The agreement was about background checks – Terry Moran (from ABC’s Nightline) and Rove seemed to agree, with 92% of Americans, that the idea of background checks were sound and should be implemented as much as possible, even closing the famed “gun show loophole” by making entrants to gun shows pass a background check upon arrival;

ROVE: There could be a lot of mutual agreement found on closing some of these so-called gun show loopholes. We could probably get agreement on a — a widespread basis of people saying, look you go to a gun show, you walk in, you get — you — you pass a check. You give — you get your little stub that allows you to purchase a weapon, and that’s it.

Of course, this goodwill and agreement didn’t go on too long because Moran, Messina and Rove started to argue over paranoia and which side is scaring who, and who we should be more afraid of – government lists of gun owners or actual gun owners. I’m sure you can guess who said what, though it was funny to hear the exchange;

ROVE: Let — let’s be clear about this, this was prompted by the Sandy Hook murders. Those guns were legally purchased with a background check. This would not have solved something like that. Let’s be very careful about quickly trampling on the rights of people who — and look, you want to get something done? Then stop scaring people. Don’t say we’re going to keep a registry of all of these guns, and…

Rove’s point, registries scare people. Why? Because Hitler. It’s always Hitler, if you’ve ever heard this argument, you know it. Hitler made people register guns and that allowed him to kill all those innocent Jews. Of course. But of course, this isn’t really true – at all (PDF).

The argument over gun registration between Rove and Moran continues as thus;

MORAN: Stop scaring people? You’re scaring people with this Orwellian sense that black helicopters and the government, if we register guns, they’re going to confiscate Americans guns. That kind of paranoia fuels…

(CUT OFF/CROSSTALK)

ROVE: With all due respect, it is not paranoia.

MORAN: Who is going to confiscate all of the guns in America? [I wish this was addressed, it wasn't]

ROVE: People have a fear of this. Why do it? Why do you need it?

MORAN: Lots of things are registered in the United States of America

Okay, it’s pretty boring stuff you’ve probably read all your Facebook friends fight about since Sandy Hook or the last time a bunch of innocent people were killed so senselessly. Rove thinks as soon as Obama knows who has guns he’ll turn into Hitler and you’ll be forced to be a Muslim slave or something. Moran wants to make the point, we’ll assume, that gun registries are not as dangerous as Rove makes them out to be and taking guns away from less than half the population isn’t as easy as he makes it out to be, and etc.

Honestly, I don’t care that much about this gun debate because both sides are really silly about it, and a lot of what happens here on both sides is total paranoia and they are both unstable (though I think Rove’s side is a ton more unstable in regards to being the people who actually don tin-foil hats).

Where I lost my shit though is lost in the crosstalk and arguing and isn’t in the rush transcript I used to pull the above quotes from. You’d have to watch the show or subscribe to their podcast (RSS) and hear it for yourself (direct link to episode, MP3).

Terry Moran says that lots of things are registered in this country to which Rove gets snippy and responds with;

ROVE: Do we register books, do we register other things that are constitutionally protected?

I. Fucking. Lost. It.

Well, yeah, we kinda do Rove, you dumb prick.

Let’s talk about the Patriot Act. It requires libraries to suddenly keep track of books borrowed – so they can turn this information over to investigators – not after you’ve committed a crime – but so they can find you first. The FBI or other outfits can ask the library who is borrowing what so they can mine that list for people who they deem “unsafe” or a “threat”. You read a book about Islam, it mentioned the phrase “Jihad” (struggle), then you might be a terrorist so we should check you out. I’ll be clear and say we aren’t supposed to be using this to violate First Amendment rights, but because the request for library records is covered under a gag order, no one knows who has asked for what on whom, and of course you can’t challenge the Constitutional nature of the law and the requests for information by law enforcement.

“Trust Us” is the motto of the Patriot Act in this regard.

Here is the American Library Association says about the Patriot Act;

The USA PATRIOT Act amended over 15 federal statutes [snip]. These amendments expanded the authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and law enforcement to gain access to business records, medical records, educational records and library records, including stored electronic data and communications. [snip]These enhanced surveillance procedures pose the greatest challenge to privacy and confidentiality in the library.

“The American Library Association (ALA) opposes any use of governmental power to suppress the free and open exchange of knowledge and information or to intimidate individuals exercising free inquiry…ALA considers that sections of the USA PATRIOT ACT are a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users.”

