Beam Me Up Scotty

If you regularly read Scott Adam's blog as I do, you will know that he harbors, a generally funny desire to rile up his readers so that they will post funny comments that give him more fodder. He also tends to loosely hide his opinion that anyone that is religious is an idiot. I don't really take that personally, but at the same his points can sometimes be a little silly.

Take his post over the weekend for instance. He asks the question:

If a man goes into the woods and pokes a bear with a stick, and the bear kills the man, whose fault is it?

Clearly the man, for not understanding the nature of the bear (Scott's point and I agree)

Next he suggests this:

Now substitute an irrational human being for the bear. The guy with the stick knows he’s dealing with an irrational and potentially violent person, and he pokes him with the stick anyway. Just like the bear, the irrational guy kills the guy who poked him.

Clearly things have changed. Surely the guy that does the poking is stupid to provoke this person, but the irrational man is still responsible for his actions as a self aware human being and thus he is at fault for the killing in my opinion. (again I think I am agreeing with Scott in this case)

Now Scott tries to hook us by asking this:

Okay, now suppose that the irrational guy is a specific kind of irrational guy – a literal believer in his faith. This is not an insult to the religious because even the Pope endorses the view that faith does not spring from rational thought. And let’s say this particular faith says that if ye poketh me with a sharpeth object, woe unto you, for I shall killeth!

I believe that Scott thinks that the situation has now changed in his loosely veiled attempt to take a jab at George W. Bush. Personally, I don't think that the situation has changed at all. The killer is no more justified by his religion to break the law than the irrational guy in step two. The provoker is just as stupid, but in the end, poking someone with a stick and murder are two very different crimes, and in no way could the cause justify the effect regardless of the killer's beliefs. This person would still be tried and convicted, regardless of their religion.

I'm not exactly sure why Scott is trying to lead us down this path, but it seems that to me that he was trying to trap a religious person into feeling like they had to be ok with murder because of the religious man's rights to his beliefs. We all have the right to believe what we want, but no one has the right to kill someone just for being annoying.

The other possibility is that he was simply saying that America is stupid for provoking the middle east and sticking are noses where they don't belong. I don't totally agree with our presence in Iraq, but at the same time, hind sight is 20/20 and at the time it seemed like we needed to be there, so I won't fault the administration for taking action, although I don't agree with how they did it.

Agree, disagree? What do you think?

UPDATE

Kevin a fellow Dilbert blog reader, suggested this:

"Obviously it's the stick's fault. It shouldn't have allowed itself to be picked up, much less sharpened."