This isn't really one of those controversial subjects, at least not as much so as my last few posts. I took AP Government in high school and learned a lot about America's governing document as well as some court cases that help it shape our legal system. The thing is, that is rare knowledge today. Not a lot of young people (or older people) opt to learn about the Constitution, and then when something huge like health care reform happens, they all scream "This is unconstitutional!" When, really, it's not. Those words alone are the siren call of the uneducated, angry American, who, more often than not, is conservative. I have called things unconstitutional before, because they actually are. I wrote a paper about the water-boarding of prisoners at Guantanamo bay and how it was unconstitutional based on previous court cases involving non-citizens, as well as the Geneva Convention. Turns out Obama outlawed it in January 2009, a year after I wrote the paper.
So what about health care reform? Is there a chance that all the people calling it unconstitutional are right, and that it will be repealed in the future? I highly doubt it. Thanks to Facebook, the average conservative's opinion on health care is incredibly obvious to me. I've seen people say things like "The government can't make me pay MORE taxes for that!" and "We have a constitutional right to freedom!" or "What if I don't want health care? Obama shouldn't decide for me!" I hope whoever reads this can plainly see the error in the first two "arguments" against the legality of health care. If not, allow me to elucidate.
So, Mr. Joe Sixpack, the government can't make you pay taxes? Especially not if the money goes to undeserving other people? I suppose welfare and social security are completely foreign concepts, then. And, the government really can tax you for whatever they want. Thanks to the Boston Tea Party (and I don't mean that tea party for religious wingnuts who have no idea what the actual Tea Party was) which was a reaction to Britain government placing a tax on tea in America. Though the authoritative relationship between England and the Colonies was questionable at the time in that America was becoming bit of a rebellious teenager to Mother Britain, Americans agreed that they shouldn't be taxed by a government that did not directly represent them. Although a few people in 2010 may feel their government doesn't represent them, they do. American citizens voted for the senators and representatives who vote on and occasionally draft bills that the President must sign or has already proposed in order to be enacted. The entire basis of our representative government is that our Legislative branch acts in the best interest of their electorate. If you don't like your senator, maybe you should go out and vote next election. In summary, as long as a bill for taxation of things is passed in the House, Senate and signed by the President, they can take your money for whatever they want.
Argument number two, freedom. Apparently, we have a constitutional right to it. This is either an uneducated statement or a vast generalization of the specific freedoms granted to us by the First Amendment. They are Freedom of/from Religion, of speech, press, petition, and assembly. If we had "a constitutional right to freedom," there would be absolute anarchy in the USA, which, after a long enough cycle of chaos and danger, would loop back around to forming a basis for a government according to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. According to this theory, in a state of anarchy people will begin to fear for the safety of their unalienable rights and will give up certain powers and make crude laws to protect them. This, of course, can go on and expand to full-blown Democratic or Parliamentary government.
That's not important. Even if we did have a constitutional right to "freedom," which is a very broad term, I'm not entirely sure that health care reform is encroaching upon it.
And then there are people who just don't want health care and feel they are being forced into unnecessary spending. This may be the one argument I have very little to say about, but only through thinking in selfish, Lockean manner. If one, as James Madison said, extend the sphere and begin thinking in a classical republican manner, the realization should be that one's fellow man is being neglected. Now I must point out that the term 'classical republican' is in no way a contrived jab at conservatives or the republican party, but is in fact a theory of government most well documented by Plato. In essence, the classical republican theory explains that in a democratic setting men will work together and make sacrifices not for himself, but for the preservation of his country and his fellows. This can also be summed up by taking a few words from Star Trek II: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one." Health care reform, in this sense, is a very classically republican piece of legislation. The people of the nation pay a small amount so that everyone can afford to go to the doctor.
One last reason my Facebook friends are getting upset over this thing is that it funds elective abortions. Instead of making this entry twice as long I suggest you read my previous post for my stance on that whole mess.
Now I would like to present some facts on the health care bill, but doing so would basically be plagiarizing this Huffington Post article. This article presents the bill in a very straightforward manner, and I will leave it to you to form your own, hopefully informed, opinions.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Saturday, March 20, 2010
03-20-10 Abortion
Of the three things I've written about to date, this is possibly the one that makes people the most upset. My own personal religious views don't matter much in the grand scheme of things, I'm only sending myself to hell for that, but because I am pro-choice I support sending countless unborn to an eternity of hellfire or something.
