John writes:

> I am surprised that you posted such garbage. I know you did it
>  tongue-in-cheek but really that kind of rubbish is about equivalent
>  to the other postings for the day including the Free p**n site!

Rubbish is in the eye of the beholder, I presume.

Although I try to read every posting on all 12 lists that I monitor, I
somehow must have missed the pornography posting. Nonetheless, pornography
doesn't bother me, so long as children aren't exposed to it. Sex is life,
both as recreation and procreation. But ignorance, especially purposefully
engendered ignorance, bothers me a great deal. It's as close to intellectual
death as anything that you will encounter, and the American fundamentalist
Christian church has become the primary purveyor of that purposeful ignorance
of late. As I've mentioned before, this ignorance is turning a magnificient
moral philosophy into a superstition.

As systems grow ever more complex, obviously fewer and fewer people in the
general population understand them. Computers are the most complex machines
that we've ever built, not of course as hardware devices -- they are
relatively simple machines --but as software devices. Even so, there are at
least 20 million people in the US that have a fairly profound grasp of how
they work. But that's not so for the machinery of life, its origin, its
metabolism, physiology and its ecology. I would estimate that there are no
more than a quarter-million people world-wide that have a deep understanding
the mechanisms of life, and thus it seems all the more mysterious to an
increasingly larger proportion of the population.

Nevertheless, that fundamental lack of knowledge -- or even a lack of a
desire to learn that knowledge -- represents no excuse for the promulgation
of simple-minded superstitions. Creationists often go on at length about the
fact that they can't get evolutionists to debate them, but using the examples
in these recent posts, it's very easy to understand why. The minister who
says that 10% of the hard drives in America are infested by either Lucifer or
his minions is as good a way for you to understand why scientists don't
bother. In this case, let us allow someone from this list with a deep
technical knowledge of computers -- I would nominate Gavin Scott -- debate
the reverend. Where would Gavin even begin? No amount of technical knowledge,
personal assurance, or even asking that the reverend show precisely where the
devil is in the disc drive would ever change the mind of such a person.

The rubbish in all of this is that someone believes this nonsense. The sin is
to let it pass, unnoticed and unmentioned. We're better than that.

Wirt Atmar

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