Re: RE: funsec Office 2007 has 0 security issues

[Ken Dyke <kdyke () keycomputerconsultants com>]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2007 at 07:23:52PM +0200, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf () dione ids pl) wrote:
> On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, der Mouse wrote:
>
> > If corporate dependence on Word and Office were as (un)common as
> > Creationism now is, I'd consider that fight won. :-)
>
> Been to the States of recent?;)
>
> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/22/opinion/polls/main657083.shtml

Despite the efforts by the right (or because of) the pendelum has
reached zenith and is beginning to swing back the other way:

An Atheist Manifesto
http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/200512_an_atheist_manifesto/

As Religious Strife Grows, Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117631918714166684.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

THE NEW CRUSADERS
As Religious Strife Grows,
Europe's Atheists Seize Pulpit
Islam's Rise Gives Boost
To Militant Unbelievers;
The Celebrity Hedonist
By ANDREW HIGGINS
April 12, 2007; Page A1

CAEN, France -- With 40 minutes to go before show time, the 500-seat
Alexis de Tocqueville auditorium was already packed. A fan set up a
video camera in the front row. A sound engineer checked the
microphones.

The star: Michel Onfray, celebrity philosopher and France's high
priest of militant atheism. Dressed entirely in black, he strode onto
the stage and looked out at the reverential audience for his weekly
two-hour lecture series, "Hedonist Philosophy," which is broadcast on
a state radio station. "I could found a religion," he said.

Mr. Onfray, 48 years old and author of 32 books, stands in the
vanguard of a curious and increasingly potent phenomenon in Europe:
zealous disbelief in God.

Passive indifference to faith has left Europe's churches mostly
empty. But debate over religion is more intense and strident than it
has been in many decades. Religion is re-emerging as a big issue in
part because of anxiety over Europe's growing and restive Muslim
populations and a fear that faith is reasserting itself in politics
and public policy. That is all adding up to a growing momentum for a
combative brand of atheism, one that confronts rather than merely
ignores religion.

Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun and prominent British author
on religion, calls the trend "missionary secularism." She says it
mimics the ardor of Christianity, Islam and Marxism, all of which
have at their core an urge to convert nonbelievers to their
worldview.

Mr. Onfray argues that atheism faces a "final battle" against
"theological hocus-pocus" and must rally its troops. "We can no
longer tolerate neutrality and benevolence," he writes in "Traité
d'athéologie," or Atheist Manifesto, a best seller in France, Italy
and Spain. "The turbulent time we live in suggests that change is at
hand and the time has come for a new order."

As with many fights involving faith, Europe's struggle between belief
and nonbelief is also a proxy for other, concrete issues that go far
beyond the supernatural. In this case, they involve a battle to
define the identity of a continent.

Half a century after the 1957 Treaty of Rome laid the foundations for
the now 27-nation European Union, Europe has secured peace and
prosperity. But it is deeply uncertain about what binds the bloc
together beyond mere economic self-interest. Says Ms. Armstrong:
"There is a big fight going on to define European civilization."

In London last month, leading British atheists squared off with
defenders of faith in a public debate on the motion, "We'd be better
off without religion." Tickets cost nearly $40 but so many people
wanted to attend that the event was moved to a bigger venue with over
2,000 seats. It still sold out. The audience declared the atheists
the victors, by a margin of 1,205 to 778, with a few score
abstentions.

In Germany, a wealthy furniture manufacturer is funding a "think tank
of Enlightenment," a group of scientists and others committed to
debunking religion. It is named after Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century
philosopher and cosmologist who was burnt at the stake as a heretic.
In Italy, one fervent nonbeliever has gone to the European Court of
Human Rights with a claim that the Roman Catholic Church is guilty of
fraud: Jesus, he says, never existed.

Prime Catalyst

Alarm over Islam has acted as the prime catalyst for much of the
polemic. Europe's Muslim populace, estimated at between 15 million
and 20 million people, is growing more numerous, more vocal and, in
some cases, more religious. The clash also feeds on a deeper
confrontation that dates back to Europe's Enlightenment, the
18th-century intellectual movement that asserted the primacy of
reason over superstition.

"The battle over religion is restarting. It is going to be a
difficult one," says Terry Sanderson, president of Britain's National
Secular Society, an organization that was founded in the 19th century
but has now gained a new vibrancy. Membership has doubled in the past
four years, to around 7,000, says Mr. Sanderson. For converts from
Christianity, the society provides a certificate of "de-baptism."
"Make it official!" urges the society's Web site,
www.secularism.org.uk2.

