Author Archives: Micah

About Micah

Oldest of 8 children. I'm skilled in piano performance and computer programming (especially C and Perl on Linux), and have a strong interest in typography, and well-made entertainment media such as books, movies, and video games.

Silent Partner

DagoodS has come up with yet another of his insightful articles. Here’s an excerpt.

As teenagers we made out behind the church or in the parking lot where the Youth Sponsors couldn’t see us. Our God/Silent Partner supposedly could see us; but he wasn’t around. He was SO silent, it was like…to us…he wasn’t there. As Older Christians we gossiped about the person, but never to the person because our Silent Partner…well…he was silent, see? Didn’t say anything about it.

Or we loaded up our bank accounts. Or justified not tithing this week, ‘cause we were taking our friends out to dinner. Our Silent Partner seemed to be just fine with substituting dinner for tithing. Didn’t say a word….

See, that is the best part of a Silent Partner. When you want to say something bad, or blame, or offend—they are there for you. But when you do not want them impinging on your lifestyle—they conveniently fade into the distant background where they belong.

Eliminating God Ain’t The Answer

(The following is the tail end from a comment I made elsewhere on the site, that I felt was worth placing a bit more prominently.)

Society’s problem isn’t belief in God, and eradicating theistic belief is not an admirable goal. If someone were to successfully eliminate all God-belief tomorrow, some other superstition would immediately arise to take its place, and become the basis for various travesties. The problem, then, is in our willingness to accept superstitious, unverifiable beliefs as not only a replacement for, but actually superior to verifiable evidence, and not with any one such superstition that may happen to be a current favorite.

The consequences of the actions we take should be commensurate with the firmness of our beliefs; the firmness of our beliefs should be commensurate with the quantity and reliability of the supporting evidence. I have no problem with belief in God that is honestly ready to shed itself in light of contradictory evidence, and I have little patience with atheists who lack that same readiness.

How Strange Am I?

So, I’ve been reflecting lately on some of the things that make me a bit… unusual. I’m not really talking about quirks or eccentricities here, so much as interests, or unusual approaches to learning things, or things I’ve taken the trouble to learn that have little value to most people.

I think I’m beginning to realize that I love arcana: knowledge that has become uncommon and unusual. It’s not because I get some sort of snobby delusions of superiority from them, or because now I know something no one else does; it’s because whenever I encounter some fascinating system I’ve never seen before, I want to know what makes it tick.

§ For instance, I’m probably virtually the only person under, say, 60 years old, that actually understands and uses shorthand (specifically, the Gregg shorthand system, at the top of that image). It’s a method for writing quickly and compactly (and, against those who don’t know that system of shorthand, secretly) that used to be required knowledge for secretaries, journalists and court recorders. It fell out of style with the advent of personal audio recorders.

Why do I know shorthand? Because I ran across it at some point when I was ten, and thought it was cool. A journalist was doing a local interest piece on my family. I told my Mom I thought he was really just a spy. “I saw him when he was interviewing the family: he wasn’t really writing anything, he was just scribbling!” It comes in handy every now and then, though possibly more often for writing private notes than quicker dictation, as I don’t have enough opportunity to exercise it to be drastically more efficient with it than I am with longhand.

§ Typography is another interest of mine; when I tell people this, it’s frequently mis-heard as “topography”, and they assume I mean that I like maps or something. Typesetting systems such as Τεχ (and the older, less powerful nroff) are in relatively wide use in the Unix world (though I think they may be diminishing somewhat in use), and are useful to know something about (though, like many, my knowledge of nroff doesn’t extend much beyond the use of a particular set of macros to create Unix “man pages”). But the real source of my fascination with and love for typography, is Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographical Style, which is an extremely artful and enlightening, if a tad eccentric and old-fashioned, work on the subject. One word of warning: reading this book will cause you to become accutely aware of minor typographical glitches whenever you are reading, where formerly they were no more than a very subconscious annoyance. And, as good typesetting is swiftly becoming a lost art, there will be no end of opportunities for such irritations.

