A Culture Of Religion

One nation, under God ...

The Pledge Of Allegiance

I'm putting on my atheist cap for this discussion, since I am one for most practical purposes. Our culture's attitude towards religion and god irks me greatly. It's not even a conscious effort on the parts of those who do it, it's just so ingrained. I don't mean to imply anyone is consciously doing anything wrong, but just to point out a phenomenon which has been bothering me.

References to God are nigh-ubiquitous in our society. In oaths, in songs, in speeches, almost everywhere. Even so-called non-denominational services typically bring up a god with decidedly Judeo-Christian attributes. Even the Pledge of Allegiance has been religified in that way. Hell, it's on every piece of our currency: "In God We Trust"

Questioned about religious references, most people are surprised, even offended at the idea that they could be removed. There's such a casual attitude towards them, such an insistence that they don't mean anything. If they really don't mean anything, then, why do people have such a problem with the idea of removing them?

There's a huge unconscious attitude that, wonderful ideals of freedom of religion aside, we're really all Judeo-Christian in the end. Or, alternately, almost an attitude that believing in a Judeo-Christian sort of God or universe is the norm, and other religions are measured relative to that. It just really gets on my nerves, personally. I do refuse to sing songs or recite things with religious meanings and references, on a matter of principle, and it really is mildly awkward standing silent in a room full of people belting "God Bless America" to be standing silently, not because I dislike America, but because I don't believe in a god, an object to participating in something that implies, even in the most indirect fashion, that I do.

What is magic?

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

I believe the above quote is much more insightful than most people realize. Many people, myself included at first, pass it off as merely witty or "cute". But to me, it raises profound issues about just what magic is, and if there even can be such a thing as magic.

Many people tend to define magic as some variation on "What can't be explained". But explained by whom? If I somehow carried a flashlight 500 years back in time, would it be magic? It would certainly seem magical to the people of the time, but is that enough to make magic? The word loses its, well, magic, if you make it depend on timeframe...

Clarke's quote suggests that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. But, that means it still isn't magic, just really hard to tell apart from it. But if it's indistinguishable from it, you can't tell the difference. So what is the difference? What is the essential difference between magic and something we just don't understand yet?

Even more generally, and relating to the previous post, can there even be such thing as the "supernatural" at all? If it exists in our world at all, doesn't that make it natural by definition? We might not be able to immediately explain it, but that doesn't make it any more supernatural than unexpected results from some scientific experiment.

My God!

He had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictably changing their meanings without any pattern ... And this had been a very short word."

Valentine Michael Smith, in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, on God.

I can't decide whether I'm an atheist or agnostic. You might think that uncertainty on the issue would drop me by default into the agnostic category - after all, I don't know, which is what the word agnostic comes from. But the problem is, I don't know what to think, because I don't know what I mean by "god". I do not believe in the existence of some higher sentient being who created the Universe. Other than jokes about the Universe's sense of irony, I don't believe in any "plan" to the world. I don't believe things happen for any specific overarching reason. In short, I disbelieve the existence of the most common perceptions of the word "god". The uncertainty arises, however, from a feeling that someone could conceivably come up with a broader sense of the word, with which I could agree.

The word "god" gets thrown around so much, so that no one knows what it means any more. I think (hope?) it's clear that no one literally believes in the whole bearded wise-old-man in the clouds idea, but I would contend that that image clouds our perceptions to the extent where we can't discuss the idea of "god" without mentally coming back to it to some extent. Courtesy of Christianity, many people now equate God with the idea of a Heaven, Hell, and some form of cosmic judgment. God means completely different things to different people, and yet you can still hear unqualified statements about god or believing in god, without any clarification of what they mean.