The atheist cause won a big-name endorsement late last year when pop
star Elton John, in an interview, said organized religion turned
people into "hateful lemmings" and should be banned.

The backlash against religiosity has even seeped into Europe's Muslim
community. In February, Mina Ahadi, an Iranian-born woman in Cologne,
Germany, set up the Continent's first Muslim atheist group: the
National Council of Ex-Muslims. She immediately started getting death
threats and was put under police protection.

"Our main message is: 'We don't believe,' " says Ms. Ahadi, talking
in a coffee shop next to Cologne Cathedral, a towering tribute to
faith that took 600 years to complete. A police guard hovered nearby.

Atheism, Ms. Ahadi says, must confront religion head-on -- and adopt
its methods. Her group started with just 30 members in February and a
month later had more than 400. It is lobbying European Union
officials for restrictions on the veil and organizing a public
meeting at which ex-Muslims will explain why they quit. "If you want
to work against Muslim movements, you have to be like them," she
says. "We have to go outside and say what we're fighting for."

Europe's atheist campaigners have also made a splash in America. "The
God Delusion," a book by Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins, has been
on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list for 28
weeks. Another British atheist, U.S.-based writer Christopher
Hitchens, has written his own antireligious treatise, "God Is Not
Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," due out in May.

Christianity, once the bedrock of Europe's identity, has been losing
worshipers on the Continent for at least half a century, though some
opinion polls suggest the downward trend has bottomed out. Around
three-quarters of Europeans still describe themselves as Christians.
But only a small minority go to church. In Western Europe, according
to polls, fewer than 20% do.

The number of atheists is hard to pin down. Some surveys put the
figure at under 3%, but others say it is much higher.

When the European Union asked citizens to rank values representing
Europe, religion came last -- far behind "human rights," "democracy,"
"peace," "individual freedom" and other choices. Only 3% chose
religion.

Religious leaders are pushing back against the assertive unbelievers.
The Church of England's Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, complained
in a December statement about "illiberal atheists who have joined
forces with aggressive secularists." He was responding to demands
that Jesus be removed from nativity plays and that Christmas parties
be called "winter festival" gatherings.

Mr. Onfray's atheist tract, recently translated into English, has
prompted three book-length rebuttals by angry Christians and a flood
of articles. To counter Prof. Dawkins's "God Delusion," an Oxford
theology professor wrote his own book, "The Dawkins Delusion."

Both atheists and their foes agree on one thing: God -- declared dead
over a century ago by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche -- is
making a comeback, at least as a focus of controversy. "Faith is on
the public agenda in a way that is unprecedented in recent times,"
proclaimed the founding manifesto of Theos, a new British-based
Christian think tank.

Europe's atheist movement has no Vatican-like central command and
springs from many different sources. Some adherents have personal
grievance. Mr. Onfray spent part of his youth in a home run by
Catholic priests, who he says mistreated him and abused others. Ms.
Ahadi, head of the German ex-Muslims group, says her first husband
was executed by Islamic revolutionaries in Iran.

Secular Europeans voice dismay at American religiosity and worry that
faith-based reasoning is spreading in Europe, too. Many Britons, for
example, believe the Christian faith of Prime Minister Tony Blair
helped lead him to entangle Britain in America's war in Iraq.

Deep Suspicion

There is also deep suspicion of Poland, a devoutly Catholic new
member of the European Union. Its deputy education minister late last
year urged the teaching of creationism, the Bible-inspired
alternative to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Celebrations last month to honor the 50th anniversary of the EU's
founding Treaty of Rome were marred by squabbling over whether
Christianity, among other things, should be mentioned in a
declaration defining the bloc's basic principles. Atheists and
secularists who believe religion has no place in politics campaigned
hard to prevent any nod to Christianity and drafted their own
so-called Brussels Declaration affirming Europe's secular moorings.

The faithful lost, and the EU marked its birthday in Berlin without
any mention of Christianity. Pope Benedict XVI was furious. "How can
they exclude an element as essential to the identity of Europe as
Christianity?" he asked at a conference organized by European
bishops. Europe is committing a "peculiar form of apostasy."

The most potent force driving activist atheism is concern that Islam,
Europe's fastest-growing religion, is jeopardizing the principles of
the Enlightenment -- and emboldening other religions to raise their
voices, too, and re-fight old battles.

"I have a big problem with Islam," says Mr. Onfray, the French
philosopher. Last fall, he offered sanctuary at his house in northern
France to a high-school philosophy teacher who had received death
threats from Muslims. The teacher had denounced the Prophet Muhammad
as a "merciless warlord" in a newspaper article. But Mr. Onfray says
his basic beef is with all religions, not just Islam.

