1. Just because you believe something doesn’t mean it’s true.
2. Just because lots of people believe something doesn’t mean it’s true.
3. Just because you believe the world would be a terrible place if something isn’t true, doesn’t mean it’s true.
4. Just because somebody very intelligent believes something, doesn’t mean it’s true (for example: Isaac Newton believed in alchemy).
   • This is particularly pertinent in arguments about religion; religionists are wont to point out that various famous scientists were (or were supposedly) Christians. Their religion doesn’t make their scientific discoveries any more or less valid, and their scientific discoveries don’t make their religion any more or less valid.
5. Just because something was believed by someone whom you consider to be good or bad, doesn’t make the thing in itself good or bad (example: Hitler was a vegetarian and opposed to smoking). This is a generalisation of the previous point.
6. Just because two things happen (together, or one after the other) does not mean that they are related. For example:
   1. A child showing symptoms of autism after being given the MMR vaccine; however, an autistic child would show symptoms at about this time anyway; this ignores other possible causes.
   2. Just because vegetarians or vegans are more healthy than meat-eaters (something often claimed in favour of vegetarianism) does not prove that vegetarianism/veganism is more healthy — there could be other reasons for the difference.
7. Science may not always get the right answer, but it has a better rate of success than making stuff up and hoping for the best. There’s a reason for that.

Ed writes that he finds atheists depressing when they throw away the "real message" of religion.

As an atheist, I have to agree — though it depends what "the real message" is. I grew up believing that Christianity taught that being a good person was what got you into heaven; it was only when I started university that I learned that actually, it’s believing in Jesus that gets you into heaven (or, more accurately, they redefine "good" to mean "believing in Jesus"). This is what put me off religion, long before I ever read The God Delusion.

You can’t even, unfortunately, argue that that’s an issue with the Church and not the religion, since it has its roots in a verse from the Bible, where Jesus is quoted as saying "nobody gets into heaven except through me" (more or less). The problem is, though, that despite the reasonable moral guidance provided by religious figures such as Jesus, they get overshadowed by the bits that give the Church power to control people, and that is why I object to religion.

Sure, you may say that the crappy church is not a good reason to avoid religion as a whole — but what other reason is there to pay any attention to it? Morality doesn’t require some Israeli carpenter/hippy to make it moral, or a Saudi merchant, Nepalese prince, or Prussian writer, and it’s perfectly possible to live a moral life without paying attention to some cosmic Jewish zombie and his imaginary friend.

So, serious question: what, exactly, is religion needed for? Answers on a postcard.

The generally-accepted (by insano-Christian types, anyway) date for the creation of the universe is Archbishop James Ussher’s calculation of September 22nd, 4004BC. This makes the universe 6011 years old as of last September.

Assuming a 90-year copyright, the universe would have passed into the public domain in September 3914BC, or 5922 years ago as of last September.

Traditional Hebrew calculations of the age of the universe are slightly more favourable, since they place the Creation at sometime in September/October 3761BC (can’t really be more accurate than that without more research on my part). However, this still would have the universe passing into the public domain in 3671BC.

Of course, this assumes that the copyright period is 90 years; obviously, if it’s 75 years then it’s even less favourable.

This also ignores the fact that the universe was written in Perl and Lisp, which suggests that God is in favour of free software; in fact, since he’s a Lisp hacker with an obvious interest in artificial intelligence, he probably has quite a bit in common with rms.

http://matthewhelmke.net/index.php/2007/12/23/24-holiday-greetings-and-hyper-sensitivity

"the doctrine of opposition to the separation of church and state."

An unfortunately common stance in the US, especially given that many of the early colonies were founded, by various groups, to escape religious persecution.

In case it’s not obvious, by the way, I’m in a political mood today, and I’m sitting on a train bored.

Anyway, my primary reason for being in favour for the total separation of Church and State is that it inevitably leads to discrimination, in several ways.

In the UK, "the Church" is generally the Church of England. Now, if the government allows its policies to be dictated by the Church of England, and if it governs the country in a way that would be appropriate with the CoE as "The Church", it’s going to lead to conflict. There are very few points that every religion with more than a trivial representation in the UK will agree on; making any kind of religious doctrine into law will alienate religions that disagree with that doctrine (for the purposes of this discussion, I’m considering atheism to be a religion, whose supporters disagree with every religious doctrine out of sheer bloodymindedness if nothing else).