Now, lest you be confused, when I say I have an interest in typography, I don’t mean, as some do, the use of flashy and avant-garde fonts for titling a magazine article, or the creative twisting of text into a catchy logo or icon. My interest is actually in ordinary running text, as found in a book.

Most people probably could not imagine a more boring occupation than the careful, minute adjustment of spacing between words, lines, and paragraphs; the pairing of just the right font appropriate to the text, and the general use of a subtle touch throughout. The thanklessness of ordinary book typesetting is that the sign of a good job is precisely that no one really notices what you’ve done at all (unless of course they true have some typographical training). A perfect example of this (though far from perfection itself, I’m sure) is my setting of Mark Twain’s Cannibalism in the Cars. It is set very plainly, without flair, and you would not guess the numerous hours spent in getting the text to look just so, avoiding various minor irritations that can crop up in typestting, and coming up with ideas to make this somewhat complicated narrative as smoothly legible as possible.

§ Music has been a very large part of my life, from very early on. My family is very musical, pretty much every one of my two parents and seven siblings has a great singing voice, and several can play at least one musical instrument. I started piano lessons when I was five, and once I could play basic chords and such, my talents were sequestered for playing music as a family, for my Dad’s worship music services at church, and for, well, pretty showing off at family gatherings and such. The scene from Step Brothers where the “perfect” brother’s family were all singing in perfect harmony was hilarious to me, because our family used to do just that sort of thing.

The combination of formal piano lessons (which I continued into the music degree program at CSU Sacramento, which BTW has an excellent music department) and regular opportunities to play off chord-sheets with my family, means that I can now read sheet music proficiently, and can also improvise based on just a few scrathed-down chords. I’ve met a lot of people who can do one or the other of those, but not both (though being able to do both is not exactly rare).

On the other hand, some of my abilities in music really are somewhat unusual. As mentioned, I can improvise off of chord sheets. I can also frequently play along by ear to songs I’ve never even heard before. I’ve actually done this on stage, in fact, when accompanying a musical group at our church. It went very smoothly.

I can also transcribe music by ear. Back when I used to head up church music ministries, I would frequently make up the chord sheets for the other players, without any instruments nearby to check it on, even if I’d never seen a chord sheet for the song before. I can do this with melody lines, too; I used to sketch melodies out that popped into my heads so I wouldn’t forget them later.

Given these things, it’s kind of a shame that I don’t do a thing with music these days. I guess I should form a band or something, but my free time for something like that is pretty much nonexistent, and there’d most likely be transportation issues. Still, the one thing I miss most from church by far is playing with musical groups; I really enjoyed that.

I’m sometimes asked if I have perfect pitch, and the answer is… well, sort of. Mainly, I only have relative pitch (that is, if I hear a note and you tell me the name, then I could give you the name of any note you play thereafter). But when I’ve gotten used to playing and singing the same song over and over, I tend to develop a memory for where that key is, and so I can frequently work out what a note is without hearing a reference pitch first. But I wouldn’t be able to do it without some silence first to find my own reference pitch from memory; most people with “real” perfect pitch actually know the note instantly, from the note itself, and don’t work it out based on some other pitch.

§ Probably from my apparent love for esoteric arcana, I tend to learn a lot of obscure programming languages and technologies. PostScript, for instance, which is a programming language that outputs printer pages. Hardly anyone actually learns how to write code in PostScript, because no one really uses it as a programming language beyond writing some boilerplate code that’s capable of reading the “real” graphical data they’re interested in. Yet it is a full-fledged programming language, capable of accomplishing some exotic feats. I wrote a PostScript file for example, which results in a different randomly-generated maze every time you print it (note though that the primary links there are to static PDFs which are randomly generated when you download them, but will print the same static maze every time; not all systems can print PostScript files directly).

As another example, I actually know the Unix sed programming/stream-editing language. This is a transformation language that changes a given input into a desired output. Most people know how to do pattern-matching and substitutions in it, which honestly is what it is most useful for. However, it has support for labels and conditional branching, and is actually Turing-complete, so could be used to theoretically transform any input into any output (ignoring the fact that implementations typically have severely limited buffer space), and I’m one of the few folks who actually bothered to learn it well enough to use some of its more advanced features. Not that that’s particularly useful, as doing anything that isn’t trivial tends to be way, way too complicated with sed; but I tend not to like knowing things only “half-way”, so… I know sed. That would seem to place me in the same category as crufty old Unix sysadmins who are decades older than me.

