Religious NutJobs

A few days ago, somebody asked me why I didn’t follow any religion. The reason is, because most religions are nuts. Seriously, they don’t make sense. Let me just pull some quotes from today’s news articles.

First off if you’re upset that the pope called your religion “spread by the sword,” then the following response doesn’t really help your case

“you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. … We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword.”

In essence, you just validated his statements. This isn’t a shot against muslims.. Just the person who issued that statement.

Now, let’s look at the evolution debate. My favorite quote has to be this one:

“We are objecting to the message that the fossil exhibits represent the scientific evidence of human evolution, They do not. Human evolution is still a theory and this cannot be called as evidence.”

Umm… fossils aren’t evidence of evolution? Care to explain that one? The very fact that intelligent design can be called a theory is a major reason I can’t give accrediation to religion. It’s not a “theory” if it’s only based on faith. Yes I know the bible says it… but the bible itself is only based on faith. There’s no facts backing that up either.

The problem with the “theory” is that it says that complexity can only come from imposed order… which applies fine to the earth, but a postulate of the theory is that anything that imposes order must also be complex… thus must also come from imposed order. So the theory of intelligent design itself dictates that God must have been intelligently created. And that contradicts your bible.

The world would be such a great place if we didn’t have religion.

September 18th, 2006

Some Random Thoughts

I just have to say that Sept 19th is national talk like a pirate day… so spread the word.

Has anybody read about this yet? It seems some belgium news sites are mad at google for sending them traffic. The uproar is about what’s called “deep linking”.. that is, linking to a particular page of a website instead of it’s homepage.

While there’s always been controvery about this, it’s frankly a very moronic stance to take. Sure it causes users to bypass some parts of your site (including ads), but deep linking sends highly targeted users to the parts of websites that they’re most interested in. Other companies spend a combined 3-5 billion / year paying SEO companies to do this for the yet the newspaper sites try to fight it when somebody sends them traffic for free.

If you don’t want somebody to link to something, you have alternatives to prevent it. You can not put it online in the first place, write some mod_security rules, or get clever with your .htaccess file. If you don’t want search engines to cache your site (as is the case here) then it’s up to you, the site owner, to say so in both your meta tags and your robots.txt file.

It’s cases like this that re-affirm neither the courts, nor the newspaper industry understand just what the internet is or even what search engines are for that matter. Maybe they’re still upset that their Sunday editions won’t fit through the standard internet tube. Senator Stevens, I’d like to hear your input on this.

September 18th, 2006