On Thu, 19 Jan 2006 18:02:52 -0000 "Richard Brodie" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Not only is there a Red Star of David but it has been > causing great controversy for years in the ICRC. Google > "Red Crystal", or check Wikipedia for the story. At least, > it had some kind of resolution.
"Like, OMG, it's a *New Age* religious symbol!" Squares and diamonds are IIRC also religious symbols in some Native American cultures -- at least the "four points" concept is, as it represents the world with four cardinal directions. And I really bet, that if you come up with ANY reasonably symmetric symbol, somebody somewhere can come up with a religious significance for it. There's an important distinction here, too. As I understand it, the point of the official recognition of "Red Cross/Crescent/Crystal" symbols under the Geneva convention is so they can make rules like "It's a big no-no to bomb buildings with this symbol on it".* That introduces considerable new wrinkles to the problem: the symbol most be unquestionably recognizable, even in the heat of battle, it must be EXTREMELY neutral if people who are otherwise blowing each other to hell are going to agree on its use, and the stakes for error are extremely high. None of this applies to the choice of logo for Python. The better example was the swastika comparison to a company logo. But that's a bit different situation. In order for the swastika to acquire this extremity of hostility, it had to be the symbol of what is widely regarded as one of the most evil political movements in the history of Earth. Even so, there are still some "innocent" uses of the symbol, such as for shrines in Japan. If you are validating this level of hatred for the symbols of Christianity (or Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, or whatever), then I assert that it is *you* who are being religiously intolerant, not the person that used the symbol. Let me put this a different way. Let's suppose that Python was written by an Omanian, instead of a Dutchman. If, in the interest of providing a unique identity, the author incorporated a crescent moon into the logo, this would not deter my using it, nor should it in any way reflect any religious implication whatsoever -- the artist, would, at most, be using imagery representative of the works' origin. This, you understand, is an example of *intentionally* using a religious symbol in a logo. Now, imagine that the language was instead, say, an astronomical data reduction tool. Now, the use of a crescent becomes topical to the language, and the fact that the author lives in a Muslim country or is himself Muslim would be completely incidental to the use of a symbol which resembles a crescent moon (but might really be a generic illuminated planet in space). Then some conspiracy theorist comes along and says "Hey, you know the symbol for XYZ is a crescent, and the author is Muslim, it's a plot!" Oh come on. The confusion of "cross" and "plus" sign is similarly accidental (and I'm not even sure that the + was intentional). It looks cool, it's got not one Python, but two, it's nicely iconic, and unique, and the "+" is even topical to computer languages, and has, as someone else pointed out, a "positive" connotation. ;-) I still like the PyGame python better, but it's not a bad logo. If anything, my objection would be that it's starting to look a bit too "corporate" for my taste. A little too clean and boxy. But I can get over that. * The part I've never been able to relate to, though, is, if they can agree on stuff like this, why can't they agree NOT to blow hell out of each other? Seems like that would be rather more constructive. -- Terry Hancock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
