Hi,
This is an identical post to one I posted at the Happy Atheist forums ... well almost (except this bit) I have been having problems getting along in normal forums, my style can be abrasive to non-atheists and I don't seem to play so well in those arenas so I've decided to restrict myself to where I can identify more with forum denizens.
OK, so I’m 51 years old, originally from Sussex, spent 10 years in Nottingham, a few in London where I did my degree and the rest in Kent where I live with my gorgeous wife and one of my daughters (the other being away at Uni, second year, optometry). I’m an IT professional by trade managing servers (outsourced) in London.
My dear late Dad was Scottish & a strong Roman Catholic, my mother had to convert from Anglican to marry him so we were bought up as Catholics ... I spent virtually all my young educated life being taught in Catholic schools but ceased to believe about 13. My religious upbringing seemed to consist of priests (mainly Irish) and penguins (nuns) who, by threat of hellfire, brimstone threats and general psychological abuse held me in fear god. I’m not joking about the abuse ... few that I know seem to able to understand Catholic near-fundamentalism but I had nightmares for decades after I left the "loving" embrace of the Catholic Church. I adopted several fads (including a phase of von Danikenism) as I shed my religious heritage and ended up believing in not much of anything ... the sort of position most would call agnosticism but I now realise was atheism.
So, once free, I offered no strong views on religion until 12 years ago when my friend introduced me to an Internet forum where we could have a great deal of fun taking the p*** out of a bunch of religious nutters but it wasn’t that before long we realised that it wasn't actually funny; that these “nutters” were the thin end of a group of US organisations that were well organised & funded and, to use my friends own words, science had taken it's eye off the ball. I said to those who would listen that the UK would be next and a few years later we were “lucky” enough to have Reg Vardy build the first of several Creationist academies in the UK and that was when my friend and I co-found the “Science, Just Science” campaign. It dropped dead nearly immediately but went through a revival a few years back with its greatest achievement being a petition on the prime ministers ePetition site and, with 1500 signatures, a good response from the government. At present, after a disastrous attempt at merging with another similar group, the “Science, Just Science” campaign has collapsed to become a blog.
I am a seasoned debater with, at times, an "uncompromising" style and do not suffer fools or foolish viewpoints gladly ... I find it intensely irritating when someone refers to a person as "a good <whatever religion>" since I fail to see the difference between that and being a good person. 12 years ago I became a militant atheist but, whilst I still have some of that in me, I have kind of mellowed ... it’s not so much that I’m more laid back, more that I fail to see the point in debating fundys and cut very rapidly to just slagging the idiots off, the logic being, it would eventually end up there anyway so why not cut out the middle man? Yes, I know that isn’t good debate technique but, with the way creationists and ID’ers twist the facts and lie, sometimes its hard to see the value of researching and constructing arguments especially when they are going to be blown off by irrelevant scriptural quotes & quote mining, appeals to authority and the usual “you’ll understand one day when you’re suffering in hell for all eternity” type threats. I now tend to be kind to have a kind of ambivalent distain for the religious believing religion to be a bad thing but also that moderate religion should be kind of encouraged on the basis that most people seem to need whacky beliefs and what could replace it could well be infinitely worse ... the moderately religious seem to me to be a double-edged sword, yes they protect us from the worst excesses of fundamentalism but they also serve as a kind of seeding ground for the same thing.
Sad as it may seem I not only work in computing, it is my hobby ... at home I have my own server, a gigabit based network and maybe 6 pc’s (not including my family’s own systems). Despite an intense interest in alternative OS’s such as Linux my OS I still prefer Windows (XP) because it works and works well on any viable hardware platform I have chosen.
Outside of science, religion and computing I mainly focus on music, movies & TV ... I have a lot of DVD's and CD's preferring SF/Action/Fantasy, I go to a gym (slacked off recently) and love a decent pint of beer (not that fizzy stuff so many seem to prefer).