So what’s the distinction? The government doesn’t keep records on who is reading what – that’s not like the gun registry idea. The libraries keep track, because the law forces them to, and the government can demand the (de facto) registry and the librarians can’t tell anyone about it. The ALA and their lawyers seem to agree, the Patriot Act, in this case, is an affront to the Constitution. Remember that book on Islam you got from the library? The religion that’s covered under the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment? And the book itself, also covered? Well, “we” know about it. And you are busted, come with us.

Rove is opposed to gun registration because the Constitution says you can own guns (and doesn’t mention registries). Fine, then fight to also repeal the Patriot Act that your former boss signed into law. Books are protected too – but you don’t mind if the government is in the business of knowing who reads what?

The reason I lost my shit – other than comparing books to guns – is that Rove fully knows we force libraries (and others) into keeping records on their users/customers for this same exact purpose. And we used 9/11 to scare people into buying this bull – but a school of dead kids isn’t enough to do a better job of looking at where the guns are moving among the citizens?

We don’t register books? Bull. We do, it’s just a secret.

Now ask yourself how many mass shootings has there been in the United States since Columbine. And how many terrorist attacks on the United States since 9/11. Either the FBI is using that book registry data to thwart terrorism, or one is not worth the freedoms you sacrificed to prevent while the other real harm to innocent people will make too many tin-foil hat wearing voters upset come the next election.

“Would Kim Peek have liked the word ‘disability’ to describe him?” Fisher asked in a phone interview beforehand. “Disability sounds so broken. Bipolar disorder is challenging; it’s incredibly intense. … You have the choice to submit, be a victim, or take it on and fly in the face of it.”

Kim Peek is the man who the story of Rain Man was based on

The woman who was Princess Leia in the Star Wars trilogy at 19 and born to Hollywood royalty — singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds — has never lived a fairy tale.

Friday, she shared pieces of her journey during “An Evening With Carrie Fisher,” sponsored by the Utah Film Center. She received the center’s second annual Kim Peek Award for Disability in Media, an honor bestowed because of the candor with which she has tackled the mania and depression that are part of who she is.

 

… Fisher was lauded as having a similar passion for knowledge and the same goal of acceptance for people who are different.

via Carrie Fisher takes Kim Peek honor for owning challenge, raising awareness | Deseret News.

The impact is somewhat chilling (see bold):

As Amazon attempts to sign big-name authors in the future, it will have to convince them that print distribution isn’t important. The 4-Hour Chef may be sold at few places other than Amazon. Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the U.S., won’t stock Amazon titles in its stores, and many independent bookstores refuse to do so as well. And while Amazon is making its New York titles available as ebooks to other retailers through distributor Ingram, few rivals are biting. The ebook edition of My Mother Was Nuts, for example, is for sale at Kobo but not at Google, Barnes & Noble’s Nook store or Apple’s iBookstore.

Via: “Ferriss: Even if I sell a million Kindle books, some people will call it a failure“

I only used six of the blocks or boxes available along with the date, time & weather:

1. CPU Usage
2. Ram Usage
3. Swap Usage
4. Network Usage
5. Drive Space Usage
6. Computer Uptime

The only thing I’m kind of missing or would want back, would be the RSS reader widget-type skin. Though I could regain that with any number of Rainmeter skins, I’m going to go without it for a while. I’m noticing instead that I am seeking out news and finding a lot more interesting and up-to-date information than reading the RSS feeds alone. The feeds I was using were not updated as often as I’d like – and I know their sources – so I can visit those sites when desired.

Here is a screenshot of my latest Rainmeter layout – cropped to only the relevant part as this is in the top left part of the screen – with no other portions used.

New Favorite Rainmeter Skin: Encoded

Your screen resolution will almost definitely differ from my own, but here is a (rough) guide for setting this up after installing Rainmeter and/or the Encoded skin from DeviantArt:

• Select any six white info boxes under Encoded -> Squares 
• Select the white_blur from Encoded -> Headers -> Backgrounds -> AeroBlur
• Edit the white_blur.ini file (right-click, Edit Skin) as follows:
  • SolidColor=255,255,255,150
  • W=371
  • H=300
• Select the following headers from Encoded -> Headers
  • Date -> Date_black-left
  • Time -> Time_black
  • Weather -> Weather_black-small (right-click, edit, give this your local weather code!)
• Select the blur box and then right-click, select Manage Skin:
  • Edit the coordinates, giving the first number (X coordinate) a value to indent from the left of the screen. I’ve used “30″. (You’ll want to repeat this or reuse this on the first box to make sure the pixels are aligned as in the screenshot above.)
  • Once in position: Deselect the “Draggable” property and change position to “Desktop” from the provided drop down
• Now just place the boxes, date, time and weather over the blur background as desired.
• ???
• Profit.

