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.

I am sad to see that while certain people propagate the use of free and open software, they keep on using something horribly outdated – the “imperial” unit of measurement. The International System of Units is used throughout the entire world, yet some Open Source software is not using it by default.

The one piece of software I ran across today, which was using that outdated system was Open Office. Now, I can not claim that it was indeed Open Office, because it might just as well be that the Ubuntu Crew changed some settings when packaging OpenOffice.org2 – than again it isn’t important who did this.

What I mean is, how can one advocate open source software, yet rely on a non universal standard for units of measurement. How bluntly irrational is it to criticize Microsoft for not conforming to a certain standard yet not doing so oneself? While nobody awaits from Microsoft to suddenly step forward and do something right, you could await such a thing from people who propagate the use and the right to use free and useful software.

I fear that not many people see this matter as I see it though. And crap; I am not in favor of dropping the support of the “imperial” system right away, or at all for that matter. I am just bored to see that the default setting keeps on being non-SI.