Indeed, some people even seem content to make this confusion and vagueness explicit! Arguing with my mom over the existence of some kind of soul or spirit, I got at least 4 distinct impressions of what she meant by the term "soul", and not even anything coherent enough to be worth quoting. But nonetheless she maintained she believed strongly in it, whatever it was. I don't mean to pick on her; I think a lot of people do this, and she's just a convenient example. I understand and agree that faith is, well, faith, and largely outside the realm of logic. But isn't it reasonable to at least have an idea of what you're believing in?

Patriotism

Kentes and Kels have convinced me to post about patriotism, so here goes.

Dictionary.com defines "Patriotism" as "Love of and devotion to one's country". Note that it's devotion to one's country, not to any specific and temporary government thereof. It is perfectly possible to protest an administration and still love one's country for the ideals and goals it stands for. "I love my country, it's the current government I have issues with", as it were. I'm betting most readers of this blog agree.

But I think that that above sentiment is probably (hopefully?) pretty apparent to anyone who's stopped to sit down and think about the idea. What interests me here is why there is such a confusion between love of country and love of administration, both now and historically. Part of it is undoubtedly convenience - if you can persuade people that your political opponents are unpatriotic, it goes a good way towards getting reelected. I suspect a deeper reason, however, links back to my earlier post about ideals in government. Patriotism, love of country, is really a love of the ideals a country stands for. However, when these ideals are rarely, if ever, explicitly worded, and then only in such incredibly vague terms as "liberty", it makes it virtually impossible to debate them. The term "liberty" is sufficiently ill-defined that any political party in this country can claim to support it, and it's difficult to debate them. It's hard to argue that you patriotically support liberty and equality, but just disagree with the current administration's approach, when that administration can easily make claims to the same ideals, and when you can't challenge their interpretation on anything more than vague philosophical grounds.

When it's so hard to hold meaningful discussion on these vaguely defined ideals, then, the only standard for these ideals becomes the present interpretation of them. Thus, disagreement with this interpretation becomes unpatriotic, since it becomes synonymous with disagreement with the ideals themselves.

Whenever I post about a word or idea, I try to open with a link to a dictionary definition. This is not because dictionaries are always right, but it gives me a way to define my terms, to show where I'm coming from, and what assumptions I'm making, instead of arguing from some fuzzy "It just seems that way to me ..." stance. If we could do the same thing in politics, I believe, it would make a huge difference. We could meaningfully debate about what it means to be patritiotic, instead of flinging around platitudes, and get at the root o different interpretations of what this country stands for.

College Apps

Hey, I'm a High School Senior, I had to post about them sooner or later. It's late, and I'm tired, so I'm just posting a slightly edited version of another paragraph I wrote for English (Mr. Jarvis was our school's headmaster until this year). This verges on whiny bitching, but I think it raises legitimate issues that come up in and with the process.

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Sitting in the info session, listening to the representative blather on with the same statistics and platitudes I've heard at half a dozen other colleges, I can think only of Mr. Jarvis's words on the college process: "You'll do great wherever you go." If that's so, I can't help but think, why all this effort? Why the weeks out of my summer touring all the country's finest learning institutions? Ah yes, I recall: the fabled "match," finding the one college that fits my interests, goals, and personality. And yet ... even supposing I find this college, this "match," and fall in love with it, I will be attaching myself to a school I have no guarantee of getting into. I suppose it's worth it, though, worth the risk of disappointment, if it means a chance of ending up at my perfect school ... But can I even really tell ahead of time? Mr. Jarvis did also mention that he knew plenty of kids who loved second choice schools, and others who ended up hating that one school they had been dying to get into. There's so much conflicting information, and so much work ... Maybe I should just roll a die.

Democracy revisited

As the title implies, this post is related to the earlier one about what we mean by democracy.