The other problem is that many religious doctrines are discriminatory in themselves. The obvious one is the Christian insistence that "I am the Lord your God; you will have no other God before me". Insisting that other religions are inherently sinful tends to piss them off a bit.

Another, which is currently an issue in the US, is the opposition to homosexuality in general, and gay marriage in particular. Basically, the main argument seems to be "it’s un-Christian", which would be a perfectly acceptable argument in a Christian country and is therefore a perfect reason why there should not be such a thing as "a Christian country" (or any other religion, for that matter). It is simply not acceptable to discriminate against any group simply because some other group claims that the first group is sinful, especially based on the frankly pretty shaky evidence that Christianity has. In the UK, it appears that it’s allowable for gay people to have all the benefits of marriage as long as they don’t call it marriage; frankly, if the Church of England are that petty they need to grow up, and they certainly shouldn’t be given any say in national policy.

Apparently, the Italian government recently voted against a law that would make it illegal to discriminate against gay people, under pressure from the Vatican (who presumably didn’t want to get sued). It’s a little worrying that Italy worries so much about what another country thinks.

It occurred to me, sitting on the train to visit my parents, that there’s a major flaw in George Bush’s War on Terror; that is, that it assumes that American intervention around the world will lead to a decrease in terrorism.

Now, cast your mind back to the six years prior to 11th September 2001. How often did terrorism make the news? Compare it with the six years since. I was 9 in 1995, so not particularly politically aware for most of that period, but it seems that prior to 2001, terrorism didn’t make the news anywhere near as often as it does nowadays. There was the IRA and assorted other groups in Ireland, Palestinian and Israeli groups making a nuisance of themselves, occasionally ETA; nothing like the scale that we’ve seen since 2001.

The question is, did the increase in terrorist activity happen before, and lead to, the World Trade Centre attacks, or did the attacks (and more pertinently, the US response) lead to the increase? Another interesting question would be: how much of the purported increase is actually real, and how much of it is media (and government) hyperbole?

The answer to the first question is reasonably simple; from what I can see, there was no increase in terrorist activity until after the World Trade Centre attacks. Strangely, fundamentalist Muslims don’t appreciate having their countries invaded on fairly flimsy pretexts, and others who might otherwise be more moderate in their views may quite easily be driven to fundamentalism by the constant threat to, and defamation of, their religion and way of life.

That’s not to say, of course, that I agree with their religion (or any other religion), or their society (or any other society that has basically non-existent women’s rights and gay rights, and poor separation of church and state—like, for example, the USA [1]). However, the US’s heavy-handed approach has not made them many friends in the Middle East.

It is often claimed that there are no contradictions in the Bible. It is also often claimed that this is a lot of bollocks. Just to add weight to the latter argument, compare Matthew 1:1-16 with Luke 3:23-38. Both passages are accounts of Jesus’ paternal ancestry, and both are different; they can’t even agree on the name of his grandfather. If the Bible can’t agree on something so trivial, how can it be trusted to be correct on anything else?

I’ve started a list of contradictions. Please feel free to contribute.

From http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62035655,00.htm:

Chizen characterized the open-source community as taking its inspiration from commercial companies. "The open-source community takes a lot of the practices and some of the ideas from commercial companies and enhances them," he said. "If we didn’t exist, there would be less to enhance."

So, basically, it’s okay for companies to exploit copyright and patent law, because if they didn’t the free software world wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Or something. What a lot of arse.

Mark Pilgrim writes about the future of reading. Read it, think about it.

Also, read rms’ essay The Right to Read.

There’s been discussion some time back (September or so) about the use of BSD-licenced code (wireless drivers from OpenBSD) in the Linux kernel; specifically, that changes to the drivers were only released under the GPL and therefore unusable by OpenBSD (which won’t accept any licence more restrictive than the original Berkeley licence).

Most of the people appear to be missing the point. Of course, the Linux developers are perfectly entitled to do so—the OpenBSD licence doesn’t require anyone to release any modifications at all, and BSD code is used by, for example, Sun, Apple, and Microsoft for this very reason.

However, that doesn’t mean they should. Just because you don’t need to release your changes doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do so anyway; Apple especially have contributed a fair bit back to FreeBSD despite not being required to. And from free software developers, a refusal to release code under a licence that’s acceptable to the author is a little hypocritical.

It shouldn’t be a case of "do it because you have to". It should be, as I’ve mentioned_before, something you do because it’s the right thing to do. The Linux guys know it’s right, yet still they avoid doing it.