I have a couple of thoughts, which may seem offensive, but I don't mean to be. These are just thoughts that have distilled out of my consideration of many different books, essays, talks, discussions, and debates. I'm hoping that it won't be offensive - as a matter of fact, I am sure that many of you on slashdot who disagree with me about whether or not there is a deity will actually agree with me about one or both of these points, though your final thoughts may be different.
 
No one has found a rational reason to believe in any deity.
There is no deity who is apparent.
 
Explanations for the above claims:
If there were a rational reason to believe in any deity, it surely would have been brought out in one of the debates against atheists, or in one of the many books and essays I've read about "why believe?", but it has not. I can not guaruntee that there is not a rational reason out there, undiscovered, but it seems unlikely. If one were to be found, I would be very excited to hear it, but for now, rationality must go out the window to believe.
 
If a deity were apparent (in the mystery of creation, or some such), there would be no major conflict about whether or not there is a deity among serious thinkers, and the attributes of said deity would not be so debated among the different religions.
 
If there is a deity, it must be a non-rational, unapparent deity. I know a few people who beleive in a deity that doesn't, by definition, try to tread into one of those areas, but most theists do tread there.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters - Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

I just ran across this speech by Douglas Adams that covers what was in my last JE, and in many ways touches on a lot of other journals I've written recently. There are, in my opinion, some amazing insights in his speech.

I've run into flack for the broadness of my personal definitions of life, that is, what is alive, what are the properties of life, and all that. What do you all think a good definition is, and are you concerned with the broadness of it applying to, for example, electro-mechanical constructs?

~ Steven Novella, Skepticblog

~ Philip K. Dick

Well, I finished a book a week ago, which, though not a book about religion, was definitely informative for my current thought process. It's called The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker. Pinker does talk about religion, but only in terms of what religion says about personality, and how that lines up with or contradicts science. In terms of religion, and specifically in relation to the question of a non-material part of the personality (a soul, or what not), all the evidence is that there isn't anything non-material to our humanity, consciousness, or personality. Now, this isn't absolute, it's just our best understanding of the mind, but for me, the burden of proof is definitely on the side of the non-materialists in this arena.

I came across an interesting article by D. J. Bernstein about the IPv6 Mess. In the article, Bernstein raises several interoperability challenges for organizations who would be interested in migrating to IPv6, which potentially make it expensive and difficult to begin deploying IPv6 on the Internet alongside of IPv4.

Read More for a discussion of how I think some of these problems might be resolved.

The basic problem is that hosts configured with only IPv4 cannot talk to other hosts using only IPv6, and hosts running only IPv6 cannot talk to hosts running only IPv4. Because of this, all servers continue to need to use IPv4 in addition to IPv6, and so do all end-users. If you are using IPv4 anyhow, there never comes a point where you can transition to IPv6-only. In order for a transition to be possible at all, we need the ability for interoperability between the two protocols.

I have been wondering, is there any reason why a router/gateway device at the 'border' between an end-user, corporate, or ISP network could not act as a bi-directional 'bridge' between IPv4 and IPv6? That is, a device which accomplishes 2 basic functions: it maps IPv6 public addresses to IPv4 addresses (either public or private addresses, as appropriate), and it supports DNS queries which treat IPv6 numeric addresses as DNS domain names (maybe something where you replace colons with periods, replace the double-colon shorthand-notation with a special placeholder, like .xx., and perhaps put a special tld at the end, e.g. 2002:abcd:efgh:0001::1 becomes 2002.abcd.ef01.0001.xx.1.ip6 [are there currently any RFCs for a representation of an IPv6 address as a DNS name?]).

This system would be based on a sort of NAT, and a cooperating IPv4 DNS and DHCP server.

In typical usage, currently, NAT devices have a one-to-many relationship with the hosts inside the NAT. That is, typically, the NAT router has 1 public IP address, and multiple internal addresses. Is there any reason why a NAT server couldn't do many-to-many mapping?

When an IPv4 device connects to the network and makes a DHCP request, it would be given a version 4 address, IPv4 default gateway address, and IPv4 DNS Server address(es) as in normal DHCP usage currently. The DHCP server would register the newly leased IPv4 address with the NAT gateway, which would create an IPv6 corresponding address. The IPv6 address would serve as the main address for the IPv4 device behind the NAT, for any hosts on the Internet which use IPv6. So, now, the IPv4 'legacy' device can receive in-bound IPv6 connections, with the necessary translation between IPv6 and IPv4 being done by the gateway, so that the IPv4 device doesn't even know it's talking to an IPv6 peer, and vice-versa.

