To wish for him to be surrounded for all eternity by those he loves most, in the presence of the source of all love, truth and beauty... I think that's something we'd all like to experience along with him.

Edit: Unclear phrasing

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She gave us a good tour and we saw this tabernacle here and this here and so on and then at one point she said, "I just want to tell you a little about the church of the Latter Day Saints." And we all politely stood and then she said how in the afterlife all families will be reunited. "You’ll be with your families forever!"

So I put my hand up and said, "What happens if you’ve been good?"

http://bigthink.com/ideas/17866

Yeah, pretty much.

Edit: OK, that was unnecessarily flippant. I personally never heard that statement as an honest question, only as a ha-ha-only-serious comeback. It turns out that all the people I met who didn't like their families felt bad about it, and realized it wasn't the way things should be.

To put it another way, I think when Hitchens calls it "the christian conception" of heaven, it wasn't a description of what certain christians believe, but of the biblical description.

I find myself writing the ridiculous sentence that Hitchens perhaps took a religious prose poem/vision/prophecy/allegory/history too literally.

I understand that he had an axe to grind. But he hasn't done justice to the thing he argued against.

Even in the Catholic mass, there is a point at which priest announces: "And so, with all the choirs of angels in heaven we proclaim your glory and join in their unending hymn of praise" at which "Holy" is sung.

This is in direct reference to the book of revelation where it is depicted exactly as such, unending praise to god.

And by the way, any meaning you take from revelation is really up to you. The book is a rambling by a deluded madman.

I take Hitchens as trying to find a common ground for argument by appealing directly to the text. So it is on point if his interpretation of the text does not do it justice, especially if the Christians interpret it differently in a way that is more internally consistent.

The problem is that no one seems to have an idea of heaven that -- if it were actually REALIZED (vs staying as an abstract idea) -- would be tolerable for any length of time by human beings. We have to assume that people are transformed into something that deals well with eternity, for example... but we never even talked about it at that depth.

I was raised Catholic by two still-seriously-believing parents, I should mention, so I have some idea of what some Christians think heaven is like. It's a vague mush of conflicting ideas.

And that's just fine, because no one wants to think about it deeply; that's not the point. It's just for saying "well, your Nana is in Heaven now, and she's very, very happy there". It's whatever it needs to be for Nana to be very, very happy.

If she's reunited with both husbands and her lover from the late 1950s as well, presumably none of them will have drinking problems or anger-management issues anymore, and they'll all get along, and be very, very happy, and also the baby that died will be there. Also very, very happy.

But again, this is already miles further than anyone delves into it. It was just "well, God will be there, and it's just amazing to be in His presence; end of story."

But if you don't unquestioningly share the christian or biblical values, and dont find til biblical god's special kind of love particularly appealing, then an eternity trapped in this might not seem so blissful.

I agree that love, truth and beauty are not simply reducible to matter alone. But that does not mean they have a mystical or otherworldly basis either: invoking supernatural explanations to explain software is obviously foolish, but trying to explain software in terms of atoms gets you nowhere.

This is why I reject both supernatural/mystical/religious and materialist positions. The earlier is conceptually flawed because it rejects or denigrates the physical world (at least in part), and the latter is just as flawed because it rejects the conceptual framework necessary to fully understand phenomena outside of the special sciences. Both camps claim that love, morality, etc. do not have much (if anything) to do with reason and reality.

Open source software won't take over by being 1.86x faster and using a totally sweet heap sort algorithm. I'm a geek and I find that kind of thing interesting at an intellectual level, but it doesn't make me want to spend an entire Saturday trying to get Linux to recognize my sound card. "Normal" people absolutely don't care and won't put up with the hassle.

With Steve gone, there's a taste-shaped hole in the entire technology world that I can't see anyone stepping in and taking over. Until the open source world gets its own Steve Jobs -- someone out there who starts focusing relentlessly on the users (how to make software "just work" and look/feel great at the same time), it's never going to unseat the dominant players (as much as I might want it to).

Stuff like that is FUD though, linux sound support is pretty good these days and the amount and variety of devices supported dwarfs the best the commercial world has to offer. In general, Linux support of legacy devices is amazing.

Newly minted hardware without a factory supported driver is a different kettle of fish but you can't really blame the Linux driver writers for that, they need information to work with and if manufacturers are not going to supply that info it needs to be painstakingly recovered, which is not always possible and almost always incomplete to some extent.

Who cares? It doesn't work. When I buy an Apple laptop I know all the hardware works. That's it. There is no blame to Linux devs (I've counted as one at times). This is the real world -- I'm not giving out consolation prizes to software that almost works.

The vast majority of people are like that; my use of the first person singular was not an accident, I count myself among them. It's not a matter of assigning blame, it's a matter of recognizing reality.

For Linux to take over the consumer desktop market, it doesn't just need to be as easy to install and maintain as Windows or OSX; it needs to be significantly easier. That is the hole a "Steve Jobs of free software" could fill.

And for fucks sake, don't say "it's FUD". I had a hard time installing drivers for an NVidia graphic card this month in Ubuntu's latest stable version, running in Dell workstation. I could even put out some videos.

I'm tired of people who had difficulties with Linux being called liars and getting down votes here.

Linux is great, but it's not finished yet. There's room for improvement. (Same with Windows. Same with OS X).

EDIT: But that wasn't the point. The point is that those kinds of problems still happen with Linux, but only sometimes, with specific distros in specific gear, but when they don't happen (such as with Ubuntu 99% of the time) Linux gets praise and adoption from non-techies.

