nineteen sixty-four

I listened to this today, on public radio, KUNM in Albuquerque:

"Newly Discovered 1964 MLK Speech on Civil Rights, Segregation & Apartheid South Africa"

Great speech! London, December 7, 1964. Follow the link above for video from Democracy Now!, with audio of the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, and also the transcript of the show.

Host Amy Goodman:

In 1964, Dr. King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Days before he received that award in Oslo, Norway, Dr. King traveled to London. On December 7th, 1964, Dr. King gave a speech sponsored by the British group Christian Action about the civil rights struggle in the United States, as well as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. The speech was recorded by Saul Bernstein, who was working as the European correspondent for Pacifica Radio. Bernstein’s recording was recently discovered by Brian DeShazor, director of the Pacifica Radio Archives.

just asking

The rational scrutiny of religious faith involves asking believers only two questions:

How do you know that?

What makes you so sure that the claims of your faith are right and the claims of other faiths are wrong?

-- Jerry A. Coyne, in Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

fun metaphor

The writer Charles Stross posted "Over-Extended Metaphor for the day." Fun read. Here's a peek, but follow that link for the entire article:

There is one true religion in operating systems, and it is UNIX. Or maybe it's not the one true faith: there's an earlier, older, more arcane religion with far fewer followers, MULTICS, from which UNIX sprang as a stripped-down rules-deficient heresy in the early days of the epoch. Either way, if MULTICS is Judaism (and the metaphor is questionable at this point, for unlike MULTICS, Judaism is still alive), then UNIX is Christianity.

[...]

The Reformation took the shape of a new, freely copyable kernel that all the faithful could read with their own eyes. This Protestant heresy spread like wildfire among the people but was resisted with acts of vicious repression by the high priesthood of Corporate IT (arguably in connivance with the infidel invaders from the Caliphate of Microsoft). The Linux wars were brutal and unforgiving and Linux itself splintered into a myriad of fractious Protestant churches, from the Red Hat wearing Lutherans to the Ubuntu Baptists.

Charles Stross's blog: Charlie's Diary

that talk doesn't belong here

At the MepisLovers forums, you won't encounter any religious or political discussions. The administrators and moderators won't stand for it. And that's fine by me. It's one of the things that makes MepisLovers possibly the best Linux forums out there.

It's nothing but a zoo at other forums where those types of discussions are allowed to take place. They don't contribute anything to the forums. They just lead to arguments and bad feelings.

Please, please, please: Let's keep religion and politics out of Linux forums. There are other places, other forums to talk about that stuff. We don't need any of it at the Linux forums.

evil

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." -- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

A Wikipedia article on the mathematician, physicist, and Catholic philosopher, Blaise Pascal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_Pascal

Too Many

Wow. What a long list of religions/mythologies/spiritual traditions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religions_and_spiritual_traditions

And this list can't even be complete. How many other religions have there been that have been completely forgotten? How many are there right now that didn't make this list?

How many people do you know of any one particular faith who believe exactly the same things, worship in exactly the same ways?

From Austin Cline's article, "Too Many Gods, Too Many Religions: All Can't Be True, But All Can Be False":

It's not logically impossible that one interpretation of one tradition from one religion might really be true after all, but the great diversity of beliefs means that anyone who claims this will have to demonstrate that their chosen religion is unequivocally more likely to be true and is more credible than all the others. That won't be easy to do.

Hm. Yet, everyone believes that their own religion is the one true religion, and that their God (or, gods) is (are) the real God (or gods).

How can anyone consider such a long list of religions/mythologies/spiritual traditions and not wonder what the truth really is? Is yours the real one just because you believe that it is? Because that's what people believe in whatever place and time you were born?

Logically, either one religion is the correct one, or none of them are. Either way, a lot of people are wrong.