9. November 2009 by Samldanach.

Edit 2:  I’m putting too many notes at the top of this entry.  This was originally supposed to go up Friday.  As you can tell, it didn’t.  Basically, I couldn’t wrestle it around to the shape I wanted.  I’m still unhappy with it, but part of NaNoWriMo is to just get the word count out there.  Allow yourself to write crap.  Oh, look, here it is!

Edit 1:  Huh.  I got about half this entry written on the ride in this morning.  Then saw Chuck Wendig link to this piece.  A fascinating read, there.  Several bits to think on and chew over.

Is science a religion?

This awkward semantic debate fills numerous comment threads out on the internet.  The modern atheist, putting his trust in things that Science! and Technology! and Education! teach him does not seem that different from the modern evangelical Christian, putting his trust in the Bible.  At least, not at first glance.  Neither adherent has actually gone and discovered the various truths they are arguing about.  They have simply heard about them, from sources that seem reputable, and the truth has the ring of veracity.

With this argument, Christians dismiss the atheist argument as simply being a different faith.  Both are equally valid (though, naturally, the Word of God should trump any peer-reviewed journal, as God is above all peers).  So, you go believe what you want to believe, but you can’t tell me that what I’m believing is wrong.

This argument frustrates the atheist to no end.  After all, science is science, it’s not some mumbo jumbo that was supposedly said by some sky ghost to a possibly insane hack who was inhaling who knows what from a burning bush on a mountain in a desert.  Science is all about the purity of thought, the rigor of carefully testing all hypotheses.  Belief has nothing to do with it.  It is about facts, and evidence, and logic.

Or is it?

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9. November 2009 by Samldanach.

I’ve written about this in past years, and want to make sure I note it again.  The date 9/11 has been embedded in our consciousness for eight years now.  But, the date 11/9 should be equally embedded.

Fortunately, this year you all probably already know what the date is significant for.  Or, at least the most prominent event.  The fall of the Berlin Wall.  The collapse of the great Soviet experiment.  The effective end of the Cold War.

I don’t think that younger people can really understand what that meant for us at the time (in much the same way that I cannot really understand VE Day or the end of the Vietnam War).  The ’80’s were permeated with a sense of foreboding.  Go back and listen to some of the music.  We honestly thought that we were all likely to perish in some kind of nuclear holocaust.  It seems quaint and paranoid now, but it certainly wasn’t then.

When the Wall came down, it seemed blatantly unreal.  Of course, I was a freshman in college at the time, so much of the world outside of campus seemed a bit unreal.  But, there was no question that history had just turned on a dime.  Assumptions about “how the world worked” just fell away.

There was a brief, halcyon period in there, where it seemed like rational thought and diplomacy had actually beaten out a military solution.  The Soviet Union was collapsing, and nobody had to die.  At least, not until events transpired that made the word “Balkan” a permanent part of our vocabulary.  But, for a time, we had hope again.

9/11 was all about the shattering of illusions of peace and safety.  11/9 was all about shattering illusions that the only way to win was to beat the other person into submission.

Of course, if we go back a bit further, the date 11/9 has a much darker event.  One much more similar to 9/11, and one that similarly should not be forgotten.  Unreasoning hatred destroyed thousands of lives, and evil was made manifest.  I am speaking of Kristallnacht, the night when Nazi Germany turned on its Jewish population.  The government attacked its own people, killing or arresting thousands of Jews, and destroying their businesses.  The snowball was pushed down the hill, and it would culminate in the Holocaust.

I do urge you to go read at least Wikipedia on these events today.  History can turn so quickly sometimes.  Watching the way it turned to both the darkness and the light on the same date for Germany is, I think, important.  To all of us.

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9. November 2009 by Samldanach.

So, I had a wacky idea while lying in bed Sunday morning.  It’s been banging around a bit, and I need a blog topic, so here we go.

Basically, it’s a concept for a dark sit-com/dramedy show.  Take a low-class, redneck family.  They win the Mega-Ball Lottery, and suddenly come into around $200 million.  Their whole lives get turned upside down and inside out.  Basic themes revolve around “money doesn’t solve everything,” “rich people are just different,” and “greedy people suck.”

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