While I'm on the subject of agnosticism, it's not uncommon to see God depicted as unknowable or so far beyond human comprehensibility that we couldn't possibly make sense of God's will (this coincidentally happens to be around the same time some aspect of God is criticized).
Yet, in churches around the country, not only is God knowable, people assert a surprisingly large body of claims about God: he's male, he's white (if the speaker is white) or black (if the speaker is black), he created the universe/life on Earth, he punishes some and rewards others based on what they do or do not believe, he begat himself in human form and got himself crucified to atone for sin, he prohibits certain kinds of sex and certain kinds of food, he boldly makes his presence known through slightly burnt toast, he's responsible for certain hurricanes and other (super)natural disasters, he blesses and punishes whole countries, and some even go so far as to assert that they know which political party or candidate God endorses.
That God seems pretty darn knowable to me. His followers stop just short of listing his favorite color.
So what gives? I thought God was unknowable and couldn't be comprehended by our feeble human minds.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Atheism and Agnosticism
This has long been a frustrating issue for me personally, because it seems the general public has a very poor grasp of the terms and wrangling over them is quite a pastime among atheists, it's basically the atheist version of the hat dance. In particular, there are a few train wrecks floating around in the blogosphere about it, like this one.
So I'd like to take a few minutes to explain what they mean and help clear up misconceptions.
Among the public, it's not uncommon to see atheism defined as dogmatically "denying" God and agnostics defined as metaphysical fence-sitters who give equal credence to both atheist and theist claims.
WRONG.
In actuality, it's really very simple.
Do you believe in a god?
Theist: Yes
Atheist: No
Can one know whether a god or gods exist?
Gnostic: Yes
Agnostic: No
(author's note: I'm using "gnostic" here as a polar opposite of agnosticism for convenience's sake. The belief that God can be/is known has generally been expected as a default belief of the religious group, and therefore a separate terminology has never really been needed)
It gets a little trickier than just that, because the more observant reader might respond, "Which god are we talking about here?" Are we talking about the Christian god or the Deist god or the Greek gods? Further, shouldn't "God" be properly defined before I answer? Excellent points, and I wholly agree. But assume for the moment that your generic, all-powerful creator God is meant.
Atheism is about belief, agnosticism is about knowledge. Since they answer different questions, they're not necessary mutually exclusive. In actuality, agnosticism is not a third path between atheism and theism. Either you buy into theistic claims or you don't. If you do, you're a theist. If you don't you're an atheist. You might be agnostic in addition to being theistic or atheistic, but you can't define yourself as a non-theist non-atheist any more than you can pick a creamer that isn't dairy or non-dairy. Whatever your stance may be, at the end of the day, you either worship and believe in a god or you don't. Atheism is merely a broad category of people who take the latter approach. (Right about here is where the hate mail floods in from people who aren't theists but intensely dislike the atheism label, often narrowly defining atheism with traits they dislike, like atheism's perceived arrogance or alleged god-denying omniscience)
Think about it this way: do you believe in unicorns? Nope? Well, do you know whether or not they exist? You have at least two options here: You could claim to not know for sure whether or not unicorns exist, but you don't believe in their existence, at least not without solid evidence that they do exist.
Another option is that you could claim that you know that unicorns don't exist because the surface of the Earth has been pretty thoroughly mapped out with no unicorns in sight. But then the unicorn believers claim that unicorns are adept hiders who only reveal themselves to the faithful, or exist in an alternate dimension and only project themselves into our world for a brief time, etc, etc. Wow, you're quite the arrogant sod for claiming you know they don't exist, aren't you? And thus, you're forced to concede the possibility, however slight, after being bombarded with a series of increasingly unfalsifiable and dubious claims. Meanwhile, unicorn believers are quite free claim to "know" unicorns exist without much examination. Dreams, football victories, natural disasters, and unicorn-shaped toast are all taken as proof of unicorns. That's essentially how existence of God arguments play out - double standards galore.
As for myself, my own views closely match agnostic atheism. I don't "know" whether or not gods exist, but I don't have a single good reason to suppose that any of them do exist, so I'm functionally atheistic regarding any conceivable god. But show me credible evidence to the contrary and I might change my mind.
