Running as Root

Penn Jillette

I've been getting back into listening to podcasts at work. After quickly working my way through everything decent that I had missed on IT Conversations I found my self hungry for more stuff to which to listen. I used iTunes to subscribe to a few promising looking podcasts (although I don't use iTunes to listen to them–it's a jumpy, glitchy CPU hog) I found Penn Jillette's podcast of his radio show. I've always found him to be an entertaining individual, and his radio show is no exception (for me anyway). If you find yourself with too much dead air in your day, I highly recommend grabbing a few of his podcasts.

The most recent Gilbert Gottfried episode, where they're making fun of Jerry Lewis (15 minutes in), was laugh out loud funny.

Jillette is a very vocal atheist, so if that sort of thing bothers you, don't listen. One of tasty tidbits he dropped on the show I just listened to is that "under God" in the pledge of allegiance is under 50 years old. Very entertaining and even slightly educational.

Breaking the Spell

I also recently listened to a Tech Nation podcast (very good series by the way) with Daniel Dennett, author of Breaking the Spell. Briefly, it's a book about using science to study all aspects of religion.

Dennett makes an interesting point that the concept of feeling guilty about "losing one's faith" is absent in most folk religions (not sure about that) and that it is when religion became more organized and competed with other religions that this concept naturally works its way in. Religions that had the concept that it was wrong to stray from the religion were more likely to propagate and therefore spread the concept while those that didn't "punish" loss of faith slowly died out.

He also attacks the idea that the only people qualified to study religion are on the inside. He suggests that this is absurd and that we'd never accept that from something like the banking industry or any other concept being studied for that matter.

Yet another interesting topic he brings up is that in the modern world natural barriers are disappearing and wreaking havoc with ecosystems. The same is happening with religious ideas. People and cultures are finding it harder to isolate themselves and their ideas from everyone else because technology (television, radio, etc) are eliminating the "natural" barriers between cultures.

One final thing he brought up that I liked is a quote from the Dalai Lama: "I have often said that if science proves facts that conflict with Buddhist understanding, Buddhism must change accordingly." That's not the whole thing, but I still like it. You can read more of the text the quote is taken from here. It's a great example of a religion treating itself and science as having the same goal–to find the truth. Good stuff.