It's not that I don't like babies, they're pretty cute, it's the fetus that people get all worked up over. There's a difference between the two terms that the West-Michiganian doesn't seem to comprehend. People identify with "baby." It evokes emotion, a drive to care, whereas "fetus" sounds cold and scientific. At some point, however, a fetus stops being a fetus and becomes a baby. But when? This is a difficult question. In the case of Roe v. Wade the courts held that a woman may have an abortion at any point before the fetus becomes viable, generally around 28 weeks. However those at the pro-life end of the debate believe that while a fetus may not yet be viable, it is still a precious, precious life.
At around 8 weeks of gestation the brain begins to form in the embryo, though does not develop as quickly as the rest of the fetus until near the 28th week, during which rapid brain growth occurs. Early in the pregnancy the spinal chord and reptilian brain form (the most basic part of our nervous system that controls autonomic functions such as heartbeat) which results in minute amounts of "brain" activity. Those who oppose abortion see this brain activity as some benchmark of life in the eight to ten week-old lump of cells. My dog is eleven years old and has more brain activity and is a lot smarter than a developing fetus (she even sits on command) but nobody is going to have a riot or bomb a veterinary clinic if she's put to sleep if my family doesn't have the means to take care of her. But if an underclass, single woman is impregnated, by God it's her responsibility to take care of that thing despite financial difficulties. If you don't want babies, don't have sex. Am I right?
No, of course not. This is possibly the worst argument I've ever heard against abortion and absolutely reeks of the Bush Administration's push on abstinence-only sex education (oxymoron, anyone?) I even got to witness this, er, abortion of a curriculum first hand. Not once was the birth control pill mentioned, and the condom was only talked about so far as to warn us students that it didn't work 100% of the time. They didn't even show us one, in fact I hadn't seen one until I transferred to public school and some kid on the bus blew one up like a balloon and let it out the window.
The sort of people who use, "if you don't want babies, don't have sex," are often firmly religious, and firmly against premarital sex. Never mind that there are safe ways to do it, just don't. But what about the married couple that doesn't want kids? Is it OK for the wife to go on the pill? Is it alright for her to have an abortion if pregnancy puts her health at risk? Can't these people enjoy the one upside to a Christian marriage without having to do it for procreation? The answers to these questions should be yes, and if it's alright for a married couple, why not an unmarried one? One always sits on a sofa before buying it. But be safe- put a plastic cover on the couch first.
And, like everything else I disagree with, pro-choice people always have exceptions to their rules. That one special case where maybe an abortion is OK. You'd think it would be rape, wouldn't you? The sex was non-consensual, so any resulting pregnancy could be terminated with a guilt-free abortion. Wrong. The answer to "rape" is "adoption." The correct response is the mother's health. If pregnancy endangers a woman's life, it should be disposed of like any other life-threatening parasite. As far as I can reason, an abortion performed in this case is saving an already established life rather than taking a chance on bringing a new one into the world. I can't see why this line of thought can't be applied to any otherwise normal pregnancy. Assuming I, a 20 year old living at home with a job at a cafe, found myself pregnant I'd most definitely have an abortion. Even if I'm physically capable of delivering the baby without any health risks to it or myself, the arrival of a child would threaten the state of my already-established life and lifestyle by way of a new financial and emotional burden. Even if I wanted to put it up for adoption the costs of staying in the hospital for delivery and potential post-natal care is much more expensive than coughing up the $400 or so for an early-term abortion pill.
I'm sure that seems cruel to some of my readers (hi mom) but that is how a fetus fits into my view of life and death. Nobody can remember being in the womb, in fact nobody really remembers anything from before the age of four, which is around the time the hippocampus finishes developing. I'm not saying that its alright to commit infanticide because toddlers have no long term memory, just that I question the "personhood" of the fetus. It has no memories, reasoning or language faculties, only basic brain functions. If you want an idea of the sort of capabilities a fetus would have if it were viable but had no higher mammalian brain, read this link.
In summary: People think abortion is "killing babies" when a fetus is not a baby; I like my dog better than I like fetuses, charter schools had bad sex ed (nobody ever told me it was fun), wrap your rascal, and nobody is going to hell for having an abortion/being aborted because hell doesn't exist.