Europe's disquiet over Islam soared after the November 2004 murder by
a Muslim militant in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh, an irreverent Dutch
writer, filmmaker and antireligious polemicist. Then came a global
furor over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish
newspaper, Jyllands-Posten.

A French court in March ended a long legal campaign by Muslim groups
to jail the editor of a satirical weekly that republished the
cartoons. The court ruled that the editor had committed no crime. One
of the groups that initiated the case immediately vowed to appeal.

"There is an identity crisis. We have to answer the question: Who are
we? One answer is to say we're atheists," says Flemming Rose, the
Danish journalist who first commissioned the drawings and now gets
invited to speak to atheist groups.

Muslim activism is encouraging other faiths to be more assertive.
University of London professor Anthony Grayling cites violent
protests by British Sikhs that forced the cancellation of a play in
Birmingham in 2004, and Christian protests against the television
broadcast of a London opera that featured Jesus dressed in diapers.
Christians and Muslims both campaigned vigorously, but without
success, to torpedo elements of a new British law that bans
discrimination against homosexuals. Such faith-based agitation, says
Mr. Grayling, threatens a "dark ages for free enquiry and free
speech."

Atheism in Europe dates back to the ancient Greeks, who coined the
word "atheos," meaning godless. Socrates was convicted of atheism and
poisoned. Early Christians and their foes each branded the other
"atheist."

Atheism as a philosophical system first took root in the 17th
century. British philosopher Thomas Hobbes dismissed religion as
"lies." He fled to France. There, Voltaire and other French thinkers
took up the cause with gusto, though many did not entirely reject the
possibility of some sort of deity. The Soviet Union enshrined atheism
as a state creed.

Mr. Onfray, the French philosopher, says he believed in God as a
child in the same way as he "believed in Santa Claus." His
impoverished parents, a farm laborer and a cleaning lady, put him in
a church-run home for orphans when he was 10. He developed a loathing
of Christianity and now embraces what he calls "ethical hedonism."
He's not married but has had the same female companion for 30 years.
He says they have a "hedonist contract," which does not require
monogamy. But, he says, hedonism is not "about cigars, vintage
Bordeaux and expensive cars."

'Foundation of Morality'

"To enjoy and make others enjoy without doing ill to yourself or to
others, this is the foundation of all morality," he says, citing an
18th-century French writer, Nicolas Chamfort.

After nearly 20 years teaching philosophy at a Catholic high school,
Mr. Onfray in 2002 set up an experimental college in the Normandy
town of Caen, near the beaches of the 1944 D-Day landing. Called the
Université Populaire de Caen, it has no exams, no degrees and
consists of public lectures by Mr. Onfray and a few friends.

The local government helps cover costs, and Caen's public university
lets him use its main auditorium -- to the chagrin of its philosophy
department, which is headed by a devout Catholic and takes a dim view
of Mr. Onfray's diatribes against God. "Frankly, we think he talks a
lot of garbage," says Emmanuel Housset, a philosophy lecturer.

Caen's Catholic theological college has tried to fight back. Maurice
Morand, a priest, went on local radio to denounce Mr. Onfray's work.
"He is a fundamentalist who hides behind the ideas of the
Enlightenment," says Father Morand. "We can't defeat him, we can only
denounce him."

Mr. Onfray's popularity shows no sign of flagging. At a recent
lecture, the 100th so far, an adoring audience held aloft lit candles
and cigarette lighters in tribute. A middle-aged man took the floor
to praise Mr. Onfray for providing "the key to life."

Pierre Andrieu, a 63-year-old former executive with BNP-Paribas, a
French bank, travels up to Caen each week from Paris for the lecture
show. He makes the trip, he says, because he shares Mr. Onfray's take
on faith -- and fears that religion is making a comeback. "It is far
more present than before," he says. "This need for religion is very,
very strong. Religion is like magic. It is all about tricks."

Ahead of France's presidential election later this month, Philosophie
Magazine arranged a meeting recently between Mr. Onfray and the
front-running candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, who sometimes attends
church. They argued about faith, politics and philosophy. As a gift,
Mr. Onfray gave Mr. Sarkozy several books, including one by his
favorite philosopher, Nietzsche. Its title: "The Anti-Christ."
-- 
Ken Dyke,
406.581.0495

"Linux can win as long as services/protocols are commodities.  By folding
extended functionality into today's commodity services and creating new
protocols, we raise the bar and change the rules of the game."
       -- from an internal Microsoft memo
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