Again, you can download the latest version of Encoded from devaintart here.

• Download the KindaLame.com edited Enigma Rainmeter .rmskin package file (temporarily removed)

I am offering it as a great jumping off point in creating something that you’ll not only find ascetically appealing but also quite useful on your desktop. No doubt, you’ll tweak it – especially as a Rainmeter users – and even more if you don’t need a SWTOR launcher icon. This is all easily changed in the Enigma options skin (once loaded).

However, if you are interested in the multitude of desktop wallpapers I use in rotation with Windows 7, rotating every 10 seconds – please use the following link/galleries;

• Dropbox Link – Add to Your Dropbox or Download Wallpaper Gallery in Zip Format
• Zip File Containing All Of My Rotated Wallpapers Hosted @ KindaLame.com (325 MB)
• Blog Gallery Of Curated Wallpapers:

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Especially Helpful Tip For Turn-By-Turn Navigation App Users

The Global Positioning System is a highly sophisticated, and yet taken for granted, navigation system based on data you receive from satellites. This, most people know. For the uninitiated you turn on your iPhone, Android phone, handheld GPS receiver or your car’s navigation system and the satellite tells you where you are on the Earth. The United States invented and launched (satellite pun!) the system as a military application to guide aircraft, missiles, track foreign objects in space and help US Naval captains know where their ships were at sea without using a compass, a map and so forth (let the computer do the work so you can focus on shooting stuff).

Though, the above is not an accurate description of how GPS actually works. The satellite doesn’t send you a signal and say “Oh, I see you at 37.2350° N, 115.8111° W“.

In fact GPS works on a few principles. The first is that a GPS receiver, like the one in mobile phones such as the iPhone and Android phones, receive signals from the satellites (though do not transmit as this would be a more costly chip) and by combining the data received from multiple satellites the receiver can deduce where on Earth the receiver is. This is known as trilateration – not the more common term, triangulation. The receiver only is told where the satellites are – as explained by the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in a very simple manner;

A GPS receiver “knows” the location of the satellites, because that information is included in satellite transmissions. By estimating how far away a satellite is, the receiver also “knows” it is located somewhere on the surface of an imaginary sphere centered at the satellite. It then determines the sizes of several spheres, one for each satellite. The receiver is located where these spheres intersect.

The Air & Space museum has a page, with diagrams, that explain in much greater detail how GPS receivers determine where on Earth they happen to be – with this notable gem;

In this diagram (above), the solid lines indicate where the GPS receiver “thinks” the spheres are located. Because of errors in the receiver’s internal clock, these spheres do not intersect at one point.

Notice the emphasis, because of the clock your receiver has – your cell phone – your location isn’t always precise. Now it should also be pointed out that most GPS receivers are only going to be approximate and not exact though you can expect your results to be withing a few meters of where you actually are, typically between 5 and 10 meters (but bet the US military is always precise when it counts).

What needs to be added to how GPS works is that each GPS satellite has within it a internal Atomic Time Clock – the most accurate clocks available as they work not with springs and metal or even computer chips – but measure time using electrons, which don’t deviate from the laws of atomic physics. Essentially GPS satellites have clocks that are basically never wrong, and were synced with the US Naval Observatory Master Clock when launched, which is the most important part of how they work.

MapToaster.com has a great explanation that couldn’t be more simplified of why time matters, and how time in addition to the location of the satellite is how the receiver puts together this information to give you a location;

The GPS receiver gets a signal from each GPS satellite. The satellites transmit the exact time the signals are sent. By subtracting the time the signal was transmitted from the time it was received, the GPS can tell how far it is from each satellite. The GPS receiver also knows the exact position in the sky of the satellites, at the moment they sent their signals. So given the travel time of the GPS signals from three satellites and their exact position in the sky, the GPS receiver can determine your position in three dimensions – east, north and altitude.

