I also noticed they had both the base version of Khet along with the expansion.  After checking prices they seemed on par with most and even a little less than other places so I decided to finally get it.

Khet (Photo credit: nachof)

I also wanted to give some props to the customer service at Vat19.

I have been noticing for the better part of a month that when I get gas and use my debit care I was not able to use it as “credit” because the zip code verification always failed.  I just assumed that it was because the card is incredibly old (expires in about 5 months).

After submitting my order at Vat19 I received and email withing about 5 minutes stating there was a problem with my credit card and they asked for assistance in resolving it.  I went out and checked my account at Wells Fargo and realized that for some odd reason they reverted the address associated with the card to my 4+ year old Nebraska address.  I responded to the email I received from Vat19 explaining the problem, gave them the correct (although still wrong) address and within minutes the owner(!) had responded that the update fixed the issue and my order would be processed and shipped same day.

Shipping the same day is their policy as long as the order is completed prior to 1400 central time.  I was not necessarily expecting it to still go out after the issues even though they were resolved prior to 1400.  Add to that, by luck of where I live, the product is showed up on Friday, roughly 48 hours after I ordered it, through UPS Ground.

While the shipping time is a bonus what really impressed me was the customer service I received.  All too often it’s easy to bitch about bad service.  I know I do it all of the time.  But at the same time I think we should give props when a company does well too.  That rarely happens.  So good job Vat19.  While your products are unusually “kitch” I don’t have any problem recommending your site for anyone in the market for that type of thing.

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But then today I was thinking about how software compares to the “real world,” and it seems that the same layering/dependency problem exists there too—what if every structure, machine, and tool on the Earth was destroyed and we had to rebuild everything from scratch? Even if the associated knowledge was somehow preserved, I wonder how long it would take us to get back to having supertall skyscrapers, fly-by-wire jumbo jets, and smart phones.

Perhaps the situation with software isn’t so bad after all, or at least the real world is no better off (depending on how you look at it).

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It’s an interesting question.  If you are truly a believer in Christ, and in Christianity on the whole, then your answer must be a resounding YES!  And not just for Anne Frank, you must also include the 6 million slaughtered by the Nazi’s in WWII,  Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Sammy Davis Jr., Howie Mandel, George Burns, The Beastie Boys, the list goes on and on.  Jews do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah and do not “accept Him as their Lord and Savior”.  Both of those points are the central to all of Christianity.  You could go as far, and it wouldn’t be a stretch, to say that without accepting those two points you can’t be a Christian and you can’t be saved.  Period.

Yet as Hermant points out, and you can verify for yourself in the comments to Ms. Evans’ post, most “Christians” completely sidestep the question.  Rather than standing up for what they have been taught, for what they claim they believe in, what they tell me personally when they find out I am an atheist, that yes, because Jews don’t accept JC as their Savior they will all be dining in the fire, they waffle and resort to vague statements about “I can’t say, God decides.”

How disingenuous is that?  I, as an atheist, am going to hell because I don’t believe in and worship Christ but if you are a Jew with the exact same belief you get some vague, politically correct, “don’t call me an anti-Semite”, BS response.  The fact of the matter is, if you are a Christian, a true Christian, if you believe in the Bible, it’s teachings, then you are, you must be, at least a little anti-Semitic.  At least if you class “knowing” all Jews are going to hell as anti-Semitic.

In the end, no matter how you look at it, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists, etc., are ALL equally damned in the eyes of Christians.  They do not, by definition, “accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior” and do not believe he is, was, or ever will be, the Messiah.

So for everyone who worries about my “eternal soul” and wants me to “let Christ into my heart” I have only one response for you, assuming you are right, then just like the Jews, God decides who gets into heaven and apparently that is NOT based on the basic cornerstone of your religion.

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Back in the day (yeah, I am getting old) the place was an “imaginarium” in every sense of the word.  The stores were a wall to wall tinkerer’s wet dream.  You would walk in for a few resistors, a diode, and a relay, a simple 5 minute ordeal, only to walk out an hour later having spent $40 on stuff you never knew existed (or that you NEEDED).  Additionally, the people who worked there were just like you.  They were interested in and excited by building “stuff”.  Often times they would be able to suggest ideas for your project, alternate parts in the rare event they didn’t carry something, and they had the ability to get something if the alternate wasn’t acceptable.  They could answer technical questions.  They could educate and inspire.

Fast forward to today.  Any components they have are relegated to the back corner and usually only comprise a few small bins.  The people who work there are ignorant as to the use of any of them. To them they are relics taking up space in the store.  All they want to know is if they can sell you a mobile phone contract.

In short, today’s “The Shack” sucks.

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• TEA members have declared multiplication “bullshit”.  One board member said, “Times is obviously a liberal, commie plot to take the thunder away from plus”.  Another commented, “Why waste time learning multiplication tables we God gave us addition?  What is so hard about adding 3 to itself 1000 times to come up with 3000?  If the Lord had intended brevity we wouldn’t have to sit through chapter upon chapter of ‘Urgon begat Smideon who begat Lupus.’”
• It was decided to move all discussion of “Pi” to home economics.  A further amendment to force only the discussion of Conservative American “Apple Pi” was defeated at the last minute by the liberal “Blueberry Pi” faction present on the board.
• The “Pythagorean Theorem” was renamed to the “(Fred) Phelps Theorem” in order to give more credence to his arguments that “the sum of the squares of the sides of an upside-down pink triangle proves that God hates fags.”

Stay tuned for further developments…

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I suppose it could be worse.  For those that don’t remember Ivan Drago was Rocky‘s nemesis in Rocky IV.

