What Rug Thinks

I was watching one of the latest videos from  +AronRa  called the Unholy Trinity Down Under: "Biblical Absurdity" . At about 16 minutes into the video he makes a comment along the lines of the following. Three religions of peace all worshipping god of love and forgiveness yet they have been at war since the beginning. That is not an exact quote but the point remains. This got me thinking how many times have we heard it said? Here are a few quotes just to get an idea what religious people say about peace and their religion. "Islam teaches tolerance, not hatred; universal brotherhood, not enmity; peace, and not violence."    -Pervez Musharraf "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God" -Jesus Christ via Matthew 5:9 "Judaism teaches peace, love, unity, dignity, and kindness." -Adam Buchwald The simple fact that supposedly all three of these religions teach peace makes it rather hard to understand why the middle e...

When you boil down all the whining, complaining, and outrage over just about anything religion gets involved with. Why should we want to have a secular society? Why should we accept a secular society? What is a secular society? Three questions cause so many arguments and a lot of hatred. Let me tackle the last question first. What is a secular society? This is a rather interesting question really. While I can't speak for everyone I think my idea of a secular society would be agreed upon by most. My idea of a secular society would definitely include religious freedom. In fact there would only be a few things you would have to keep in mind. The main one is you have complete freedom to do as you wish up to the point it affects other people. When dealing with public keep your religious out of it. Let's say you own a business it shouldn't matter what your customer does in their private life or what they believe. That doesn't affect you in any way because it's just busi...

Evolution has been mocked by creationist since the idea first came to light. I think most of it is really the misunderstanding of what evolution says. Therefore, I'm going to use a metaphor so at least the basic idea of evolution can be understood. Then I will explain the metaphor so there are no misunderstandings of what I mean.  Let's say you are walking with some friends. On this walk you are talking, laughing, and not really paying much attention to where you are. After a while there is a gap in the conversation. You look around and realize you are very far from where you started this walk. You may even wonder how you walked so far and didn't notice. However, you know you have been walking so you understand you must have walked all that way. You simply don't remember the walk. You only remember the conversation.  Every step you take in a walk is a small step that doesn't get you very far. These steps in random directions wouldn't get you very far. How...

How can you protect your hard drive? To answer this question we need to talk about how a hard drive works in the first place. Then maybe just from understanding how they work we can figure out the best way to protect them. Time to get my geek on, wohooo! There are two types of hard drives you are likely to run into. Solid state (SSD) and traditional hard drives (HDD). Both of them have their pros and cons as well as different ways to protect them.  The traditional hard drive or HDD (Hard Disk Drive) is not really all that complicated in the basic overall function. There are really only three basic parts of the hard drive we need to worry about. First, there are the platters that store the data through magnetic markings. This is very similar to a vinyl record storing analog audio in the bumps and dips in the groves. For the younger people in the crowd. It's also similar to a CD storing digital music data. Second is a read/write head that either detects or causes the magnetic...

One question that I have heard a lot is, "How can you be moral without God?" There is also the more offensive version of this, "You just want to sin. That's why you deny God." That second one is rather offensive remark but I try to ignore that fact. Since really they have no idea what they are saying. I assume they really mean the first statement otherwise I would just be pissed off. The question being how can I be moral and an atheist at the same time. Well, that's really simple. I live my life with a few basic rules. These rules are as follows. Life is preferable to death. Pleasure is preferable to pain. Freedom is preferable to anything. The good of the many outweigh the good of the one. (Thank you Spock!) Honesty is always the best option.  Logic outweighs emotion. Violence is only for self defence.  That's it, just 7 things to keep in mind when making decisions in my life. I think most people would agree with most of these as well. If y...

Recently there was an issue in Indiana where they set a "Religious Freedom Law" into place. This law had a section in it that allowed anyone with a religious belief to discriminate against anyone they wished. Thankfully they fixed the law and it's not longer an issue. However, it did get me thinking about discrimination in general and I have come to the conclusion that if someone doesn't understand why discrimination is wrong then they are simply a shitty human being. Let me tell you why. Let's first take a look in history and see what discrimination has gotten the human race so far. I'm not going to go back to the beginning of recorded history because I don't want to be here for years typing this up. So I'll start with the dark ages. Religious discrimination between christian nations caused an untold number of deaths due to the wars they incited. The middle east has been at war so many times I have lost track all due to the idea that one religion is b...