§ I’ve memorized the ASCII table of character codes. Yeah, really. I can actually read that . No, it’s not just for general geek snobbery; I actually found it to be quite useful while I was studying terminal control sequences and the ISO-2022 character encoding standard (two more bits of esoteric arcana, though these actually happen to be very useful to me now as a co-maintainer of GNU Screen). It has also proved to be useful for doing percent-encoding for URLs in my head.

§ Alright, so like thousands of other programmer geeks, I know C, C++, etc. However, one difference between myself and the vast majority of other programmers I’ve met is that many of the programming languages and other technologies I know, I learned directly from the relevant published standards. I have copies of the C and C++ language specs as published by ISO/IEC, I go to ECMA to read about “JavaScript” and ISO-2022 (Ecma-35), the Open Group for Unix specifications, and the W3C for DOM, XML, XSL, and HTML.

That’s not necessarily the best way to learn something; it certainly isn’t the quickest. But it does tend to make me… “unique”. I do frequently find it to be helpful, to know a lot about nitpicky details, so I don’t have to wonder about the corner cases that might trip up other folks. Knowing what the standards say about something helps me to write very portable code that runs on as many existing implementations as possible, and hopefully any future ones that may be written. It also gives me an idea of what features of a language are likely to change, and which are likely to remain stable.

The thing about standards, though, is that they frequently represent an ideal that differs, mildly or very substantially, from that technology as found in the real world. The current C standard has loads of things that virtually no one implements, or plans to; and all the major C++ implementations lack the “export” feature for templates. As to trying to write useful websites that conform to all the applicable standards… it’s simply an exercise in frustration. Thus, it’s not enough to know what a document says about the technology on paper; you need real experience with actual existing implementations to know what is portable. And that is probably why most people don’t bother learning the “official standards” to begin with, and what makes my familiarity with them so unusual.

God vs Santa Claus

So, a few times I’ve been asked why arguing against the existence of God is so important to me as an atheist. Most recently, my sister Grace (who, by the way, is awesome, and is one of the very few to respond to my apostasy with genuine questions, rather than blind assertions), asked:

if God is just a magic man and/or type of Santa Claus… why all the fuss in arguing His non-existence? If He truly does not exist why are people so passionate about denying Him? What is the point on your end? people don’t write about denying Santa Claus, because they don’t believe he is real but even if some people do believe in Santa no one spend their time trying to convince them.

The response I gave, that I’m actually not passionate about denying God, and that the concept of God doesn’t bother me, is true, but also potentially misleading and may have been missing the point. As I also said in the response, there are things I’m passionate in arguing against, and while I may feel indifferent about the actual existence or non-existence of God, I feel very strongly about particular conceptions of God, or certain arguments that are built on the premise of His existence, and I think I can state my position a little more clearly as follows:

  • If you’re naughty, Santa Claus gives you coal in your stocking; he doesn’t torture and maim you for all eternity because you didn’t accept his only begotten elf as your personal savior (and after having created you in such a way that you would be “naughty”).
  • Santa Claus never told women that they must be submissive to and obey their husbands, respecting their authority.
  • Nobody uses Santa Claus as a pretext to determine who is allowed to fall in love, marry, and have a family, and who is not allowed.
  • Santa Claus doesn’t make anyone feel torrents of guilt just because they notice that a member of the opposite (or, same) sex is very, very attractive.
  • Santa Claus is used to manipulate you into buying things; God is used to manipulate you into supporting evil wars and evil leaders.
  • Belief in Santa Claus means you might remain ignorant about where your presents really come from; some beliefs about God mean that you remain vastly ignorant and deceived about where we come from… and where we are going—and are compelled to strive to keep everyone else just as ignorant.
  • There are a number of people for whom God does not fit any of the above at all. I have no quarrel with them. Some atheists claim that “liberal” religion is bad because it provides a sort of safe haven for fundamentalism, but I have yet to see a strong case for this. If all your God does is provide you with hope, and a motivation to do what is right as determined by your own conscience, and to love your fellow human, then good on ya. I could care less about convincing you He or She isn’t real. It’s when belief in God begins to convince you that what is evil is really good, or that some factually-supported knowledge must be untrue just because it contradicts what your God said that I become indignant. And yes, that’s the sort of God-belief I will be somewhat passionate about: because, unlike Santa Claus, it has a very real and direct impact on the world in which I live.

