The winds and tides have lead you, the unwary netizen, to the homepage of Jan Haugland.

That's no doubt wholly unintentional from your part.

There are probably many legitimate reasons for cluttering the W3 with a page saying little else than ‘here I am’, but I can't think of any. I've had pages on the Net for a long time, even something not completely unlike a home page, but it became more and more an embarrassment. I could delete it completely, and leave my real pages with links to the homepage hanging in limbo. Or I could pull my act together, find a useful excuse (like, brushing up my html/css skills) and replace the rubbish with a real page.

Instead, you'll get this one, which will no doubt become hopelessly outdated long before I update it again.

Some Personalia

I live in Bergen, Norway. I was born in '68, and I'm married to Kirsten. If you are English-speaking, my name will probably make you assume the wrong thing about my gender J.

Work

I am an independent software developer and systems consultant. I maintain the Visual Basic FAQ, so it should be pretty obvious that this is my primary and favorite tool. Much of what I do is database work (Access, SQL Server) and also more and more VBA/Office solutions. Contact me for details.

Studies

I have a B.A. and are currently doing graduate studies in History of Religions. Normally, English is not short of adequate names, but it gives priority to the "hard" or natural sciences, and even reserves the word "science" for those disciplines. In Norwegian and German, it is called Religious Science, which would probably cause less misunderstandings than e.g. "religious studies."

So, before you ask, I'm not studying to become a priest.

History of Religions is a term describing the study of religion using the tools of sociology, anthropology, psychology and every other -logy you can imagine. Almost. We make a few assumptions. We study religion as a human activity. Personally, I think the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim was more than a little correct in stating that religion was the society written on the heavens.

I always get questions about my personal religiousity when people hear what I study. The ideal, of course, is to 'deaden' one's personal convictions when studying religion. In reality, that's impossible. Instead I believe in declaring upfront what you believe, so the reader of your work (or whatever) can easily know your bias. I'm a skeptic. I'm not religious. I don't believe in any ‘supernatural agents’ -- gods or God -- and I don't particularly disbelieve it either. I mislike being preached to immensely, which no doubt is influenced by the fact that I grew up in a nasty cult.

I'm not really allowed to say that, even. In post-modern study of religion, religions are cute, period. While "everybody" accepts that commercial, political and domestic affairs need to be regulated by laws and regulations, there is a general consensus, especially among certain arm-chair religion-experts who have hardly been outside their offices to meet a real religious person, that religion has some nature-given right to absolute freedom. As the particular bias of the previews sentences reveals, I beg to differ.

I see no reason to hold religions separate from political or commercial organizations. People may believe what they want, as they do about [other] political and social questions. Organizations, particularly when they control individuals and grab for their wallets, need to be scrutinized no less than political parties or businesses.

Doomslayer

The title "doomslayer" is stolen from a Wired article about the late Julian Simon. I'm not trying to steal that title from him; it's well deserved. The problem is simply that there are thousands of nutty doomsayers, ranging from the familiar religious end-time prophets to environmentalists, post-modern humanitarians, new-agers, politicians and journalists. One "doomslayer", one voice of reason in the wilderness, is simply not enough. With even that voice silent, we need many more to kill what seems to be an immortal human superstition: that everything is going to hell.

I strongly believe in the sustainability of human progress. I believe economic growth, population growth and industrialization can go on "indefinitely." We have problems, but these can be solved within the framework of the currect economic and political system, which can be improved as it has been improved in the past.

It's a fact that while we have hunger, we have never in recorded history had less people starving. We have wars, but their role and impact have been steadily decreased over time. Disasters take a much smaller death toll than in earlier centuries. We have diseases, but medical progress has increased the expected human lifespan in all regions on this planet. If you think crime is bad now, be happy you didn't live in the Middle Ages, when people had to fortify cities. We have pollution, but we have less pollution than some decades back, not more as the media will have you believe.

Fact: In every way life is better for people living in our age than for any previous generation of human beings.

The above facts make certain people depressed, even angry. They want the world to go to hell, and they want to look back at the past as a lost "golden age."

Beats me.