Someone who installs an OS has immediately gone beyond mere "user". A fairer comparison must include pre-installed machines.

How? By writing drivers for undocumented hardware?

> it doesn't just need to be as easy to install and maintain as Windows

Have you tried to install Windows recently? Fat-finger one prompt and you need to return it to the store to get it back. Make one little mistake in your backup and you need to buy install disks, etc. Don't buy anti-virus software and kiss it goodbye.

It's only easy because nobody does it - they all just pay the $100 install tax and have the store do it for them.

If you actually had to install a system and run a non-trivial program Mac would win, followed by Ubuntu, and then the rest would trickle in at the unusable-by-the-masses level.

Windows 7 install (recently) from disk is dead simple, please give an example of something you could destroy through fat-fingering. Anti-virus is pointless for most users who don't pirate software and who use a modern browser (along with some common sense... Like say, not installing viruses). Kiss it all goodbye is ridiculous, when was the last time you heard of a virus doing anything other than installing spyware or a botnet?

Most people pay your so-called tax because there is no viable alternative, these aren't the kind of people who will buy the parts and put it together themselves.

Finally, I found ubuntu to be more difficult to install than windows. Think "proprietary" drivers... And there are a bunch of fat fingering opportunities in the ncurses version of the install.

Destroy as in magic smoke? No. But have to take back to the store to have it reset. Yes.

This initial language prompt the computer booted to didn't have a back button once you'd chosen. If you get that wrong, good luck changing it if you're a casual user.

> Anti-virus is pointless for most users who don't pirate software and who use a modern browser (along with some common sense... Like say, not installing viruses).

That's fine for you and me. I've only ever found one virus despite scanning what I download.

But it was a malware posing as an archiving tool not warez, and malware is everywhere and does everything to look legit. Legitimate users get burned by this all the time.

As for a modern browser, sure - up to date IE is much better than before but Flash hardly is, so IE hardly is, so Windows hardly is... A single security layer simply isn't sufficient. A browser that's so plugin-happy needs to be better sandboxed.

Which is why for a computing environment where your browser is running as the primary user, you need a virus scanner.

> Most people pay your so-called tax because there is no viable alternative, these aren't the kind of people who will buy the parts and put it together themselves.

That's exactly what I mean. There's just enough hard about the install to make it not easy and thus it's hard by most people's reckoning.

Only the Mac is really good and that's because they supply the hardware so they know the drivers, the configuration, etc.

> Finally, I found ubuntu to be more difficult to install than windows. Think "proprietary" drivers...

"Here's a machine that won't run Ubuntu - see what a tough install Ubuntu is!"

Ouch.

> And there are a bunch of fat fingering opportunities in the ncurses version of the install.

Sure. But even still, less of a "there's no back button" kind of thing and more just complexity because of difficulty. Windows by default uses the entire drive, Ubuntu could but that'd make it harder in other ways. But judging it on that sort of thing misses their simplicity in areas that can be simple. As much as can work, just does. No EULAs, no trapdoor options, no hurried backups onto DVDs you forgot to buy and had to go back to get because it doesn't come with a $.30 install disk, etc...

You're making my point. I (someone who works in the software industry) had a problem with a piece of open source software. If the open source world is going to go mainstream, the reaction can't be "That's FUD." It has to be "That's unacceptable, we need to fix this immediately."

Don't do it for me. If I decide the tradeoff of effort vs. benefit is worthwhile, I can eventually resolve the problem myself. Do it for my mom, who just wants the printer to work so she can print handouts for her students. Do it for your grandparents who just want to check their email and look at their grandkid's pictures. Or just tell me I'm an anti-open source propagandist and dismiss me.

I've made my decision. Computers are made for people, not people for computers.

But thanks for proving his point by calling him a liar.

Really.

Counterpoint to your story: I bought a notebook with a 3G card in it, couldn't for the life of me get the thing to work under windows vista (which it came installed with). It got so bad that I suspected that the hardware must be broken.

For kicks I booted the machine using ubuntu NBR, not only did it detect and configure all the other peripherals properly but it also auto-detected the 3G card and it made it work instantly without further configuration, other than clicking the 'connect' entry in the menu and entering the PIN code (four times '0').

Just because there is the occasional glitch I'm not going to say 'windows vista doesn't support lots of hardware'.

If you say your soundcard/wireless/etc doesn't work under a major distribution then that's really unfortunate, but that does not make your story representative of the vast majority of Linux users. Personally I haven't seen any configuration issues in Linux for over a decade unless it was because I was using some very rare and either very new or totally obscure hardware, and even in those cases I could always get it to work by using google for a bit.

Except for that one time with the 3G card under windows. But that's not proof of anything other than that there was at least one instance where someone had a hardware issue with a windows machine.

Now please do not say you can write a driver yourself.

But that sorta proves his point. Linux isn't good to normal people today just because it's full of geeky magic dust. It is good today because it "Just Works™".

In terms of the original article, I think that answers the question of why stupidity continues to exist. Most people (even ones who appear to me to be stupid) are smart enough at enough things that they continue to live and procreate.

The game theory examples the author gives in the second half of the article over-simplify the issue by assuming stupid is a binary on/off attribute. Within a game, you can assume that's true by assuming the people make stupid decisions within the rules of the game. But in real life, there isn't one single set of rules that determines whether we or not we live and procreate.

I've read a quite thorough explanation similar to this in one of Scott Adams' books : most people are somewhat intelligent, but behave stupidly at times - In fact, we may assume most people behave stupidly most of the time. Maybe he called that the "Dogbert principle" or something similar.