    A Whole ’Nother Logic?

    If man bases ideas on his logic, than all he says will be all there is. Mans Logic is Man’s, where as Gods Logic, though given to some men, is Gods. So, either choose logic given by man, or logic given by God.

    Found in the “Favorite Quotes” section of my brother Joseph Cowan’s Facebook profile. I suspect it’s of his own authorship.

    I was going to comment further on it here, but thought better of it after realizing it’s a waste of breath. But really, if you can’t instantly find several glaring things wrong with this *cough* logic, then you are already beyond hope. You are a slave to your emotions, and have no ability, or even the desire, to use the mind “God gave you”.

    All that logic is is a definition of the words “true” and “false”: those words have no meaning outside of “man’s logic”. You can say that the existence of God is “true”, or that God exists outside/defies logic¹, but to attempt to claim both simultaneously is to not even know what the word “true” means. What can I do at that point? It’s exactly like trying to convince someone that 1 + 2 isn’t 6¾: if they won’t accept your definitions of 1, 2, and +, there’s nothing further to say.

    ¹ Although, the latter amounts to meaninglessness, while the former is actually provably incorrect for any meaningful definition of God.

    These sorts of quotes always get my goat, because one of the few things in this world that can consistently and reliably piss me off is irresponsible ignorance, especially willful ignorance. Quotes like this are like saying, “I’m fine with my ignorance, I have no interest in thinking about anything. I’ll believe whatever I want to, whether it adds up or not, simply because it’s what I want to believe in.”

    What God Doesn’t Explain

    Following is an excerpt from my response to this comment from smeagain, which I’ve made into a short blog post as it pretty much summarizes why I’m an atheist (as opposed to some other variety of ex-Fundamentalist-Christian). It doesn’t really say anything I haven’t said before, but it makes a pretty decent summary.

    I have come to many of the same conclusions as Micah, though I don’t call myself an atheist, I can no longer call myself a Christian.  It still feels weird saying it.

    All of this aside, I can’t find a way to explain away God.  Sure maybe life on earth evolved independently, difficult to accept but easier than zapped into being by the creator.  The whole universe exploding into existence from “the big bang”.  but where did all that energy come from.

    To me the more science discovers, the more we see the nature of
    God.

    To me, the more science discovers, the less is explained by the existence of God.

    As you say, “where did all that energy come from”—the big bang can’t have been the very start, and I don’t know anyone who thinks it was. It’s simply “as far back as we can trace”. Something must have been before it. Something must have had no beginning. To minds that have developed in a universe where all things have both beginnings and ends, it’s boggling. And yet, to say that God is that “something” explains nothing. Why isn’t God subject to the same “beginning” that everything else must be subject to? It’s certain that there is something eternal, but answering “where did the universe find its beginning?” with “God” doesn’t actually answer anything; it simply shifts it to “where did God find Its beginning?”. You can assert that “God had no beginning”, but you can just as easily assert that “the universe had no beginning”, or the “underlying fabric of matter-spawning quanta”, or whatever. To the question, “where does all this come from?”, the answer “a Magic Man did it” is not an answer. It’s simply another question in disguise.

    That’s why I’m an atheist: there are no remaining questions for me to which God is any kind of reasonable answer. It’s true, this leaves a number of questions to which I now have no answers of any sort; I just think that admitting that the answers haven’t been found is more intellectually honest than substituting made-up ones.

    That said, I don’t have anything against belief in a God, as a concept in itself: I don’t even think it’s a “superstition” so much as a sometimes-convenient, if illusory, abstraction. It’s when folks take this God for whom no evidence exists, and add detailed knowledge about His character and what He wants us to do and not to do, for which no credible source exists—that’s when I start to become concerned.

