The Moral Ambiguities resulting from 'Heaven'

I don't believe in Heaven. The reason people do - in fact, the reason anyone believes in any kind of afterlife - is relatively clear to me, though. The simplest way to explain it, without meaning to be crass, is that Heaven is simply wishful thinking; it is an idea created by humans to fill a gap, popularised as a reward to sweeten the deal. I certainly don't want to die, which is a sentiment I would conjecture the majority of humans share - but if I'm not going to die, there has to be somewhere for me to go when I 'appear' to die, right? Not necessarily.

Naturally, any form of scrutiny renders the idea of heaven idea fallacious. Wanting something that is impossible on human terms will not increase the odds of it actually happening, however much we might persuade myself that it will. This is all by the by - the point I want to make is, can the idea of an afterlife actually be harmful? On a personal so-called 'spiritual' level perhaps not, but for humanity as a whole, it poses some interesting moral questions.

Consider the following thought experiment. You are presented with two beings, identical in all but their lifespan. The first is predicted to live for fifty years, the second for fifty thousand. Both are wrongly accused of a crime, the penalty for which is fifty years of incarceration, without compromise. You are allowed to select one to go free.

No genuine moral person would pause for thought at this point. The answer is most definitely that the first being, with the shortest lifespan, should be freed - his incarceration would take him up until his death, while the second being would only serve a thousandth of his life imprisoned unjustly.

One message that could be taken from this scenario is that we are more likely to take action to help a person in need when their suffering is all they will ever know, when there is nothing for them afterwards. The natural counter to this is that a religious believer considers any human worthy of heaven, if they earn their place; yet the fact is that without heaven, we are not given an excuse to allow unnecessary suffering of any kind. One only has to look at the long list of celebrated religious martyrs (Jesus is the one example everyone knows - hanging on a cross for three days would have been slightly more difficult to bear if the place he was so damned eager to go didn't exist) to see thatthe idea of heaven is a moral brick wall - one which impairs the human ability for reason.

Empathy and Call of Duty 4

I was struck by this fact when I completed Call of Duty 4 last week - games are becoming increasingly like films every year. Not so much due to the graphics, the score or any aesthetic reason. This game drew me in, so much so that I even began to empathise with the characters. I'm bound to drop spoilers here, so if you plan on playing CoD4 at some point, save this article for another day.

I don't play many new singleplayer games. For the past three years I've had a rather unhealthy obsession with Counter Strike - it started off slowly, I joined a clan and found myself hungering for organised matches every evening, I even went to a LAN at one point. The urge to shoot at virtual representations of real people was so great, it became a dominant part of my life. It was something of a social thing, more about the people than the gaming at times - but that's a seperate story. Most importantly, I began to realise how important a human face can be on a computer generated character's body. I barely touched a singleplayer game during my time with CS; and aside from the Half-Life series, Call of Duty 4 is the only new shooter I've properly played since 2005.

Cloning, the mind, and immortality.

Something which has been running around in my head of late.

Firstly, I asked myself, if I was given the choice of living indefinitely would I take it? Certainly I would.

In popular media immortality is presented as a double edged sword - the allure of everlasting life, versus the inability to end it when life becomes a pain. I would have to think more carefully about that; but if humanity is to develop a means to indefinite life, it will most likely be without that second clause. So yes, I would do it.

But how? What conceivable ways could a human retain life forever?

A number of possibilities present themselves. The first is simply medicine and lifestyle; in the last millenium - even in the last two hundred years, the expected human lifespan in developed countries has skyrocketed, mainly due to increased knowledge of health, wellbeing, and the ability to target diseases with increasingly complex medical ideas and technology. Some would say this is only a temporary solution - nothing can stop the mind from deteriorating, the body's organs from failing after so many years. But what about when science is able to synthetically replicate organs, or when nanotechnology is able to repair and replace broken neurons in the brain? Once the human body is fully understood (and there is no natural law to prevent this) such procedures will enable humans to far surpass their current lifespans.

GodTube.com - a collection of oddities.

