The decision has not required any real time or attention from me, however. There’s no credible opposition to Obama from the left. And when I woke up this morning I checked and no, I have not turned into a fundamentalist Christian, I like gay people, and I seem to remember most of what I was taught about economics. Based on the bits and pieces I’m hearing from the debates, that pretty much makes me ineligible to vote Republican.

This gives me a rather strong advantage I think; with the opposition opinion so alien (and even actively opposed!) to my own, I really don’t have to spend much time forming an opinion on them.

In fact, however, while millions of atheists are indeed walking our streets, it would be difficult to find even one who could accurately be described as militant. In all of American history, it is doubtful that any person has ever been killed in the name of atheism. In fact, it would be difficult to find evidence that any American has ever even been harmed in the name of atheism. It just does not happen, because the notion of “militant atheism” is entirely fantasy. The Myth of Militant Atheism

Noise’s argument seems to be an entirely semantic one, and dependent on conflating “militant” with “violent.” Militants can certainly be violent, but it’s not a necessary precondition. Making it so is another abuse of language.

My dictionary defines militant as:

combative and aggressive in support of a political or social cause, and typically favoring extreme, violent, or confrontational methods

It seems militant would apply rather nicely to many atheists, as well as tea-partiers, 99%-ers, gay-rights activists, anti-abortion advocates, and — well — anyone inclined to stand on a street corner and yell about how everyone else is wrong about everything.

Richard Dawkins springs to mind as a great example of militant atheism. He is combative, aggressive, and supports confrontational methods to combat what he sees as rank stupidity. In this video titled Richard Dawkins on militant atheism, he says:

Now, it may sound as though I’m about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that that’s not what I’m going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. No, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism. But that’s putting it too negatively.

He says it’s too negative, but confrontational is certainly what Dawkins — author of a book called The God Delusion — is. More to the point, Dawkins identifies another atheist thinker as “militant:” Darwin’s friend Edward Aveling. Aveling was loudly atheist and tried to push Darwin to be more loud himself. But as near as I can tell, Aveling never actually killed anyone either.

This is certainly not to say that atheists need to be quiet, modest, or decorous. Militancy has a place; it is often necessary to change things. I happen to agree with Dawkins that atheists could get more respect by being more obviously atheist and less tolerant of hatred directed their way. If there really is no such thing as a militant atheist, then maybe that’s part of the problem. I think that’s the point Dawkins was trying to get across.

Most of my early shopping was done online, but I was having trouble. “I spend most of my day staring at small text,” I said to Elf. “I need a monitor that does a good job with that. No one reviews these based on how they display nine-point monospaced type.”

“Maybe you should go to Best Buy and look at some,” she said. “Not buy. Look. Then you can see your yourself.” That seemed like a reasonable suggestion, so off I went. And to maximize the potential, I added two other major chains in Christiansburg: Wal-Mart and Staples.

When it comes to technology, we’re not exactly spoiled for choice.

Anyway, Wal-Mart had precisely four monitors, each a different size and brand, and none of them were turned on or hooked up. The Wal-Mart experience compared to online: no reviews, no demonstrations, and greater chance of hitting slow-moving pedestrians in the parking lot.

Best Buy had a double-handful of monitors on the back wall, brightly lit by bare flourescent lightbulbs placed just a few inches above the screens. Hardly what I’d call ideal lighting for judging monitors. They were also showing a video demo rather than a computer interface, so there was no real way there to judge what the programing experience would be like on any of these. I have a really good idea of what an elephant’s skin looks like on AOC, Asus, Acer, Samsung, and LG monitors, but not 9pt Menlo.

Staples fell somewhere between the two with a measely selection of monitors that were at the very least on. They, too, were showing a video demo. But either the video demo was low-resolution or the monitors were not set to their native display resolutions, because all of them looked like crap. I think it was a native resolution problem, though, because the Norton Antivirus warning dialog box on all of them was freaking huge.

