Since the moment I was born until this time now I have never experienced anything that I would class as ‘religious’. When I was a teenager I was quite interested in finding out some kind of truth to our lives. Desperate to find some cohesive meaning to our existence I read various religious texts and explored all kinds of esoteric ideas. Even though some texts have idealistic and interesting takes on our reality the end result was that I was left feeling that there was no evidence or solid truth in anything I read. In fact the majority was confusing, bizarre, esoteric and impossible to apply in any meaningfull way. Some religions, Christianity for example has a fundemental philisophical flaw. I could never understand why God created Satan:

‘Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.’

If God is meant to be ‘pure’, a perfection, and Satan is his antithesis then how do you explain that Satan is a product of God? God then must be corrupt himself in some way to produce Satan. If Satan reflects absolutely every evil in our world and in human beings and he is a product of God then God himself is worse than Satan as he knowingly unleashes this evil onto the world and corrupts his own creations (Adam and Eve). By default every evil in the world is Gods doing while you could say Satan is a victim of his own creation, God made him evil. This for me is a fundemantal flaw in the Christian philosophy. Using very basic logic the Bible even in its very early stages is flawed and God is nothing more than a selfish thug, killing without mercy and punishing those who love him in an attempt to test their faith. God does not practice what he preaches.

Christianity is not the only religion that has flaws, but I am not writing this to list the many examples of the relationship between religion and the illogical. My simple example is symptomatic of almost all religious texts that I have read, the interesting thing for me in all of these texts is that central to their stories are that beings with supernatural powers entwined with miraculous events play a huge role in defining believers real world. I am not talking metaphore here, lets not let modernisms let religion off by explaining away ridiculous stories as some kind of metaphore or purely as some kind of fable. They were never intended that way, and people have been killed and still are killed over not accepting that religious texts are literally the ‘truth’.

Religion accepts and promotes a form of madness. A fear of nothing except the demons they create. The emphasis rather than on life is actually on death. It is as though death and the ‘afterlife’ have more importance than life itself. I have often considered that religion is a focus for people who refuse to accept the most obvious and self validating reality that life is what you can measure and nothing more. I won’t even entertain a Solopsist argument and David Deutsche sums up the problem of that perspective very well in the Fabric of Reality (a must read). I could rant all day about religion but you would get bored and so would I. I think I have made my point.

O9lfKmZR17s
Here we see Thomas teaching Mr Wells to say DADADADADA

One of the most boring things when you are writing a blog is typing. The sounds, the wrist cramps and the dullness of the whole experience makes writing a blog tedious. So I decided to try out some voice recognition software to make the whole process and little bit more enjoyable and a little bit more natural. The process is definitely faster than typing and I must admit, I do like the idea of while I’m speaking the words instantly appearing on the screen.

Because of the process sometimes your grammar can be slightly off, but on the whole it is very satisfying. I first tried Microsoft’s own voice recognition software that I found that to be pretty inaccurate so I tried Dragons NaturallySpeaking which are found to be pretty amazing. The more I dictate to the system the more it seems to pick up on the way I speak. Watching sentences spring out of thin air when you’re speaking is fantastic, particularly if you are reading at quite a pace. I must admit I’m completely sold on the idea mainly because I love technology but also because if it makes life easier it’s good. The only problem means that sometimes you can get quite carried away and if you’re not careful you can miss mistakes made by the voice recognition software.

These mistakes could quite easily make your writing very surreal so it’s good to doublecheck over what you have dictated.You can also control your Windows system and other commands using the voice recognition system. But things certainly could get very difficult if you’re in a roomful of people or you have noisy background sounds. As I am an aspiring author at this moment in time, this system is a godsend. It still makes the odd mistake but the more you train the system the more accurate it becomes. Apparently it has a 99% success rate once it is used to your voice. Although saying this I did have to dictate the last sentence three times to get it correct.

So have I saved time dictating for this blog, well maybe. But I must say it’s a far more enjoyable experience than tapping away and creating a claw out of both of my hands. At least I know when I get RSI, which is inevitable, that there will be a way for me to still interact with the computer.