I'm always sad when I read something like this. If believing in God and protecting the planet or accepting basic science are contrasting ideas, then your wife's grandparents are believing in a caricature, not God.
But I think you can do better than just saying "these are fairy tales". I recently read a book from a former atheist (Jennifer Fulwiler) who came from a very loving and intellectually honest family. Her father said this when she was young: "Make sure you don't start believing things just because someone says it's true, even if it's coming from me. Question everything." I wish more people would be like that, atheist and religious alike.
That first paragraph is emblematic of the thing that most worries me about using religious groups as the core of one's social life. It may come from a well-intentioned place, but people are way too quick to resort to outright denigrating other people's beliefs in a way that, at best, infantilizes them with descriptions like "fairy tale" and "caricature". (There's not a whole lot of semantic distinction between these two characterizations.) Because of the ways that group behavior and peer pressure work, that will only get magnified if most your social life revolves around people who share identical beliefs.
There need to be more social institutions that encourage different people from different backgrounds to come together and learn to be more respectful of one another. How about a renaissance for bowling leagues?
Except that if your conscience (and everything in you) is under the _laws_ of physics, it implies that you are a deterministic or randomized machine. But then it is not easy to explain free will, for example. You could say that if it exists, it is a physical phenomenon, but what laws does it conform to? So most naturalists say that free will is just an illusion, but I personally would not call this a "patently obvious" choice. (I think it is a "Very Large Mistake")
Notice that a single "for" can iterate in a multi-level structure. You can also use :let if you don't want to call (get-in) multiple times (which makes the code shorter, but more redundant and less efficient)
I use CL/Scheme/Clojure at work. I generally prefer comprehension style ('for' in Clojure, srfi-42 in Scheme) but sometimes CL's loop let me save a few nestings.
One of such patterns is when I have to accumulate multiple kind of things while I zip through the input. Somewhat contrived example: You have a hashtable that maps integer key to a list of strings. You want to scan it just once and build two lists, strings associated with odd keys and strings associated with even keys.
;; populate input
(defvar input (make-hash-table :test 'eql))
(setf (gethash 1 input) '("ichi" "hi"))
(setf (gethash 2 input) '("ni" "fu"))
(setf (gethash 3 input) '("san" "mi"))
(setf (gethash 4 input) '("yon" "shi" "yo"))
(setf (gethash 5 input) '("go" "itsu"))
;; loop
(loop for k being each hash-key in input
when (oddp k) append (gethash k input) into odds
when (evenp k) append (gethash k input) into evens
finally (return (values odds evens)))
; => ("go" "itsu" "san" "mi" "ichi" "hi") and ("yon" "shi" "yo" "ni" "fu")
Right! I tried to construct a terse example in hurry but apparently missed the mark. Usually loop comes handy when conditions and the way to extract values gets more complicated.
I had similar experiences in Hungary: I grew up in a very religious community (mostly Catholic) and went to a Catholic high school. Many of our teachers (including biology, geology and physics) were Catholic priests, yet I never heard anybody arguing against evolution.
I was 17 years old when I first met a young-earth creationist: he was an American missionary... I am still Christian and I know lots of people in various religious groups, but 14 years later I have only met one person who believes in Intelligent Design, and I know about 2 other people from mailing lists / blogs who are creationists.
The sad part is, young-earth creationists are such a vocal group that whenever somebody learns that I am a Christian, I am usually asked how I can believe in such nonsense as a 6000-year old Earth :)
"If you always knew the wise thing to do, would you ever choose the unwise path?"
Yes, people do that. When someone cheats on his/her spouse, is it because it seems to be the wise path? No, it's quite likely that such a person knows that it is wrong, unethical, and also very unwise - and still do it. And we all do this in smaller things all the time: e.g. exercising our ego and being rude to each other when we know that it will only make things worse; eating a lot of junk food when we know that it will make us unhealthy - and so on.
People are not just rational minds: we also have instincts and emotions. Free will is not about finding the solution to a logical problem: it is about balancing between these things.
Just think about how you could define an algorithm for solving an ethical dilemma. What is your algorithm? What is Mother Theresa's algorithm? What would happen if everybody had the same (supposedly ideal) algorithm, and would kill / self-sacrifice in the same kinds of situations? Would we survive at all?
If transferring our minds to software would be possible, would we want to transfer our emotions or instincts to this software at all? Would we really want to live as robots, or would we want to keep something "human" too?
Still, it's so strange to me: not only Slava disappeared, but most of the original authors stopped participating in the development and even stopped blogging about Factor. See http://planet.factorcode.org - most blogs have been abandoned for years, some of them are dead links... Also, I have not found any public announcement about who will maintain Factor in the future.
I really like what I know about Factor, and I have tremendous respect for Slava and others who created this language. I looked into the code a little bit, and it looks a very well-thought and very serious work, and I have no idea how they could create it in such a short time.
Still, you can't manage a project like this. No matter how great the language is technically, I won't start using it for any serious work if I don't see any vision, any chance that the project will not get stuck in this stage. I really hope that Factor will overcome these challenges. It would be so sad to see such a brilliant piece of work to be abandoned.
> I don't have that same sense of enthusiasm because for me everything isn't new.
I agree. I think one of the reasons why people in 30s seem to be more "close-minded" to new ideas is because they already have a decade of experience of the (then) fresh new stuff. This is especially true for the IT world.
Let's face it, we are reinventing the wheel in every 5 years. Just look at how frameworks and programming languages go in and out of fashion. You may say "oh man, not again!" when an enthusiastic young programmer tells you how great node.js is - which may be true, but in your open-minded 20s you already learnt Erlang, Twisted, EventMachine and Java NIO for the very same thing.
I'm not yet 30, but I already feel that I am becoming more conservative. I have seen a lot of "hot stuff" come and go, so I try to learn from technologies that seem to persist. Look at C, this old monster: it survived its creator, and for a reason. Now look at YUI or ExtJS: they were so "hot" around 2007, and I haven't even heard them mentioning for a long time. When somebody says that framework/language X is so great and "hot", I am a bit more careful now that 5 years ago: will it be around in 2 years? If not, does it worth even bothering?
Is this closed-mindness or wisdom? Very hard to tell. I am trying to be open-minded in a sense that I try to look and evaluate everything new, but I'm sure that I say "no" to much more things than 5 years before. I wonder how I would see myself in the eye of my 5 year-old younger me.
But I think you can do better than just saying "these are fairy tales". I recently read a book from a former atheist (Jennifer Fulwiler) who came from a very loving and intellectually honest family. Her father said this when she was young: "Make sure you don't start believing things just because someone says it's true, even if it's coming from me. Question everything." I wish more people would be like that, atheist and religious alike.