Kyu
This is an identical post to one I posted at the Happy Atheist forums ... well almost (except this bit) I have been having problems getting along in normal forums, my style can be abrasive to non-atheists and I don't seem to play so well in those arenas so I've decided to restrict myself to where I can identify more with forum denizens.
OK, so I’m 51 years old, originally from Sussex, spent 10 years in Nottingham, a few in London where I did my degree and the rest in Kent where I live with my gorgeous wife and one of my daughters (the other being away at Uni, second year, optometry). I’m an IT professional by trade managing servers (outsourced) in London.
My dear late Dad was Scottish & a strong Roman Catholic, my mother had to convert from Anglican to marry him so we were bought up as Catholics ... I spent virtually all my young educated life being taught in Catholic schools but ceased to believe about 13. My religious upbringing seemed to consist of priests (mainly Irish) and penguins (nuns) who, by threat of hellfire, brimstone threats and general psychological abuse held me in fear god. I’m not joking about the abuse ... few that I know seem to able to understand Catholic near-fundamentalism but I had nightmares for decades after I left the "loving" embrace of the Catholic Church. I adopted several fads (including a phase of von Danikenism) as I shed my religious heritage and ended up believing in not much of anything ... the sort of position most would call agnosticism but I now realise was atheism.
So, once free, I offered no strong views on religion until 12 years ago when my friend introduced me to an Internet forum where we could have a great deal of fun taking the p*** out of a bunch of religious nutters but it wasn’t that before long we realised that it wasn't actually funny; that these “nutters” were the thin end of a group of US organisations that were well organised & funded and, to use my friends own words, science had taken it's eye off the ball. I said to those who would listen that the UK would be next and a few years later we were “lucky” enough to have Reg Vardy build the first of several Creationist academies in the UK and that was when my friend and I co-found the “Science, Just Science” campaign. It dropped dead nearly immediately but went through a revival a few years back with its greatest achievement being a petition on the prime ministers ePetition site and, with 1500 signatures, a good response from the government. At present, after a disastrous attempt at merging with another similar group, the “Science, Just Science” campaign has collapsed to become a blog.
I am a seasoned debater with, at times, an "uncompromising" style and do not suffer fools or foolish viewpoints gladly ... I find it intensely irritating when someone refers to a person as "a good <whatever religion>" since I fail to see the difference between that and being a good person. 12 years ago I became a militant atheist but, whilst I still have some of that in me, I have kind of mellowed ... it’s not so much that I’m more laid back, more that I fail to see the point in debating fundys and cut very rapidly to just slagging the idiots off, the logic being, it would eventually end up there anyway so why not cut out the middle man? Yes, I know that isn’t good debate technique but, with the way creationists and ID’ers twist the facts and lie, sometimes its hard to see the value of researching and constructing arguments especially when they are going to be blown off by irrelevant scriptural quotes & quote mining, appeals to authority and the usual “you’ll understand one day when you’re suffering in hell for all eternity” type threats. I now tend to be kind to have a kind of ambivalent distain for the religious believing religion to be a bad thing but also that moderate religion should be kind of encouraged on the basis that most people seem to need whacky beliefs and what could replace it could well be infinitely worse ... the moderately religious seem to me to be a double-edged sword, yes they protect us from the worst excesses of fundamentalism but they also serve as a kind of seeding ground for the same thing.
Sad as it may seem I not only work in computing, it is my hobby ... at home I have my own server, a gigabit based network and maybe 6 pc’s (not including my family’s own systems). Despite an intense interest in alternative OS’s such as Linux my OS I still prefer Windows (XP) because it works and works well on any viable hardware platform I have chosen.
Outside of science, religion and computing I mainly focus on music, movies & TV ... I have a lot of DVD's and CD's preferring SF/Action/Fantasy, I go to a gym (slacked off recently) and love a decent pint of beer (not that fizzy stuff so many seem to prefer).
Kyu
A man is born to a virgin mother, lives, dies, comes alive again and then disappears into the clouds to become his Dad. How likely is that?
