An honest look...

This is a moment I decided to take to look at myself. An honest look, that is, not one of those semi-delusional ones that most of us enjoy our lives in, but an honest one.

I am very anti-religion and a border-line atheist. I say border-line because I'm still trying to work all the Christian out of me. I was born and raised in that faith, and kept with it through college. I started to move away at the end, because I found that sex and drinking were a little more fun than church. It's not to say I was doing it to excess in either. I married the girl I was sleeping with, and love her dearly. I never have been busted for DUI (and never would be, since I take precautions against driving when I go out drinking) and have only gotten in trouble for coming back to a dorm room a little too drunk once.

I suppose that doesn't explain where atheism comes into the mix, does it? Well, I enjoy the intellectual life. That's not to say I am one... I was never cut out for a life of science. But I love to read and to explore ideas. I get called a know-it-all more than I'd like, but you know what? Most of those that get to know me eventually realize that what I know I can back up and what I don't I don't pretend to. If I don't know much about a subject, I'll keep quiet.

A passion of mine is astronomy. To a point, science in general, but astronomy and physics in general. Fact is, the universe is billions upon billions of years old, we're made of space dust and evolution is real. Observation and experimentation have laid this out for us quite plainly. That doesn't so much pull up atheism as it does push away the right-wing bullshit machine so common in America today.

If I have a flaw (and truth be told, I have many) I'd pick out as my biggest, it'd be my absolute intolerance for misinformation. We're not talking about someone not knowing something or being mistaken here. I'm a trainer in my career and I writing training information, so I'm use to people not knowing things. I certainly don't know a lot, but that's what learning is about. And I've been wrong many times before, so that's not it. No... what I really hate is when people knowingly perpetuate wrong information for their own agenda.

I get into a lot at work. There are several different kinds of "technical" people and I work with them all. There are the techs that only see their world, and that's okay, but they get annoyed at us people that are involved in a bigger picture. There are engineers, and they see the world as one big spec sheet. Then, there are the people that really grate at me, the people that get opinions stuck in their heads and stick to them and never let trivial things like fact or truth stand in their way.

Case in point, we're dealing with this now... people seem to bad-mouth partners that load their software on our system. My opinion, you don't bite the hand that feeds you. It's just a bad idea. But I hear people giving advice to our techs that's just simply bad, and I want to smack them around. Things that were true a decade ago, but no longer really hold any water. More than one person on my training calls has gotten smacked down over stuff like this.

Again, that's computers, not my general world view. But it gives you an idea how much I hate willful ignorance. But, the fact is, the same thing extends to religion. You can only be an intelligent person in there so long before you grow tired of the self delusion that permeates the whole thing. The whole Evolution vs. Creationism (and its retarded step-cousin Intelligent Design) is just asinine, especially considering one half of the argument is basically perpetuating misinformation and bullshit. At best, the information is out of date (such as the lack of a fossil record, since there has been a hundreds of discoveries that have filled it in quite nicely). Or the whole "evolution is nothing more than a theory" horseshit you see in all the arguments.

Sidebar: My normal reply to that is "well no fucking shit, moron." Yes, you are correct. Science is governed by a process that takes ideas, moves them into observations, which become hypothesis, which become theories. Just about everything science is a theory, not just evolution. Astronomy is governed by theories. Particle Physics is a theory, as is electromagnetism, as is just about everything else. Earth goes around the Sun... that's a theory. Yes, it's backed up by a huge amount of observation, but the theory none-the-less.

I don't have kids yet, and I'm not sure how I will teach them about the world. But I know that I don't want the crap circling around in America today sticking to them. If they decide to go to a life of faith, I accept that. But I'm not going to lie to them as they grow up just to keep them from seeing the truth of the world.

And that, my friends, is why I am who I am.