religious purpose, churches are still subject to the law’s provisions. (e.g. a child care facility operated at a church or a church service open to the public).

This, of course, raises the question of what consitutes a “bona fide religious purpose”. Erickson spends some time talking about cases about who is and isn’t a minister, then admitting that no church has actually been, you know, oppressed, before reminding you to stay scared of creeping liberalism and impending tyranny.

But I still want an answer to the question: what’s a bona fide religious purpose for a bathroom, even in a church? Is peeing a sacrament? I know that the Bible includes the phrase “he that pisseth against the wall”, but it just seems to mean “man and boy”. There’s 2 Kings 18:27 (note to Donald Trump: that’s pronounced “second Kings”, not “two kings”):

But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?

But not only doesn’t this sound like an exhortation for good Christians to emulate, they’re not even using a bathroom.

Obviously, maybe some church has a religious ritual for peeing, one that’s not found in the Bible. But in that case, I want to see the church in question explain itself.

“Guns Don’t Kill People”

A story from the Associated Press tells of a clash between white nationalists and counterprotesters in Sacramento (emphasis added):

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A white nationalist group’s rally outside the California state Capitol building turned violent as fighting broke out with a larger group of counter protesters, leaving 10 people injured with stab wounds, cuts and bruises.

Fights erupted when about 30 members of the Traditionalist Worker Party gathering to rally around noon Sunday were met by about 400 counter-protesters, California Highway Patrol Officer George Granada said. [&hellip]

Sacramento Fire Department spokesman Chris Harvey said nine men and one woman, ranging from 19 to 58 years old, were treated for stab wounds, cuts, scrapes and bruises. Of the injured, two were taken to the hospital with critical stab wounds, but they were expected to survive.

The thing that leapt out at me is that in a country where we keep having mass shooting after mass shooting, week after week after blood-soaked week, to the point where most of them don’t even make the news, this clash, which sounds like a 400-person brawl, didn’t kill anyone.

The other thing that’s missing from the reporting: guns.

So yeah, people are stupid and violent, and if they don’t have guns, will find other ways of killing each other — after all, we did it for thousands of years before the invention of gunpowder — but guns make it so much easier.

Let’s not make it any easier to kill our fellow humans than it has to be, okay?

So You’ve Poked Your Eye Out
Tower of Parliament in Planet of the Apes
Image by @jeremiahtolbert. Used with permission.

If you are or have a parent, you’re no doubt familiar with expressions like “It’s fun until somebody gets hurt” or “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!” in A Christmas Story. In one of those rare cases where Russian is more compact than English, my dad would use the word “доигрались” (“do-ee-GRA-lees’”) when my brother and I played too rough and someone wound up getting hurt. It’s from “играть” (“ee-grat’”, to play) and the prefix “do-”, meaning “until” or “up to the point that”.

We’d play, he’d tell us to be more careful, we’d ignore him, and then someone’s knee would get scraped or head bumped, or something in the house would be broken. And my father would look at us and say, “доигрались”, “So you didn’t think, didn’t listen, and now…” and the “and now” would be there for all to see, too obvious to mention.

That’s a word that’s been coming to mind a lot lately. The Republican party has spent decades cultivating anger, ignorance, and xenophobia. Now they have an ignorant, xenophobic candidate whom they can’t control. Доигрались.

Churches have spent decades, even centuries vilifying women and LGBT people, and now they’re panicking because young people aren’t joining. Доигрались.

Most recently, Britons have decided that they hate foreigners so much, they’re going to divorce Europe, and sent the Pound into free fall. It’s still too early to tell what the final outcome will be, but I’m still thinking, доигрались.

SMH.

It’s Too Soon to Ask for Evidence, and What Is Evidence, Anyway?

Let’s take a peek over at Eve Keneinan’s post Keeping Track, which recounts a Twitter discussion between her, @MrOzAtheist, and Mark Houlsby, about Houlsby’s assertion that

There is no evidence for God. Therefore God does not exist.

Here’s a representative excerpt from Keneinan’s recap/rebuttal:

But evidence is an epistemological concept, pertaining to knowledge, to how we know that something exists or not, and what its properties are. Existence on the other hand is a metaphysical or ontological concept.

And another:

His claim that MH1: There is no evidence for God is already defeated by AMH1: It is possible there is evidence of God that has not yet be discovered.  I of course hold there is evidence for God, and plenty of it, [and so on, and so on]

And this (emphasis added):

I and others have attempted to refute this argument by arguing “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” We proffered plausible counterexamples: such things as protons (at one time), intelligent life in the Andromeda galaxy, and black holes (at one time). We argued that it is overwhelmingly likely that there are things for which we do not yet have evidence.

