tekHedd – the blog

I read deconversion stories at exchristian.net on a regular basis, and they usually are quite sad. Oh, losing faith is only a little bit sad, but the joy of finding truth usually cancels it out. I’m talking about the sadness of realizing that your entire family and most of your friends are in a cult, and will now begin to exclude you from their lives.

What’s really strange is that I’ve been an atheist for most of my life, openly for most of it, but only now am beginning to feel excluded by family. I can partly blame myself for beginning to openly stand up for what I believe (isn’t that what you taught me, mom?), and partly I can blame modern “conservatives”. For the last 35 or so years (yeah, I feel old now), I have mostly ignored the strange antics of my Christian relatives, and they mostly ignored my lack thereof.

But, it is a problem now, ever since neocons started claiming martyrdom. That’s right, in case you haven’t had it shouted in your face endlessly on national TV, the claim is that Christians are being persecuted and forced out of the US government. Which is funny, since for the first century or so, we didn’t *have* any Christianity in our government. But, you know, Christians have been told for over 2000 years that they are being persecuted by the majority; it’s right there in the Bible. “You will be persecuted,” it says this very clearly. And, you know, if you shout something often enough on national TV, it becomes truth.

Of course, the claim of “Religion being persecuted by the majority” is doubly ridiculous considering the overwhelming majority of religious people in this country. But we can safely overlook this claim anyway, because we know what it really means: “we are in the majority, and we want a theocracy”. Yes, it very much is what Christians are pushing for.

So, if you’re voting on the basis that you want to stop the evil secular hordes from persecuting you, you’re really voting for theocracy.  I can’t imagine any single change to our government that is less American. Any high school textbook will back me up here.

But again, I hear people claiming that I am wrong, that what they just want is the freedom to distribute federal money to nonsecular groups, the ones that do so many good works (and only ask in exchange that you allow yourself to be brainwashed). Well, sure, I guess I can kind of see that maybe. But, in the principle of fairness, I believe if you are going to give government money to faith-based institutions, you also have to start taxing faith-based businesses, which is to say churches. We probably should start doing that anyway, shouldn’t we? You know, the ones that tell you how to vote and openly talk politics from the pulpit. Don’t tell me your church doesn’t suggest how you should vote on the all-important issues like abortion, war, gay marriage and the like. The moment churches started pushing for pro-faith legislation, they ceased to be nonpolitical, and engaged the whole “no taxation without representation” side of things…

And it’s really all about money and power, in the end. Nonbelievers are a problem, because you don’t get their money, and you can’t tell them what to think or how to vote. Well, slander has always worked in the past, let’s just make up some more facts! “Atheists are demons who want you to go to hell, they are without morals, they want to tear down your churches. Atheists are arrogant!” That last one especially makes me laugh. In any war, it is essential to dehumanize the enemy so that your soldiers will not feel bad about crushing them. Fight on, Christian soldiers.

Ah, the guided introduction. This is the part where eHarmony really betrays its Christian heritage. Back and forth with two sets of canned, but probing questions to determine whether this other person is an ideal mate, parent for your children, whatever it is you’re looking for. In the second round you can enter your own questions, but by that point I’m wondering if it’s even worth it.

I mean, consider that I’m investing over an hour of time answering canned multiple-choice questions over a girl, I can ask if she chews with her mouth open, but I can’t tell if there’s any chemistry at all. And this is of course the bottom line–why am I looking for a girl anyway? Why not date a guy, or a fish? Because I’m not gay, and I’m not of the piscine persuasion. Yes, it’s about sex. There, I said it. It’s nice to have a long-term relation ship with someone, but in the end you’re going to be getting down, or expressly not getting down (if you’re totally a cold fish).

And I suppose this suggests two primary customers for eHarmony. Group 1 is people who are saving themselves for marriage, and want to be absolutely certain before they get involved. Group 2 are people who got involved based on chemistry, it went bad, and now they’re afraid it will happen again. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to meet anyone in group 1, but that’s easily filtered out by saying you’re not christian. So that leaves you meeting, primarily, lonely but badly hurt people. Which, I am increasingly discovering, covers pretty much everybody in the over-30 age group. I certainly can’t exclude myself from that group either, of course, but I waited until I feel pretty good about life before signing up.

Which means that the primary value-add of eHarmony is that you don’t get to have wild, passionate sex while you’re waiting to discover whether someone you just met is compatible. Sure, there are less regrets this way, but… it’s just not very human, ils it?

Welcome to eHarmony: welcome to cookie-cutter eHarmony profiles. If these profiles aren’t fake, well, then no wonder all of these women are single.

I don’t know what I did in my profile, but the evil robot inside eHarmony has decided that I should go out with women who love to go hiking and camping and want an adventurous guy who wants to share  those things. And of course, they all want somebody who is honest and sharing and all that, but come on who doesn’t? If the only thing you’re looking for in a man is that he’s honest, you’re admitting to having some serious trust issues. Seriously!

But it’s more than that, they’re all exactly the same! eHarmony tries to make poor writers more interesting by letting you check boxes for your good and bad qualities–have you noticed that everybody thinks they have the same good qualities? I would love to get my hands on the eHarmony database, not to do evil, but to do statistical analysis to see how many people think they are Easy-Going, Genuine, and Warm. While we’re at it, two of the three things you’re “most thankful for” will always be “Family” and “Health”, with good odds that the last slot will be some variation on “financial stability”, considering the economic situation.

Do I even need to comment on the pointlessness of the field “these are my three best life skills?” I would be willing to bet that you, the reader, are good at finding contentment and pleasure in simple things, and at maintaining a network of friends. Wow, what a deep insight into your character. I feel like I know you better already!

Just about the only useful information in the whole profile is “how you spend your leisure time”, and “additional information”.

Finally, and this is important, Ladies! Listen up! If the last book you read was “Eat, Pray, Love“, be aware that this is a self-help book for the recently separated, whose primary goal is to teach you that it’s OK be completely self-absorbed. Yes, yes, stop for a second… I know you’re reading it because a friend recommended it and you’re coping just fine and… can I finish here? I don’t care why you’re reading it, the point is that it looks bad. OK? Don’t blame me if guys (not me) assume you are coping badly with your recent divorce/breakup/etc, and are now going to be completely self-centered.

Also, it has been on the bestseller list for two years. Does revealing this information tell us *anything* about you except that all your friends have read the book already, and now one of them gave you their copy because, you know, it’s good, but it’s really not a keeper, you know what I mean, I’m not going to read it again, just throw it out when you’re done with it, OK?

eHarmony, the zero-information dating zone. Might as well just post a craigs ad saying “Warm, genuine SWF seeks LTR with similar guy, attach photo if you want me to read it looking forward to hearing from you!” It’s cheaper and will get you similar (no) responses from genuine, warm guys.

And then there’s this damn multi-threaded application bug

1) The first thing any tutorial should tell you about multi-threaded application development is this: there is virtually no way to test for or reproduce threading bugs. So, don’t use threads unless you really have to.

2) The second thing is that they should warn you about write reordering, even inside a lock. (So always use a lock, even if the variable is atomic, unless you’re darn sure order isn’t important.)

3) The third thing they should do is reiterate #1.