damerell | (no subject)

(no subject)

I just finished Dawkins's "The God Delusion" and am now very angry about everything.

Everyone should read it, even - especially - those currently deluded.

On the plus point I know what to get my mother for her birthday.

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Well, you might come to your senses. :-)

I'm not sure. There is much less evolutionary biology - and most of it has been in Dawkins's earlier books, often several times - and the same is true of the regular mocking of creationists.

The discussion of the possible biological or cultural imperatives for religion is quite interesting. I am normally quite unable to understand why any rational educated person should be religious [1] and Dawkins goes some way towards a possible explanation.

There's quite a bit about the political machinations of the religious right in America, too.

[1] Honestly, I'm not trying to launch TGGD here. This is the literal truth.

I'm fairly sure it was in

ozarque's Livejournal that I found the suggestion that the evolved process of learning to recognise objects as people and attribute will to them provides the basis of unfalsifiable religion. This only explains origin, rather than persistence, but is a data point. Another is that rationality usually only goes so deep: late in The Red Queen the author recounts an experiment from which results indicated that people understood logically identical problems far far better when framed as social contracts than as bald puzzles. Even people whom one would expect to be able to regard as fundamentally intelligent. (You have a personal footnote by email to chiark.)

Is your copy of the Dawkins book handy? Or has

oneplusme definitively claimed it for this week?

(There are Still Thursdays?)

It's not my copy, alas, but my housemate's.

There are still Thursdays.

Having got just over a hundred pages in by the time I got back to Oxford last night, I found that Dawkins mentions the source of this suggestion, but of course the name escapes me at the moment.

I saw at Feltham that Stagecoach are doing MegaTrains too, these days, which would make the Reading-Feltham leg significantly more feasible.

(You may correctly deduce from this posting that I now have a working DSL again.)

Your chiark mail is timing out again. u.u;

Presumably your mail system is still broken somehow.

Or Chiark generally hates email from Yahoo. One of the two.

I'll have to sort out a Proper Account, then.

Actually all I see are 450 delays. What was the text of the bounce?

"Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1)
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too
long."

It gives up 25 hours after queueing with the Yahoo MTA.

It fibs; it tried between 2000 on one day and 1445 on the next. Also, of course, it could establish an SMTP connection, it just got a 4xx response.

RFC 2821 says the retry time should be at least 4-5 days (section 4.5.4.1).

I've fettled something to accept your mail personally, FWIW.

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