I know plenty of sane and reasonable Christians. Heck, I'd like to hope that the majority of them are. But GodTube.com shows a more tarnished picture: created just last year, as a rival to YouTube, to anyone with half an ounce of common sense it's clear that most of its occupants are trying to make […]

Top Ten Doom Clones

There's a fascinating graph that can easily be found on Wikipedia here that studies the usage of the terms "Doom clone" and "first person shooter", looking at their respective usages in Usenet posts between 1993 and 2002. The phrase "Doom clone" looks to have been conclusively defeated by "first person shooter" by late 1998, which interestingly coincides with the release of Valve's Half-Life. But like the secretive Trystero in The Crying of Lot 49 (I'm sorry, that's the second Pynchon reference in two posts – I'll try and cut them down) the phrase was not quite defeated, but merely forced underground, along with the games that remain lumbered with the label. To be honest, the fact that mainstream magazines and the game-playing public labelled games like these as "Doom clones" was a bit unfair. The games weren't exactly carbon-copies of the massively successful id classic, many didn't even use its influential engine – it's just that the early competitors to Doom were sometimes looked down upon and have been largely forgotten today – even when some of them were brilliant in their own right. So what defines a Doom clone? Well, by my definition a Doom clone is an FPS released between 1993 and 1998, which use sprites for their characters and objects and generally have Doom-esque technology to work with. Some games on the list are still famous today – others have fallen into at least partly undeserved obscurity. Because of the relatively primitive engines they use, they can often be difficult to get working on modern operating systems – but where possible, I'll offer some advice as to how these games can be played in 2008 (remember that DOSbox will theoretically run them all). Incidentally, for those who have yet to experience the joys of Doom itself, it can be found in a Collector's Edition on (for example) Amazon, and there's a guide to getting the game to run under XP over at the excellent Doom Wiki here. For now though, on with the list – from #10 right up to #1…

Cats, a man's best friend.

My cat is sitting on the chair next to me, watching me type away.

I live in a family of four, we have one cat and one dog. The reason eludes me, but the cat, Sappho, has always been very close to me, while the dog has been distant. When people talk about dogs being a man's best friend, it always confuses me: my dog shows little regard for humans, with his tendency to deposite enough hair in a week to render most of the carpets invisible, his constant desire for food - more often than not my food - and his unescapable need to empty his bowels every day, which one of us or all of us must bear witness to on his daily walks. When he begs for food, half of the time he decides it smelled nicer than it tastes, and he coughs it up onto the floor. When he wants to leave a room, he doesn't even attempt to open the door when it is already slightly ajar. And when we are in close proximity, I normally end up with a sticky coating of saliva on my trousers.

Having a dog - or more specifically, having my dog - meets none of the prerequisites of a friendship.

Why arguing about religion is futile

Over the past few months the number of arguments, debates and discussions I've had on religion has been exponential - since I decided to fully reject the idea of a god, it seems like the opportunities arrive daily. And, god (no pun intended) it ain't easy. Hitler was a Christian … Stalin was an atheist. I'm sick of hearing those two names. The first thing people have to realise is that in their purest forms, neither religion nor atheism promotes immoral behaviour. As someone who has spent a large part of their life as a Christian, I'd define the fundamental nature of each as follows.

Please, Celebrities, Stop Exposing Yourselves …

I moderate a forum on a different site, and lately we've been having a spam problem. Each new captcha or human verification we add just triggers whoever writes these bots to work around it, sometimes in a matter of days. It's an incredibly popular site to begin with, so adding admin verification would be impractical.

There […]

How to Attempt to Get a Novel Published

Hell, I haven't published a novel. But I've tried harder, and got further, than most. I remember trawling huge numbers of sites trying to find some master plan, some unstoppable secret weapon to help me get my first novel published. What I can tell you is that the guides that are out there are largely contradictory and often misleading. And whilst the business of writing and publishing novels is a difficult, time-consuming, and ruthless one, there are a few golden rules that you can try to stay within if you're really serious about becoming the next Stephen King, Philip Pullman or (god help us) Dan Brown.

The Nine Billion names of God

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a classic SF short story in the 1950s called The Nine Billion names of God, in which he discusses a computer designed and built for a Buddhist monastery to calculate the billions of possible names possible for God, using the entirety of the possible combinations of available characters.
"We use a special […]