It's not that I don't like babies, they're pretty cute, it's the fetus that people get all worked up over. There's a difference between the two terms that the West-Michiganian doesn't seem to comprehend. People identify with "baby." It evokes emotion, a drive to care, whereas "fetus" sounds cold and scientific. At some point, however, a fetus stops being a fetus and becomes a baby. But when? This is a difficult question. In the case of Roe v. Wade the courts held that a woman may have an abortion at any point before the fetus becomes viable, generally around 28 weeks. However those at the pro-life end of the debate believe that while a fetus may not yet be viable, it is still a precious, precious life.
At around 8 weeks of gestation the brain begins to form in the embryo, though does not develop as quickly as the rest of the fetus until near the 28th week, during which rapid brain growth occurs. Early in the pregnancy the spinal chord and reptilian brain form (the most basic part of our nervous system that controls autonomic functions such as heartbeat) which results in minute amounts of "brain" activity. Those who oppose abortion see this brain activity as some benchmark of life in the eight to ten week-old lump of cells. My dog is eleven years old and has more brain activity and is a lot smarter than a developing fetus (she even sits on command) but nobody is going to have a riot or bomb a veterinary clinic if she's put to sleep if my family doesn't have the means to take care of her. But if an underclass, single woman is impregnated, by God it's her responsibility to take care of that thing despite financial difficulties. If you don't want babies, don't have sex. Am I right?
No, of course not. This is possibly the worst argument I've ever heard against abortion and absolutely reeks of the Bush Administration's push on abstinence-only sex education (oxymoron, anyone?) I even got to witness this, er, abortion of a curriculum first hand. Not once was the birth control pill mentioned, and the condom was only talked about so far as to warn us students that it didn't work 100% of the time. They didn't even show us one, in fact I hadn't seen one until I transferred to public school and some kid on the bus blew one up like a balloon and let it out the window.
The sort of people who use, "if you don't want babies, don't have sex," are often firmly religious, and firmly against premarital sex. Never mind that there are safe ways to do it, just don't. But what about the married couple that doesn't want kids? Is it OK for the wife to go on the pill? Is it alright for her to have an abortion if pregnancy puts her health at risk? Can't these people enjoy the one upside to a Christian marriage without having to do it for procreation? The answers to these questions should be yes, and if it's alright for a married couple, why not an unmarried one? One always sits on a sofa before buying it. But be safe- put a plastic cover on the couch first.
And, like everything else I disagree with, pro-choice people always have exceptions to their rules. That one special case where maybe an abortion is OK. You'd think it would be rape, wouldn't you? The sex was non-consensual, so any resulting pregnancy could be terminated with a guilt-free abortion. Wrong. The answer to "rape" is "adoption." The correct response is the mother's health. If pregnancy endangers a woman's life, it should be disposed of like any other life-threatening parasite. As far as I can reason, an abortion performed in this case is saving an already established life rather than taking a chance on bringing a new one into the world. I can't see why this line of thought can't be applied to any otherwise normal pregnancy. Assuming I, a 20 year old living at home with a job at a cafe, found myself pregnant I'd most definitely have an abortion. Even if I'm physically capable of delivering the baby without any health risks to it or myself, the arrival of a child would threaten the state of my already-established life and lifestyle by way of a new financial and emotional burden. Even if I wanted to put it up for adoption the costs of staying in the hospital for delivery and potential post-natal care is much more expensive than coughing up the $400 or so for an early-term abortion pill.
I'm sure that seems cruel to some of my readers (hi mom) but that is how a fetus fits into my view of life and death. Nobody can remember being in the womb, in fact nobody really remembers anything from before the age of four, which is around the time the hippocampus finishes developing. I'm not saying that its alright to commit infanticide because toddlers have no long term memory, just that I question the "personhood" of the fetus. It has no memories, reasoning or language faculties, only basic brain functions. If you want an idea of the sort of capabilities a fetus would have if it were viable but had no higher mammalian brain, read this link.
In summary: People think abortion is "killing babies" when a fetus is not a baby; I like my dog better than I like fetuses, charter schools had bad sex ed (nobody ever told me it was fun), wrap your rascal, and nobody is going to hell for having an abortion/being aborted because hell doesn't exist.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Thoughts for 3-9-10: LBGT
I'm not really sure where to begin this one, as it's something that bothers me entirely too much and I tend to lose objectivity when I talk about it.
Recently Republican senator Roy Ashburn, who adamantly voted against gay rights, was caught drunk driving from a gay bar in Sacramento last week. For a while there was some speculation as to whether or not he had been at the bar and whether or not he was actually homosexual. Today I read an article on the MSNBC(1) stating that this man had publicly apologized for endangering people by driving under the influence, but also admitting that he was gay.
