Poor Thomas gets a bad rap

Anyone with a religious upbringing is familiar with the story of the apostle Thomas doubting the resurrection until he observed Jesus for himself. When this story is told, he is often cast in a very negative light for his skepticism. Even as a child this story rang incredibly shallow to me. The moral of the story was implied to be that one should have faith without evidence.

Note that in the story, Thomas isn't even doubting Jesus himself, so it can't really be described as a religious faith issue (which would hold -slightly- more water, but still not enough to keep the story afloat). He is doubting the other apostles' account of Jesus' appearance. The moral of the story applied to a real life situation seems to be that if you came up to me and told me that you chatted with my dead grandmother a few days ago, that I should take your word for it instead of saying "O rly? Pix or it didn't happen".

To this day whenever I hear a reference to the story, it makes me cringe a little that people actually think that requiring evidence for wild claims is a negative quality. As someone who loves science and just generally as a human being, there are few qualities that I would hold to be higher. Requiring evidence is good. Skepticism is good. These are keystones to knowledge accumulation. I am quite proud to consider myself a Doubting JD. But don't take my word for it.

Microsoft is dumb

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It's not surprising that the same people that have convinced themselves that Vista is a good operating system aren't well informed enough about history to know that a spherical earth was commonly accepted in Columbus' time. It's also not surprising that a large ad campaign has no ethical problems with propogating a common falsehood. It's no wonder that mainstream society is so ignorant about so many things.