Is this arrogant atheism? Hardly. What is arrogant is blind belief in a god parading itself as informed by knowledge when it clearly isn't.
So I'd like to take a few minutes to explain what they mean and help clear up misconceptions.
Among the public, it's not uncommon to see atheism defined as dogmatically "denying" God and agnostics defined as metaphysical fence-sitters who give equal credence to both atheist and theist claims.
WRONG.
In actuality, it's really very simple.
Do you believe in a god?
Theist: Yes
Atheist: No
Can one know whether a god or gods exist?
Gnostic: Yes
Agnostic: No
(author's note: I'm using "gnostic" here as a polar opposite of agnosticism for convenience's sake. The belief that God can be/is known has generally been expected as a default belief of the religious group, and therefore a separate terminology has never really been needed)
It gets a little trickier than just that, because the more observant reader might respond, "Which god are we talking about here?" Are we talking about the Christian god or the Deist god or the Greek gods? Further, shouldn't "God" be properly defined before I answer? Excellent points, and I wholly agree. But assume for the moment that your generic, all-powerful creator God is meant.
Atheism is about belief, agnosticism is about knowledge. Since they answer different questions, they're not necessary mutually exclusive. In actuality, agnosticism is not a third path between atheism and theism. Either you buy into theistic claims or you don't. If you do, you're a theist. If you don't you're an atheist. You might be agnostic in addition to being theistic or atheistic, but you can't define yourself as a non-theist non-atheist any more than you can pick a creamer that isn't dairy or non-dairy. Whatever your stance may be, at the end of the day, you either worship and believe in a god or you don't. Atheism is merely a broad category of people who take the latter approach. (Right about here is where the hate mail floods in from people who aren't theists but intensely dislike the atheism label, often narrowly defining atheism with traits they dislike, like atheism's perceived arrogance or alleged god-denying omniscience)
Think about it this way: do you believe in unicorns? Nope? Well, do you know whether or not they exist? You have at least two options here: You could claim to not know for sure whether or not unicorns exist, but you don't believe in their existence, at least not without solid evidence that they do exist.
Another option is that you could claim that you know that unicorns don't exist because the surface of the Earth has been pretty thoroughly mapped out with no unicorns in sight. But then the unicorn believers claim that unicorns are adept hiders who only reveal themselves to the faithful, or exist in an alternate dimension and only project themselves into our world for a brief time, etc, etc. Wow, you're quite the arrogant sod for claiming you know they don't exist, aren't you? And thus, you're forced to concede the possibility, however slight, after being bombarded with a series of increasingly unfalsifiable and dubious claims. Meanwhile, unicorn believers are quite free claim to "know" unicorns exist without much examination. Dreams, football victories, natural disasters, and unicorn-shaped toast are all taken as proof of unicorns. That's essentially how existence of God arguments play out - double standards galore.
As for myself, my own views closely match agnostic atheism. I don't "know" whether or not gods exist, but I don't have a single good reason to suppose that any of them do exist, so I'm functionally atheistic regarding any conceivable god. But show me credible evidence to the contrary and I might change my mind.
Is this arrogant atheism? Hardly. What is arrogant is blind belief in a god parading itself as informed by knowledge when it clearly isn't.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Dark Flow
I love a good scientific discovery, but oh man, this is just plain weird.
Dark Flow
Apparently, some star clusters are moving towards a region in the sky as if by gravity, but nothing we know of in the observable universe could conceivably be responsible. It's as if there's something outside the observable universe pulling them there.
Now, it's important to understand that the observable universe isn't necessarily the totality of the universe - there may be lots of matter out there that we can't see yet because it's so distant that its light hasn't made it here yet.
But still this is a pretty amazing and bizarre discovery.
In my geekiness, I'm tempted to call this the Beyonder Force. :D
Dark Flow
Apparently, some star clusters are moving towards a region in the sky as if by gravity, but nothing we know of in the observable universe could conceivably be responsible. It's as if there's something outside the observable universe pulling them there.
Now, it's important to understand that the observable universe isn't necessarily the totality of the universe - there may be lots of matter out there that we can't see yet because it's so distant that its light hasn't made it here yet.
But still this is a pretty amazing and bizarre discovery.