This man is a married senator, father of four. And yet, he had the courage to say "Yes. I am gay." Many people in his position would admit to drunk driving and perhaps make up some shoddy excuse as to their presence at the gay bar or deny it entirely. This man, who voted against a day honoring Harvey Milk, against recognizing out of state marriages (which I think is unconstitutional under faith and full credit but is irrelevant) admitted he was gay.
The actions of Senator Ashburn are a prime example of the sort of self-hating behavior homosexual people will exercise. The abject hatred, shame, or sorrow caused by this fundamental, undeniable aspect of themselves seems, to me, to cause absolute rejection and even fear toward any who identify as homosexual. Homophobia is an intensely irrational thing, but horribly sad as well. Often times its just a cover up, especially with men. If a man is accepting of homosexual behavior, he may think people assume he is homosexual as well. Instead they feign repulsion- or truly believe that those feelings of nonacceptance should be the norm for everybody. Its emasculating to be homosexual, so to preserve machismo homosexuals are shunned like lepers.
However, leprosy isn't really that big a deal any more. If you lived around 550 BC, it was, and so was homosexuality. In fact, they're even listed in the same book of The Bible only 3 chapters apart! The words on same-sex relationships, though, are almost the only thing modern American society really holds to out of Leviticus. Chapter 11:5-28 lists all that we can and can't eat- outlawed are pigs, rabbits, and shrimp. Chapter 12 lists the purification ritual for a woman after she bares a child. She is unclean for 1 week if a boy is born, 2 for a girl, and after this waiting period she must bring a burnt offering of lamb as well as either a pigeon or turtledove "sin offering" to the church.
Chapter 13 regards the treatment of lepers. Anyone with a scab on the skin is quarantined for a week. If it gets better, you're free to go. If you have it but it goes away, wash your clothes and put them in quarantine for a week. Chapter 14 is all about how to cure leprosy.
Chapter 15 uses the word "issue" repeatedly to cover any and all bases of fluid- blood, snot, drool- that come out of the human body and how all contact with it makes the object or person unclean. Of course I'm so immature I keep substituting "issue" with "semen" as I read.
15:19-30 depicts how a woman is unclean during menstruation. She is not to be touched, nor is anything she touches. Once her period is over she still must wait seven more days to be considered clean. Then she can go ahead and offer lambs and birds to the church. By this system a woman is only considered clean for half of a month at most.
Chapter 16 is all about weird atonement rituals that, under any other context, a normal Christian would call satanic.
And then we have good ol' chapter 18. Don't look at your relatives naked (18:6-15) Your brother's wife's naked body belongs to your brother. It his his nakedness (18:16)
Don't get relatives naked together even if you're not related to them (18:17-18)
You can't see your wife naked if she's menstruating (18:19)
Don't sleep with other dudes or animals if you are a man, and a woman isn't allowed to let an animal have sex with her (18:22-23) The only thing I like here is that they don't explicitly say two women shouldn't sleep together. Even back then they knew lesbians were awesome.
Out of all these things listed, why is the treatment of homosexuals really the only thing that has lasted, and even outside a religious context? I've had it told to me in school that it is America's Judeo-Christian history, but most of our founding fathers were deists at worst. Is it because we think, deep down, that it is unnatural? Surely homosexuality is a deviance that occurs only withing the sexual perversion of the human mind. Not so. There are a reported 1,500 species that exhibit homosexual behavior(2). This includes sex and spans all the way to parenting. A pair of male black swans will form a temporary three way relationship with a female until she produces eggs, and then scare her off.
Of course, nature is no basis for extrapolating human morality, but I am not debating whether homosexuality is right or wrong, only if it is a biological, inheritable trait. Many people think being gay or lesbian is all in the mind, that one can be conditioned out of it. If this were true, it is my opinion that it would not occur in animals at all (or maybe just in the ones that have higher mental capacities such as dolphins, which actually engage in non-reproductive group sex- meaning they stimulate the genitals of others with their flippers, noses, etc for pleasure(2). Fascinating!)
With all the other biologically occurring "atrocities" that occur in life, such as mental handicaps and other birth defects like anencephaly, why do we pick homosexuality as something to be stomped out? Clay Aiken can't help being gay any more than Trig Palin can stop being retarded.
