I agree with you completely.
We chatted quite a bit about ten years ago on a.g.marathon and myth.b.org (I under a different name). Nice to see a familiar name years later, and even nicer that you're a voice of reason in this thread!
This reminds me of a comic about an engineer at a philosopher conference.
All the so-called great philosophy questions can be answered definitively if you allow for the terms to be properly defined.
Defined by whom? And what is this "properly"? You think the point of that comic is that if we'd only let the engineers handle philosophy, they'd figure it all out right-quick?
The profession of the philosopher is to refuse adequate definition to these questions, so that they are unanswerable by design; their work is no better or more useful than religions assertions.
This is about as ignorant as an engineer mocking theoretical physics ("Oh, so your particle accelerator's going to help me build bridges, huh?") or a programmer mocking theoretical mathematics ("Play with your pretty partition function approximations, we have Real Work to do on these databases"). If you truly think religion or philosophy offer nothing to human knowledge, you are even more blinkered and dogmatic -- not to mention foolish -- than the zealots you seek to ridicule.
Kids are still rebellious, to be sure, but they express their rebellion in stupid, unimportant ways like abusing drugs and alcohol or using the "wrong" words that they know adults don't want them to say. I'd much rather they rebelled by not accepting statements without proof.
Aren't the things you cited exactly that?
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too hard to write.
