From Taoism To Infidel - Richard Carrier

I just read a very interesting narrative by Richard Carrier about his journey into atheism.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/carrier.html

I have always found Chinese philosophy (Confucianism, Taoism, as well as Buddhism) to be more intellectually satisfying than the theistic religions. As Richard Carrier mentioned, the Eastern philosophies says much about how to conduct oneself in society and living in tune with nature. Theistic religions, particularly Christianity, seems to be about "believe or be damned". This has always irked me. The precepts of Christianity is particularly nasty as it seems to imply that ethically and morally good people should be punished (not rewarded by going to heaven) simply because they do not believe that Jesus Christ is god, while evil doers (murderers, robbers and thieves, bullies) will be rewarded as long as the evil doer accepts Christ. Naivity and gullibility in believing in fairy tales is rewarded instead of honest effort and critical questioning about understanding life and how to live it propitiously.

Truly, the intellectual contrast is staggering. That is why it astounds me how smart theists do not question themselves more honestly and more critically about why they believe what they believe, especially when what they believe is in direct contradiction with reality. It simply amazes me that superstition still has such a strong stranglehold instead of reason and rationality in our current age, where we have the tools of science to acquire new knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.

The Holy Trinity

I read a very amusing post in RichardDawkins.NET today about the Christian belief in the Holy Trinity (link).

A theist has mentioned that he accepts the belief that God, his son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are each 3 individual entities, but are also just 1 entity (God itself). To this Christian, "God is three and God is one". Everything is consistent.

Shuggy responded that this is a false proposition. And a false proposition implies ANY proposition. With such a proposition, the Trinity can be made to be consistent with ANYTHING.

Shuggy then proceeded to use an amusing mathematical proof to illustrate this.

So, first, we have 3 = 1 .... eqn (a)

Minus 1 from both sides, we get:

2 = 0 .... eqn (b)

Now, if we add 1 to both sides of eqn (a), we get:

4 = 2 .... eqn (c)

But since 2 = 0 from eqn (b), we can substitute this into eqn (c) to get :

4 = 0 .... eqn (d)

If we divide both sides of eqn (c) by 2, we get :

2 = 1 .... eqn (e)

But since 1 = 3 from eqn (a), we can substitute this into eqn (e) and get:

2 = 3 .... eqn (f)

Looking at all the equations we have derived, we see that we have proven:

0 = 1 = 2 = 3 = 4 and so on.

Thus, if you can believe in the Trinity, it logically follows that you can believe literally everything, regardless of whether it is true or not.

Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynold is a book about creating presentations with software like Microsoft PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress. How it differs from other books on the subject is that it asks you to reject the templates that comes with these software, and to instead think "less is more".

The ideas in this book emphasize that the visual aspect of a presentation can be ruined by using too many graphical objects on each chart. This is often the case with casual users who become enamoured by the capabilities of the presentation software they are using, and then proceed to make the mistake of including as many widgets as they can on each chart. Reynold gives many refreshing ideas on how a good presentation should look like, and refers to slideshows by Steve Jobs as well as those on TED as examples of how a good presentation should be done.

Reynold has a web site at  www.presentationzen.com that expands on the ideas in his book.