My shopping cart story

I'm an agnostic. But not an atheist. Basically, I don't have any idea whether there is a God or not, because I'm not smart enough. And I don't believe anybody else is smart enough, either: I could never accept the authority of any priest, parson, minister, or other religious leader. (I don't play well with others.)

There's a specific reason why I'm an agnostic, and it is because of a shopping cart.

A while back, I went out to a grocery store, and it had a bunch of coin-operated shopping carts out front. You know the ones I mean: you put in a quarter, and you get to take the cart. When you're done with it, you put it back and get your quarter back. This is supposed to prevent theft.

Anyway, the carts in front of this store used a slightly different mechanism than what I was used to, and I was having trouble figuring out how to put in the quarter and extract the cart. Then, it occurred to me: if I can't figure out how to operate a shopping cart, perhaps I might not be smart enough to know whether God exists.

And, to this day, that's where I've left it. I have more than my share of existential terror, but I've never bothered trying to read any philosophy or religious writings. They won't help me, as nobody else has really figured out whether God exists, either. So I spend my time thinking about other stuff.

Note to any hard-core scientific materialists out there, the ones I call "aggressive atheists": scientists haven't figured out why the universe even exists, why the Big Bang happened, or why everything in history hasn't already happened yet, since time is infinite. Try figuring out answers to those questions, why don't you?


So I just went out and bought a new external hard drive. For $220, including tax, I now have 465GB of new storage. Whoa.


I've always had a soft spot for failed spam. Today, I got email from somebody calling himself "SYSTEMS". The subject header was "update". The message was blank. It's like the spammers who send messages from "%SENDER%".


And, in the latest news: the Globe reports that a giant ice shelf has snapped free from Canada's Arctic. The ice shelf is the size of 11,000 football fields, and the explosion was loud enough to register on earthquake monitors 250 kilometres away. I'm starting to get a little scared of what might happen. It could get ugly.