The Atheist Blogger

This is just a quick blog post to highlight the reasons for my continued absence from the blog, as my last post was more than a month ago, and I haven’t posted on a “regular” basis for several months. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being an increased workload at university, given that I am now in my final year of study for my degree. It’s more than that though; I like writing blog posts, but I generally think that blog posts that aren’t at least a few paragraphs long are ultimately pointless unless they are really meant as quick placeholders to let people know what I’m up to.

I’ve been told multiple times by people that I’ve exceptionally good at explaining things (usually), and when I have an idea for a blog post, I want to research it as much as I can before I write about it. I usually read several sources, and the whole process takes a good hour at least, if not more. Hence my problem is finding a few hours free where I can work on the post without interruptions. Of course, the other problem is that Twitter has practically removed the need to write small updates on the blog. Not only do I stay in contact with a lot of my friends and readers via Twitter, I can post tiny bursts of information from literally anywhere with a 3G internet connection.

Another problem is that other projects have suddenly become popular, largely because of my advertising them on Twitter. AtheistForums.org for instance, has exploded with new members and posts in the past few months. Various events in the world have managed to piss me off so much that I’ve become increasingly more interested in politics, namely that of Libertarianism in the UK (a criminally underrepresented minority in my opinion). I could rant about so many things on this blog, but I’m worried it’ll just divert off to something of a personal blog again, rather than one focused on atheism.

Anyway, I’m going to plow ahead and see what happens. I want this blog to stay on track, and I certainly have no plans to take it down. I’ve been doing some “atheistic” work recently, so I’ll be blogging about that when I find the time. Tomorrow for instance, I’m going to the House of Lords (part of British parliament) with the President of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist, and Secular Student Societies (AHS) and the British Humanist Association (BHA). Last week, I met Ariane Sherine at a book swap event in Windsor, and I have the photo to prove it:

@ah8r + @arianesherine = @awesomeness

So watch this space. It’ll be updated eventually, but possibly not as often as I have managed before. I’d just like to thank everyone who has supported the blog thus far, and that includes all my readers, all my twitter followers, and anyone else who’s stopped by and thought “cool blog”.

So today was my 21st birthday, huzzah! I’ve had a great day, was taken out to lunch by my mother and her new boyfriend, had a card made for me by my friends, and got given “The Passion of the Christ – Director’s Edition” by my atheist housemate. Unfortunately I’ve also had to revise a load for exams coming up, so it has been a day of trying to comprehend horrible software engineering slides.

As with this time of year, I’m cutting back on the blog to make time for my studies. I’ll still post every now and then, but it will probably be small posts rather than lengthy philosophical musings. I’ve been contacted by a person who wants to write some articles for the blog, so hopefully that will go ahead and we’ll have some form of content going. If anyone else wants to write the odd article, or share something you think others might like, then feel free to contact me.

Oh, and 21 in binary is 10101 which is palindromic and awesome. Another example is in base 4, where the number is 111. If I ever want to feel like a teenager again, I can use hexadecimal and get 15!

The British broadsheet newspaper The Telegraph has been caught in a despicable attempt to blacken the name of a new atheist student organisation of which I am a proud member. The article in question, titled “Atheists target UK schools” is only made more misleading by its subheading, which reads “Atheists are targeting schools in a campaign designed to challenge Christian societies, collective worship and religious education.” Of course, neither of these is an accurate description of what the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS) is campaigning for. The AHS is a student organisation aimed at universities and colleges, not schools, and nothing the AHS is campaigning for includes challenging religious education or collective worship.

The Telegraph articles states:

The federation aims to encourage students to lobby their schools and local authorities over what is taught in RE lessons and to call for daily acts of collective worship to be scrapped. It wants the societies to hold talks and educational events to persuade students not to believe in God.

What the AHS actually wants to do is encourage interfaith discussion through a variety of events, focusing on both scientific and religious education, as well as supporting charity work. The aims of the current initiative are outlined in brief here:

• To teach students how to debate and create dialogue between school faith groups.
• Provide the school with fun and educational events and activities, including two student-led courses: ‘Perspectives’ in which a speaker from a faith group gives a talk followed by Q&A, and our ‘One Life’ course, which considers moral and ethical issues without god. Many events will also support the scientific curriculum.
• Encourage charity volunteering.
• Give students the experience of running a group and managing events.
• Show students that it’s ok not to believe in god and encourage critical thinking.
• Bring out issues concerning religious privilege in schools such as collective worship and incomplete or biased religious education.

The Telegraph article, perhaps one of the most blatant examples in recent years of “lying for Jesus” goes on to quote Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute on the matter of this supposed atheistic child indoctrination.

Atheists are becoming increasingly militant in their desperate attempts to stamp out faith. It is deeply worrying that they now want to use children to attack the Christian ethos of their schools. Many parents will also be anxious at the thought of militant atheists targeting their children. – Simon Calvert, Christian Institute

Of course the AHS is using children to counter Christianity, but the children in question are well into their late teens and early twenties, old enough to think for themselves one might have concluded. The implication present in both the Telegraph article and in Simon Calvert’s quotation is that the AHS are targeting children of primary and secondary school age, and this is a completely fallacious assertion. Recently, the AHS has been approached by several 6th form students who wish to form atheist groups at their respective colleges, and as a result 16-18 year olds from across the UK have been invited to a conference at Warwick University on 21st June. The aim of this is to help students set up societies at their colleges, and to support them.

As far as I am aware, the only organisation who are involving the younger generations of children is Camp Quest, which is a summer camp for the children of nonbelievers. This can hardly be called atheistic indoctrination though, since the children who go there all choose to participate, and the parents of those children are well aware of the activities that the camp includes.

