Oh hell yes. One of the posts nobody cares about.
I’ve been working on the site a bit this morning:
That’s it. Move along and forget what you saw or read.
N.B. There shall be more informative posts in the future – hopefully.
The question formulated by LostintheWhirlwind was the following:
I would like to know a specific reason why you do not believe in God or any other higher power.
Please actually explain yourself, and please don’t flame. I’m really interested in knowing what you all think.
I am an agnostic and I believe that the question is quite easy to answer.
Now, why would I choose to be an agnostic? What I am searching for a proves. You need proves in almost all the areas and parts of your daily life.
You do need to have a driving license when operating a car, so that you can prove that you are able to. You have to prove to your bank that you earn money in order to get a credit card. In court you have to be proven guilty before you can be sent to prison. Now, this last example is actually the most important one. Perhaps because it is the most obvious one to everybody, but perhaps because we just need – as human beings who like to question and analyse things – that something has taken place (a crime for instance) otherwise there is no need to believe that said convicted is a bad person and whatnot.
Interestingly, religion is the only place (hence the almost in my third sentence) I know of – or that I can come up with in a fraction of a second – where this seems not to apply. Why is that? I do not know. Prove me that that there is a god, and I will accept and formally acknowledge that I have been wrong. So far though, nobody has been able to do that.
You might argue that I could just as well prove that there is no god. Fair enough. But I believe I can counter that. To do so, we’ll have to get back to the court example I gave earlier on. People don’t go to a judge and say: “Look I haven’t done anything wrong.” without having been accused. There just is no need to prove that you haven’t done something, if there is nobody able to show that there has been an illegal act of your part. I reckon that most people do share my opinion on these court “rules”.
Now, I ask you. Where is the proof that there has been something – or that there is something – like a god? Asking me to prove that there is none seems just to be asking the question the wrong way around, as I tried to show with the court analogy.
As always, no offense meant to anybody whoever worships a god. I hope though that you will be able to understand why I am not.
Yesterday there was a Digg story, linking to an article over at the The Telegraph which had first been digged by johndi saying:
“I’ll be the first to admit many of our policies are misguided, and sometimes just wrong. I’ve traveled quite a bit, and haven’t found a country yet where the people like their government. Consider how you feel about your government, before you criticize Americans based on ours.”
Now, all that long intro – I have written only – to be able to post my response to that statement:
Dear johndi,
[Quote]Consider how you feel about your government, before you criticize Americans based on ours.[/Quote]
That isn’t a valuable statement at all. Most if not all countries might have some inner problems, and some problems with international relations. Yet no country with so much power, or closely so, tries to impose itself just as much on the rest of the world.
Just because there is no single military or economic power to challenge the United States in any way, doesn’t mean that they have the right to do just about anything they want. Be it CO2 emissions (Kyoto – ever heart of it?), warfare (Afghanistan & Iraq), or human rights (Guantanamo).
Was it another country who would allow itself such disrespectful actions against other countries; was it another country to try to interfere in situations and places where it better had to keep its social and demographic ideas out; was it another country with a politician which would claim that you are either with or against us; the politicians would be removed from their positions, and the countries would face embargoes from whatever nation on earth. Not so the United States.
To me, in all honesty, and without any offense meant, the United States is acting and arguing as a young teenager. Feeling omnipotent yet not facing the consequences or the dangers of its actions. Acting egocentrically and claiming that nobody understands why they are acting so.
Note that this is a political problem; I do fully understand and acknowledge that the decisions made by whatever president in office is not always the opinions and the path the population would have chosen.
They did it again – yet again I might say. According to a BBC article Charlotte Knoblauch made the statement that to her Ahmadinejad was a second Hitler. Now how clever is that? If you want to punch something through in Germany, remind the people of how bad Hitler was, and boom, they are going to support you.
Do not allow yourself to believe me straight on. Go and read a bit about how they deal with certain problems and you’ll see. I’d like to quote “Hermann Göring” right here and now:
Once in German and once in English (both quotes “reading” the same).
“Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg […] Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. […] das Volk kann mit oder ohne Stimmrecht immer dazu gebracht werden, den Befehlen der Führer zu folgen. Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land.” – in einem Interview mit Gustave Gilbert in seiner Gefängniszelle, 18. April 1946 –
Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”
Gilbert: “There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”
Göring “Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Now, back to the topic. So technically there are 2 points of criticism. And while I do not try to protect Ahmadinejad, I have to say that the way in which Knoblauch made her points is strictly unacceptable. First of, being positioned at a somewhat higher and by there important rank, saying whatever goes through your head without thinking first of what accusations you are actually going to make, is a very bad thing. Acting in such a way proves, in my opinion only of course, that such a person has no right to be in the position he or she may be in.
