Another pop at god and recycling

I was rereading a book on atheism yesterday. It made me think about what God's beliefs (if there is a god) would be. Would god be an atheist?

The answer, if you think about it is fairly straight forward. One online dictionary defines Atheism,

"as a philosophical view, is the position that either affirms the nonexistence of gods or rejects theism. When defined more broadly, atheism is the absence of belief in deities, alternatively called nontheism"

If god has no god to worship and knows there is no other god then he has no choice than to be an atheist as belief in oneself as a god seems hardly a qualification of faith.

So if god is an atheist then that makes an interesting precedent for the religious. Its ok to be an atheist because god is an atheist. Get your head around that multi level paradox.


On a completely different note. Recycling. Did you know that aluminium cans are worth about 40p per Kg and it takes about 60 cans to make up a Kg. So if you wanted to earn 5000 pounds from recycling cans you would need about 750,000 tin cans which you could never actually collect at a cost to make it worthwhile. And aluminium is considered one of the few recyclables that are really cost effective.

What this means is that there is no money in recycling unless the consumers are actively involved. The collection of most recyclables is a negative business case ignoring the environmental benefits. As oil prices rise the cost of collection will grow.

As with just about everything environmental, until the finances of recycling start to make sense to not just the recyclers but the consumers we are unlikely to see major increases in recycling rates above those we have today.

The solution? The cost of items need to reflect their whole life cost and not just the value at time of consumption. This would push the price of aluminium and other recyclables to levels where the value paid to the collector would be profitable and therefore more would be recycled.

As it stands today, the costs of collection (wages, fuel, vans etc) is likely to rise faster than the value of the commodity. Increasing the costs of landfill tax will not make the positive case needed but will just increase fly tipping.

Trigger's Broom

For those few of you out there who do not understand the title I will explain. The famous TV series 'Only Fools and Horses' has a road sweeper called Trigger. In one episode Trigger is explaining to the others in the cafe how he has won an efficiency award for the fact that his broom has lasted 20 years. But he then points out that it has had 14 new handles and 17 new heads. When asked "How can it be the same bloody broom then?" Trigger pulls out a photo of him with his broom 20 years back and says 'what more proof do you need!'.

Why is this in any way interesting? I am working on a project at the moment where the value of an IT system in terms of its asset value and write-off is being determined. But the system was originally built for a different purpose than it is used for today. The system has been refreshed and is now sitting on entirely new hardware and OS and COTS than it was originally and has had major code enhancements and rewrites since it was put into service. Over the course of its life (until 2018) it will almost certainly be rewritten entirely. But for accounting purposes the life of this 'asset' will be calculated across its potential whole life.

You can see the parallel quite clearly. The system will have last 20 years and only have had 17 new heads and 14 new handles.

The really funny thing is that Trigger is considered a virtual retard in the series. What does that make our accountants then?

More Hitchens

In my previous blog entry I talked about the views of Christopher Hitchens and his book 'God is not Great'. My main criticism of his position was that he did not provide a complete argument. There are four main possibilities. Good that is done because of religion, bad that is done because of religion, good that is done without religion, bad that is done without religion. Hitchens makes a very good argument that the doing of good by the religious does not require a god to do it (all the goods could be carried out equally well by the atheists). He also recognizes but skims over that bad things are also done by atheists (an equally impressive list of killers and tyrants).

So the book, as I have said is imbalanced. But the arguments and the way they are put forward are extremely convincing and it got me thinking again. While I can see the argument I make seems viable I could not pin down the why. Why does he appear to present such an imbalance. Then I realized. He discusses 'religion' not as an evil corporation and separates (or fails to recognize) that religions are run by humans.

If religion is bad and his views are that the religions have no real divine foundation but are creations of man then to have religion removed would not solve the issue. For it is clear that the creations and running of organizations which are then use their power to corrupt, enrich and empower themselves over others is not just a religious issue.

Where there is any form of society there will be a hierarchy and therefore power and money to be had. Whether it be in a corporation, our politicians, capitalism or religion there will always be an opportunity for bad people to take advantage and do everything they can to perpetuate that position.

To pick on religion alone is not a useful argument to have today. It clearly provides a case study of how the worst of mankind can manipulate and do bad it is not alone. If we focus on the outcome Hitchens would like we see that his goals (a world without religion) would not remove the ills he places at the feet of religions. It would simply move the problem to other areas. Religion is a symptom of the problem not the cause.

