Brain Drippings

Apple has recently introduced their new Intel based Macs, and earlier this month stunned everyone with their release of Boot Camp, which allows the new Intel Macs to load and install and run Windows XP, albeit with a reboot. What is most tantalizing about Boot Camp is not it’s ability to boot into Windows XP, but rather the potential that it shows for Leopard (OS X 10.5 expected late 2006 or early 2007). Rumors abound, from the silly to the though provoking. No one knows for sure who is not under NDA, but one interesting idea comes from the otherwise lunatic fringe of Cringley, who supposes that Leopard will include a full Windows API for Windows XP. This, for the none geeks amongst you, means that OS X 10.5 would be able to run a Windows XP program without booting into Windows. Cringley is often far afield and seems to miss the point more often than not, (his nonsensical ramblings about kernels recently really exposed his lack of knowledge) but this, at least, is a very interesting idea. He even posits that the turning point for this was the 1997 agreement between Apple and MSFT that settled Apple’s copyright infringement case against Microsoft with a technology sharing agreement. This agreement includes the time period when Windows XP was released. Now, Billy Boy (Bill Gates) has always lived in The Steve’s (Steve Jobs)shadow, and his whole career can be viewed as an effort to get The Steve to respect him, something that has not happened. Oh sure, to the outside world Bill’s Billions speak to his success and most people would say that Bill won whatever pissing contest there was. Bill and The Steve know better. Their competition is not about money, and it’s not about market-share. It’s about history and their place within it. It is already obvious that The Steve is seen, rightly or wrongly, as the visionary, the leader, the savant. Bill is the Boswell to The Steve’s Johnson, but lacking Boswell’s wit, charm, and dynamic personality. What The Steve has managed to do since Apple’s 1997 reverse-buy of NeXT is nothing short of amazing, and Bill, who for a few short seconds may have believed he had finally succeeded, didn’t even realize that his big moment at Mac World was actually a subtle (to some) jibe at Bill by The Steve. How many people, seeing Bill’s huge face over the stage at Macworld thought of the immortal 1984 commercial introducing the Macintosh? And now Disney has done a reverse-buy on Pixar, which means that twice now The Steve has managed to take over company that was buying him out. OK, he’s not exactly taken over Disney (yet?) but Pixar has become Disney’s animation department, so the effect is at least similar.

The right-wing Christian opposition to science and especially to evolution has always puzzled me. I never bought the whole ‘contrary to the Bible’ spiel because, frankly, so many other things in the Bible are completely ignored. We will get beyond the ‘love thy neighbors’ which, as a friend of mine pointed out, is a tenet that fundamentalist seem to believe applies only to everyone else. And only if they themselves are the neighbors in question. Moderate Catholics don’t go shooting Doctors over abortion, for example. There are probably hundreds of verses in the Bible dealing with slavery and I’ve yet to meet a fundamentalist who’s in favor of slavery. Or at least who is willing to admit it.

But then it struck me, evolution, more than any other scientific fact, strikes at the very core of all fundamentalist faith, and it’s not because it’s contrary to the Bible, but because it is contrary to the very concept of religious faith.

The primary tenet of fundamentalist faith, and indeed of all faith—the one linchpin on which the whole of all religious belief hangs; so basic that it is not even acknowledged because it is so obvious—is simply that the world used to be a better place and it’s been going downhill since the creation. Fundamentalists don’t believe in evolution because they believe in DE-evolution and, by the very nature of being fundamentalists, cannot harbor two contradictory thoughts.

Evolution proves that organisms adapt. Adapt implies improvement, and if things are improving then they can’t have been better in the past. Ergo, evolution is contrary to the fundamentalist way of thinking.

People have a seemingly natural way of glossing over their own past and remembering their youth and childhood with deftly contorted memories that highlight the good, often at the cost of any reality. They then transfer this tendency to history itself.

And it’s not just Christians. Astrologers, so-called New Age Pagans, and even most people who are not particularly imbued with religious fervor are tainted by the illusion of nostalgia. The past was better than the present, and everything is going to hell. “Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” We can imagine this being said 10 years ago, and perhaps even 100 years ago, but in fact this was said a century before Christ.

Neo-pagans carping about how ‘advanced’ the Druids and Celts are casually ignore the human sacrifice aspects of the Celtic religion, to say nothing of the fact that we know practically nothing about their religion (the Romans were very effective at stomping it out). Christians or Jews who try to discover the ‘Wisdom of Solomon’ ignore the 30-35 year life expectancy of 3,000 years ago. To say nothing of child birth risks, or, say, the risk of being sold into slavery and shipped off to Athens.

And speaking of Athens, that is where the idea of biological evolutionary theory first occurred, by the way. So, on the basis of that ‘Wisdom of the Ancients’ crap, we should accept it as gospel, right?

The vast chasm that separates rational thought from faith is one simple thought, is the world getting better or worse?

Or, in other words, for all their faith and evangelism, fundamentalists are pessimists. After all, they know the world is going to end in some hellish apocalypse.

If you are a scientist you have empirical evidence that the world is getting better, and that the lives of nearly every human being on the planet are noticeably improved over their lives a century ago. Once you accept that, then the whole foundation of fundamentalism slides away.

Can you be religious and be a scientist? Certainly. In fact, most physicists seem to have some sort of faith, but I don’t think it’s the sort of faith that fundamentalists would consider any kind of religion, and probably not even a faith. But can you be a fundamentalist and be a scientist? No, you can’t. You can’t be a doctor and discard biology. You can’t dismiss evolution while treating drug-resistant infections. You don’t get to be a doctor if your prescriptions include phrases like ‘Prayer Circle’ any more than if your recommended treatment for fever is blood-letting. See, medicine has evolved too.

Amazingly enough, Georgie continues to be exposed in lies, lies, and more lies. The scumbag who told the nation that anyone in the White House who leaked classified documents would be fired has admitted that he was the one who authorized a leak of classified information. The WHite House is calling this a “declassification”, which is another lie since Georgie Boy followed none of the procedures for declassification. What a surprise, he probably couldn’t read them. Of course, he hasn’t followed through by tendering his resignation. Georgie ruined a CIA operative’s career to punish her husband for daring to question his network of lies about Iraq, and now the asshole has the gall to use the exact same argument to start raising support for bombing Iran. “This time for sure.” Right, how many more thousands of people will Chimpboy be responsible for killing? Impeachment is too good for this scumball. He should be locked away in Levenworth for perpetrating the deaths of tens of thousands of people on a network of lies, to mention nothing of his extensive network of torture prisons around the world.