In my geekiness, I'm tempted to call this the Beyonder Force. :D
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Ghosts: the only logical explaination for anything strange
101 signs that you've encountered a ghost
Written by a "clairvoyant advisor" from PyschicHaven.com, so you just know the advice is bound to be deliciously bad.
Apparently, any unusual or strange phenomenon at all (ranging from unexplained foul odors to daily screams in the distance) is a good indicator that ghosts are afoot. Even your nephew's imaginary friend is probably the bodiless soul of someone who died and now wanders the Earth spooking people. Nothing else could possibly make more sense than that, right?
And the list even has really freaky stuff like your house's walls bleeding, talking to your dead grandma on the telephone, and seeing someone at the mall who doesn't have a face. Oooh, spooky! Wait...no face? Seriously??
Most of the "ghostly" activity people report seems wholly explicable (if sometimes a bit unnerving). For instance, I've seen a rocking chair rock by itself, and doors blow open and shut, and I've heard newspapers rustle without anyone else nearby. It's called the wind.
And it's interesting just how quickly people just to ghost explanations when there's a near infinite number of potential supernatural or mythological beings that are equally reasonable to assume. Why can't demons be blamed for the bloody wall? Or rearranged furniture be the work of mischievous fairies? The culprit is whatever the person imagines it to be. And for about a third of the American public, that culprit is a ghost.
So watch out fair reader, for the next time you get a unexpected massage from someone who isn't there, it might be a ghost! o_O
Written by a "clairvoyant advisor" from PyschicHaven.com, so you just know the advice is bound to be deliciously bad.
Apparently, any unusual or strange phenomenon at all (ranging from unexplained foul odors to daily screams in the distance) is a good indicator that ghosts are afoot. Even your nephew's imaginary friend is probably the bodiless soul of someone who died and now wanders the Earth spooking people. Nothing else could possibly make more sense than that, right?
And the list even has really freaky stuff like your house's walls bleeding, talking to your dead grandma on the telephone, and seeing someone at the mall who doesn't have a face. Oooh, spooky! Wait...no face? Seriously??
Most of the "ghostly" activity people report seems wholly explicable (if sometimes a bit unnerving). For instance, I've seen a rocking chair rock by itself, and doors blow open and shut, and I've heard newspapers rustle without anyone else nearby. It's called the wind.
And it's interesting just how quickly people just to ghost explanations when there's a near infinite number of potential supernatural or mythological beings that are equally reasonable to assume. Why can't demons be blamed for the bloody wall? Or rearranged furniture be the work of mischievous fairies? The culprit is whatever the person imagines it to be. And for about a third of the American public, that culprit is a ghost.
So watch out fair reader, for the next time you get a unexpected massage from someone who isn't there, it might be a ghost! o_O
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Spore Review
If you're not living under a rock, you already know most of what I'm going to say. Let me put this very simply: I love this game. It has some flaws (like DRM, which only lets you install 3 times until you have to phone up the company and beg them for more) but it's still amazing. It's just incredibly fun to play, and the humor is great.
Cell Phase
Plays like: FlOw
The good: You get to swim around in a primordial pool teeming with life. It's very beautiful.
The bad: Most of that life is MUCH bigger than you and is determined to eat you. For every creature you can beat up on, there are 5 that could easily own up your zooplankton behind. Your only option is to get on land ASAP.
Creature Phase
The good: This is my favorite phase, hands down. You start out as a single individual of your species on a vast, unexplored continent. You can periodically come back to the nest for healing and mating. As you explore, you encounter the nests of other species, and you can then choose to mercilessly exterminate them or complete a bunch of emasculating and somewhat tedious befriending games with them. I chose the exterminate path and had a blast leading my warband and carving swaths of destruction with them.
The bad: It takes a long time to unlock all the upgrades, tier 1 walking is painfully slow (so upgrade fast!), and sometimes other species' nests are hard to get to when they're on hills, anything more than a 10 degree incline is apparently beyond your species' ability.
Tribal Phase
The good: As a fledgling tribe, you get a small camp to build up, and a handful of troops to command. Similar to the creature stage, you can either exterminate or befriend your rivals with instruments. If you befriend another tribe they'll periodically send over some food, and the spectacle is adorable (plus the Mariachi music is hilarious! :D)
You really have to be on your guard on this one, as at least one of the 4 other tribes will attack you aggressively. Fortunately, the combat is pretty easy.