The cool trick here, for outbound connections, is that the NAT device could, I think, create mappings in the other direction too:

Consider some scenarios:

1) You have legacy devices (like a Tivo, Cell phone w/ Wifi, XBox/Playstation/Wii, etc) or applications (and so you need to configure your PC with IPv4 for the legacy app) which are not IPv6 compatible, but your network/ISP and the Internet at large has migrated to IPv6. The device or application uses DNS to resolve a name to an IP address (that is, in this scenario, no literal IPv4 address is trying to be resolved, but just a 'normal' dns entry like slashdot.org, or possibly one of the .ip6 entries as described above). Is there a way to allow the legacy devices or applications to still function?

      In this situation, my idea is that the following would occur: The IPv4 request is made to the DNS Server, but the DNS Server only is able to get an AAAA record for the server (which is for IPv6 addresses), but no A record (for IPv4 address). The DNS Server then makes a request to the the NAT to map the IPv6 external address to an IPv4 address internally. The NAT that sets up such a mapping using private network addresses which are not reserved by local policy for internal hosts (that is, maybe for your internal hosts, you are using 192.168.*.*, which leaves 10.*.*.* unused, and so available for this 'mapping'), so for example, the NAT adds an entry in the NAT tables that 10.0.1.14 maps to the IPv6 address 1234:abcd:ef01:1111::5 (NOTE that the IPv6 address might be for an external host *or* an internal host which is using IPv6 inside the LAN).

      The NAT then replies back to the DNS Server to use 10.0.1.14 for that IPv6 entry, which replies back to the legacy device with the mapped internal address of 10.0.1.14, and the DNS Server caches the IPv4 address for future lookups (temporarily; such caching should expire after some time if that DNS entry has not been referenced, and the NAT should also expire the mapping after the same amount of time, so that a different IPv6 host can be mapped to that private IP address).

      So, now the legacy device(s) attempts to open a connection to the server using the IP address it got back from DNS, which is the 10.0.1.14 address. The gateway device sees that the connection is for one of the 'mapped' addresses, and does the necessary NAT and routing to move the traffic back-and-forth between the IPv4 device, and the IPv6 device. This all happens *completely transparently* to the IPv6 host and the internal IPv4 host.

2) Similar to the above scenario, except no DNS query is performed; the app or device instead tries to connect to a hard-coded IPv4 address:

      In this scenario, if the hard-coded IPv4 address is for another IPv4 device which isn't on the local network, then perhaps the gateway could map the IPv4 address (as long as it isn't one of the non-routable address blocks) to an IPv6 address which embeds the IPv4 address.

      I've heard of something called 6to4 which is a way of carrying IPv6 traffic over the IPv4 Internet without using an explicit tunnel, which used a similar concept of embedding an IPv4 address into an IPv6 address. I don't see why a similar approach couldn't be used for allowing IPv6 hosts and gateways to connect to IPv4 hosts across the backbone. The packets would be carried as far as necessary as IPv6 packets, then translated back into IPv4 packets by a gateway server somewhere, when it transitions from the 6Bone to an IPv4 network.

3) You have legacy devices inside your network (maybe servers), which need to receive in-bound connections from an external IPv6 host.

      Since the legacy device's internal IPv4 address was mapped to a public IPv6 address when it received a DHCP lease, external hosts can make a connection to the public IPv6 address, and the gateway does the necessary NAT to pass the traffic to the internal IPv4 address, transparently to both the external and internal host.

      In conclusion, it seems to me that a strategy like what I've described should, I think, make it possible to allow the 'core' of the Internet (backbones and ISPs) to begin upgrading to IPv6 without breaking IPv4 devices. Then, you can begin upgrading 'edge' networks. Is there any reason why this wouldn't work, or wouldn't work well? Are people already doing this, and I'm just not aware of it (I tried googling information for IPv4 to IPv6 transition, and didn't see anything like this, though my research was only brief, and definitely not exhaustive)?

        Note: This all might sound pretty complicated, but I think that something like this could be included in 'home broadband' gateway devices from companies like linksys/cicso, d-link, netgear, etc, already configured for users so that it 'just works'. I think such routers could take care of this automatically. It might not even be necessary for users to install such a device at home - this 'bridging', it seems to me, could probably be done by ISPs.

