To Believe is to Believe

No amount of belief will make something a fact.

--James Randi

Human brains are hard-wired to make connections and form conclusions that become beliefs. The weird thing is that we don't really get to choose what we believe; well, not so much as a conscious decision as choosing what to wear each day. Indirectly, it does seem that we can open our minds to new information, causing internal conflict which may or may not get resolved as a change in belief.

Take, for instance the 2013 case of Republican Senator Rob Portman's views on gay marriage. As a Republican, he was obligated to tow the line on defence of 'traditional' marriage. His personal views on the matter were likely in line with the party views as well. His world gets shaken up when his son reveals he is gay. Two years of cognitive dissonance and then the Senator announces that he supports gay marriage. This could have played out in a number of ways. Some people disown children that lead lives that are different than their own. Others attempt to ignore the elephant in the room and pretend that their own reality is the one true reality. But Senator Portman's stance on gay marriage changed. He said, "Ultimately, for me, it came down to the Bible's overarching themes of love and compassion and my belief that we are all children of God." The fact of the matter is that we are all humans, whether or not you believe that we are children of any god. We should treat our fellow humans with respect and allow them every right that we would like to enjoy ourselves. You know, the Golden Rule (and the Silver Rule too.)

But sometimes it is hard to see the end game because of our own blindness. What blinds us? Belief. Belief is an irrational mess of neural connections in the brain that causes a person to link some concept with the notion of truth. It is the neural equivalent of a logical identity. It does not require any proof; it just IS. We fill our brains with these beliefs with one informing and changing the next, the whole of which becomes the basis for our world view. The world view filters and influences every new concept and event that enters the brain. These new filtered thoughts then affect our world view; sometimes reinforcing it, sometimes tearing it down for realignment. But it all boils down to the fact that our brains are squishy and fuzzy when it comes to logic and rationality; these two concepts rarely have much sway when we are encountering new ideas. Mostly we believe what we believe because we believe what we believe. People with degrees in this field call this confirmation bias.

So you see, to believe is to believe; it has nothing to do with facts, logic, rational conclusions, or reality. But just because you believe something does not make it a fact.

Once I understood the concept of confirmation bias, I was able to start to see instances where my own beliefs were influencing me, causing me to reject logical or otherwise rational thought because it did not mesh with my current belief system. And then as you know it all fell apart (i.e. my religious foundations crumbled) and I had to start questioning all my beliefs to see if they were founded in reality or if they were floating, supporting themselves by the power of confirmation bias. But I am in a better place now, mentally. I don't have to juggle so many things and my shelf, the things I have questions about, is much less about god and religion and more about life, the universe, and everything. This is not to say that I have conquered confirmation bias; that is not possible. My brain is still every bit as irrational and squishy as it ever was, but now I am much more open to the idea that my belief system might be systemically wrong. Maybe now, you might say that I have to take the periodic effort to prune my belief garden, looking for un-rooted beliefs and moving them over to the unfounded idea museum where live the invisible pink unicorn, Santa Claus, fairies, and yes, all the gods.

Freezing Roasted Coffee Beans

I have searched high and low for reliable information about storing coffee beans post roast. This is a time when the highly volatile compounds in the coffee quickly oxidize and otherwise change into not-so-tasty compounds. If you are anything like me, your coffee consumption cannot keep up with drinking 12oz or 16oz of freshly roasted coffee beans each day. And I don't have the tools/time/sanction/desire to roast beans daily at home. So unless I can retrofit my car to roast beans to perfection using engine heat during the commute and then grind and brew the coffee at work, I am having a hard time coming up with ideas on how I can get that fresh-roasted flavor using beans that are not actually freshly roasted. Maybe I need to think outside the box a little more.

This is the scheme I have come up with:

1. Buy a pound of fresh-roasted coffee
2. Split the coffee into daily portions in small canning jars (4oz)
3. Put the jars in the freezer
4. Pull the the jars out one-by-one on the day of use
5. Grind the coffee beans
6. Brew the coffee
7. Enjoy the nearly fresh-roasted quality of coffee for up to 3 weeks past roasting time.

