And the New Year started with a *cough*

[tcpip]

Had a quiet but pleasant NYE. Was originally planning to go to a 2600-AU gathering, however caseopaya was suffering from the 'flu. So we had a quiet night at home with the rats, drank a bottle of Moet, ate Belgian chocolates as was visited by possums at 2 am. Of course, subsequently I also developed said 'flu. An interesting experience, a combination of a cold and a fever simultaneously. Was dutifully cared for by nurse severina_242 as I was bed prone for fourty hours straight.

The positive side of it all is that has meant I've had time to play Delta Force. The great thing about this game is the realism. You can be shot from 200 meters from an opponent you cannot see. You can fire every round from a machine pistol at an opponent at 20 meters and miss entirely.

Managed to drag my corpus out to a Clinton and Debs' gathering last night, replete with the usual suspects (left-of-centre academics, military personnell and the like). The main star was a visit from Carlos, a Portuguese administrator who I made friends with in East Timor and has now been there for three years. Was working for the National Parliament, now working for the Ministry of the Interior.

What work I've managed to do has been interesting. Having crunched the numbers I'm advising against upgrading SpamAssassin until we upgrade our servers. Besides, it gives me a little more time to comprehend how it all fits in with Amavis and Postfix. In the meantime, it is considered high-time to install a webstatistics package, of which AWStats seems to be the product of choice.

The tsunami toll keeps rising with 140,000 now the confirmed number of deaths. Kevin Rudd raises the question of why Burma is pretending that it's toll was so low. Meanwhile, as I thought would be the case, the real problems are just beginning; lack of safe drinking water and seasonal rains is bringing pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria and skin infections were appearing along with some cases of gangrene.

In the face of existential crises, of which natural disasters must surely be counted, there is a certain inevitability that people start getting religious and for religious leaders to feed on the fear. So various Australian religious have offered their interpretations. The Anglican Dean of Sydney apparently believes that the tsunami is God's punishment on sinners, as does the chief executive of Federation of Islamic Councils. Only the President of the Hindu council rejected the notion that it was a punishment from above.

On a positive note, TRN offers the top ten technological advances for 2004. There's some interesting gadgets-to-be coming out of that...

Comments

[severina-242.livejournal.com]

You forgot to add - "dutifully cared for by a sick nurse Severina_242, who has the flu from hell herself, who worked two hours unpaid overtime yesterday and came home to a house devoid of real food and was too dizzy to go down to the supermarket to get the makings and ended up crumbling into some sort of flu-wracked heap."

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, not feeling the best are we?

Antibiotics may be recommended... This damn thing is potent!

[severina-242.livejournal.com]

I'll live.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

If it gets worse make sure you go to the quack... I'll be doing just that if I don't improve in the next couple of days...

[caseopaya.livejournal.com]

I'll believe it when it happens!!!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You'll be pleased to know I've just rung client #1 to say I can't come in today... They were quite OK about it too!

[caseopaya.livejournal.com]

Good to hear! Back to bed with you, or at least to the Dr! ;P

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Only the President of the Hindu council rejected the notion that it was a punishment from above.

Not the only one. See comments by Neil Brown (Dean of St. Mary's) and Rabbi Raymond Apple here.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Not that the Anglican rector of Terrigal really counts as a religious leader on a national level, but he had a good letter to the editor:

"I disagree with Phillip Jensen when he implies that the recent tsunami and other natural disasters are among the ways in which God punishes a wayward human race. However, I would say that the attention Phillip Jensen gets in the press could well be God's punishment on the rest of the Anglican Church of Australia (outside of Sydney) for not speaking up more forthrightly against this sort of insensitive, inhumane and ungodly teaching."

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Still, on a theological level the Anglicans will either have to accept a deist position (God started up the natural laws and let them run their course) or an interventionist position (the tsunami was caused/could have been prevented by divine intervention).

If the Anglicans have become deist, good on 'em, I reckon... Perhaps Jensen can leave them and form his own cult of divine punishment.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

The deist position is hard to reconcile with omniscience, though. If I hold a brick above somebody's head and then let it go, I can't very well plead that I just started it up and let it run its course; the damage it does is a foreseeable consequence of my action. If God sets up natural laws knowing what the consequences will be, the same objection applies.

In fact, once you add omnipotence and an unchanging will to the mix, it's not clear that time is a meaningful concept when applied to God; IIRC this is how St. Augustine got out of the "Can God make a rock so heavy He can't lift it?" paradox, but it makes it hard to separate things out into 'God did this' and 'God didn't do that'.

