Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Miller Time or Mecca Time?


Check out this article.

The Western world is on a collision course with invigorated Islam. It's only a matter of time.

Am I right?

At this point in our history we have to ask ourselves. What time is it -- Miller Time, or Mecca Time?

12 comments:

Hræfn said...

Greenwich Mean Time developed as part of measuring longitude (using then-newly developed accurate clocks) for navigation -- hence why Greenwich is also 0 degrees longitude. Both the time-standard and the longitudinal base are of course arbitrary -- but that just makes it all the more unlikely that people (even Muslims) will accept all the hassle of changing to a new arbitrary base without a very good reason -- particularly given that it would mean changing all the maps and all the clocks (as I very doubt that Mecca is an exact multiple of 15 degrees away from Greenwich longitudinally -- meaning that all clocks and timekeeping would have to be changed a few minutes).

All of which has nothing to do with having Big Ben -- which has no causal relationship, and only a rather loose geographic relationship with GMT. It'd be a bit like building your own Eiffel Tower as part of calling for a re-basing of the metric system.

Simeon (Sam) George Drakich said...

How soon will Jumping Taliban Jack Layton be calling for the change over?

P@J said...

Sir Richard, I’m not sure you are making your own cases as expressed in earlier posts about the superiority of faith over reason by blurring the lines between Cargo Cults, Islam, and Christianity: all fly in the face of common sense and established sciences. Besides the obvious weirdness that one ideology is only a skyscraper and dazzling light show away from complete world dominance… how powerful is your god again?

Let’s start by the weird assumption that building a bigger clock somehow makes their time-keeping more valid. Here is where the Cargo Cult thing comes in. Big Ben is just a big clock, it has nothing to do with Greenwich, any more than that ball in New York has to do with the location of the earth in it’s annual orbit of the sun. Greenwich isn’t even the standard time anymore, it was replaced decades ago by coordinated universal time, based on the operation of a world-wide network of atomic clocks. So their thinking is twisted at the offset.

But since you have already mentioned that you don’t believe in atomic clocks… maybe you empathise more than I. “Some day we will build a clock to the moon!!! Then all your time will belong to us!!!”

Here is another story that outlines the pseudo-science behind calling the location “the centre of the world”. Double ugh. Complete scientific ignorance mixed with religious fervour: A deadly combination in any religion.

Good to see that you have adjusted your current hatred towards the real threat to your faith: other, better faiths. Us peaceful, accommodating atheists are really a minor issue relative to the pressure Christians are facing form better organized and more militant religions.

BallBounces said...

Culturally, Christian England is ground-zero of modern western culture.

BallBounces said...

"Besides the obvious weirdness that one ideology is only a skyscraper and dazzling light show away from complete world dominance… how powerful is your god again?"

Check out the book of Revelation for the Big Reveal. He's big enough to create the world, weak enough to be crucified on a cross, powerful enough to raise the dead, and mighty enough to subdue all evil under his feet in time, and good enough to invite us to share eternity in his kingdom.

All-mighty, all-good, all-wise.

BallBounces said...

I was, of course, using Miller Time and Mecca Time as metaphors for the collision of two incompatible cultures. Islam is as much a political project as anything else.

P@J said...

“Christian England is ground-zero of modern western culture”
Yes, that is why they flew airliners into Big Ben and Westminster Abbey.

England has not been the centre of anything since WW2 ended, except maybe (briefly in the 60s) pop music, (briefly in the 70s) absurdist televised humour programming, and soccer hooliganism.

“All-mighty, all-good, all-wise.”
The question was rhetorical.

P@J said...

further reading on Christian England and modern western culture.

BallBounces said...

By "ground-zero" of modern western culture I had in mind England (and I would extend this to include the UK) of 300 years or so ago, when it was still a Christian country.

From ground-zero you get the rise of the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, British influence on colonies such as India, Singapore, Hong Kong, the spread of the English language and its emergence as the world's language, and British/American culture and inventions from Egg Beaters to the Beatles. Everyone posting on the internet is a child of modern western culture, and England is its ground zero.

GMT is just one symptom of this fact.

P@J said...

Nice post-hoc rationalization there.

But let us get back to the points you raised. Building a bigger clock does not make your time more valid. It is ridiculous to think so. Adding a laser light show doubly so.

Further, the whole “Mecca Time” thing is an example of pseudo-science: cherry picking or making up data to suit pre-conceived notions based on how a holy book says the world should be, and calling it science.

This just proves that the purveyors of Islam can be as irrational as the purveyors of Christianity. So if your religious goal is a race to the bottom, you are right: a clash of cultures is imminent.

BallBounces said...

"Building a bigger clock does not make your time more valid."

You're taking this post 'way too seriously. My point had nothing to do with the merits of one clock vs. another. The point was simply that Islam is asserting itself and seeking accommodations and concessions from the western world and that this points to a coming clash.

E.g., recently a Canadian man could not properly visit his wife in a maternity ward because there was a Muslim present, breast-feeding (behind a screen), and he was considered "unclean". He couldn't use, e.g., the bathroom, again, because it offended Muslim sensibilities.

"Mecca Time" reminded me of the ad slogan for "Miller Time", and I thought that that was a pretty good characterization of the two cultures.

It really had nothing to do with time or clocks per se.

BallBounces said...

"Nice post-hoc rationalization there."

Nothing post hoc about it. It is what I had in my mind at the time I typed the words. Little England/UK is the geographic ground-zero of the spread of anglophile culture which now dominates the western world and, through the USA, influences the world in its entirety.

"... nothing intellectually compelling or challenging.. bald assertions coupled to superstition... woefully pathetic"