Overall, I have to say that shopping the brick-and-mortar stores was pretty frustrating. I had to find parking; I had to look online for reviews anyway, and at Best Buy I had to wait ten minutes for a stock-check on the one monitor I was interested in.

After all was said and done, I ended up ordering the Asus VE228H from Amazon for about fifty dollars less than the out-of-stock monitor I was interested in at Best Buy.

I’m also far less likely to go into any of these stores for a product I have to research; if the brick-and-mortars are going to compete with online sales, they’re going to have to figure out what it is you can do in person that you can’t online, then focus on that.

Last weekend I took some time to prune my RSS and Twitter feeds. If we’ve exchanged emails or worked together, don’t worry — I was pruning people who didn’t know me and probably didn’t care whether or not I was following them anyway.

I read fewer weblogs, too. I am a shadow of my former social media self.

In the process of weaning myself from outrage I’ve discovered that I don’t want to hear news and opinion immediately any more. I’d prefer to get a broader, more complete picture. That’s something that really can only happen with the passing of time and the attention of a skilled, dedicated writer. Not a professional journalist, necessarily, but someone dedicated to gathering facts and telling a story.

Turns out there’s something to be said for the less personal, more narrative longer-form writing. Something weblogs aren’t good at.

The problem with the day-to-day, build-a-regular-readership form of weblogs is that they rely on that regular readership. The communities become insular, with their own lingo and inside jokes. This is even true of very large communities like Reddit, which has an entire language of cartoons. It makes it difficult to get into reading one of these. Like leaping into Lost in the middle of the fourth season.

What we need is something that takes a longer view, assembles facts from many sources, then tells the story in a compelling and interesting way. Something that’s willing to sacrifice responding in the same thirty-minute news cycle to gain some perspective and not report the first available rumor (and the next and the next…). That sounds like something we used to have a long time ago. Something called a mmm… mmmm… mmaa…

Magazine!

Remember magazines? Ones you actually pay for? They used to be excellent at these kinds of things. I hear there are still a few good ones out there. Ya’ll read any? Which ones?

I didn't actually eat this, I just dig the picture.

When I do eat poorly too much sugar and too many refined foods, I feel depressed, tired, and sick. When I cut that stuff out, my mood improves and so does my energy level. Stress makes it more difficult to stay on the diet; awareness makes it easier. Too much awareness actually makes it more difficult.

I say this because the holier-than-thou, pseudo-religious, extremely arrogant attitude of people towards people who don’t share their food beliefs was a real incentive to fall off the wagon, and that goes for the low-carb crowd as much as it does the low-fat crowd.

Everyone is trying to find their way right now in the face of a polluted well of scientific data, and calling people who cook cupcakes drug pushers (for example) doesn’t help.

Anyway, so the plan now is to be on the diet and try not to worry a lot about the politics.

You may recall that we’ve been migrating our clients off of Flash already — mostly at their own request. Adobe’s announcement yesterday that they were going to stop supporting a mobile device version of the Flash player will only serve to hasten that. Protestations otherwise, it’s hard to see Adobe’s announcement as anything but a no-confidence vote either in their platform or their ability to sell it. What they’ve done is reinforce in client minds that Flash is a dying technology, and few people want to hitch themselves to that.

I actually appreciate The Walking Dead a lot. I’m happy there’s original programming out there somewhere that’s not reality television, even if I’m a little mistifyed why this is The American Movie Classics channel’s responsibility. The series is well acted, well-written, and has high production values. People who like it have every reason to do so. But I don’t think I do.

Watching The Walking Dead does help me identify what it is I’m looking for in speculative fiction by having next to nothing of it. They’ve got gore, action, and loads of interpersonal drama. What they don’t have is mystery. There’s the first half of the pilot episode where Rick wanders around town in his hospital johnny trying to figure out what happened, but after that no one seems to be particularly curious about it. People got sick and turned into zombies. What else do you need?

