That John Martin

Over the past couple of weeks, Beliefnet has been hosting a debate on matters of faith between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Andrew Sullivan, blogger for Time and author of The Conservative Soul. (No prizes for guessing who’s arguing what.) As well as serving up many of his greatest hits, Harris has dropped some brilliant new, biting quotes, in the articulate manner one comes to expect from him.

On Benedict XVI:

The fact that the current pope freely uses terms like “reason” and “truth” does not at all guarantee that he is on good terms with the former, or would recognize the latter if it bit him. Starting with the (utterly unjustified) premise that one of your books is an infallible guide to reality is not a particularly promising approach to inquiry—be it physical, ethical, or spiritual.

On Vatican II:

Your brandishing of Vatican II is just silly, and only bolsters my argument. Are you saying that for about 1960 years Christians (including all the popes) were mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity? Would you have our readers believe that Vatican II represents some kind of epistemological breakthrough? In reality, Vatican II was just damage control.

He even invokes the FSM:

Needless to say, your attempt to pull theism up by its bootstraps (”since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator”) could be used to justify almost any metaphysical assertion. “The Flying Spaghetti Monster who created the universe” is also “definitionally” the Creator of the universe; this doesn’t mean that he exists, or that the universe had a Creator at all. Many other chains of pious reasoning could be cashed-out in the same way: “Satan is the Tempter; I find that I am tempted on a hourly basis to eat ice cream and have sex with my neighbor’s wife; ergo, Satan exists.”

It’s a fun read. I sense defeat in Sullivan’s most recent reply — though I’m sure he wouldn’t characterize it as such — as he abandons argument and falls back to what amounts to a “just because” justification. He’s been a good sport, however. The faithful could do worse than having him championing their cause.

Ken Norton has confessed to his double space after a period problem. This is a pet peeve of mine — I’ve been known to reply to emails with the quoted text de-double spaced. The cure: watch this snippet from an interview that Scoble did with Bill Hill, Microsoft’s chief typography geek, where he talks about the evilness not only of double spacing but of underlining as well. (The Bill Hill interviews were easily my favourite from those early Channel 9 days.)

The University of Sydney, maker of fine computer scientists, has (sadly) entered into a deal with one of the residential colleges in which the college will renounce rights for some of its land and allow the university to build a new medical research centre with the proviso that it is never used to carry out foetal stem cell research. The agreement doesn’t stop the university from conducting stem cell research elsewhere, which I’m sure it will, but it’s a shitty precedent to set.

Synergy is a brilliant little software utility that allows you to share a keyboard, mouse and clipboard between not just machines but operating systems. It runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux, and it’s open source. Dave from Freshview has a short clip demoing it on his triple monitor setup.

John Paczkowski writes the greatest headlines in tech journalism. Today is his last day at Good Morning Silicon Valley. He’ll be missed, but he leaves it in the capable hands of Dr. Murrell.