Ah, Wirt:

Good posting, I especially like the "devil in the disc drive" fragment.
Has, kinda got a ring to it, eh?  8-))

Kind regards

JP

>>> Wirt Atmar <[log in to unmask]> 07/25/02 12:13PM >>>
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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