But first, a brief interlude to my college trip out West last Spring. Two of the schools I visited, Harvey Mudd and CalTech, prided themselves on a strong honor code in the student body, which allowed teachers even to give all tests as take-home, at CalTech, with no fear of the students cheating. What intrigued me about both, though, was their elegant one-line formulations that summed up the entire honor code. At Harvey Mudd, it was "Don't be a jerk", and at CalTech the slightly more rigorous, "No member of the CalTech community may take unfair advantage of any other". I like the latter especially, because, in one simple sentence, it sums up the ideals behind every aspect of the Tech community, behind what is considered "right" or "wrong" in basically any context. That's not to say it's unambiguous -- "unfair" leaves a lot of room for argument. But it gives a universal starting point and guideline.

Linking back to the first topic, it strikes me that this is exactly what most or all governments, and our conception of democracy, lack. We speak of democratic ideals, of liberty, of freedom, and so on, but we don't even have an abstract definition of any of these terms. Members of the legislature therefore are all working from differing conceptions of the principles guiding them, with no way to debate or even accurately convey these differences. I think, ideally, that the legislature should have a mandate to legislate in a way to promote some explicitly worded fundamental principle. Like CalTech's, it should be open to interpretation. But it would give a common starting point, and a way to get at the real core of disagreements of ideology, rather than quarreling over various practical consequences of these beliefs. It's probably unrealistic, but I'm not about realism here.

That's not a word!

It always intrigues me whenever I witness a debate over a word's status as a word - virii, or boxen, for example, for the /. crowd among you. For whatever reason, there seems to be a near-universal tendency to assume that there's an authoritative answer to the question.

But how could it ever be so clear-cut? Languages are by their nature highly evolutionary. Words are constantly created or destroyed to match the times. "Normalcy", for example, was a word unheard-of a hundred years ago - "normality" was used instead. But Warren G. Harding, in a slip of the tongue or deliberate act of coining, used the word in a presidential campaign, and it stuck. Practically no one would dispute the word's legitimacy today. But at what point did it "become" part of the language? The moment Harding first uttered it? Hardly, or else we would have to assign "strategery" the same legitimacy. The moment dictionaries started including it? Which dictionary? And surely it must have been in at least semi-common usage before dictionaries would consider it worth inclusion.

"Ain't" ain't a word, 'cuz it 'ain't in the dictionary, runs an old quip. But "ain't" is in most dictionaries now, but is still not considered acceptable in any formal context. And in scientific or technological fields, words must be coined practically daily to describe newly observed or created phenomena or technologies, and may even make it into common usage before they'll be universally incorporated into dictionaries. But no one's likely to question those.

Dictionaries describe a language, they don't define it, I once heard said, and I think it's a better summing-up than I could coin. Languages don't have a single well-defined structure and vocabulary, no matter what people might think. Words will create themselves; Sometimes you have to just stop fighting it.

Lockpicking

Inspired in part by Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, I bought a Master Lock today, with the sole purpose of learning how to pick it. Just for curiosity's sake - if I wanted to steal anything from school locker's, enough people leave them open anyways.

Anyways, I've been meaning to do this for some time, and I recalled the time when, a month or two ago, I announced my intention of learning to crack Master Locks in the RL locker room. A friend spoke up, mentioning that I might not want to announce that publicly, suggesting, it seemed to me, that'd I'd probably be better off not knowing at all. Maybe I'm imagining things, but it seems to me that general sentiment would concur that lock picking would be an unwise hobby to pursue.

That seems somehow wrong to me. Knowledge, by itself, should never be a bad thing. Learning to pick locks, and then using that ability to steal others' property is wrong. Learning to pick locks just for the challenge it presents, and at worst to execute a practical joke (merely unlocking a friend's locker to spook him out), should not be. Now, I recognize that you can never know for sure why someone wants to learn something, and it's certainly easier to assume malicious intent, and try to suppress the knowledge entirely, this is ultimately a losing battle, and, more importantly, it strikes me as simply unjust and unfair.

Now back to cracking that lock.

Democracy

One hears an awful lot on the topic of "democracy" and democratic ideals these days, particularly in the context of promoting it in other nations (This post was sparked by a Lincoln-Douglass debate at Milton on the very topic). It seems simple enough, right? Everyone knows what democracy means -- "Government by the people", to quote both Merriam-Webster and dictionary.com.

