Having now hit the mid-point in our Claremont Conversation Project, we decided it was time to move off of “SlowDaddy” and onto our lab server.  We did a test run the week before, and so were not expecting any problems.  Ha!

 

It was a learning experience.  We learned that transferring files on an iPod sometimes changes the file name case.  In case you are wondering, yes that makes a big difference on a Linux system.  It took us several hours to figure out why some of the user icons weren't working, and how the file names were getting messed up.

 

We learned that the MySQL installation on our lab server defaults to a Czechoslovakian Unicode character set, the only consequence of such being that curly quotes and words like résumé become rendered very oddly.

 

We learned that using FileZilla with GoDaddy only works if you turn off the “multiple connections” feature.  GoDaddy FTP completely blows chunks, and we ended up having to manually download individual folders to prevent timeout errors.

 

In any case, we now have our installation running on a reliable and speedy server.  With any luck, nothing else significant will go wrong in the next couple months, and our users will have a much more pleasant experience.

There's a very interesting article in Wired about "the new atheism."  Essentially, the movement says that society needs to treat the religious fanatics as the loons that they are, instead of doing the world a disservice by recognizing them as holding ‘real’ position.

As a fanatical loon myself, I find the movement strikingly honest.  I suspect that their adherents would probably wish me to be more perturbed than I actually am, but I find myself empty of concern that the movement will accomplish anything.

I think that the movement towards pure reason and a categorical denial of anything above the physical realms is ultimately unsupportable.  Even in reading the Wired article, and a few of the cited proponent's other writings, we find not a total rejection of the spiritual but its replacement.  Rather than the Jewish temple or Southern Baptist church, we find that they want a 'temple of reason.' Sounds like shades of the French Revolution to me, and we all know how that turned out.

If the prime movers of the movement can not support a world without religion, then I sincerely doubt that people with actual lives outside of navel gazing will adopt it in droves.  However, I do have to applaud the movers & shakers as at least being honest about what they want to accomplish. They say a lot of things that many atheists probably think, but don't want to be put on the record as supporting. 

In the end, I think that the "new atheism" is simply the movement taken to its logical end.  As a Christian, I have no fear of this; the movement just makes the contrasts between our points of view more apparent.  Modern muddy-headed thinking and sentimental clap-trap does no one any good; honest & clearly delineated disagreement between philosophies provides at least enough clash that we can see who is on what side.