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The Christian god apparently feels that being mauled and eaten by a bear is an appropriate punishment for making fun of the chrome domes.  As stated in the second book of Kings 2:23-24:

2:23 And he [Elisha] went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

2:24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

Really?  What the hell.  So killing 42 children by having them gruesomely torn apart by a couple of bears is punishment fit for the crime of calling out someone’s baldness?  Elisha needs to get some cojones and man up.  I mean, if you can’t handle some kids making fun of your receding hair line then you need to just find a hut, park your ass, and never go outside again.

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Basically I see two reasons people become (or are) religious:

• Childhood Indoctrination
• Life Events

I will look at each of these in turn.

While I am unsure who to credit it is often stated that “All children are born atheists.”  I tend to agree with that assumption.  A child is not born with an innate or instinctual knowledge of a god or higher power.  In fact babies, it could be said, know nothing beyond eating, sleeping, and shitting.  While many Christians will claim that all children are born with Jesus in their heart but that claim is easily disproved.  If Christians’ claims are true then what is the explanation for “other” religions?  For surely if all children are born with a knowledge of god eventually they would come to know and understand that knowledge and there would not be any reason for Islam, Hinduism, the Greek and Roman pantheons, or any other type of god.  The very fact that there are multiple religions (I am not speaking of different off shoots of the same religion like Catholicism vs. Lutheranism) should lead anyone to believe that you are not born with any knowledge of a specific god and that the god you eventually come to believe in is taught to you.

We could take this a step further and actually test this hypothesis.  We could take a just born child and sequester him/her from any knowledge of any type of religion or religious information and see if at some point in that child’s life they “found god”.  Surely if all children are born with Jesus in their heart they would eventually “just know” right?  Of course we have no need of performing such a horrible experiment on a child to prove my point.  It is simple enough to look to the many recently converted tribes in deepest, darkest Africa, or heretofore unknown peoples in the deeps of the Amazon rain forest.  Until they were introduced to Christianity none of them (and absolutely none at that) had any idea of the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Greek, etc. god(s).  It more than proves the point that without someone indoctrinating a child (or a whole people) there would be no knowledge of the Christian god.  (NOTE: I will, generally speaking, be talking about the Christian god since I am from the US and that is most prevalent here, though I believe my ideas apply unilaterally to all religions that believe in a super natural being.)

So the first reason people are religious is childhood indoctrination.  Children are taught to believe what their parent teach them.  If you teach your child to believe in the Christian god then it will.  If you don’t then it won’t.  I am not going to say “never” will as we will explore when talking about my second point from above, but as a general rule people are Christian because, since before they were even old enough and mentally developed enough to know what it is they are being taught to believe, that is what their parents have told them to believe.  I find it odd that in a time where roughly half of all of America was up in arms that President Obama had the audacity to “indoctrinate” our country’s youth by telling them to stay in school that no one seems to have a problem with the daily cases of indoctrination at the hands of religious parents.

The second reason for religiosity is “life events”.  I use that term rather broadly.  We hear stories all the time about someone “finding Jesus” or being “born again”.  More often than not these things take places after some sort of “happening” in a person’s life.  They mange to walk away from a car wreck they never should have.  They win the lottery.  They witness an immense act of kindness.  They find their soul mate (who happens to be religious).  The feel lonely, unloved, or think themselves an outcast.  The reason these types of people turn to religion is because, at some psychological level, it satisfies something.

There is a common expression called the “god of the gaps”.  The idea is that throughout history religious ideals and explanations have been applied to things that were unexplainable.  Prior to Sir Isaac Newton people couldn’t explain why an apple fell from a tree.  To them the obvious explanation was that god made the apple fall to the ground.  There was simply no other explanation.  Once Newton discovered the theory of gravity “god” was no longer needed to explain that phenomenon.  Throughout history you will find similar instances, both large and small, where something unknown and inexplicable was attributed to a higher power.  Many cases were explained through science eventually and no longer attributed to god.

Humans feel the need to be able to explain everything their senses tell them is happening and because of this need it is this same god of the gaps principal that drives some adults to (or back to) religion.  For someone who can’t explain how they survived the crash (many times that is not explainable, not because it is impossible, but because we don’t have ALL of the information and variables to precisely recreate the scenario) it is easy to attribute the unknowable to god.  For someone who beat impossible odds to win a large sum of money in the lottery it may seem that only an act of god could have shined such fortune on them.  They are using god to fill in the gaps.

For others is is simply the need for companionship and acceptance.  Someone who doesn’t feel a part of a group will find welcoming arms in the religious.  This need for and extension of companionship is not a bad thing.  It is all of the other dogmatic baggage that comes a long with it that I find harmful. People want to be accepted, loved, and cherished and religion provides a “path of least resistance” for someone looking for someone to “fit in”.

Children (and adults) believe in all sorts of imaginary creatures.  Leprechauns, unicorns, monsters in the closet, the troll under the bridge, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the man in the moon, etc.  We allow all of those beliefs to get kicked to the curb eventually once they are old enough to realize the absurdity of such beliefs.  For some reason though the equally bankrupt idea of a personal god, some super natural being, is not just allowed to continue to exist but is reinforced, fostered, proclaimed (against all reason) as truth.

Most religious will point out at this time the idea of “faith”.  And I will get to that in a later post but for now I think I have fairly squarely offered up my ideas on the reasons for religiousness in people.  Feel free to discuss the merits and demerits of my ideas.  This is a journey after all and a pretty lonely one at that.

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I find it interesting that they make it out to be such a family game.  I can’t imagine ever playing D&D with anyone in my family.  Not that it can’t be done and not that it couldn’t be enjoyable.  I am just speaking of MY family.

If you are into D&D but don’t play anymore (and have nothing better to do) you can check out a podcast of a group including Wil Wheaton, a couple of guys from Penny Arcade, and others here.

Hat tip for the commercial goes to Sociological Images.

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