How come, first of all, that it still isn’t allowed to say that the Holocaust did never take place? Sure, to me and I’d say most of the world it did. And sure enough it was a tremendously bad thing, horrible not to say. But still. What on earth is the problem if somebody goes ahead and says that it didn’t exist, take place, and whatnot? I just can’t understand the problem the German governement and society seems to have with this situation.
Not allowing to speak once mind is a crime. Speaking something unrightful isn’t – and it will never be. At least to me.
Now then. Next point. Apparently – and I am quoting the BBC here – Mr Ahmadinejad has described the Holocaust as a “myth” and said Israel should be “wiped off the map”.. Again, I can not protect or respect his reasoning. But why oh why is saying something similar to that sentence a problem? Of course the idea of somebody speaking rubbish – which applied to Knoblauch – applies to Ahmadinejad as well – no doubt about that. But again, why is it a problem if somebody makes such a statement?
I can not grok it – I’d like to say.
The main problem to me however, isn’t the remarks both of those people made. No. It is the way some of the German politician answer and reacted. I’ll quote the BBC again: “Several groups plan to participate in a demonstration against Mr Ahmadinejad on Sunday, including the Israeli cultural organisation and exiled Iranian dissident groups. [...] Bavaria’s Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein plans to join the demonstration. [...] “If he were to come, we, as Germans, must make it very clear that he is not wanted here,” Mr Beckstein said.
First of – who is he (Mr. Beckstein) to tell the people who most probably voted for him, what they have to do? Is he a part of the executive and the legislatural force of the country? Who is he, to assume that his view of the situation was to be mirrored by all of his people?
Then there is the demonstration. I have no problems with the Israeli organisation protesting, or the Iranian dissident groups, and whoever would like to be a part of it. I have a problem with the sentence “Bavaria’s Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein plans to join the demonstration. That hurts. If Beckstein plans to join the demonstration he shall very well do so – as a private citizen. Using his position in the political and social ladder to accentuate his position should – in my opinion again – be outlawed.
Ah well. What shall I say…
Yesterday evening while laying in bed, I once again had one of this strange thoughts. And again I was too lazy to get up right away and note it down. Anyhow.
Have you ever thought about why we do not have any LDAP support on mobiles? (Now this might exist somewhere, but to this date I have never heart of it.) Imagine kicking of the telephone book you are used to and switch for a national solution to the problem of “How on earth am I supposed to find the number of this and that person”?
We’ve certainly all been subjected to the case where we just couldn’t either remember of find a number in our digital or not address book. What was the solution? Well, either call a service who is going to query their database for you, or look it up in the telephone book (if then the telephone book is listing mobiles).
Now, instead of having a telephone book for the wired connections, we could have one for mobiles as well. Heck, best would be to only have one decent register on where one has to search.
Now imagine you are on the way, say somewhere in the country side. And as many people nowadays you carry your mobile with you just about anywhere. While sitting somewhere under a tree (heh, I can even try to be romantic) you suddenly want to call an old friend of yours.
Virtually impossible at the moment, it might not be in the future.
Now, getting back to LDAP support on a mobile. Imagine if there was a national LDAP service running, where you could type in the name of the person you want to query it for (intuitive, isn’t it) and it would give you as you type your results (imagine the “as you type” part once the input of the user has reached more than 3 or 4 characters – the connection speed and all make it impossible in my opinion to fetch or get a huge new list at every new character the user enters).
Technologically we have it all. I mean, there are Linux smart phones out there. And as many modern day mobiles have (Lord, here we go) Java capabilities everybody could just download an application allowing him to reach this service. The connection speed of the devices get’s better all the time too. GPRS should already be plenty fast, UMTS would be even better.
I can imagine though, that some people would feel uncomfortable with such a solution. After all, it’s your numbers available to just about everybody. And even though there are people who would have their name and numbers in an offline register – read: telephone book – they wouldn’t allow you to have their names and numbers in an online register. After all, every technology involving the internet is dangerous…
I sincerely hope that this service doesn’t exist yet. Not because I will make myself some kind of ridiculous if it does, but because otherwise I could have saved myself some minutes of typing.
Anyhow. Anybody of you got an opinion on this?