    The Providence of Pasta

    Ever since converting from Christianity to Pastafarianism, I find that the Flying Spaghetti Monster makes his presence known to me constantly, reassuring me by his active involvement in my day-to-day life.

    One might suppose that, having rejected the One True God in deference to the One True Monster, I would cease to reap those little beneficial coincidences-that-aren’t-coincidences, those thoughtful reminders that a deity is in fact watching over and actively manipulating events in my life. One couldn’t be more wrong.

    Several months back our next-door neighbors moved out, and some new ones moved in. Blessed be the Bucatini, the new neighbor was a Linux Software Engineer, who likes Star Trek and plays the Piano, and was even a fellow Pastafarian—just like me! Such a meeting of kindred spirits couldn’t possibly be coincidence! Unfortunately, the FSM placed the call on him to serve His Noodliness in San Diego just a short few months later, so I probably won’t have any more contact with him. Which is alright, really, ’cause it turns out he had some just-mildly-irritating social idiosyncrasies, but hey, if everything the FSM sent my way were perfect, where would be the challenge to life, and the need to depend on Him? I’m not quite sure what the FSM’s purpose was in introducing someone like that into my life only to snatch him away again before there’s any chance to form any sort of a relationship, but anyhoo, I guess it’s the thought that counts.

    Having an obscenely large number of accounts with various machines at various points on the Internet, I’ve recently taken to pre-generating a set of secure passwords, and whenever I need a new one, I just grab the next one on the list. These passwords typically consist of a randomly-chosen pair of dictionary words, with a randomly-chosen punctuation character between them. Imagine my surprise to find that the randomly generated passwords for two of my accounts are direct (if terse) descriptions of what I use the accounts for! Clearly the odds of this being simple. unguided chance is too high for this to be a mere coincidence (I calculate the odds at one in two-and-a-half billion (thousand million), which is precisely the chances of a particular pair of words being chosen at random from a dictionary of 50,000 words). I’m mystified as to what the purpose might be that the Flying Fettuccine has deemed worthy to place His Noodly Appendage upon my laptop’s pseudo-random number generator, and why these particular accounts and none of the dozens of others; but I take comfort in the knowledge that He has done so, and that the Lasagna works in mysterious ways.

    Yesterday was truly a day of Remarkable Reminders of Pastafarian Providence. Why, just last night I was taking the bus home as usual, and was amazed to discover that I had precisely enough quarters—no less, no more—to pay the fare. Praise Pasta! And earlier that morning, an old, old acquaintance friended me on Facebook—she was a classmate from first grade. First grade! What are the odds that we’d even remember each other, let alone the odds that she would find me through another mutual friend who had just added me because that friend had found me through my best friend’s ex-girlfriend of a decade ago, who happened to have a friend in common with me. Way too many coincidences to be “Just Coincidence”. Truly, the Might of the Macaroni is terrible to behold! How humbling and awe-inspiring it is to know that the Flying Spaghetti Monster devotes his vast and eternal energies into arranging such Divine Appointments. Truly I am blessed! I have no doubt that the Almighty Pasta has arranged just such a meeting so I can tell her all about Him.

    The proof of His Divine Pastaness is all around. I marvel that so many don’t see the signs—or, as I must sadly conclude, turn a blind eye toward them. How do they not see these daily testimonies to his presence? If they’d just take the time to offer up a prayer (“Grace” seems appropriate), or spend a little time to read The Recipe Book a little every day, maybe they’d come to know Him as I have. All these signs I encounter every day prove beyond any shadow of a doubt, the undeniable reality of His Daily Presence and Providence, and provide me with the absolute surety that My Monster Is Real.

    Or maybe just that people tend to be abysmally poor at estimating probabilities. Shrug.

    (Note: just to be clear, I didn’t make a single one of the above stories up. If you really believe things like these are uncannily unlikely, you should probably take a closer look at what you think you know about statistics, chance, and math.)

    Deconstructing the Myths of “The First Thanksgiving”

    http://www.oyate.org/resources/shortthanks.html

    Myth #11: Thanksgiving is a happy time.