The bad: At max pop, there are sometimes pathing issues. I made the mistake of telling my army to eat up all at once and a couple of them (including the chieftain) got stuck somehow and almost starved. And if you made a non-humanoid creature, it's quite hard to dress them up in tribal gear. Putting a grass skirt on a centipede-like monstrosity is quite the challenge.
Civilization Phase
Plays like: a scaled-down version of Command and Conquer
The good: As a fledgling city-state, you have to conquer/purchase/convert enemy cities to win. If you go military, it's extremely easy, you can just tank-spam the entire continent to death fairly quickly, then build airplanes to quickly demolish any cities that aren't on your starting continent. Converting isn't much more difficult, but it seems to take a little longer (but makes up for it with the menacing hologram). I haven't figured out purchasing yet, so I don't know about that.
The bad: It's a little too easy, especially considering how difficult some of the other phases are. (see below)
Space Phase
Plays like: A space version of Civ 4 set to deity difficulty.
The Good: Here it is, the big enchilada. The endgame. The sandbox. And for the most part, it's extremely well done for something this immense in scale. You get to command whole planets and fight wars on a galactic scale, and battling other spaceships on the planets is incredibly fun, as well as the struggle to unlock the huge array of badges and powers. But since it's 90+% of your gametime, its flaws are extremely noticeable and persistent.
The Bad: It's not really much of sandbox when you keep getting hit up with missions all the time. And even worse, many of them are timed missions. Whether it's an ecological disaster (with a 3-minute timer), one of the frequent pirate raids, a Grox attack, one of your allies under attack, etc, you are guaranteed to be nearly ceaselessly occupied with crisis after crisis, with little time to explore or even figure out how to play this phase.
The enemy empires are extremely aggressive, right off the bat. I had several nearby empires demand tribute constantly (with ever-increasing demands). Eventually, they gave up on the charade and attacked me. I also had empires that I hadn't even heard of yet declare jihad on my species (the religion aspect of the game really is pretty annoying, with a surprisingly large percentage of alien races acting like a cross between the Ur-Quan and a drunk Mel Gibson). Almost immediately after one attack was fended off, there would be another one, and they had huge empires in comparison to mine.
Terraforming: unless you have all the cool terraforming powers, it's extremely long, hard, and expensive to make any T3 colonies. The learning curve is pretty rough, so I had a tough time stabilizing the ecosystems with the right plants and creatures.
Money: there's never enough of it. All you get is spice, but trading it only gets you a few thousand. Meanwhile, you're practically guaranteed to have ginormous rebuilding bills for all your constantly-attacked planets in the upwards of hundreds of thousands. You get broke and you stay broke.
Lastly, and this is a minor criticism compared to the other stuff: the ship's tracker isn't very good. Sure, you get an audible ping and a fairly ambiguous arrow every few seconds, but it's not especially helpful. It'd be nice to get a colored trail to the object or at least get your target highlighted on the screen, but that doesn't happen, so it's a squint-fest hunting for the barely visible critter you desperately need for your colony's biosphere (all while being bombarded with missions to defend your empire or timed ecological disaster missions).
So, unless you're a masochist or have access to some excellent cheat codes (I bit the bullet and used the money cheat relentlessly), you might want to stay away from the space phase until it gets patched up to something playable.
Final Grade: A-
Despite all my complaining, I really did love this game to pieces. For the immensity of what it tries to do, it does most of them extremely well. And the deluge of user-created content is great. I love seeing my old creations roaming the myriad worlds of the Spore universe.
Cell Phase
Plays like: FlOw
The good: You get to swim around in a primordial pool teeming with life. It's very beautiful.
The bad: Most of that life is MUCH bigger than you and is determined to eat you. For every creature you can beat up on, there are 5 that could easily own up your zooplankton behind. Your only option is to get on land ASAP.
Creature Phase
The good: This is my favorite phase, hands down. You start out as a single individual of your species on a vast, unexplored continent. You can periodically come back to the nest for healing and mating. As you explore, you encounter the nests of other species, and you can then choose to mercilessly exterminate them or complete a bunch of emasculating and somewhat tedious befriending games with them. I chose the exterminate path and had a blast leading my warband and carving swaths of destruction with them.
