If you're just joining us and want to know what all this is about, look to the rebooted first installment. If that's too much clicking, just read the questions for the day and leave your answers in the comment box.

Complete the statement: "I feel impatient when..."

...as often happens, I'm ready to go somewhere and Lauren isn't.

How would you dress if you want to a costume party?

Well, back in college, one Halloween I went as a flasher. The whole 9 yards. That was a fun time. As an adult, however, I'm much more reserved in my costuming. Now the premium is on ease of putting the costume together... so a flasher might still be the first option, as I still have the trench coat, but I'd probably throw some boxers on under it.

Say something about suicide.

Fortuntely, I don't have any direct experience with suicide. Not that long ago, though, I was talking to someone I knew in high school whose father committed suicide in the face of chronic pain and the prospect of renewed addiction to pain medication, and it's been pretty devestating for the family, even if understandable in its way.

As I said yesterday, I wanted to reveal and discuss the winner and runners-up in the CFI Blasphemy contest. To recap, entrants were asked, in 20 words or fewer, to skewer religious belief. Also, as I mentioned yesterday, they were asked to do it in a way that was witty and not mean-spirited. In other words, religion should be attacked with sharp, pointy objects, not blunt force trauma. Fair enough.

Without further ado, I present the runners-up:

There's no religion like no religion. (Daniel Boles of Thailand)

Nothing overly profound here, but a nice little turn of phrase.

I wouldn't even follow your god on Twitter. (Michael Hine of South Carolina)

For the digital age, there's an expression of exactly how little time some of us make for that God fellow. Or, really, I should say your god fellow to echo the original and emphasize the rather subjective nature of all the different gods people believe in. How do I know that the blue you see is the same as the blue I see is less profound than How do I know that the God I imagine is the same as the one you imagine.

I survived the God virus.

In a time when we're so worried about swine flu and other dangerous diseases, it makes an interesting logical leap to think of God in those terms, as a "virus," as an infection and not necessarily a nice one at that. It's also suggestive of Richard Dawkins' "meme" idea, that God is just an idea, albeit a viral one with a lot of strength. 

The reason religious beliefs need protection from ridicule is that they are ridiculous. (Michael Nugent of Ireland)

And this gets back to the issue I raised in yesterday's post. Ridicule is a form of criticism, humorously pointing out inconsistencies, errors, and hypocrisy. Often, the ridicule has some basis in fact (side note: I heard a story yesterday of nuns praising George Carlin's words you can't say on television monologue as pointing out the hyprocrisy of those rules). And if that's the case, ridicule is a pointed, amusing, and therefore memorable way of bringing such failings to our attention. Sometimes a recognition of the failing of a belief system or institution cause us to reject it; sometimes it causes us to seek reforms. In either case, something valuable has probably happened. If a belief is true, on the other hand, ridicule won't change that. It may have an unfortunate effect of bringing memorable scorn upon something that does not deserve it, but perhaps this, too, can be an opportunity to raise the issues, to explain why the apparent contradiction, inaccuracy, what-have-you is actually true, right, proper, good.

Okay, I know: I'm being too generous toward reasoned debate: people remember the attack more than the refutation. Such an attack is, at least, a call for each individual to join the battle for himself or herself, and after all, it's in the mind of the individual that such things must ultimately be decided, not in the public arena--because just as strong belief doesn't guarantee truth, neither does the popularity of a belief.

Okay, enough of my blathering. For approximately one line. The winner:

Faith is no reason. (Ken Peters of California)

It seems to me that what sets this one apart from the others is the different ways it can be read. Thinking of "reason" as meaning "the faculty of intelligent  and dispassionate thought," it reads like a comparison: "Faith? Well, it's okay I guess, but it's no Reason!" At the same time, it's a critique of the basis of faith: faith is having no reason for believing something. That's a little harsh, because I think most people do have reasons for their faith, but it gets to the way that, when push comes to shove, "faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." It is, in other words, believing on the basis of hope and ultimately the only evidence we have of things we can't see or verify. Believing something that ain't so, is how someone put it. And finally, you can read it as saying that Faith is no good reason for an action, it's no excuse for bad behavior.

Well, I know I've got a variety of people out there reading, so what did you think? Did you find them witty? Thought-provoking? In poor taste? Dull? Your thoughts are always welcome.