    The only limitation I can think of at the moment, is that the ISPs would need to make sure they didn't try to service too many users with one gateway - because of the fact that you would be mapping IPv6 addresses to private addresses like 10.x.x.x, you are limited to how many mappings can be maintained by any given gateway at any given time, but I think that as long as you don't have a large number of users, there's enough normally unused addresses in 10.x.x.x and 192.168.*.* to allow for mapping a large number of IPv6 to IPv4 addresses. Even though the Internet needs Billions of addresses, I think it likely that a small set of users will only ever be connecting to a few thousand or tens of thousands of those hosts at any given time, so the approx 16.7 million private addresses in the 10.*.*.* network should, in most cases, be sufficient, I think.

It's the first time I've gone to church since the whole breakthrough in understanding and change in perspective I had back in June.

So what kind of church does an atheist agnostic secular humanist try out? I went to a local Unitarian Universalist congregation. In the end, I don't know what they really have to offer. I agree with a lot of their principles, and their focus on social justice, but I didn't feel like the sermon wrestled with the rough ideas of what it means to be spiritual and non-exclusive, or compelling us to social justice.

It wasn't bad, just not... exciting. Maybe I'm naive. Maybe I could only find that kind of excitement in a spiritual message when I believed in the supernatural. I don't know - I still find that excitement, but now I find it in relationships and discoveries (of beauty and knowledge), and not in reaching beyond the natural world in any sense.

Well, after all that, we're thinking of trying a different UU congregation next week - maybe a younger crowd with a more vibrant "spirituality" exists close by. If not, I will remain "unchurched".

"A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." - David Hume

I just finished reading the Humanist Manifesto II. That's something I can support all around. I wish humanist values were more prevalent in my extended family and social circle, so that I could express more of these ideals without stepping on toes...

Well, I just finished reading Simply Christian: why Christianity makes sense by N.T. Wright (HarperOne, 2006, 1st ed.). He definitely moves away from why he believes in Christianity to what he thinks Christianity should be in the second half of the book. As he made that move, I found him to become more and more condescending towards non-Christian perspectives (statements like, "I don't mean the kind of "sense" you get within the flatland world of secular imagination" - frankly, this smacks of the same unfounded elitist attitudes that say things like "only Christians have true joy" or the like.). In the end, if you're a Christian, you may find the book inspiring, but for me, it fell pretty flat in the end, and provided nothing compelling in its case for God.

Well, I finished Carl Sagan's book, and there's not a lot of commentary on religion in the latter half of the book, so I won't comment on it except to say that the book is very enlightening, insightful, and inspirational.

On to the "religion" referenced in the subject line, I'm currently reading Simply Christian: why Christianity makes sense by N.T. Wright (HarperOne, 2006, 1st ed.). I do appreciate some of what he has to say, but I can't say that he's making good cases for all his points, especially on the matters that are at the crux of the issue for me. As an example, on the question of Jesus and miracles, Wright makes this comment:

The remaking of God's people was at the heart, too, of his remarkable healings. There is no doubt, historically, that he possessed healing powers; that was why he attracted not only crowds but also accusations of being in league with the devil. (p.101)

For me, there's two problems with that statement.

First, many people, even in the modern world, attract many followers and accusations for "performing healings" (The fact that every seriously investigated or well documented case shows no sign of anything miraculous, and often shows the "healer" to be a charlatan, is also, in my opinion, relavent). The fact of crowds, and even antagonistic believers (i.e. he did it, but he used EVIL to do it!), does nothing to prove the veracity of the claims of healing.

Secondly, the only testimony we have of all three things (healings, crowds, accusers) are four documents written 40 years after the claimed events are purported to happen, and then later commentary on those four books. Not exactly something that deserves the weight of the words "there is no doubt, historically". There's a whole world of extraordinary claims made in ancient texts that we dismiss as non-historical, and unless there's something I'm missing, this claim has no more substantiation that the others.

A clarification is in order here, as well. I'm not saying that people can't believe that Jesus did healings. I'm just saying that it is entirely a matter of faith, and there are no "doubtless historical facts" to base that faith on.

"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F. Roberts

I don't believe Roberts is really notable for saying anything else.

"Offence is what people take when they can't take argument" - Richard Dawkins