I happened to stumble across this article on CNN last night. The gist of it is that the previous day the Queen of England pardoned Alan Turing - who broke the Nazi Enigma code in WWII, saving thousands of British lives, and who also invented the prototype for the modern computer, the eponymous Turing Machine - for indecent homosexual acts he
committed in the 1950s, shortly after which he killed himself. Wanting to know more, I looked up his story on Wikipedia.
It is a story that is both fascinating and depressing. Turing was a brilliant scientist who at the age of 15 was already solving complex mathematical problems without any formal training. By age 16, he understood Einstein's theory of relativity implicitly debunked Newtonian physics although Einstein never stated this explicitly in his work. After studying at Cambridge and Princeton, he joined Britain's elite code-breaking unit and single-handedly cracked the German's Enigma code, saving countless lives during WWII.
After the war he invented the prototype for the modern computer, the Turing Machine, which gave formalization to the concepts of algorithm and computation. He is considered the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.
In his personal life, Turing had known he was gay since he was a teenager and while not open about it, he never denied it either. Following an incident in 1952 where Turing's house was robbed by an acquaintance of a lover of his, in which it came out that Turing had slept with another man during the police investigation, Turing was offered a choice between prison or receiving weekly female hormone shots for an entire year to 'control' his deviant libido. Not surprisingly, Turing ended up killing himself just a year after he received chemical castration treatments.
What really shocks me about this entire incident is the level to which blind hatred for homosexuals (or any group as was the case of Jewish scientists living in Germany in the 30s) caused England to essentially kill off one of its most dedicated and remarkable citizens. Turing dedicated his life to helping the State and was a hero and patriot in every sense of the word.
I recently finished reading 'God is not Great' by Christopher Hitchens. The way a man like Turing was treated - despite his great brilliance and heroism - clearly has its roots in statements that appear in Leviticus calling for men that sleep with other men to be put to death by stoning, as well as statements in the new Testament recently made famous by the scandal surrounding the Duck Dynasty show (a show I ave no interest in watching). Literal interpretations of these sorts of edicts lead directly to the kind of self-defeating persecution of great minds and great individuals simply because they were born a certain way (created by God in that way if you will) and that the sin of their birth doesn't correspond with a statement made by a nomadic tribe 4,000 years prior, in an entirely different place, time and cultural setting. Similarly, Naziism obsessive Jew-hatred had clear roots in 1800 years of Church dogma, initially begun in the new Testament.
My prayer for the new year is that we learn to have true respect for all of God's creations - the ones that are living and breathing and creating on a daily basis in the here and now. And that those of us that are inclined towards religion in one way or another use it only as a force for good.
Update: The movie is called The Imitation Game and it's awesome! I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Turing specifically or in understanding the concept of genius in general.
