Sky News recently featured an interview with an Anglican minister on the subject of the appointing of a gay bishop. His message, although not put quite so bluntly, was that while it’s okay to be gay, it’s not okay for two men to have sex.

On the BBC’s Talking Point page on the subject, Paul, UK agrees with him. “It’s not gay people that the Bible teaches against, it’s the homosexual act. Celibacy is the best option - both for gays and for unmarried heterosexuals - who want to take holy orders. In this case, as Dr John has stated that he is, and will remain, celibate, surely the issue is more one of non-repentance for what the Bible teaches is a sin.”

But this is intellectually dishonest. How can anything as harmless as two consenting men having sex be wrong? Making people choose between acting against their nature or feeling perpetually guilty, when there is a harmless alternative, is not moral, it is cruel. It simply doesn’t make sense to suggest otherwise and it’s hard to see how one can do so without abandoning reason and taking the bible literally.

Despite assertions to the contrary, the bible does have plenty to say about homosexuality. Richard Murray, UK, a conservative Christian, demonstrates where a literal interpretation leads when he writes, “To all you “Christians” who say being gay is okay, I suggest you read your bibles. This is a case in which the Word of God is shouted down by the liberal mob.”

So what do the liberal mob have to say? John M, Lyne Meads, UK writes, “The church is a reflection of society. The Bible reflects the society of the times in which it was written. There are as many interpretations of the scriptures as there are people, each person accepting or rejecting passages according to need or circumstance. Churches which don’t adapt decay. A church which reflects the current needs of its people may thrive.”

In other words, the bible is irrelevant. If we are free to pick and choose the bits we like and ignore or re-interpret the bits we don’t like, then there doesn’t seem to be much point in reading it at all. This doesn’t sound very Christian to me. And yet it’s exactly the right way to go about things. You have to think for yourself. How right or wrong something is can be measured directly by the amount of harm it would do to others. It cannot be measured in terms of thousand-year-old literature.

That so many are taking seriously a discussion about whether or not God wants there to be gay bishops suggests that they are not thinking for themselves.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Imaginary Friends at 3:13 PM EDT

2 Comments »

Judging the quality (or in other words, reliability) of a peice of software is not always easy when all you have to go on is its user interface. Sometimes, however, the clues just slap you in the face. For example, today Microsoft Sourcesafe presented me with the following dialog box as I tried to add the files to a new project:

Adding more than 150 files is not recommended. Windows may fail to add all selected files. Continue? Yes/No/Help

Why am I not brimming over with confidence in this tool?

Incidentally, clicking help took me to a page entitled, “Topic Not Found.”

Posted by Rob Fisher as Open Source at 4:17 PM EDT

No Comments »

It is right that Brendon Fearon, who was shot while trying to burgle Tony Martin, should be able to go to court to try and sue him for compensation for the post traumatic stress he says he is suffering.

He should be able to do this, so that we can all see what a pathetic low-life he is, and laugh as the case is thrown straight back out of court. Or as the judge put it, “there are important issues here that need to be determined”. Let’s hope they get determined sensibly.

As Henry Bellingham, MP for Northwest Norfolk says, “no criminal should have any right after he has broken into a property - all legal rights should be left outside the property that was burgled.” There are no vague boundaries here. It is not possible to break into somebody’s house by mistake. If you do, you should fear for your life.

See the heated debate around this subject that has already occurred in the comments section.

See also Samizdata and its readers’ take on this story.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 10:51 PM EDT

2 Comments »

Thinking about visiting Japan, and looking for information about learning Japanese to further that end, I came across an interesting web site explaining why I shouldn’t - learn Japanese that is. I haven’t yet decided whether to treat it as a warning or a challenge. I’m sure learners of other languages too will be able to relate to it.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 9:27 PM EDT

No Comments »

Eric Raymond isn’t blogging quite so prolifically lately, but he still comes up with some real gems. In The Delusion of Expertise he describes how he discovered that Terry Pratchett didn’t pursue a career in software or hardware design because he didn’t think he had the required knowledge. But it is a delusion to think that people doing hardware and software design posess some kind of required knowledge and expertise in advance.

They don’t. Everybody is figuring things out as they go along. The whole point about designing software and hardware is that everybody is trying to do things that haven’t been done before. If it has been done before then it isn’t interesting or worthwhile to do. The really interesting and useful work requires experimentation, imagination, creativity and playfulness; the ability to learn from what doesn’t work and figure out how to fit things together. In other words, it requires a hacker mentality.