Go read, or at least skim, the whole thing if you’re curious.

In my experience, this sort of argument isn’t at all unusual for the more intellectual, ivory-tower sort of apologist. But here’s the thing: Keneinan says that “at one time” there wasn’t evidence for black holes. That “at one time” was on the order of a century: it was 101 years ago that Karl Schwarzschild discovered the radius around a collapsed star that bears his name.

A hundred years ago, we couldn’t sequence DNA because we didn’t know its shape and didn’t understand its role in reproduction. Hell, we hadn’t even isolated insulin yet.

Keneinan uses the word “galaxy” in the full knowledge that everyone knows what that is, and why it’s difficult to find life there. But a hundred years ago, we didn’t know that those fuzzy blobs in telescopes were in fact other cosmic islands of stars like our Milky Way. We didn’t know about the expanding universe or the Big Bang.

Meanwhile, we’ve had Islam for 1400 years, Christianity for 2000, Judaism for over 3000, and they’re still stuck on “well, you can’t disprove God” and “what constitutes evidence, anyway?”

You’d think that if there were any solid evidence for God, it would’ve shown up by now.

If You Use Unix, Use Version Control

If you’ve used Unix (or Linux. This applies to Linux, and MacOS X, and probably various flavors of Windows as well), you’ve no doubt found yourself editing configuration files with a text editor. This is especially true if you’ve been administering a machine, either professionally or because you got roped into doing it.

And if you’ve been doing it for more than a day or two, you’ve made a mistake, and wished you could undo it, or at least see what things looked like before you started messing with them.

This is something that programmers have been dealing with for a long time, so they’ve developed an impressive array of tools to allow you to keep track of how a file has changed over time. Most of them have too much overhead for someone who doesn’t do this stuff full-time. But I’m going to talk about RCS, which is simple enough that you can just start using it.

Most programmers will tell you that RCS has severe limitations, like only being able to work on one file at a time, rather than a collection of files, that makes it unsuitable for use in all but a few special circumstances. Thankfully, Unix system administration happens to be one of those circumstances!

What’s version control?

Basically, it allows you to track changes to a file, over time. You check a file in, meaning that you want to keep track of its changes. Periodically, you check it in again, which is a bit like bookmarking a particular version so you can come back to it later. And you can check a file out, that is, retrieve it from the history archive. Or you can compare the file as it is now to how it looked one, five, or a hundred versions ago.

Note that RCS doesn’t record any changes unless you tell it to. That means that you should get into the habit of checking in your changes when you’re done messing with a file.

Starting out

Let’s create a file:

# echo "first" > myfile

Now let’s check it in, to tell RCS that we want to track it:

# ci -u myfile
myfile,v <-- myfile
enter description, terminated with single '.' or end of file:
NOTE: This is NOT the log message!
>> This is a test file
>> .
initial revision: 1.1
done

ci stands for “check in”, and is RCS’s tool for checking files in. The -u option says to unlock it after checking in.

Locking is a feature of RCS that helps prevent two people from stepping on each other’s toes by editing a file at the same time. We’ll talk more about this later.

Note that I typed in This is a test file. I could have given a description on multiple lines if I wanted to, but usually you want to keep this short: “DNS config file” or “Login message”, or something similar.

End the description with a single dot on a line by itself.

You’ll notice that you now have a file called myfile,v. That’s the history file for myfile.

Since you probably don’t want ,v files lying around cluttering the place up, know that if there’s a directory called RCS, the RCS utilities will look for ,v history files in that directory. So before we get in too deep, let’s create an RCS directory:

# mkdir RCS

Now delete myfile and start from scratch, above.

Done? Good. By the way, you could also have cheated and just moved the ,v file into the RCS directory. Now you know for next time.

Making a change

All right, so now you want to make a change to your file. This happens in three steps:

  1. Check out the file and lock it.
  2. Make the change(s)
  3. Check in your changes and unlock the file.

Check out the file:

# co -l myfile
RCS/myfile,v --> myfile
revision 1.1 (locked)
done

co is RCS’s check-out utility. In this case, it pulls the latest version out of the history archive, if it’s not there already.

The -l (lower-case ell) flag says to lock the file. This helps to prevent other people from working on the file at the same time as you. It’s still possible for other people to step on your toes, especially if they’re working as root and can overwrite anything, but it makes it a little harder. Just remember that co is almost always followed by -l.

