I got an email today from a kid doing some research for a religion course at his school. He wanted me to answer six questions, and I thought I’d post my answers here as well because they state in a nutshell some of the reasons religion’s not my cup of tea. His questions appear in bold print and my answers immediately follow each question.

1. Do you believe in god or gods?

No, I don’t believe in any god.

2. Why or why not?

One of the big reasons people believe in gods is because they (gods) are thought to give an adequate explanation of how we came into existence. People are inclined to think it self-evident that everything must have a creator (else how did it get here). So they cite an omnipotent god as the creator of everything and consider the problem solved. But it’s not solved. Who created their god? And who created their god’s creator? There’s no satisfactory way to answer the question. I’m content just to acknowledge that we don’t yet understand how we got here.

Other people have spiritual needs that believing in a god fills. I simply don’t have these needs, or at any rate, I don’t find that believing in a god helps to satisfy them for me, though I can see how religion might fill a void for many people.

3. What is this god or gods like that you believe or do not believe in?

I believe in no gods. When evangelical Christians question my atheism (they’re the only ones who seem to be greatly bothered by it), I’m always happy to respond that I believe in just one less god than they do. As I don’t believe any god exists, I’m at a loss to describe what they’re like. They’re like nothing because they don’t exist!

4. How do you know?

Call it an educated guess. I’ve never seen evidence that I think suggests that there’s any god. I disbelieve in gods for the same reasons I suspect we all disbelieve in invisible pink unicorns: There’s simply no objective evidence to suggest that they exist. I don’t know that gods don’t exist; I just think it’s highly improbable. Similarly, there’s no way for me to know for sure that invisible pink unicorns don’t exist; I just haven’t seen any compelling reason to think that they might exist, and I’m happy to assert, until I’m proven wrong, that they don’t exist.

5. Does the existence of god or gods make any difference? Explain.

This is kind of a weird question, and I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking. If I think there are no gods and the Judeo-Christian god does in fact exist and behave as described in the Bible, I suppose it’ll make a difference because I’ll find myself in Hell when I die instead of just beind dead. But that’s not a proposition I can really test right now, so there’s not really any way for me to posit that the existence (or lack of existence) of gods makes any difference.

Let me approach this from a different angle, though. I don’t think the existence of gods makes any difference with respect to morality. I believe things are moral or not moral independently of any law or proposed deity. Whether or not there was a god, I’d think certain things were wrong, and I’d think it whether the god(s) proclaimed them wrong or not. So in that sense, the existence of gods makes no difference to me.

6. Imagine that you have been given an opportunity to interview god. What questions would you ask?

I don’t believe in god, so this is sort of an irrelevant question. I’ll play along for a minute, though, and pretend that the Judeo-Christian god exists and that I could interview him. I’d probably ask something like this: Given that you’re all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing, how do you account for pain (physical and emotional), disease (spina bifida in innocent babies, for example), human cruelty, aging, death, all manner of things that are simply irreconcileable with an all-loving, all-powerful god? These things don’t seem very loving at all coming from an entity with the power to revoke them.

It seems as if it’s been a while since I did a Lennie update. Even this week, she seems to have learned so many new things that I know I’ll one day regret not having catalogued them all as soon as they’ve happened.

One of my very favorite things she does now is to scrunch her face (often when given the command “Scrunch”). A scrunch includes the squinting of the eyes and either the pursing of the lips or the pooching out of the lower lip. It adds to her impishness. I don’t have a good picture handy or that’d be the image displayed here.

She’s been singing for a while, saying “la la la” along with Mleeka. Lately she’s picked up hand motions to go with the “Wheels on the Bus” song. She’ll raise and lower her arms for “up and down,” she’ll sort of rotate her hands around one another for “round and round,” and she’ll put her finger to her lips for “shh shh shh.” Just tonight, she started doing the side-to-side hand motion for “swish swish swish.”

Lennie loves birds. If she spots one outside, she grins and enthusiastically points to the sky, saying “boolrh,” which is her rendition of “bird.” If you then ask her what a bird says, she’ll sometimes say “twee twee twee.” She’s also gotten pretty good at pointing birds out in books. She’s known ducks as ducks for a long time and has recently picked up chicken (which says “bock bock bock”), but she doesn’t recognize either of these as birds as far as I’ve seen. She recognizes pigs now, calling them “pink pigs,” which comes out more like “pubpub,” but she’s consistent about it, so we know what she means. When she spots a kangaroo or a horse in one of her books, she identifies them as dogs, which is pretty far off but which isn’t really terribly bad. When she sees the various monkeys in her books, she calls them “mama.” This is no reflection on Mleeka but is an example of Lennie’s difficulty pronouncing second syllables different from their first syllables; it’s much the same as how she still says “bah-bah” for “baby.” It’s slightly off topic, but she recognizes flowers pretty well and has even identified abstract paintings of flowers as flowers.

