Alt.Religious.Rants

Passionate "religious" disputes come in all shapes and sizes and don't seem to need to have anything to do with religion. In the software business I come across them all the time, people have vested interests in particular technologies or methods and make all kinds of unsubstantiated claims and irrational attachments regarding the wondrous nature of their particular poster children. It seems to be common behaviour that exists at the intersection of human nature and a self preservation/promotion instinct, highly analogous to peoples cultural and religious beliefs in many ways since these are often arguments that may never be "won" (without AK47's), they hinge on perspective, personality, culture, upbringing, vested interests etc. all of those soft squidgy, subjective things that are often impervious to reality and evidence.

I experienced a classic case in point the other day around the omnipresent feud between PC and Mac fans, a debate with a (non-technical) colleague about the relative merits of these two computing platforms (from a business perspective) came to a head when he reeled off a list of what I assume he felt were knock out mac features in order to shut me up, this is what he said,

"It (i.e. the mac) just works"
"Macs don't get viruses"
"Macs are lighter, thinner and have longer battery life"
"Macs boot up quicker"

Much like when atheists debate with religious people, this chap didn't appreciate that just because a particular position is taken it doesn't mean the holder of that position has no experience of the other side. Quite often people who rely on PC's for business own mac's at home (as I do) and atheists who criticise religion were often raised within a faith system, it's always worth checking before attempting your coups de grace.

Mac's don't "just work", their software can be just as poor as poor software running on a PC, the bug count for office on the mac is just as big, if not bigger than office on the PC. All the main anti-virus vendors have products for the mac, just because people don't bother writing viruses for the mac doesn't mean they can't. My Dell laptop is lighter and thinner than a Macbook and my iMac takes longer to boot up than my PC and anyway this cartoon from xkcd.com sums up the future pointlessness of this debate quite nicely..

The obvious elephant in the room was that owning a Mac makes (some) people feel good, and therein lies their main motivation for buying one, the rest of the pseudo-science is mostly wrong or generalised beyond usefulness. I find the same thing with all religious debates, people really have a problem simply admitting that they can't justify their preference but it just makes them feel good, and that's all.