The bad: It takes a long time to unlock all the upgrades, tier 1 walking is painfully slow (so upgrade fast!), and sometimes other species' nests are hard to get to when they're on hills, anything more than a 10 degree incline is apparently beyond your species' ability.
Tribal Phase
The good: As a fledgling tribe, you get a small camp to build up, and a handful of troops to command. Similar to the creature stage, you can either exterminate or befriend your rivals with instruments. If you befriend another tribe they'll periodically send over some food, and the spectacle is adorable (plus the Mariachi music is hilarious! :D)
You really have to be on your guard on this one, as at least one of the 4 other tribes will attack you aggressively. Fortunately, the combat is pretty easy.
The bad: At max pop, there are sometimes pathing issues. I made the mistake of telling my army to eat up all at once and a couple of them (including the chieftain) got stuck somehow and almost starved. And if you made a non-humanoid creature, it's quite hard to dress them up in tribal gear. Putting a grass skirt on a centipede-like monstrosity is quite the challenge.
Civilization Phase
Plays like: a scaled-down version of Command and Conquer
The good: As a fledgling city-state, you have to conquer/purchase/convert enemy cities to win. If you go military, it's extremely easy, you can just tank-spam the entire continent to death fairly quickly, then build airplanes to quickly demolish any cities that aren't on your starting continent. Converting isn't much more difficult, but it seems to take a little longer (but makes up for it with the menacing hologram). I haven't figured out purchasing yet, so I don't know about that.
The bad: It's a little too easy, especially considering how difficult some of the other phases are. (see below)
Space Phase
Plays like: A space version of Civ 4 set to deity difficulty.
The Good: Here it is, the big enchilada. The endgame. The sandbox. And for the most part, it's extremely well done for something this immense in scale. You get to command whole planets and fight wars on a galactic scale, and battling other spaceships on the planets is incredibly fun, as well as the struggle to unlock the huge array of badges and powers. But since it's 90+% of your gametime, its flaws are extremely noticeable and persistent.
The Bad: It's not really much of sandbox when you keep getting hit up with missions all the time. And even worse, many of them are timed missions. Whether it's an ecological disaster (with a 3-minute timer), one of the frequent pirate raids, a Grox attack, one of your allies under attack, etc, you are guaranteed to be nearly ceaselessly occupied with crisis after crisis, with little time to explore or even figure out how to play this phase.
The enemy empires are extremely aggressive, right off the bat. I had several nearby empires demand tribute constantly (with ever-increasing demands). Eventually, they gave up on the charade and attacked me. I also had empires that I hadn't even heard of yet declare jihad on my species (the religion aspect of the game really is pretty annoying, with a surprisingly large percentage of alien races acting like a cross between the Ur-Quan and a drunk Mel Gibson). Almost immediately after one attack was fended off, there would be another one, and they had huge empires in comparison to mine.
Terraforming: unless you have all the cool terraforming powers, it's extremely long, hard, and expensive to make any T3 colonies. The learning curve is pretty rough, so I had a tough time stabilizing the ecosystems with the right plants and creatures.
Money: there's never enough of it. All you get is spice, but trading it only gets you a few thousand. Meanwhile, you're practically guaranteed to have ginormous rebuilding bills for all your constantly-attacked planets in the upwards of hundreds of thousands. You get broke and you stay broke.
Lastly, and this is a minor criticism compared to the other stuff: the ship's tracker isn't very good. Sure, you get an audible ping and a fairly ambiguous arrow every few seconds, but it's not especially helpful. It'd be nice to get a colored trail to the object or at least get your target highlighted on the screen, but that doesn't happen, so it's a squint-fest hunting for the barely visible critter you desperately need for your colony's biosphere (all while being bombarded with missions to defend your empire or timed ecological disaster missions).
So, unless you're a masochist or have access to some excellent cheat codes (I bit the bullet and used the money cheat relentlessly), you might want to stay away from the space phase until it gets patched up to something playable.
Final Grade: A-
Despite all my complaining, I really did love this game to pieces. For the immensity of what it tries to do, it does most of them extremely well. And the deluge of user-created content is great. I love seeing my old creations roaming the myriad worlds of the Spore universe.
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