She loves to dance (as she always has). Sometimes in the car, she’ll rock her whole little body side to side in her seat in much the same fashion that Ray Charles often rocked on his piano bench. Sometimes she does this weird little sumo maneuver (not in a dancing context necessarily) in which she just stomps very hard in place. It’s not an angry stomp or anything; she’s just trying out the old legs. Other moves she’s gotten good at include kissing, hugging, and patting babies, waving like the queen (or actually more like the queen doing sort of a palm-up wave), pushing carts in pretty much any store we go to, asking to be picked up or lifted into a chair (saying “up” with a very plosive “p”), and shaking her head no pretty vehemently.

Speaking of saying “no,” she’s learned to call my laptop a “no,” and she’s fond of approaching it with an outstretched finger, looking at me sort of indignantly, and saying “noonh.”

She loves to sit in the chair I got her before she was born, and she also likes to be lifted into the glider and be rocked. Sometimes she’ll try to rock herself. Last night, she got up into my chair unassisted and promptly climbed over toward the end table to see what havoc she could wreak there.

Lennie’s picked up some body parts this week. She’s known “nose” for a long time and for some reason always points at the sheep’s nose in one of her books. But she can identify her nose and noses on other people and animals and dolls. This week, she’s learned eye, cheek, chin, and ears, though I’m not sure she’s consistent about identifying all of them.

She can now drink out of an uncovered cup and loves drinking from a straw, always with supervision, of course. She likes ice cube slivers, and when we give her orange juice, she lets just the teensiest taste in and then backs away and grins because it’s so tangy. She likes foods with strong flavors. Onions and dill pickles are near the top of the list. She also likes salami and swiss cheese.

Every day, I find myself begging her for kisses. I tried to bribe her tonight, offering a dollar per kiss. She gives them away pretty freely to Mleeka and to the dog. She’ll also kiss Uncle Andy when he taps his cheek. Sometimes she’ll then tap her own cheek in response. It’s very rare for her to kiss me, less rare for her to pat my back.

Some saps say that the day you first meet your child is among the happiest days of your life. For me, it wasn’t. I was running on empty, having gotten very little sleep. Mleeka had hemorrhaged during an unplanned C-section. I was overwhelmed and unsure of the precise nature of my feelings toward this little loud squirmy baby. Oh, I knew I’d love her and that I was embarking on a fun trip, but I couldn’t have known how fun it in fact is to be a parent. There is absolutely nothing better in the world than watching your happy baby. It makes the frog in my ribcage jump for joy to see Lennie laughing, discovering things, scrunching her face, communicating. When she’s tender with me, offering the rare kiss or other show of affection, there’s simply no describing how it feels.

/var/mailman/bin/withlist -l -r fix_url <list_name> -u <new_hostname> -v

This trick comes in handy when your company’s gotten a new URL and you want the subscription confirmation messages and various other things to use the new URL. It also doesn’t hurt to poke around in /var/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py and change a couple of things and restart the mailman process.

I jotted these down in a notepad a few weeks ago and wanted to get them recorded for future reference. Just some random notes for using Ruby on Rails.

• Put validates_presence_of :title (for example) in the model for a module to require that a value be present when the new or edit form is submitted.
• To create a new module, execute “script/generate scaffold <module_names>”. Module names should be singular. This’ll generate all the default templates for the scaffold so that you don’t have to create them from scratch.
• In the model, use things like “has_many :categories” to describe relationships among modules/tables.
• Like python, ruby/rails has a console thingy that you can use to test code quickly. Run scrip/console to fire it up.
• FastCGI is a pain in the ass but is faster than CGI and seems to be better than mod_ruby. Need at some point to write up some notes on making this work well. Quick and dirty: Make sure apache user and group are set near the beginning of the file (before mod_fastcgi is loaded); make sure the fastcgi log directory isn’t in a symlinked path and that it’s chmoded to 0777; get the debug dispatch.fcgi (lost the link but can find it later), which seems less buggy; after changing dispatch.fcgi, be sure to kill all dispatch.fcgi processes.
• Make sure you kill old sessions. If you get too many of them, your software will bog down.