Lunch at the Labs

Larry Wall and Religion.

A couple of weeks ago Slashdot (News for Nerds. Suff that matters.) posed some readers' questions to Larry Wall, the creator of Perl in an email interview. Question 7 asked:

Please tell us how in the world a scientific or at least technical mind can believe in God, and what role religion has played in your work on Perl .

Larry's entire response can be read here, but the part that most intrigued me was:

If God is creating the universe sideways like an Author, then the proper place to look for the effects of that is not at the fuzzy edges, but at the heart of the story. And I am personally convinced that Jesus stands at the heart of the story. The evidence is there if you care to look, and if you don't get distracted by the claims of various people who have various agendas to lead you in every possible direction, and if you don't fall into the trap of looking for a formula rather than looking for God as a person.

And I emailed him the following in response:

By "evidence" do you mean "scientific" evidence or "evidence" like at a trial where the prosecution has a witness testify about what they heard or saw? If you have "hard evidence" (like evidence for Einstein's theory of relativity) I'm sure the world would like to know about it. The funny thing is that even with hard evidence people are often wrong. How many times have scientific theories had to be revised (e.g. Newton's law of gravity) when new evidence comes along. Given the limits of the human mind (consider being at a magic show), to be so absolutely sure of anything seems illogical to me. Is there anyway your belief system can be proved wrong? If not, it's just blind faith. With so many religions in the world giving different versions of the same story, how do you choose which one to believe? What are the odds that you would believe as you do if you were brought up in a Jewish or Moslem culture rather than a Christian one? It's probably similar to the odds that you would think python is a better programming language then perl. But at least for programming languages you seem to realize it's not a matter of "evidence".

That was over two weeks ago and I have not heard back from him (probably because he gets so much email that he never even noticed mine).

Iraq and the UN.

I am surprised by the positive reaction of our media and our allies to George Bush's speech to the United Nations. Previously the administration had floated the idea that Iraq was aiding terrorism, but no proof was ever made public. Then they claimed Iraq has (or is about to get) weapons of mass destruction (WMD), but once again no evidence was put forth. In both cases there supposedly was evidence but it could not be made public for "security" reasons. I (and apparently the rest of the world) don't buy this. When you are going to invade a sovereign nation that has not attacked you first, it seems to me you should provide some evidence no matter what. (Just as you would not kill a murderer while withholding the evidence proving guilt because it would hurt your sources). Neither of these attempts to garner support for ousting Saddam Hussein has worked.

Now George Bush's latest reason (presented at the UN) for invading Iraq is that they failed to obey some (16?) UN resolutions and suddenly the world says, OK that's a good reason. But how many other countries have failed to obey UN resolutions? I don't know for sure, but I suspect Israel is right up there with Iraq. (For years it has defied resolutions to to quit the West Bank and Gaza.) What's the significance of a UN resolution other than showing who has more political muscle to line up the votes? Why have I not heard even the slightest questioning of this in the media?

Just what is the threat to the United States? Why don't the Arab countries who should feel the most threatened by their Iraqi neighbor support a regime change in Iraq?

Evil.

I hear the word evil mentioned a lot these days. The 9/11 terrorists who hijacked airplanes in order to crash them into buildings and kill thousands of innocent individuals are called evil. And now everyone is calling Saddam Hussein an evil man. The PBS program Frontline did a program to commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11 Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero concerning the questions "What did we see on September 11? Was it Evil?"

What I find most interesting about this is that evil always refers to what others do. Why was there no mention in the Frontline program that the Arab terrorists see us as evil? Were the Medieval Crusades and Pope Urban II evil? Was the United States evil when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? It sometimes seems tricky to me to ascertain what is a "war" and what types of killing are evil depending on whether or not they are done during wartime. Was what we did to the American Indians in this country evil? Then there are our well known peacetime atrocities like The Tuskegee Syphilis Study where 200 black men were not told they had syphilis so they could be used as human guinea pigs to study the disease. and the CIA MKULTRA program where unwitting human subjects were given psychoactive drugs in illegal human experimentation. More recently President Clinton "mistakenly" bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and we don't even know how many were killed because we would not let the UN investigate. I would like to ask George Bush if he thinks a fundamentalist Christian who kills people while blowing up an abortion clinic is evil.

I am afraid that in order to stop the evil done against us that we will have to stop doing evil ourselves. But I don't see that happening. Actually I don't even see the world as "good" versus "evil". I see criminal acts committed by human beings to futher their (often religious) agenda. When a lion mercilessly kills an antelope is that "good" or "evil"? These are just some thoughts I don't hear discussed in the media. I'm not sure about my opinions though.

Invading Iraq.

There's a lot of talk these days about the U.S. invading Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Here are some of my thought about it:

• During the 1980's U.S. Presidents Reagan and Bush #1 helped arm Iraq to fight Iran and we could care less about any atrocities Saddam Hussein committed. What is the real reason for getting rid of Saddam Hussein now? See my weblog of July 1, 2002 for one possibility.
• What happened to the principle of deterrence? For 50 years we held off the evil Soviet empire by threatening to retaliate if they ever used their weapons of mass destruction. It worked very well. Why won't it work with Iraq now?
• What's the big deal about giving some evidence for the supposed Iraqi threat? For such an important issue, I don't buy this business that we "need to protect our sources".
• Even if Saddam Hussein is as evil as we claim, in my opinion, unilaterally removing a head of state sets a bad precedent which will come back to haunt us eventually. It's kind of like killing someone who might be a murderer in the future; it might be the expedient thing to do at the time, but it's too easy to make a mistake. What will prevent any one country from invading another that it thinks will be a threat in the future?

  In general I think we as a country need to consider the long term effects of our foreign policy decisions. For example, looking back it's clear to me we would have been better off NOT helping the Talibian defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. The principal that your enemy's enemy is your friend does not seem to work very well in foreign affairs because situations can change too easily.

Profiling Terrorists.

Since 9/11 there has been debate in this country about whether we should use profiling to catch future terrorists. The argument goes that all 19 of the airplane hijackers were young Arab males and 15 of them were from Saudia Arabia, so in the future we should take extra precautions with people who fit that profile.

The question I have is how hard would it be for a young Arab male to assume the identity of someone of a different ethnic background (I keep reading that identity theft is a common problem) and to disguise himself to not look like an Arab. Even without a sex change operation, I'm amazed at what some of the "men" I've seen in the East Village of NYC can do with their appearance. I'm afraid we are assuming Al Qaeda will act as they have in the past, but they seem to keep coming up with new ways to terrorize us. If I can think of this, I'm sure they can too. And why have I not heard this discussed in the media?