After watching two-point-five episodes, I looked through some episode guides to see what I’d get out of the show by fast-forwarding all the interpersonal drama and significant looks, and it looks like I’d have a much, much shorter show.

Yesterday I called and cancelled my satellite television, just like I said I was going to do in June. The plan is to use Netflix, iTunes, interesting podcasts, and maybe some DVD purchases and rentals for our evening entertainment.

I’m not a TV snob, I just don’t turn it on to have noise and distraction. That’s why God invented the Internet. But I used to like TV a lot, and then TV changed on me.

A&E, where I used to go to watch standup and see old Monty Python episodes, seems to be about half reality programming and half autopsies. The non-fiction channels — Discovery, History, etc — are also all infected with Reality Programing crud. I haven’t found a broadcast show I thought was compelling enough to watch every night since mid-run X-Files, and good lord I sound ancient.

All the television stations seem to have blended into all the other television stations, and the only one making great original TV on a regular basis seems to be AMC which I remember as being the station that used to show all those old war movies. That is messed up.

I rolled my eyes over how lame Star Treck had become when I heard there was going to be a Cardassian wedding, and then I learned I’d spelled that word wrong in my head and the truth was far more tragic. I mean, this is the reason I don’t watch TV. I want space battles and dinosaurs. What I get instead is soap opera, cheap-ass unscripted drama, and endless reruns of American Freaking Chopper.

Anyway, the guy from DirecTV wanted to know why I was canceling and I said we didn’t watch TV anymore, really, and no, I didn’t want to talk about it. It sucks to be them. They were perfectly competent at delivering boatloads of unwanted, uncreative crap into our family room, and they ought to be rewarded for it. Unfortunately, my crap-based requirements are already well met by Facebook and I don’t need to pay slightly more than a C-note per month to get more of it.

If they want us to watch more television, they’re going to have to do it better.

Bonus: This weblog has been around long enough to have captured the last time I cancelled cable, and let me tell you — television is currently far worse than I ever remember it being.

Tell me what the good shows are, please. Otherwise I won’t know about them. What should I be buying in season packs from iTunes?

Hell — the classic “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” definition of hell, which is eternal and immeasurable torment forever and ever — has always been a problem for me. When I was really young I was worried that not believing in the right thing would cause me to end up in Hell.

And then later, when I was a little but not very much older, it seemed to me that Hell had to be reserved for really bad people. Not “I opened my eyes while praying” bad, but, like, Nazi Holocaust or Stalinist Purge evil.

I found it (and still find it) impossible to believe that people of good will and good motivations would end up in Hell simply because they made the wrong choice, went to the wrong church, or prayed on the wrong day.

Or, you know, happened to be born gay.

The point I tried to make to my evangelical friend yesterday when he expressed his concern that I’m going to Hell for not being Christian was that any god who causes eternal, unrelenting torment because you picked the wrong card in a celestial game of Three-card Monte is fundamentally evil.

Forget Hitler and Stalin. Yes, the suffering they caused was enormous, but it pales in comparison to the eternal torment of the unconverted and unbaptized. It’s cruelty on an infinite scale, so massively vindictive it’s hard for me to believe any entity — even the more unsavory ones — could allow such a thing to occur and not be consumed with hatred and loathing for Itself.

In other words, it’s such a horrific notion that I can’t imagine it could possibly be true. The only reason the idea could even exist is a number of prosaically evil (or perhaps merely misguided) people thought something like that sounded like a good way to keep the flock in line and in pews. IE, a bogeyman.

I make no claims about what the afterlife is like. But I am reasonably certain that there is no Hell. If there is, there’s no point looking for justice in this life, because there’s certainly none in the hereafter.

Dante and Virgil in Hell by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

I had an evangelical friend tell me today he was concerned that a god I don’t believe would send me to a Hell I don’t believe in. I can understand why a Christian might have that concern, but I have never understood why anyone thinks that’s a effective argument to make to non-believers.

I guess it’s akin to thinking you can convince someone the Bible is true because it says it is.