Shallow and Pedantic

Sour chewing gum

On an online board, friends posted a photo from a party a while back, as I’m chewing some extra-sour chewing gum:

I find this suitable for use in macro form. For example, in the Computer Security course, we’re going to compromise a windows-based server using a buffer overflow vulnerability. Unfortunately, this means we’re going to have to use (as per the course’s demands) Visual Studio 2003. My response:

Means of control

New URL – not interesting. You’d notice by now, as you’ve been redirected. Guess my new E-mail. OpenID – interesting, but I don’t have anything particularily interesting to say about it right now.

This, however, is interesting: “10 things christians and atheists can (and must) agree on“, a nicely written piece over at cracked.com. But this isn’t blogspam, I’ll actually share my two cents. (or shnekel, if you like)

I have a serious problem with religion; It is my opinion that it is an overly powerful means of control. Whether it has evolved as such or not is hard to tell. But today it seems to pose a very serious threat to the world.

Now, don’t get me wrong – control of this type is very important and useful. Specifically, it manifests itself in a basic moral system which, many believe, has served mankind well. You know, “thou shalt not murder”, stuff like that. Some may even say that it was a central factor in overcoming our primal urges, and development into the ever-so-slightly more sophisticated society we are today.

However, there are other, more dangerous manifestations of this control. Specifically, it seems all-too-easy nowadays to get up and say “This-and-that god has spoken to me – we must kill those-and-them”. “God has spoken to me, we must, uh, enlighten these our-religious-character-rejecting other-religion-followers. There’s some oil in it for us, too”. “This land has been promised to us this-and-that years ago, we must kill all other-religion-dwellers”.

Of course, the link here is politics. When used as a series of anecdotes, morals, stories, hell – even as a way of life – religious is mostly harmless. However, when a religious leader becomes a political figure, the temptation is simply too great, and religion becomes used as a tool of the agenda. It doesn’t take a whole staff of advisors and a big media budget to convince the public now – it only takes a proper connection with arbitrary dogma to do that.

Throughout the years, the secular public has wished for separation of church and state. But noone has yet stated it better than George Carlin – “Keep thy religion [or, in accordance with the linked post, thy lack thereof] to thyself”.