From: Paul Church

Date: 08 Jul 2005

i'd noticed that ridiculous 'call to arms' some time ago but like a lot of people i initially gave it some credence, based solely on Jim Gray's credentials (i guess i was fooled about him - fifteen years ago, before any products that i knew of supported predicate locks in even the simplest of ways, i actually thought he was a deep db thinker, maybe even ahead of his time).  today i followed the links and indeed it all does seem an outrageous hijacking of db philosophy to the extent that i understand it. which understanding is not much, so that must make the thoughtless commercialization of theory horrific in the eyes of people who understand it better than i do.

if your local library has a copy of 'Voltaire's Bastards', subtitled 'the dictatorship of reason in the West', by a guy named John Ralston Saul, i recommend the chapter called 'the faithful witness'. it may not offer much  hope but for me at least there is the consolation that this has happened before, long before i was born. it is all about the hijacking of language over the centuries, usually for autocratic or political reasons. not just in the IT field, i detect that we are presently languishing in one of the historical ebbs rather than the flows. today i was thinking about yesterday's London events.  who knows who's behind them but i couldn't help but marvel how people who haven't read the Koran feel that they can interpret it on the basis of verbal pronouncement from various religious fanatics.  same thing goes on with the Torah and Bible.  had an otherwise gentle aunt who could become almost violent about passages from the book of Revelations. i makes me laugh when i heard the execs of recording companies who sell the current popular music.  they are complaining about theft from a generation who don't live in the same language world.  they are missing the biggest market!  today, there is actually a kind of 'inde'  'rock-star' industry for aspiring preachers who misstate those written and interpreted records of history that was aural for centuries. and some of the listeners are most violent than my late aunt.

it's everywhere.  my landlady is a teacher and it seems i get looks whenever i use words like 'blind', 'deaf' or 'crippled'. out of those three, my father was subject to two and he had no problem with any of those words.  i notice that Geo. Bush now commonly uses the word 'ideology' without embarrassment.  even though i might be described as an atheist, all i can say is 'Good God'!

From: Fabian Pascal

Anything will be said to make a few million bucks, particularly if you can get away with it by taking advantage of ignorance. It's the American way and, unfortunately, increasingly the way of other societies.

Nothing you say is news to me. It was not news to Orwell either, witness his NewSpeak. But there is poetic justice: religion is what brought Moslem society down from its peak (read Bernard Lewis), and the same is taking the US down.

Religion has been hijacked more often than not, because that's its inherent property. It was invented for one purpose, and one purpose only: to exploit human weaknesses in order to control and manipulate [see, for example, THE CLOSING OF THE WESTERN MIND]. All you got to do to succeed in this is destroy education and make sure knowledge and reason are dismissed, and judgment is suspended [in favor of faith]. In a certain sense today's American education is on the same path with current Pakistani, Saudi, and Palestinian "education". With similar consequences.

As a fellow atheist I have been saying " Holly Jesus" for years (btw, christianity is another hijacking of religion—jewish religion; I highly recommend THE MYTHMAKER by Hyam Maccoby, it’s also on the Interesting Reading page). I'll take a look at JR Saul's book when I get a chance.

Posted 9/9/05