Over the holidays, I discussed with some atheist friends the question: what would it take to make a believer out of me? What experience could I have that would convince me that some sort of divine presence inhabited the world? More specifically, what could convince me that the Biblical God exists?

Read on for the surprise ending!

I think a copy of Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation ought to be available, for free, to anyone who wants one; but especially to children. We probably can't do much to change the ideas of millions of religious adults, but we certainly ought to expose as many children as possible to the idea that their parents might just possibly be delusional lunatics when it comes to the idea of "god". Planting that idea in the minds of as many kids as possible is the one thing that I think might avert a future religious-ideology-driven apocalypse.

is the means by which much radical Islamic terrorism is financed. So it's simple: if we get ourselves off of the "oil standard", we'll be well on our way to winning the war on terror.

I should mention that while I agree with Mr Reisman's analysis of the sources of terror funding, I dont' agree with his suggestion to reduce oil prices by drilling in US wilderness areas. I've seen the urbanization of America proceed essentially unchecked in places where I've lived, and I consider that to be tragic. It's nice to have the possibility of expanded oil exploration in North America as a backup plan, but I think we should consider it a last resort. Only if such exploration and extraction could be achieved with minimal environmental impact would I support it. Anyway, increasing the oil supply would undercut terror financing, but it would not address the underlying problem of our out-of-control petroleum consumption.

I heard heard a snippet of a story on NPR -- an interview with a woman who "trusts George Bush because he is a Christian".

That has got to be among the stupidest things I've ever heard. This is a guy who has advocated the torture of terror suspects, and has almost certainly broken Federal law in order to illegally spy on American citizens.

Think about it. FISA permits surveillance without warrant for up to three days, and given the number of individuals who were under surveillance, it's clear that obtaining those warrants after the fact would not have caused the administration undue inconvenience. Therefore, the argument that FISA ties the NSA's hands with respect to domestic surveillance is a red herring. Therefore, the administration must have another reason for circumventing FISA's warrant requirement. Why would they want to circumvent FISA unless they planned to perform surveillance that they knew the FISA court wouldn't condone?

And if the administration's argument that the executive branch legal right to tap anyone's private communication in a time of war (which has been made permanent, don't forget) is accepted by the judiciary and the American people, then there is nothing to prevent that power being applied for political purposes. A warrantless domestic surveillance program has no transparency whatsoever, and is therefore a threat to our democracy.

What difference does it make if he says he's a Christian? Don't actions speak a lot louder than words?

This guy should not be trusted. He should be impeached.

I've spent a lot of time this weekend perusing Misty Irons's web site. If that site is any indication, she is a model for the values that Christians are always talking about but (as far as I can see) rarely applying. I was unsurprised to learn that by demonstrating these qualities in the real world, she got herself in quite a bit of trouble with her church.

My favorite quote:

The future of the Christian church in America lies with the preservation of civil liberties, not with the dogged pursuit of our Christian moral agenda to the annoyance of everyone else.

It's very encouraging to read that sentiment on a very conservative Christian's site.

Yes, this story is filed under "Faith", for what could be a more religious question than "Emacs or vi?"?

There seem to be, conservatively, dozens of web pages out there that attempt to provide vi users with the rudiments of Emacs competence. However, there seem to be few if any (and none in the top dozen Google results for "vi for Emacs users") that do the opposite. So, since I'm in the midst of coming to grips with vi, and making decent progress, behold my "vi for Emacs users" page. It's a work in progress; if you want to see some particular Emacs task elucidated, or you find an error, or want to make another comment, then please comment on this story, since the actual vi-forEmacs-users site is static.

I was much struck by two recent stories on NPR, which have inspired me to end serveral weeks' neglect of this blog.

The first story is Penn Jillette's essay for "This I Believe", the NPR column on personal faith. All the previous installments I'd heard had all dealt with the alleged truth of the existence of one or another god; and naturally many of these pieces were mutually contradictory. I had just about given up on ever hearing any non-theistic viewpoint expressed, but Mr Jillette has done a wonderful job. As a friend of mine recently quipped, "As long as everybody has their own imaginary friend telling them what to do, we're never going to get along."

The other story is this piece about the Supreme Court's consideration of New Hampshire's parental consent law. This law requires that parents be notified 24 hours in advance of a minor having an abortion, and makes no provision for exception except in the case of "imminent death" of the minor.

During the story, the NH legislator who introduced the bill defended it by stating that it's "common sense" that parents will want to know if their child is about to have an abortion. Now, it's also common sense that people ought not to smoke cigarettes or over-indulge in alcohol; do you plan to legislate against those things as well? And have you noticed that while such notification may be common sense from the parents' perspective, it may not be from the child's? Have you considered the plight of children in abusive homes, or those who have been abandoned, or those who have run away from home for valid reasons of self-protection?

And isn't any attempt to legislatively enforce "common sense" exactly the sort of big-government interference in personal affairs that conservatives are always bleating about?

The Pope plans to prohibit homosexual men from becoming priests, believing that this will eliminate child molestation by Catholic clergy.

This is not only a slap in the face to the millions of gay men who are not child molesters, it also constitutes tacit approval of those few straight priests who are.

Memo to Benedict: some small percentage of both gay and straight men are pedophiles. It's those people you should be worried about.

Starting tomorrow -- oops, today, the witching hour has arrived -- I will be helping to teach a youth religious education series on world religions at my local Unitarian Universalist church. Not because I'm an expert on the subject, but because I volunteered. So it behooves me to learn something more about world religions than that Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are the three, you know, big ones.

OK, that might be a bit hyperbolic, but I think that the political debate over the teaching in public schools of Darwin's theory of descent with modification has ignored an extremely important fact: that there are practical consequences to society for teaching children codswallop.