Louise Harel and a Bottle of Rum

Which, for the record, is the only way you could convince me to vote for her. Drinking is the sole explanation for how a significant portion of the population could be lining up behind a woman who is proud of her refusal to debate in the language of fully one third of the island she wants to be in charge of.

That's really the heart of this, for me; Harel, by refusing to communicate her message to the massive number of electors in Montreal who might want to hear it but who simply don't understand French has essentially told them that she is not concerned with them. So does Montreal want a mayoral candidate who will not represent its whole population? Does Montreal want a mayoral candidate who'll once again try to divide it along linguistic lines?

Nearly 3 centuries of coexistence in Montreal has finally begun to unite the population in common interests; Harel isn't charismatic enough to undo that, but with power she could push some people to saying and doing very stupid things. It's something we don't need.

Anti-Vax and a Bottle of Rum

Alright, I'm posting from my iPod for the first time since it got all appstored, so bear with any difference in formatting and all that. All future iPod posts will bear the "...and a Bottle of Rum" suffix in the title.

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Okay, this H1N1 thing has got the crazies coming out of the woodwork. "Injecting a disease in your arm is dangerous!" they shriek; "I knew someone who got crazy sick because of the flu vaccine!" they continue. All of it faster than you can say "post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy" Which I guess is true of most phrases.

Here's the brass tacs: polio and smallpox are GONE. They don't exist in the western world BECAUSE of vaccination. Influenza mutates more quickly and dramatically, so we haven't been as lucky, but vaccines do help us build up partial immunities, so that if the strain we were vaccinated against comes around, we're unaffected and if some variation on that strain comes around, our odds of dying are significantly lower.

We don't have any native immunity to H1N1. The government of Canada is giving away vaccines. H1N1 is killing young adults and pregnant women. Smarten up, take an hour off work and take a god damned jab in the arm.

For better, more educated info, check out www.sciencebasedmedicine.org and glance at Thunderf00t on Youtube. The blog is obviously more complete than the videos.

Just Something I’ve Been Meaning to Say

iTunes is, in my opinion, one of the heaviest, most unwieldy and least useful pieces of software ever created by any major developer in the history of computing. It is clearly a lazy port job from the apple platform over to windows and it needs to be scrapped and built from scratch in a platform-specific way. That or it needs a team of competent porting programmers.

A Corollary to Pascal’s Wager

You must wager; it is not optional... Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists. (Source)

The Wager, as it has stood for so long, maintains that the Believer has nothing to lose, should he be proven wrong in the end; I would argue that this is not only mistaken, but that from the Atheist’s view it is ultimately the Believer who has the most to lose.

This may require some explanation:

If there is no other life, then the only one that matters is this one. That is a simple, elegant truth that is implicit in the idea of Atheism (or PEARLism as the wonderfully eloquent Thunderf00t likes to describe it). In such a paradigm, it is a crime against one’s self and one’s life to deny those instincts and pleasures permitted by proper social morality and pragmatism in order to maintain the self-abnegating, rigid, irrational pseudo-morality of scripture in hopes of meaning in a non-existent afterlife.

Self-abnegation is an evil doctrine; I do not mean, of course, that human beings should indulge every single urge which takes hold of them, or that we should feel compelled to act on every instinct. What I mean is that we should feel free to apply common sense and good judgement to our choices without the interference of superstitious, ancient tribal dogma. To claim that homosexual love is immoral on the sole basis of scripture ignores the impact of such judgement on those who have no other choice but to live and love that way. To claim abortion is wrong under every circumstance on the sole basis of scripture ignores the larger issue of circumstance, which, in cases of rape and extreme poverty can make the carrying to term of a child costly, dangerous and damaging on a personal, filial and social level.

These are only two of the more flagrant cases in which adherence to the morality of Christian scripture (which is one of the more lenient of the Big Three) corresponds to a direct and drastic diminishing of human quality of life; they do not begin to scratch the surface of other so-called “moral” doctrines, like male dominance, pre-marital celibacy and capital punishment.