Omnipotence really is very hard to combine with omnibenevolence; most approaches usually have to end up compromising on one of those two, though they rarely explicitly acknowledge that that's what they're doing.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You're quite right about omniscience. Indeed, I thought of that (in my delerious state) a couple of hours after my post.

With regards to the unchanging laws of nature, iirc, Augustine made decided that no, God couldn't change the unchanging laws that it set itself.. Also, iirc, it was either Leibniz or Spinoza who added "But they could if they wanted to".

Which of course, raises the problem of omnibenevolence once again... I suppose there is the "Job solution" (i.e., your reward will come)... which in many ways is not dissimilar to Epicurus' love of life despite extreme personal suffering and illness.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

With regards to the unchanging laws of nature, iirc, Augustine made decided that no, God couldn't change the unchanging laws that it set itself.

The answer I've heard, which I thought was Augustine's but may not have been, went something like this: because God's will is eternal and unchanging, he is never in conflict with himself. Thus, the 'paradox' never truly arises, because it requires an impossibility - that God would both want the rock to be lifted, and want it not to be lifted. (The reason the paradox seems plausible is that such a contradiction is quite possible in changeable humans.)

I suppose there is the "Job solution" (i.e., your reward will come)...

But that then raises the question, couldn't God provide the reward without the suffering first? Most approaches that I've seen end up having to modify their definitions of 'omnipotence' somewhat to avoid objections of the "why doesn't God make it exactly the same as it is now, only without the bad bits?" variety.

The thing that always bugged me about the book of Job was the 'supporting cast' mentality towards the family members who get killed off to test his faith - at the end of it, Job is rewarded for his faith and he's more than compensated for all he's lost, but there's no mention of them coming back to life. One has to hope that they all got to Paradise... even so, the idea of killing a whole lot of people to give one guy a chance to shine offends my inner egalitarian.

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

All-powerful
All-knowing
All-loving

Pick two.

(Corollary:
Omnipotent+omnibenevolent = blind
Omnibenevolent+omniscient = impotent
Omnipotent+omniscient = malevolent, or at least callous.)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Very good!

If I was a theistic person I'd be arguing for option two. At least there's some motivation for creating the universe!

Strangely enough, most theists I've discussed this problem with choose option three. Now I find that seriously weird.... I guess psychic masochism is popular among such people...

[darkstardeity.livejournal.com]

Just once I'd like to see a religious leader come out and say "Hey listen up guys, I've just had an interesting thought. You know how we've been persecuting gays, starting religious wars and lying about our motives to do so and turning back the clock on education and social reform, deliberately leaving people to wallow in ignorance and poverty in some of the richest countries in the world, not to mention what we're doing to the poorest? And now we get natural disasters like this tsunami happening? Well, maybe it is a wake up call, and the message is not that we should keep doing what we have been doing even more fervently than before, but that we are heading in entirely the wrong direction, and that we should turn things around and start practising compassion and acceptance without judgement, just as Christ urged us to."

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Heh. I think you'll be waiting a while before someone actually says something like that.... Hmmm... The idea of a progressive fundamentalist is interesting however...

Have you ever read the book of Amos?

[darkstardeity.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not sure "good" fundamentalism would be much of an improvement, except in an end-justifies-the-means kind of way. But then you know my views on religion - I think it is inherently psychologically crippling and I believe the whole human race would be infinitely better off if we could dump the idea entirely. Not likely to happen any time soon though *world-weary sigh*

No, I've not read (or heard of) the book of Amos.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Ahh, Amos.. What a clever (Old Testament) book.

Amos is prophet, fire and brimstone type. He gets his self-righteous crowd and reminds them of the heinous crimes committed by other nations against the people of Israel..

And one-by-one he ticks them off, for the Lord is indeed a vengeful god, and the crowd cheers on the punishments meted out.. and just as we reach the grand crescendo...

Now it's Israel's turn....

Interesting, Amos' prediction for the punishment to the children of Israel is more or less exactly what you described; for their oppressive practises and their religious arrogance...

AWStats

[(Anonymous)]

AWStats is a few hundred lines of perl, that read some logs and output HTML graphs.

Seriously, if you cannot get this to work, even on a windows box.
I dont think you should even be running an IIS server.

Its people like you who's infected IIS servers stream garbage at my servers day in day out.

./anon

Re: AWStats

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

AWStats is a few hundred lines of perl, that read some logs and output HTML graphs

Yes we know that.

Seriously, if you cannot get this to work, even on a windows box. I dont think you should even be running an IIS server.

Seriously, it is working.

Its people like you who's infected IIS servers stream garbage at my servers day in day out.

However this is not the case.

./anon

Ah, of course.