If triangles had gods their god would have 3 sides

This is a quote from a rather interesting book 'God is not great' by Christopher Hitchens. It is a fascinating book where the evils of much of history have been placed squarely at the feet of religion. Even the observations that secular tyrants have existed were outlined as at best not objected to and at worst conspired with by various religions.

It is a good read for those interested in the other side of the theological arguments. There were good and bad points to the book. It was refreshing that it did not delve into the existence or non existence of god, just the effects of religion on the world. He nicely states that he has little objection to religion in its own right if only they would allow non believers to have the same rights. He covers at length the history and current position of religion on non believers of which most people are familiar with in Islam but probably not so familiar with similar writings in Christian texts and the old Testament.

The thing that nagged me about the book is fairly straight forward. He counters the argument of people who are religious doing good by saying that those people and no religious people do good and would do so without the need for religion. I.e. Religion and a belief in a god is not a requirement to do good.

But he does not use the same argument when playing the other way. He states clearly that religion and beliefs are the reason for many bad things. But Chris, sorry to say this but bad deeds do not require religion either. I have no doubt that there are bad people who use religion as a 'tool' to do their evils but this does not mean that the religions are bad. At best you could argue that the existence of religion makes the bad man's task in committing evil deed easier (ultimately its a money and power thing) but again we should use the same argument that perhaps the existence of religion makes doing good easier.

You can't have your cake and eat it and to argue in an imbalanced way can lead to the same accusations that are regularly made against religions and their inability to see all the alternative explanations.

Two weeks away

Two glorious weeks away in sunny Corfu gives one lots of time to read and think. The Greeks are a funny lot. How they came up with democracy is beyond me but that was a few thousand years ago so it was probably different back then. My post on the difficulties of democracy imposition abroad crossed my mind only closer to home this time.

The Home Secretary is on the offensive around the extension of the time limit to hold people (they do like to use the word terrorist but lets be clear, at this stage they cannot be labeled as such without trial) without charge. What has that got to do with democracy. Well nothing directly. But the report was clear that the likelihood of the bill going through this time is quite high. The reason given (and this must be taken with caution given my reflections on the news in previous blogs) was that the backbenchers had capitulated because a defeat for the government at this stage would be the end of Brown and consequential implosion of the Government and Labour).

If there is any truth in this matter then we can see a clear indication that the individuals that make up government in Labour are clearly more concerned with their own ends than the good of society. Not a new position but I think this issue shows a far clearer emergence of such behaviors. The existence of the Whip in many ways confirms this. Democracy at its best.

Reading various Greek Philosophers while away led me to think about what structures could be used instead. The first thing I looked at was why we like democracy. What does it give us?

My first view is that it gives us nothing positive in itself but is a mechanism to deal with a negative. The second point is that democracy is not synonymous with any particular structure of government. It is just that we decide to organize government in the way we do but that has little to do with democracy. We could have radically different forms of government which include democracy. We just naturally associate parliamentary structures with democracy.

Democracy was originally intended to let the citizens have a say in how they were governed. Each citizen (in modern views) having one say. But what we get is a choice but one which is rather limited. For example, we cannot chose the type or structure of the government we want, only the people who make up that structure. We could argue that these people could have policies to change government but this is almost never the case. The very system which votes you into power is not going to be changed. First past the post proves this.

When the people we do choose to sit in this predetermined structure get to power they have no obligation to do ANYTHING that they said they would nor do you get a say beyond their selection. Given that the choice you have is normally amongst pretty similar politicians and views the spirit of democracy is somewhat tainted.

So what can be done. Well, we could split the responsibility. If we accept that democracy is the ability to rid ourselves of trouble then we should work this into any new way of working. Maybe a constitution which those elected cannot change. Then an election can be not necessarily for just the people but also the type. This would separate the pigs from the trough. You could have two votes. One for the type of government and another for the people to populate it. So Labour might campaign for first past the post and a parliament but the queen might campaign for a monarchy. By keeping the constitution solid and not permitting it to be changed then whatever type of gov you have you could get rid of.

But why would one want to change in this way. The reason is that the type of parliament we have is inefficient, expensive and does not necessarily represent the will of the people. Why have 600 people in parliament when they are pretty much controlled by the few anyway. Why not just have the few and let them get on with it. if they do not perform then we could use technology to rid ourselves of them (a sort of voting system in real time, not for policies but to dump the government, just like Britain's got talent).

Ok, so maybe a bit too radical but the general dissatisfaction with the politicians today and the complete inability we have to do anything about them (they are pretty much all the same and the system keeps them there) is not the democracy we deserve.