In response to the article, AHS Press Officer Chloë Clifford-Frith had this to say:

The AHS is disappointed that the paper chose to twist information as far as possible to create a negative, sensationalist message out of a positive development for educational provision in schools.

The AHS does not and would never seek to challenge religious education in the manner that article goes on to suggest. The AHS strongly believes in the importance of a balanced, impartial and full religious education and would support the introduction of a national RE curriculum to ensure standards are met.

To find out more about the Warwick University conference on 21st June, please contact press@ahsstudents.org.uk or visit ahsstudents.org.uk.

There are, in my experience, two types of coursework. The first type is the one actually set by lecturers, which you hand in and get marked. Sometimes this coursework actually counts towards your degree, sometimes not. More often in Computer Science, the coursework counts for about 10% of the final grade, which I think is a ridiculous amount considering the amount of coding that goes into them. The second type of coursework is the one that isn’t specifically set by the lecturer, but which they hint at and make you think “holy shit, I’d better actually do try this out”.

Recently I’ve been doing a bit of both, and so I now present to you, second year “coursework” for Computer Science:

Robotics

Possibly my favourite part of the course is when I get to mess around for hours in labs with Lego NXT robots. Last year we had to get them to do simple things like collision detection (making them run around the room without banging into anything), but this year we are expanding into the realms of sensor calibration and maze-solving. Our current team robot is the most compact we’ve built so far,with a footprint of 130mm x 120mm. The maze walls are very low, so all three sensors had to be very low down on the robot, and the two wheels at the front are as close together as we can possibly get them. We went through several different methods when creating the rear pivot, first using a flywheel, then a small ball, before finally using a flexible prong that both supports the robot and gives it much needed suspension. The final robot looks like this:

Our robot, affectionately named "Cockmuncher"

The robot currently solves mazes using the Left Hand Rule, and will soon use Tremaux’s algorithm and the ever popular A*.

Algorithms & Complexity

“Algorithms: Yay! Complexity: Boo!” is how I sum up this course, because although we learn about the implementation of a load of useful algorithms for sorting and searching, we also learn about their complexity and the horrible calculations you have to do to find them. Eurgh.

Nevertheless, I decided it would be fun to program some of these algorithms in Java. I used a custom made random number generator to produce various files containing comma-separated unsorted random numbers. I then used various sorting algorithms to sort the numbers into numerical order. So far I’ve coded versions of Bubble Sort, Merge Sort 0, Insertion Sort, and Heap Sort. Once I’ve got the programs to a workable condition I’ll release the source code online for people to play about with. I also need to code Quick Sort and a few searching algorithms.

Update: Here is a screenshot of my implementation of Heap Sort, sorting a random array of 1,000,000 integers:

6.60 seconds...bitches.

Until I implement Quick Sort nothing else has even come close to beating (or indeed actually finishing within 10 minutes) Heap Sort in this test. It is legendary :D

Information Security

For my specialisation, I’m doing Information Security, which involves lots of cryptography (code breaking), and looking into security of systems. Currently we’re going through keystreams and hashing functions, and we’ll be programming implementations of those next term.

For now however, I need to get on with my work! :D

An article I wrote for our student newspaper.

If there is one question I get asked more than any other, it would be “Why don’t you believe in God?”. Rather than going down the popular route of trying to work out which God the inquirer is talking about, I like to respond with reasons I don’t believe in any gods. To be an atheist, you don’t just have to disbelieve the existence of one god; you have to disbelieve in all of them.

By far the most persuasive reason I disbelieve in gods is the sheer lack of evidence for them in the first place. A theist might argue that all of existence is evidence enough for god, but the problem with this conclusion is that it does not explain the god. In fact, it makes things even more confusing, because it invokes a “supreme” being that in most religions is all-knowing and all-powerful. Such a being is so infinitely complex that the only way you can possibly explain its own existence is by claiming it was “always there”. Not only does this argument rely on speculation and blind faith, but you can easily turn it around and argue that the universe – in some form – was always there. Indeed, the same line of argument is used with Intelligent Design, and the same problem is reached; you simply cannot explain or give evidence for the “designer”. All things considered, it is far easier for me to believe that there was some perfectly natural cause for the universe than to suppose an infinitely complex being.

Another problem I find with the whole “god” idea is the contradictory nature of religion. It’s not just that there are several hundred religions all claiming to be the truth, or that all of them contradict each other in some way, but that each religion is internally inconsistent. Evangelicals like to claim that the Bible is supported by science, but it is simply not. The Bible has stayed roughly the same for generations; science has not. When a new scientific discovery threatens the “infallibility” of the Bible, one of two things can occur; either believers change the way they interpret passages so that the inconsistency is effectively removed, or they reject the entire scientific idea. Not all believers choose to do the same thing of course. This whole process of constantly updating religious texts to comply with science begs the ultimate question: If a god did exist, and these texts are supposedly its word, why was it so wrong in the first place? Have we really risen to such a high level that we are out-thinking an all-knowing god?

Finally, I see no logical reason for life to exist after death; a concept most religions like to advertise. Science tells us we really are just a bunch of atoms, and that even our consciousness can be explained with natural processes. I have no problem with that; I find it quite a humble view. In retrospect, I think our self-awareness is the cause of our fear, and subsequent fixation with death. Problems arise when one attempts to imagine what it is like not to think; it’s impossible to do by the very nature of thinking. So which is it? Was an afterlife created for us so we can live on, or did we create an afterlife to cope with our fears of death?