Notice again my added emphasis. If you are truly the nerd you can learn more about the theory behind GPS at gpsinformation.org with included math from Pythagoras and a run down of how the receiver gets it’s “fix”, per se. To get even deeper I would also suggest an article from an Ohio State professor of Astronomy’s Richard Pogge in regards to Einstein’s theories of Special & General Relativity and how they relate to the real world (and how GPS is a working example of both theories).

Essentially now we have a good understanding of GPS. It works on satellites telling us where they are, and what time they sent their signals. Without bringing Eisenstein into the discussion that’s all we need. The receiver does the rest. But for accurate readings, and for your Google Maps Navigation to give you the best results, and the best result quickly, we need to both be able to see the satellites (not be in an underground parking garage) and have an accurate clock on our Android phones.

If you have been using a computer in, I don’t know, the past 15 years you probably either are running an operating system that updates the time on it’s own from atomic clock servers or you run a daemon to update the computer time at a certain frequency – maybe once a day or so. For many applications, especially network communications and encryption, accurate times are very important. And as the National Air & Space museum showed us in the quote and diagram above – an accurate time on your cell phone is important in having an accurate GPS reading. And if you have noticed when updating your computer’s clock from time servers – the clock on your PC is never right!

Even hand made watches drift in time from other clocks – but your PC and phone also drift. And finally we are getting to the tip we set out to provide in this the article after all the background information! Your phone likely gets the time from the cellular towers, but a lot of carriers don’t have their cellular towers always updated – or rather, they have drifted from what we could call the “real” time in relation to what the US Navy keeps and what the GPS satellites are using. Or your particular phone model or software version doesn’t update as often as it should. It could maybe update only on start or at other predefined times – and once you use the app presented below you’ll see that the time on your phone can drift a few seconds every few minutes or so.

Enter, ClockSync from Serge Baranov

(Install from Google Play Store Link)

This nifty app will automatically update your clock at intervals you define from the information provided by NTP, or Network Time Protocol Servers. If you are fanatical, you can update your phone’s clock every hour, or just once a week. I’ve found that on different phones this will improve the GPS fix time on Android (how long it takes for the receiver to locate you on the planet) and improve the accuracy of that first fix (and help it stay correct as you move – especially driving). Easily one of the first apps I’d install on a rooted phone – though root isn’t required as you can manually update the time without granting it superuser privileges.

Before I end and simply urge you to install this nifty app today here are some examples of ClockSync in action.

ClockSync after an update from the local (to me, Ohio State) NTP Server

ClockSync Time After Update Showing 0 Second Drift From Atomic Time

ClockSync around 30 seconds after the NTP Server update

ClockSync Time Showing 0 Second Drift From Atomic Time 30 Seconds After Update

ClockSync just a few seconds after showing 0 drift we see the fractional change;

ClockSync Time Showing Fractional Drift From Atomic Time A Few Seconds Later

ClockSync statistics since usage: note the overall correction over time, almost 8 minutes!

ClockSync Screenshot Showing Total Time Correction Since Just Earlier This Year – Almost 8 Minutes Total

A simple screenshot of my settings page showing updates happen every 3 hours and use a high precision mode

ClockSync Settings Screenshot – Example of My Setup

Finally I’ll add that ClockSync comes setup with a Network Time Protocol server already in place, however you may want to find a server closer to your actual location. Unfortunately you can’t use the military servers unless you identify yourself as being a military user (and you’d not be reading this now probably…). However with some Google-Fu you can likely find a local server by searching your state’s name or even better you can look on the NTP.ORG site and find which pool of NTP servers is best for your region.

Here are links below to world-region NTP pools to use with ClockSync (or even your PC) and servers for each country as of this posting;