----
Sources
(1) Anti-gay Calif. state senator: I'm gay
Associated Press. Mar 9 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35781534/ns/us_news-life/
(2) Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and
Natural Diversity, St. Martin's Press, 1999;
Recently Republican senator Roy Ashburn, who adamantly voted against gay rights, was caught drunk driving from a gay bar in Sacramento last week. For a while there was some speculation as to whether or not he had been at the bar and whether or not he was actually homosexual. Today I read an article on the MSNBC(1) stating that this man had publicly apologized for endangering people by driving under the influence, but also admitting that he was gay.
This man is a married senator, father of four. And yet, he had the courage to say "Yes. I am gay." Many people in his position would admit to drunk driving and perhaps make up some shoddy excuse as to their presence at the gay bar or deny it entirely. This man, who voted against a day honoring Harvey Milk, against recognizing out of state marriages (which I think is unconstitutional under faith and full credit but is irrelevant) admitted he was gay.
The actions of Senator Ashburn are a prime example of the sort of self-hating behavior homosexual people will exercise. The abject hatred, shame, or sorrow caused by this fundamental, undeniable aspect of themselves seems, to me, to cause absolute rejection and even fear toward any who identify as homosexual. Homophobia is an intensely irrational thing, but horribly sad as well. Often times its just a cover up, especially with men. If a man is accepting of homosexual behavior, he may think people assume he is homosexual as well. Instead they feign repulsion- or truly believe that those feelings of nonacceptance should be the norm for everybody. Its emasculating to be homosexual, so to preserve machismo homosexuals are shunned like lepers.
However, leprosy isn't really that big a deal any more. If you lived around 550 BC, it was, and so was homosexuality. In fact, they're even listed in the same book of The Bible only 3 chapters apart! The words on same-sex relationships, though, are almost the only thing modern American society really holds to out of Leviticus. Chapter 11:5-28 lists all that we can and can't eat- outlawed are pigs, rabbits, and shrimp. Chapter 12 lists the purification ritual for a woman after she bares a child. She is unclean for 1 week if a boy is born, 2 for a girl, and after this waiting period she must bring a burnt offering of lamb as well as either a pigeon or turtledove "sin offering" to the church.
Chapter 13 regards the treatment of lepers. Anyone with a scab on the skin is quarantined for a week. If it gets better, you're free to go. If you have it but it goes away, wash your clothes and put them in quarantine for a week. Chapter 14 is all about how to cure leprosy.
Chapter 15 uses the word "issue" repeatedly to cover any and all bases of fluid- blood, snot, drool- that come out of the human body and how all contact with it makes the object or person unclean. Of course I'm so immature I keep substituting "issue" with "semen" as I read.
15:19-30 depicts how a woman is unclean during menstruation. She is not to be touched, nor is anything she touches. Once her period is over she still must wait seven more days to be considered clean. Then she can go ahead and offer lambs and birds to the church. By this system a woman is only considered clean for half of a month at most.
Chapter 16 is all about weird atonement rituals that, under any other context, a normal Christian would call satanic.
And then we have good ol' chapter 18. Don't look at your relatives naked (18:6-15) Your brother's wife's naked body belongs to your brother. It his his nakedness (18:16)
Don't get relatives naked together even if you're not related to them (18:17-18)
You can't see your wife naked if she's menstruating (18:19)
Don't sleep with other dudes or animals if you are a man, and a woman isn't allowed to let an animal have sex with her (18:22-23) The only thing I like here is that they don't explicitly say two women shouldn't sleep together. Even back then they knew lesbians were awesome.
Out of all these things listed, why is the treatment of homosexuals really the only thing that has lasted, and even outside a religious context? I've had it told to me in school that it is America's Judeo-Christian history, but most of our founding fathers were deists at worst. Is it because we think, deep down, that it is unnatural? Surely homosexuality is a deviance that occurs only withing the sexual perversion of the human mind. Not so. There are a reported 1,500 species that exhibit homosexual behavior(2). This includes sex and spans all the way to parenting. A pair of male black swans will form a temporary three way relationship with a female until she produces eggs, and then scare her off.
Of course, nature is no basis for extrapolating human morality, but I am not debating whether homosexuality is right or wrong, only if it is a biological, inheritable trait. Many people think being gay or lesbian is all in the mind, that one can be conditioned out of it. If this were true, it is my opinion that it would not occur in animals at all (or maybe just in the ones that have higher mental capacities such as dolphins, which actually engage in non-reproductive group sex- meaning they stimulate the genitals of others with their flippers, noses, etc for pleasure(2). Fascinating!)