And yet, such a simple topic can be so complicated ... What, in practice, does government by the people mean? Both dictionaries I reference refer to "majority rule" in one form or another, the situation becomes more complicated on issues on which there is no majority opinion, but rather a large number of varying factions. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem essentially states that there is no generally fair method for choosing a winner out of multiple possibilities.

But even aside from questions of voting, I have to wonder if there could even be a democratic system without voting as such. Could you somehow have a system that reflects the ideals of "government by the people", without actually directly polling the entire populace? I don't know how such a system would work, but it's not immediately obvious to me that voting as we (or the ancient Greeks) conceive of it is the only way to implement a democracy, even though the two have become fairly synonymous in our conception. It all comes back to the question of how exactly you decide what the people want in their government. And what if the people were to vote to establish an absolute dictatorship?

I guess the take-away is that it seems odd to me to spend so much time debating the merits of spreading democracy in various ways, when we're not even sure exactly what democracy means, and how to best implement it. It seems to me that those are questions worthy of more attention than they're getting.

On quotation and punctuation

If you read my previous post, you may have objected to my punctuation of quotations, namely putting any following punctuation mark outside the closing quotation mark. This is intentional, and not a mistake on my part.

Conventional grammar, of course, would have you punctuate quotations "like this," which is to say, including any trailing punctuation inside the quotes. Confusingly enough, you do this regardless of whether the punctuation is part of the including document, as in that example, or part of the quotation ("What?" he asked). As part of being contrary, and as an extension of my coder personality, I follow a far more logical pattern, in which anything in quotations is the literal text being quoted, and any punctuation that makes up part of my document coming outside the quotes. This strikes me as far more sensible, and is especially a must when discussing code or grammar questions such as this one, where details of punctuation are significant, and ambiguity intolerable.

Some thoughts on qualification

As a first musing, and as a peek into where my title came from, I'm posting a paragraph I wrote for English a couple of weeks ago, which is typical of the kinds of random thoughts that occur to me -- I've held this opinion for quite some time.

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The word "unique", by its very existence, demands qualification. English teachers and other grammarians often maintain it to be an absolute, unqualifiable term: something either is or is not unique, and there can be no shades in between. From such an absolutist standpoint, though, surely everything becomes unique, if examined closely. No two objects, entities or ideas are truly identical, if one is willing to look at small enough details, and so every one must be unique! Considered this way, it becomes clear that "unique" retains meaning only through unwritten convention: something can be considered "unique" only if different enough from all others to be worthy of note. If one realizes this, it then makes sense to make such a convention explicit, defining uniqueness as the degree of difference between something and its most similar counterpart. One can then talk of degrees of uniqueness, of a "radically unique" concept that shares little in common with any before it, or of a "barely unique" person hardly distinguishable from the rest of humanity.

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Some other thoughts in a similar vein:

• Can anything ever accurately be described as "unqualified"? Isn't unqualified itself a qualifier, and thus innately oxymoronic?
• Similarly, nothing's unremarkable once you remark on it being so. Indeed, this word leads rapidly to paradox -- if that's all you can say about something, is or is not that object unremarkable?
• And why do English teachers have issues with qualifying "unique", but not "remarkable"? Either you can remark upon it, or you can't -- this one seems if anything a clearer argument to me.

About this blog

I've settled on a use for my blog.

What this blog is not

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• About how much my life sucks
• About how much my life rocks
• About my life at all
• About my code, or any OSS development I may be involved in
• Gay

What this blog is

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The subtitle sums it up pretty well. I'm a bitter, cynical, but nonetheless idealistic high school techie with a tendency to think about things entirely too much. This blog is a dump of my random philisophic musings on just about everything, that I feel could conceivably be of interest to someone else. Comments, be they expressions of concurrence or declarations of my insanity, are welcomed.