Recently, the Center For Inquiry (an organization with a goal of promoting "a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values") held a Blasphemy Contest, asking entrants to come up with statements of 20 or fewer words critical of religious belief. For today's entry, I thought I'd share the runners-up and the winner with brief commentary. Instead, after deciding it's worth sharing a bit of the statement they offered along with the announcement of the awards, I ended up writing a fair bit about that, so I'll share the results tomorrow (no cheating by poking around the CFI website!).

When CFI decided in September to hold a contest in conjunction with its commemoration of International Blasphemy Day, it generated a firestorm of controversy. Some observers claimed that CFI was soliciting hate speech, and they likened CFI to Nazis publishing anti-Semitic attacks.

CFI rejected those mischaracterizations then and continues to reject them now. “In holding a blasphemy contest, we wished to underscore our position that religious beliefs are subject to examination and criticism, just like other beliefs,” said Lindsay. “Sometimes that criticism may take the form of a scholarly essay; sometimes the criticism may take the form of a pithy, pointed remark. Both are appropriate forms of free expression.”

CFI emphasized it wanted clever, concise statements that might capture some of the flaws of religious beliefs. CFI was not interested in crude attacks on believers. CFI was not disappointed in the entries—either in their quality overall or their quantity. Approximately 650 contestants submitted over a thousand entries (contestants could submit two entries).

There's a sort of political correctness arising out of a form of cultural relativism, that suggests we can't criticize anyone's beliefs, because they're all equal or because it will hurt people's feelings or whatever the reason is. It seems to me that if there's one thing that should be fair game, it's beliefs. Criticizing someone based on in-born traits like skin color or ethnicity, that's terrible, because it's criticism based on something the person didn't choose and can't change. Although beliefs are all-too-often not consciously chosen or changed, they could be (and often, imo, should be), and if that's the case, why is criticism not allowed?

And here's the thing. Let's assume--as most people with strongly held beliefs (i.e. the people who often seem most offended by criticism of their beliefs) do--that most sorts of beliefs have a truth value. It may be difficult or impossible to ultimately prove the truth or falsehood of a given belief, but the underlying assumption is that a belief is true, or is at least something that could be true or false. So, given that starting point, if one has any kind of commitment to truth, shouldn't one be happy to go through the difficult process of having those beliefs questioned?

No, really. What happens when your beliefs are challenged? You either decide that the beliefs you held were, in fact, incorrect, and you modify them in some way up to and including giving them up entirely; or, after considering the criticisms, you decide that they are not valid (and it is to be hoped that you have good reasons for doing so), and in the process of defeating this challenge to your beliefs, you have given yourself better reason for thinking that your beliefs are, in fact, true. Or, anyway, a better approximation than the alternative.

Of course, we have to acknowledge a hard fact: we're mostly predisposed to be skeptical of other people's skepticism of our own beliefs. That's just how we're built: we're more likely to reject an alternative to our beliefs than to reject the beliefs. The effect of this natural bias is that, in the interest of truth, we should take very seriously beliefs that challenge our own. And I'll be honest: it's tough to do. Mark Twain observed that "Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits," and Jesus had a similar, if less pithy, formulation of the problem when he suggested that we should take care of the log in our own eye before we worried about the motes in other peoples' eyes. In other words, it's easy to see how mistaken other people are and much harder to see it in ourselves.

But when we do, it can--I submit--be a very valuable experience.

Thoughts?

I really didn't want to write another "how our lives are going post" hot on the heels of so many others, but this was a day that a) drained me enough that I couldn't think well even if I wanted to and b) pretty much demanded to be written about, as a great example of the way that things often don't go as planned around here.

We were meeting with a realtor today to look at land, and we'd seen one place and were driving to the next, one we'd already seen but really liked and wanted to get a better look at. We brought our camera along this time. As we waited at a light in a left-turn lane, though, an old guy with a handicapped parking sticker rear-ended us pretty solidly. I have a feeling that these things always feel worse to the rear-ended than to the rear-ender, but it felt like more than a little tap, to be sure.

Neither his age nor his evident infirmity stopped me from yelling at him on behalf of my pregnant wife, who was more than a little shaken up by this. We had to wait for a police officer to join us, and the guy didn't have proof of insurance "with him," which of course might well mean that he doesn't have insurance. Super. In the meantime, the realtor had driven on, oblivious. I called her cell and left a message, but apparently (I found out later) her phone had fallen out of her pocket at the first place we visited.

Well, my wonderful wife was, once again, very helpful, figuring out what drivers we needed and downloading them, burning them to a disc, and installing them. And she neither charged me a one-time fee nor tried to sell me a 1-year contract. So I am writing this from my own computer, newly reconnected to the inter-webs.