Now let’s change the file. Edit it with your favorite editor and replace the word “first” with the word “second”.

If you want to see what has changed between the last version in history and the current version of the file, use rcsdiff:

# rcsdiff -u myfile
===================================================================
RCS file: RCS/myfile,v
retrieving revision 1.1
diff -u -r1.1 myfile
--- myfile 2016/06/07 20:18:12 1.1
+++ myfile 2016/06/07 20:32:38
@@ -1 +1 @@
-first
+second

The -u option makes it print the difference in “unified-diff” format, which I find more readable than the other possibilities. Read the man page for more options.

In unified-diff format, lines that were deleted are preceded with a minus sign, and lines that were added are preceded by a plus sign. So the above is saying that the line “first” was removed, and “second” was added.

Finally, let’s check in your change:

# ci -u myfile
RCS/myfile,v <-- myfile
new revision: 1.2; previous revision: 1.1
enter log message, terminated with single '.' or end of file:
>> Updated to second version.
>> .
done

Again, we were prompted to list the changes we made to the file (with a dot on a line by itself to mark the end of our text). You’ll want to be concise yet descriptive in this text, because these are notes you’re making for your future self when you want to go back and find out when and why a change was made.

Viewing a file’s history

Use the rlog command to see a file’s history:

# rlog myfile

RCS file: RCS/myfile,v
Working file: myfile
head: 1.2
branch:
locks: strict
access list:
symbolic names:
keyword substitution: kv
total revisions: 2; selected revisions: 2
description:
Test file.
----------------------------
revision 1.2
date: 2016/06/07 20:36:52; author: arensb; state: Exp; lines: +1 -1
Made a change.
----------------------------
revision 1.1
date: 2016/06/07 20:18:12; author: arensb; state: Exp;
Initial revision
=============================================================================

In this case, there are two revisions: 1.1, with the log message “Initial revision”, and 1.2, with the log “Made a change.”.

Undoing a change

You’ve already see rlog, which shows you a file’s history. And you’ve seen one way to use rcsdiff.

You can also use either one or two -rrevision-number arguments, to see the difference between specific revisions:

# rcsdiff -u -r1.1 myfile

will show you the difference between revision 1.1 and what’s in the file right now, and

# rcsdiff -u -r1.1 -r1.2 myfile

will show you the difference between revisions 1.1 and 1.2.

(Yes, RCS will just increment the second number in the revision number, so after a while you’ll be editing revision 1.2486 of the file. Getting to revision 2.0 is an advanced topic that we won’t cover here.)

With the tools you already have, the simplest way to revert an unintended change to a file is simply to see what the file used to look like, and copy-paste that into a new revision.

Once you’re comfortable with that, you can read the manual and read up on things like deleting revisions with rcs -o1.2 myfile.

Checking in someone else’s changes

You will inevitably run into cases where someone changes your file without going through RCS. Either it’ll be a coworker managing the same system who didn’t notice the ,v file lying around, or else you’ll forget to check in your changes after making changes.

Here’s a simple way to see whether someone (possibly you) has made changes without your knowledge:

# co -l myfile
RCS/myfile,v --> myfile
revision 1.2 (locked)
writable myfile exists; remove it? [ny](n):

In this case, either you forgot to check in your changes, or else someone made the file writable with chmod, then (possibly) edited it.

In the former case, see what you did with rcsdiff, check in your changes, then check the file out again to do what you were going to do.

The latter case requires a bit more work, because you don’t want to lose your coworker’s changes, even though they bypassed version control.

  1. Make a copy of the file
  2. Check out the latest version of the file.
  3. Overwrite that file with your coworker’s version.
  4. Check those changes in.
  5. Check the file out and make your changes.
  6. Have a talk with your coworker about the benefits of using version control..

You already know, from the above, how to do all of this. But just to recap:

Move the file aside:

# mv myfile myfile.new

Check out the latest version:

# co -l myfile

Overwrite it with your coworker’s changes:

# mv myfile.new myfile

Check in those changes:

# ci -u myfile
RCS/myfile,v <-- myfile
new revision: 1.3; previous revision: 1.2
enter log message, terminated with single '.' or end of file:
>> Checking in Bob's changes:.
>> Route around Internet damage.
>> .
done

That should be enough to get you started. Play around with this, and I’m sure you’ll find that this is a huge improvement over what you’ve probably been using so far: a not-system of making innumerable copies of files when you remember to, with names like “file.bob”, “file.new”, “file.new2”, “file.newer”, and other names that mean nothing to you a week later.