    Fact: For many Indian people, “Thanksgiving” is a time of mourning, of remembering how a gift of generosity was rewarded by theft of land and seed corn, extermination of many from disease and gun, and near total destruction of many more from forced assimilation. As currently celebrated in this country, “Thanksgiving” is a bitter reminder of 500 years of betrayal returned for friendship.

    There’s nothing wrong with enjoying this festive holiday (I certainly fully intend to do so); but let’s not entertain the pretension that it was originally a celebration of friendship and harmony with the native peoples of the area, or that God had miraculously “provided” food for the “pilgrims”. Instead, let’s enjoy the opportunity to dine, celebrate, and enjoy the company of our friends and family.

    Fear? Politicking? Religion? Ignorance?

    Repost of my response to a comment at The Barefoot Bum’s blog.

    Fear? Politicking? Religion? Ignorance?

    Having been raised as a fundie Christian, I’ll go with Ignorance (well, and Religion, obviously, but that’s redundant).

    In the church I was raised in, we were not taught to hate¹ homosexuals, we were taught to “love the sinner, hate the sin”. We could genuinely feel kindness and good-will toward someone we knew to be homosexual, while condemning their lifestyle².

    But the Bible condemns homosexuality³. It’s a “sin”, and the Bible tells us that temptation can always be avoided, so therefore it must also be a “choice” to be gay. It also goes against nature (never mind that there are numerous observed instances of homosexual behavior throughout nature; bonobos for example routinely use it as a relationship-building means). God created HIV as a punishment for homosexuality (never mind that its first sufferers would not have contracted it in that way; I suppose God hates African hunters, too).

    Probably due to Paul’s language in Romans about God giving men over to unnatural desires, “[burning] in lust one toward another”, I believe most Christians associate homosexuality entirely with ravenous sexual desire, and do not realize that deep, unconditional and selfless love, thoughtfulness, and human affection play as much a role in gay relationships as they do in straight ones. This makes it easier to despise. For me personally, I think being exposed to the humanity of homosexual relationships may have played a significant role in my own change of perspective.

    I suspect that most proponents of Prop 8, perhaps contrary to expectations, don’t actually support civil unions between homosexuals either, but referred to it as an attempt to placate. “Look, this law (as opposed to our desire) isn’t taking away your rights to a relationship together, just marriage!”

    Ignorance really is the rule. But combatting it is difficult, when the biggest root of the problem is the belief that the Bible (or the Church) is the Word (or Voice) of God. Still, it can be eroded through steady exposure to the many evidences that the Bible is the work only of men, that homosexual preference is not a choice, that homosexual relationships can be as loving as heterosexual ones, that there’s no such thing as an engraved definition of “traditional marriage”, etc. It’s an uphill battle, but society is slowly coming around.

    A decade ago, Prop 8 would’ve won by a landslide—in fact, a decade ago, no one would have bothered to propose it, because no one would have feared that their precious “definition of marriage” was in jeapordy. It’s a desparation act, and despite the temporary victory, its existence is in itself something of a good sign, I think.

    That the proposition was accepted is also no reason to feel that we can’t repeal it in the next election: it succeeded in large part due to heavy financial support from outside the state; it may be that they’ll feel safe enough not to spend so much money in defense of their creation. Either way, we’ll never defeat it unless we remain steady and continue to challenge it at every turn.

    ¹ By “hate” here I mean intensely negative emotional feelings. I generally prefer to view “love” and “hate” in terms of the actions one takes, and not just emotions; from that perspective Prop 8 is absolutely an act of hatred. Also, I don’t mean to imply that my church experience is universal, or even necessarily usual: there are certainly plenty of examples of church atmospheres where the attitude toward homosexuals is unquestionably hateful.

    ² in much the same way we would accept unmarried couples but condemn their lifestyle. However, while many churches had unmarried couples the church would try to “love into righteousness”, I know of few to no churches that would admit gay couples under the same terms.

    ³ Despite having heard arguments to the contrary, I still find this a hard conclusion to escape. Fervently devoted gay Christians continue to fascinate me.