These behaviours, this so-called morality, cheapens the only life we have on this earth. It robs people of the choices which allow them to live full, meaningful and happy lives and it unnecessarily adds misery, confusion, conflict and pain to a life already shot through with all of the above. When a believer dies, whether or not he has lived his life to the fullest, whether or not he has experienced a life of meaning and happiness, whether or not he has managed to accomplish all those things he would have liked to do, he is still dead. While he may not be able to regret the life he has wasted, he will nevertheless have wasted it.

So my corollary to Pascal’s Wager, or at least my modified wager, would be this:

The non-believer who places all meaning on this life may find, after death, that he is held to justify his actions and beliefs before a creator; this may lead to an unpleasantly long stay in hell.

That being said, the believer who places all meaning on the afterlife may find, upon his death, that he is losing his life without having lived it. Furthermore, if he is right and there genuinely is a creator, the likelihood of his believing the faith that the creator requires (assuming that it is one of the hundreds or thousands of denominations of the “revealed” faiths of earth) is so slim that regardless of his belief he may nevertheless end up joining his non-believing counterpart in hell.

Author’s Note: I do not include agnostics in this because I believe it is a bad scientific position to hold and that, upon examination, agnostics usually fall into the category of non-practicing religious people or weak atheists rather than anything in between.

As far as the first point, allow me to illustrate; if I tell you that there is an invisible unicorn under your bed that cannot be touched by human hands but that grants wishes if you believe in it just enough, you’d be completely right not to believe me – there would be no evidence for it. This is the same position one must take vis-à-vis religion; in the absence of proper evidence, the only sustainable position is disbelief. Agnosticism is the practice of saying “That’s all well and good, but there could be a unicorn there.” It is useless, contributes nothing to the conversation and is the doctrine of the terrifyingly politically correct.

Edit: The believer being referred to here is one who believes and practices his religion; the non-practicing believer is in the same boat as the atheist in that he may well enjoy his life to the fullest or what-have-you, but by not adhering to the dogma and doctrines of his faith, he will, by his own beliefs and by those of most others, be damned to hell.

On the Chaplaincy

Most people would agree that a modern democracy owes it to itself and its citizens to maintain a secular approach to affairs of state; the separation between the church and the people's sovereign institutions of governance is imperative to those same institutions' impartiality before all citizens and their proper service of state interests.

So why is it that our armed forces are still maintaining an active chaplaincy - either at home or in missions abroad - on the public dime? Is it so strange that our enemies think we're fighting religious wars against them? Our own government is paying to ship priests overseas to preach the Christian message.

I understand that our soldiers are doing a tough job and some of them need a bit of spiritual guidance or what have you to be able to go out and face those realities every day for however long their tours of duty end up being. But the abovementioned proper service of state interests requires that we consider the ramifications of state-sponsored religious figures in our state-sponsored war-machine (not that the Canadian war-machine is particularly terrifying, but I wouldn't wanna piss 'em off, anyway). The trick, I believe, lies in the "state-sponsored" bit.

Soldiers who want spiritual guidance should be given the same choice as people all over Canada and the United States: pay the Tithe. The military could cut funding to the chaplaincy entirely, paying only for their transportation, while the soldiers themselves pay the tithe from their salaries to keep their regiments stocked with all that's required to satisfy their spiritual needs. This hands-off approach may not be immediately appreciated by our enemies on the ground, but the intellectuals (and yes, our enemies do have a class of intellectuals interpretting world events for them) may well understand the intention behind the change.

Additionally, the stories of soldiers forced to attend services by social pressures might change if the culture of religious kow-towing espoused by the people at the top is, in this way, forced to change. I doubt it, but one can hope. The real pay-off will be in the long run; every other facet of our society has benefitted from the democratization and accessibility that secularization has brought with it, the military will prove to be no exception.