With all the other biologically occurring "atrocities" that occur in life, such as mental handicaps and other birth defects like anencephaly, why do we pick homosexuality as something to be stomped out? Clay Aiken can't help being gay any more than Trig Palin can stop being retarded.
----
Sources
(1) Anti-gay Calif. state senator: I'm gay
Associated Press. Mar 9 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35781534/ns/us_news-life/
(2) Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and
Natural Diversity, St. Martin's Press, 1999;
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Thoughts for March 6, 2010
I wrote this nice long schpeil while sitting on my porch at 11 AM, amazed that such a feat could be comfortably done this early in March in Michigan.
---
So, I decided to start thinking about the world and things in it. It seems a majority of the people in my community refuse to, or it just hasn't occurred to them to do it. Most likely it's out of protection for their easily shattered world view, and that's a large part of why I'm no longer a religious person. I'm inquisitive, I like to think and I find logic a major delight of our reality. Once logic is worked into religion it just doesn't hold together, but this discovery was very gradual for me. Logic slowly weaseled its way into my constricted mind, breaking to bits all the pious mold that had gathered over the years. This easing in to atheism made it much easier to accept, the alternative of a sudden realization is much too damaging. Imagine a flash of lightening, and all of a sudden it becomes apparent that every facet of this belief system is nothing but an elaborate lie perpetuated by centuries of scare tactics.
That's an excellent reason why religion is so persistent. It had far humbler beginnings, of course. So many years ago, and still today, we as humans were trying to grasp and comprehend the world around us. Before modern science all that was available was speculation. God began as a hypothesis. It rains, so something has to cause it (I love that here we still have logic, even though the conclusion isn't the best ancient man's mind was in the right place.) A generally accepted consensus was the existence of beings like ourselves, but more powerful and out of our reach. Back in the days of the Sumerian Ziggurats in what is now modern day Iran that was a perfectly viable explanation. Now it's just a shame that years upon years of scientific progression was not enough to disprove the God Hypothesis.
Can you really expect people to kill God so easily? Charles Darwin's contemporaries thought he had. His theory of evolution took out the need for a creator and replaced it with a series of minute changes that occurred over millions of years, generations, mutations and failures. I find it odd that something so provable is still referred to as a theory while something that completely lacks any trace of physical evidence is considered nigh-universal fact. It seems to me that this problem stems from the people who think God is the truth. They don't entirely comprehend evolution, which brings me back to the beginning paragraph. It isn't a difficult concept, but once they begin to understand it God begins to die. They'd rather cling to this ancient security blanket than open their minds to the possibility that maybe God is wrong.
But God, or at least the guys the Christian God roped into writing the 2nd best selling book after the Ikea catalog, has this marvelous little loophole going for him. He can't really be definitively proven or disproven. Even lacking hard evidence, there's still a chance that after death we are greeted by St. Peter, God and some guy called John Smith (really, Mormons?) And lacking solid evidence is even better for God, it turns out. Religion hinges entirely on a person's willingness to cease thinking about anything else and blindly follow it. This practice is called "faith," and without it, I've been told, God is nothing. So, God refuses to be proven by his very essence and we just kind of have to, ahem, take it on faith that He's waiting for us after we kick the bucket. A lot of people believe in God out of pure selfish desire- if you don't believe in God and he turns out to exist, you end up in Hell. Incidentally, even if you do believe in God and forget to repent for a sin before you die, you go to Hell anyway (so much for being a forgiving God.) Of course, nobody at all knows what happens after we die. Because we are self aware (and self-centered) creatures, we don't think "nothing," is an adequate answer. God can't be proven, though, until he decides to make it egregiously obvious, and by doing so he eliminates all need for faith, thus voiding his own existence. If you liked that last sentence I suggest you go read Douglas Adams' The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, from which I loosely paraphrased (Mr. Adams wrote it far more eloquently and humorously.)
In summary, God is like the fairies in the movie "Hook," Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Boogey Man. Once you stop believing in them they no longer exist, and no one older than seven years should think they're real.