• North America
  • Canada — ca.pool.ntp.org
  • United States — us.pool.ntp.org
  • Mexico — mx.pool.ntp.org
  • Guatemala — gt.pool.ntp.org
  • Panama — pa.pool.ntp.org
  • Bahamas — bs.pool.ntp.org
  • Costa Rica — cr.pool.ntp.org
  • El Salvador — sv.pool.ntp.org
• Europe
  • Austria — at.pool.ntp.org
  • Switzerland — ch.pool.ntp.org
  • Germany — de.pool.ntp.org
  • Denmark — dk.pool.ntp.org
  • Spain — es.pool.ntp.org
  • France — fr.pool.ntp.org
  • Italy — it.pool.ntp.org
  • Luxembourg — lu.pool.ntp.org
  • Netherlands — nl.pool.ntp.org
  • Norway — no.pool.ntp.org
  • Poland — pl.pool.ntp.org
  • Sweden — se.pool.ntp.org
  • Slovenia — si.pool.ntp.org
  • United Kingdom — uk.pool.ntp.org
  • Finland — fi.pool.ntp.org
  • Ireland — ie.pool.ntp.org
  • Russian Federation — ru.pool.ntp.org
  • Belgium — be.pool.ntp.org
  • Portugal — pt.pool.ntp.org
  • Greece — gr.pool.ntp.org
  • Hungary — hu.pool.ntp.org
  • Bulgaria — bg.pool.ntp.org
  • Romania — ro.pool.ntp.org
  • Czech Republic — cz.pool.ntp.org
  • Yugoslavia — yu.pool.ntp.org
  • Estonia — ee.pool.ntp.org
  • Belarus — by.pool.ntp.org
  • Slovakia — sk.pool.ntp.org
  • Ukraine — ua.pool.ntp.org
  • Lithuania — lt.pool.ntp.org
  • Macedonia — mk.pool.ntp.org
  • Moldova — md.pool.ntp.org
  • Latvia — lv.pool.ntp.org
  • Croatia — hr.pool.ntp.org
  • Republic of Serbia — rs.pool.ntp.org
  • Bosnia and Herzegovina — ba.pool.ntp.org
  • Armenia — am.pool.ntp.org
  • Iceland — is.pool.ntp.org
• Asia / Middle East
  • Philippines — ph.pool.ntp.org
  • Malaysia — my.pool.ntp.or
  • Turkey — tr.pool.ntp.org
  • Singapore — sg.pool.ntp.org
  • India — in.pool.ntp.org
  • Hong Kong — hk.pool.ntp.org
  • United Arab Emirates — ae.pool.ntp.org
  • Japan — jp.pool.ntp.org
  • Bangladesh — bd.pool.ntp.org
  • Israel — il.pool.ntp.org
  • Korea — kr.pool.ntp.org
  • Thailand — th.pool.ntp.org
  • Iran — ir.pool.ntp.org
  • Taiwan — tw.pool.ntp.org
  • China — cn.pool.ntp.org
  • Indonesia — id.pool.ntp.org
  • Vietnam — vn.pool.ntp.org
  • Pakistan — pk.pool.ntp.org
  • Oman — om.pool.ntp.org
  • Uzbekistan — uz.pool.ntp.org
  • Sri Lanka — lk.pool.ntp.org
  • Kyrgyzstan — kg.pool.ntp.org
  • Cambodia — kh.pool.ntp.org
  • Qatar — qa.pool.ntp.org
  • Saudi Arabia — sa.pool.ntp.org
  • Iraq — iq.pool.ntp.org
  • Kazakhstan — kz.pool.ntp.org
• Oceania
  • Australia — au.pool.ntp.org
  • New Zealand — nz.pool.ntp.org
  • New Caledonia — nc.pool.ntp.org
• South America
  • Brazil — br.pool.ntp.org
  • Chile — cl.pool.ntp.org
  • Argentina — ar.pool.ntp.org
  • Venezuela — ve.pool.ntp.org
  • Peru — pe.pool.ntp.org
• Africa
  • South Africa — za.pool.ntp.org
  • Madagascar — mg.pool.ntp.org

Which I first have to mention, I like the new HD layout at Lifehacker because once you are in a category or timeframe of posts that you enjoy you can continuously scroll and read more posts that you’d likely find interesting. It seems to be written for larger displays or possibly televisions.

Being that they seem to love the Mac OSX platform (link shows currently ‘About 1,190 Google results’  for Mountain Lion, the latest Apple OSX offering/update, at Lifehacker.com) – maybe they are changing the layout of their site, or offering a new layout, for the rumored Apple Television. That may never come, or might depending on who you ask, or be an IP-TV set-top box, or who actually knows? Clearly you can already take advantage of the layout now with a high-resolution setting on a wide-screen monitor or if you are into browsing through an existing HTPC setup – or as CNN Money notes, the existing Apple TV, the Xbox.

