Gary Haran.com

I was looking forward to seeing Alister McGrath on The Hour. I’m a big fan of Dawkins but I’d pay good money if someone could shut him up with reasonable discourse.

Viewers of the show had claimed that McGrath was the man to bring down Dawkins. After all he was once an atheist and now is a priest. He even wrote two books attacking Dawkins. Aside from half decent rethoric McGrath has nothing on Dawkins.

“God is more exciting than I thought.” - Alister McGrath

After watching the show I felt the segment with this guy was an utter waste of time for me. I was looking for intellectual discourse, a reasoned argument why God could be believable. All I got was empty rethoric and a man calling Dawkins grumpy. Because of that I’d like to state that McGrath is half the man Dawkins is.

I’m reading the latest book by Christopher Hitchens in which he tells the world how religion poisons everything. It’s hard to disagree when you look around you.

Just last month a girl was stoned to death by her own family. Her offense was to fall in love with the wrong man and betray the beliefs of her people by accepting her lover’s faith.

This isn’t the first account of hurtful behavior from family members towards someone of their own family who “chose” to love someone of a different religion. This radio show prank has a girl tell her Jewish parents that she’s now going out with a Italian of Christian faith. The parents treathen to pull her out of school and kill themselves if she doesn’t stop that relationship immediately. If this wasn’t a joke it would be construed as abusive guilt tripping by anyone. As the joke escalates the father says that he’ll go to jail for killing him.

We call ourselves civilized yet we are unable in our modern societies to point the finger at this xenophobic behavior. We just sit quietly saying nothing like that policeman did in the videos of the stoning (I’d link to it but youtube had to remove the content due to it’s graphic nature).

As accountability is waived because no one dares say that religion itself is the problem I can’t help but hope that the new enlightenment is near. Religion is the problem, not the solution.

I have some great co workers who discuss freely on various subjects. This last week we had the chance to discuss fidelity, “libertinage” and marriage on our lunch hours.

I’ve been happily married for close to 2 years now and it didn’t come to me as an easy choice. Before my commitment I had been in multiple open relationships. Wind of this must have reached the priest who officiated our wedding. He spent the entire sermon time explaining why marriage was important and what it represented. He used the words *limit* a total of 16 times and looked almost only at me the entire time.

Some of my colleagues are free spirited and would like more freedom but are unable to afford it in their current relationship due to constraints confered by the couple’s understandings. Others would not even consider anything outside the scope of what their life offers them.

Multiple arguments have been made for the open lifestyle. Analogies with food came up: “We don’t eat the same meal every day. Diversity is helpful in appreciating even our favorite meals.”, “Yeah but some foods hurt your health in the long term.”.

Other more interesting concepts came from colleagues in how their relationships with different types of friends helped shape the person they currently are. Analogies to the one night stand and the person you meet only once for just some chit-chat. Say a cab driver asks you a question regarding politics you might see it as easier to speak to him about it than you would your own mother. Discussing this point of view with someone you barely know could result in some interesting discussions you wouldn’t otherwise have.

Perhaps the most interesting point that was raised is that as you pair yourself with someone you accept a part of life that is inescapable. Life is about the struggle to know what you want, the struggle to achieve it and accepting to live within the bounds that nature and circumstances handed you.

With Internet Explorer 7 finally around the corner it’s safe to say that IE5 is going to be less and less of a worry. However because Microsoft had so many bugs in IE6 now fixed in IE7 we now have to take those into account when designing proper CSS.

Because conditional comments is great when you don’t mind having multiple css files I wanted a better approach, one that would allow all CSS to be in a single file so I can separate css files for other reasons than cattering to the browser du jour.

Here’s a simple hack that allows you to cater to over 90% of browsers out there.

#divName{ padding-top: 2px;/* Safari, FF, Opera */ #padding-top: 1px;/* IE7 */ _padding-top: 1px;/* IE6 */ }

Yes that’s 3 lines instead of a single one. At least it’s all in the same file.