---
So, I decided to start thinking about the world and things in it. It seems a majority of the people in my community refuse to, or it just hasn't occurred to them to do it. Most likely it's out of protection for their easily shattered world view, and that's a large part of why I'm no longer a religious person. I'm inquisitive, I like to think and I find logic a major delight of our reality. Once logic is worked into religion it just doesn't hold together, but this discovery was very gradual for me. Logic slowly weaseled its way into my constricted mind, breaking to bits all the pious mold that had gathered over the years. This easing in to atheism made it much easier to accept, the alternative of a sudden realization is much too damaging. Imagine a flash of lightening, and all of a sudden it becomes apparent that every facet of this belief system is nothing but an elaborate lie perpetuated by centuries of scare tactics.
That's an excellent reason why religion is so persistent. It had far humbler beginnings, of course. So many years ago, and still today, we as humans were trying to grasp and comprehend the world around us. Before modern science all that was available was speculation. God began as a hypothesis. It rains, so something has to cause it (I love that here we still have logic, even though the conclusion isn't the best ancient man's mind was in the right place.) A generally accepted consensus was the existence of beings like ourselves, but more powerful and out of our reach. Back in the days of the Sumerian Ziggurats in what is now modern day Iran that was a perfectly viable explanation. Now it's just a shame that years upon years of scientific progression was not enough to disprove the God Hypothesis.
Can you really expect people to kill God so easily? Charles Darwin's contemporaries thought he had. His theory of evolution took out the need for a creator and replaced it with a series of minute changes that occurred over millions of years, generations, mutations and failures. I find it odd that something so provable is still referred to as a theory while something that completely lacks any trace of physical evidence is considered nigh-universal fact. It seems to me that this problem stems from the people who think God is the truth. They don't entirely comprehend evolution, which brings me back to the beginning paragraph. It isn't a difficult concept, but once they begin to understand it God begins to die. They'd rather cling to this ancient security blanket than open their minds to the possibility that maybe God is wrong.
But God, or at least the guys the Christian God roped into writing the 2nd best selling book after the Ikea catalog, has this marvelous little loophole going for him. He can't really be definitively proven or disproven. Even lacking hard evidence, there's still a chance that after death we are greeted by St. Peter, God and some guy called John Smith (really, Mormons?) And lacking solid evidence is even better for God, it turns out. Religion hinges entirely on a person's willingness to cease thinking about anything else and blindly follow it. This practice is called "faith," and without it, I've been told, God is nothing. So, God refuses to be proven by his very essence and we just kind of have to, ahem, take it on faith that He's waiting for us after we kick the bucket. A lot of people believe in God out of pure selfish desire- if you don't believe in God and he turns out to exist, you end up in Hell. Incidentally, even if you do believe in God and forget to repent for a sin before you die, you go to Hell anyway (so much for being a forgiving God.) Of course, nobody at all knows what happens after we die. Because we are self aware (and self-centered) creatures, we don't think "nothing," is an adequate answer. God can't be proven, though, until he decides to make it egregiously obvious, and by doing so he eliminates all need for faith, thus voiding his own existence. If you liked that last sentence I suggest you go read Douglas Adams' The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, from which I loosely paraphrased (Mr. Adams wrote it far more eloquently and humorously.)
In summary, God is like the fairies in the movie "Hook," Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Boogey Man. Once you stop believing in them they no longer exist, and no one older than seven years should think they're real.
The first of many
Welcome friends, enemies and random internet patrons to 100 Solo. This is a spur-of-the-moment blog I plan to use to convey my daily thoughts on issues I'm not really allowed, by some unspoken societal more, to discuss. It's not going to be profane, but living on the street that currently holds the record for most churches in one mile (in America) means the sort of people I live around won't take kindly or intelligently to what I have to say. I'm all for open discussion, I am nowhere near an authority on anything at all and of course I'm bound to be wrong, misinformed or simply ignorant on some point or another. If you see an incorrect fact or simply feel the need to correct me, go ahead and do so. But, and here is where most of my peers disappoint me in their skills of discourse, please be at least civil about it. If any received comments are rude, condescending, overly profane or vulgar they will be ignored or deleted.
This won't be about my life, for the most part. It isn't a diary, just a collection of my thoughts as I take note of them throughout the days. Be prepared for social commentary, snide comments, and controversial subject matter. I try to keep an open mind and I encourage readers and commenters to do the same, otherwise nobody really learns anything.
This won't be about my life, for the most part. It isn't a diary, just a collection of my thoughts as I take note of them throughout the days. Be prepared for social commentary, snide comments, and controversial subject matter. I try to keep an open mind and I encourage readers and commenters to do the same, otherwise nobody really learns anything.
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