Apple Televisions, set-top boxes and other minutia aside, Nate Kontny writes in his Lifehacker article;

I believe it was when I was about 14 when I was sitting alone, it’s raining outside, and I was manning a golf course pro-shop my dad used to own. I realized I had started making a habit of daydreaming about little details of things. I’d be sitting on a chair, and my thoughts would start to wander. I’d stare at a door. I’d start to think about the hinges on the door. Soon I’d find my focus on the screws that held the hinges to the door. Macroscopically, that’s about as far as my eyes can go looking at this door.

So I’d just sit there thinking about those screws.

There’s a company who manufactured the screws. There were decisions made about what kind of screws to make. What lengths and sizes. What materials. What kind of machines needed to be made to make them. Maybe they were thinking about expanding their business because hopefully there’s such high demand for their product. There were probably quality assurance people looking over the screws. My particular screw may have even been manually handled by someone randomly looking over the quality of screws after they were machine milled.

The journey of the screw didn’t stop with its creation…

The article goes on about the screws themselves, but the writer takes you down the path of showing you how daydreaming about the little details around you can benefit you more than hinder you. Daydreaming isn’t as bad as what your teachers and parents made it out to be. In fact, the article author (tumblr page) is the founder of two Y Combinator start-ups himself.

You can find his article on the Lifehacker.com link above in the first paragraph or visit his site ninjasandrobots.com to find the original article - and give him some kudos (no really, look to the right). The ninjasandrobots blog itself is full of interesting and surely inspiration articles written by Nate himself, such as his latest post Every day try to do one thing you couldn’t do yesterday, journaling his path from not being able to do a push-up to being able to do “dozens and dozens”. Basically his last line says everything you need to know and need to hear; “Often, I failed and thought I’d finally reached the limit of who I am. But I was always wrong.”

As he says in his articles, if you like what you see there you might want to follow him on Twitter @natekontny

I can’t say enough how happy I am with the setup and it didn’t take much time to get everything in place at all. Typically you browse the #Rainmeter group on Deviant Art and you find a ton of skins that look great but when it comes time to fitting it to your needs (or your screen resolution) it doesn’t come out the way you’d expect. Or two hours into doing it you realize you could be watching someone on My Free Cams dance around a little for too much in tips…

I didn’t use everything and moved some things around, which was most of the time spent configuring, shuffling what I wanted to go where – and haven’t really touched it since. I did take about an extra minute to create an icon for Star Wars The Old Republic, which I link at the bottom if you somehow are rocking this amazing Rainmeter skin and need a white icon that’s not square – and you’d like to represent the Empire (Die Jedi Dogs!)

Before I present you with the screenshot of how I eventually laid everything out, I have to say that I didn’t hate Morph at all. I loved it. Being that it had solid backgrounds the text was easy to read, I didn’t have to worry about attaching each skin element (boxes mostly) to each other to create some an effect like the one in the Molecular Desktop recently featured on Lifehacker and it was pretty much everything I wanted and nothing more. I wanted a glance at some system monitoring measurements, and for them to be clear enough to see on my screen from around five and a half feet away (HDTV monitor).

Without much more ado, because I came only to post a screenshot anyhow – here is what it came out looking like (minus my quick and horrible blurring of my tray icons for security reasons).

My Rainmeter Enigma Theme Screenshot

The Zod’s Rainmeter Desktop Screenshot Based on The Enigma rmskin – Click to Enlarge The Image/Visit the Image Page

As promised here is my SWTOR Empire Logo Icon – Right Click and Save. It is too small to post (and won’t show on the background plus it takes a Razer mouse to get the precision to click it)

But Most People Don’t Understand They Are Blinded Assuming Their Chosen Religious or Political Philosophy Is The Only True Way

By chance I came across this quote from Steve Allen just earlier, though I first saw it aired on television right after the 9/11 attacks – maybe the next day or so;

“…and no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured
we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful
inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion
as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the
naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we
might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do
us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their
protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear
that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in
God, then, is just that — a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect
for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most
virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are
frustated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus
because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity
is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar
is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to
obscure such reality.
Steve Allen in ”The Courage of Conviction“

Couldn’t be put any better. If you look at your religion or politics as absolutely true, if you never hear the other side and think “that’s a good point” or your faith truly unwavering - you are probably the fanatic – and lying to yourself. The rest of the world wouldn’t care except that you are the first to take up arms to defend those beliefs. Trading ideas for violence is never the right way to go.