Anyone who is afraid of pursuing a particular career path because they don’t have what they perceive to be the required knowledge should know that what’s really important is the ability and willingness to learn new things. That’s why people go to university - not to learn a particular set of information but to nurture and ultimately demonstrate the ability to learn.

Knowing that it’s normal to not know how to solve a problem in advance, one can approach almost any challenge without fear.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 6:04 PM EDT

No Comments »

Next time you’re driving yourself mad trying to figure out what song it is in that advert, look at the database at Commercial Breaks and Beats. You can search for songs that appear in UK adverts by looking up the name of the company. You can also find out what adverts your favourite artists’ songs appear in. Isn’t the Internet great?

In unrelated news, this is my 100th blog entry. w00t!

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 10:14 PM EDT

2 Comments »

Common sense is over-rated. When people use the phrase, “it’s common sense” to defend an assertion, it’s a sign that they haven’t thought through their position well enough to think of a proper argument. It’s a sign of sloppy thinking. In her book Sex, Drugs and Economics: An Unconventional Introduction to Economics, Diane Coyle spends many pages disspelling common sense economic myths.

For example, common sense might suggest that imports are bad for a nation, whereas in fact they lead to cheaper, better goods and wider choice. Why buy expensive, inferior local goods when by importing you can get more for less? To pay for these imports a country exports what it is good at producing.

Another good example of false common sense that is visted often in the book is the lump of labour fallacy. This is the idea that immigrants take jobs from locals. It is based on the false assumption that there is a fixed amount of work to go around. If this were true, we’d all be out of work thanks to steady population growth over the last few million years. What actually happens is that over the longer term the increased population creates demand for goods leading to economic growth. We actually need young immigrants who are willing to work, because as the nation becomes more prosperous, birth rates decline and the population gets older on average. So unless immigration balances this effect out, those in work will have to support more and more retired people.

Coyle spends each chapter covering areas of life such as music, sport, infrastructure, defense, and even sex and drugs. The relevant economic principles are explained and the effects of government policy discussed. There is apparently nothing to which economic principles can not be applied.

It’s a wonderfully up-to-date book, and Coyle is well informed on the effects of technology. She explains how the success of Microsoft is due to a network externality - the idea that the values of certain things increase with the number of people who have them. This effect is equally relevant to emerging 3G mobile phones, and indeed these are discussed in another chapter on auctions. The British government auctioned five 3G licenses raising UKP 22.5 billion for the taxpayer. The companies complained that they had overpaid for the licenses and would have to pass those costs on to the consumer, but Coyle argues that the companies themselves have judged value of the licenses in an open, ascending bid auction, and competition will mean that they can’t pass the cost on to consumers. It will be shareholders who pay. She writes, “It makes me rather suspicious that doubts about 3G technology began to emerge in the press, doubts raised by the companies that had just spent a fortune on it, in a matter of weeks after the auction took place, and in the run-up to a general election. If that wasn’t an industry lobbying for an improvement in the terms and conditions of the licenses, I’m an impressionist painter.”

Finally, one of the reasons I enjoyed the book so much is that it points out how governments can badly screw everything up with stupid policies. The chapter that scathingly attacks agricultural subsidies is the highlight for me.

If paper clip manufacturers were given a multibillion-dollar subsidy direct from the government, and gained as much again in extra revenues because the government restricted imports of cheaper foreign paper clips, you might imagine they’d be pretty contented about the state of business. Even better if the subsidy from taxpayers took the form of a guaranteed minimum price per paper clip that exceeded the cost of manufacture. And if that meant there were mountains of unwanted paper clips dotted at sites around the country so the government switched to paying manufacturers not to make any more paper clips — well that would be even more pleasurable. Money for doing nothing.

The result of this madness is that we pay in effect a 25 to 30 per cent tax on food. It keeps too many farms in business producing too much food. How do they produce too much food? By using increasingly environmentally damaging chemicals, and using low quality animal feed like srcapie infected sheep fed to cows.

Abolition of farm subsidies would certainly put many farmers out of business. That would be the point. … The hope would be that farmers or other purchasers of land would opt for commercially viable activities instead of milking the government. In other words, the countryside would be used for activities that reflected people’s preferences as indicated by what they are willing to pay for.

It’s a perfect example of the superiority of free-market capitalism.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, Reviews at 11:41 PM EDT

4 Comments »