I took both Dawn's advice and my wife's advice, and the first thing I did was install AVG, so here's hoping we're good now. My computer boots up approximately 4 million times faster than it did before. The computer originally came loaded with approximately 10 billion "Free Trials" of things, not to mention 2 trillion semi-useless programs, most of which seemed set up to load automatically into the little tray at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, apparently so they could be useless more quickly for me. No such things exist now.

Of course, neither does much of anything else. I'll need to reinstall all the programs I use most often. Now, in the process of looking for install discs, I found... the Windows XP Media Edition restore disc that came with the computer. How I didn't find it in the first place when we were looking for it, I don't know, because it wasn't well hidden at all. I know there are a lot of good extras on there, up to and including the fact that it's a newer version of Windows XP (2005 vs. 2002), plus it most definitely has all the right drivers. Part of me feels like I should install it, get it done now before I move over any files, reinstall programs, and all that. But part of me wants to just go with what we've got.

So far, the major things I'm missing are... all my audio drivers. And I'm a music guy, so that's kind of a big deal. I'm not sure what the best way is to get those back. I also need to find the install disc for my music composition software, Sibelius, but I'm sure it's around somewhere. Lots of other little things here and there--I'm sure I'll find lots more that I'm missing, but for now I'm enjoying having 80 gigs of free space. I don't think I had 80 gigs of free space when I bought the computer, and I don't know how long I'll have it for now, but it sure does cook with this vast empty space!

For my part, I'm feeling better. I took the motion sickness stuff again this morning (it's 24-hour stuff) just to be sure and have felt fine all day.

We made some progress on the computer front as well. Lauren talked to one of the tech guys at her school and he kindly gave us a disc with Linux on it, which allowed us to get onto the computer and recover all the files that I could think of that I would have lost (which, of course, isn't necessarily all the files I will wish I had backed up). So that's pretty good. Maybe we should have just stuck with Linux and said goodbye to Microsoft, but I wanted a fresh start, so we reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows. Except that we didn't have the original Windows XP Media edition and had to use the Home edition from another computer.

In the process of all this, we lost the drivers for... pretty much everything. So the computer's clean, it's running smoothly and quickly, but it's gun shy about getting on the internet--or it just doesn't know that it can go on the internet. It's repressed the experience, or something.

My wonderful wife discovered something though: the extended service plan that I'd purchased from Dell along with the laptop was still good! I could talk to someone in India who would fix all my problems! Hooray!

So first I talked to a guy who I could barely understand and who thus had to repeat himself a half dozen times at several points in our coversation. We were both very patient, though, and really the guy did a pretty good job working out the problem with me, but it turned out that I had a software problem and he was a hardware guy. Oh, okay, so maybe he could help me with this other problem. You see, by the time the first year of my computer ownership was over, the battery was a worthless piece of crap. Months before that, it got to where it could hold less than a minute of charge. Seriously. By the end of the year, nothing. In my move to Rhode Island, I had misplaced that information and didn't think to check on-line for that information (as my lovely wife, in this case, had). So what could we do about that?

As it turned out: nothing. My extended warranty on hardware... doesn't include the battery. But they could sell me a replacement battery... for slightly less than an arm and a leg... an arm and a foot, say. No thanks. Glad I paid for this stupid extended protection...

But at least I could get my software issue resolved when he transferred me over to the software department. For some reason, after explaining that he was going to transfer me over, he transferred me first to his supervisor... who told me that I was going to be transferred to someone in software. Seriously, they needed a manager to repeat that to me? So the software guy asks if, as he assumes, the guy in hardware explained... something or other. Which turned out to be the "nominal" fees of the payment plans, either a one-time service charge or a 1-year plan. Say what? Let me get this straight: the three years of protection I paid for doesn't cover the battery, it doesn't cover any software issues... so what did I actually pay for? And although I didn't listen to hear the "nominal" fee, I'm pretty sure it was more than strictly "nominal."

Thanks, no. I'll poke around with it a bit more myself and see if the school tech guy can help me out. Considering how thorougly dissatisfied I am with Dell at this moment, I'm not giving your techincal support another dime. I'm also not going to be buying another Dell when we decide it's time for a new computer, because your customer service is lousy, your service plans feel quite a bit like a big cheat, and judging by your batteries, your product is at least significant parts junk. I may or may not go Mac for my next computer, but I sure won't be going Dell.