So far (I am at the beginning of the third week of my first trial using this method,) I have found the coffee stored in this manner to be nearly as good as fresh-roasted coffee. Not exactly the same, but light years beyond roasted beans merely stored in a sealed can on the shelf. It is not bitter. I can drink it straight up or mix it with milk or soy milk without the need to add lots of sugar or milkfat to cut the bitter.

Prior to this set up, I was freezing a week's worth of beans in a jar. Monday was pretty good, Tuesday was tolerable, Wednesday was not so hot, Thursday and Friday were not good at all. Week one was better than week two and so on. So I can attest to freezing having some deleterious effect on the beans. Since I am not opening, closing, exposing frozen beans to moisture and/or air, the quality seems to hold fairly well. I have not done side-by-side blind samples with fresh beans or anything like that, because I am almost certain I would be able to tell the difference. Especially by Friday of week three. But like I said at the top, I do not drink enough coffee each day to be able to buy fresh-roasted beans every day, so this is a compromise between quality and economy. And I think it is a fairly good solution for the time being.

My dream coffee machine would take in beans for a single use. It would roast them, grind them, and then brew them according to my desires that day. Why doesn't my dream coffee machine exist yet? Somebody get on that!

Beyond Mere Replication

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination.

--Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

By nature, all organisms will tend to look out for their own (genes) best interest. That is what The Selfish Gene is all about. It is not about a gene that makes organisms selfish, but rather how the genes will ultimately program organisms to better replicate themselves. Not that genes have that kind of foresight, but it is more of a trial and error, feedback-reinforced cycle that we call natural selection. Basically, genes that fail to propagate to the next generation will not be seen again. Replicate or die.

In many cases this causes the organisms themselves to behave in rather selfish manners. This includes humans. But as humans, we are among the few species that might possibly rise above this selfish gene-level programming to be better individuals and better as a whole.

"I'm gonna tell Dad." "I share no kinship with that individual!"

--SMBC episode 3101 by Zach Weiner

Life as a 'higher' organism, whatever that may mean, implies to me that our concern should be more than just what our genetics would dictate. In the cited SMBC episode, the mother says that she has no kinship with her child's father. While she has no kinship with the father, she has a vested interest in keeping him around so he can contribute energy in ensuring success of THEIR offspring. But maybe it rings more true in this comic strip because the mother now has a cloned daughter that carries 100% of her DNA, so there is not as much need for the sexually produced daughter that only carries 50% of her DNA. We don't currently have a way for people to clone themselves commercially, so our most selfish of desires (to live forever, either ourselves or through our DNA legacy) cannot be fulfilled quite yet. But I digress....

Our legacy is carried on through our offspring which each carry 50% of our DNA. Because the portion carried may overlap, there is no way to guarantee that all of our DNA is copied into our children, but obviously the more kids we have the higher the probability that we have not missed any of our DNA. But what I would like to argue is that it is not just our kids that carry our DNA. Each of our parents shares half our DNA. And our aunts and uncles share a quarter, as do our grandparents and grandchildren. Our first cousins share one-eighth of our DNA. Or wait, they share 99.99% of our DNA. What am I thinking?!? We are all HUMAN, which means we all share 99.99% of our DNA. Hell, we share 99.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees, and we don't even count them as humans. What I am trying to get at here is that we have moved the US and THEM line too far up the tree. If we push it back just to the point that separates us from the rest of Mammalia, then that leaves a big US. Like almost seven billion of us. Say it again.... There are almost seven billion of *us*. You and I are one kind. You and I may not have the same mother, but we are siblings. Nearly identical in every way except those that don't count (hair color, skin color, eye color, height, weight, strength, etc.)

This is our chance to take that step, to learn ourselves what it means to be inclusive, to teach our kids to love humankind, each and every one. There is no reason for killing. There is not reason for violence. There is no reason for hurt. Realization of who we are (NOT sons and daughters of a vengeful god), brother, sister, mother, father, all of the same family, can lead to a world of peace, a world where we can grow and become much more than mere replication could have ever imagined.

In Science We Trust

How can you trust quantum mechanics, if you haven’t done the requisite experiments yourself? ... Or how can you trust that the government isn’t putting mind-control drugs into the fruit you buy in the supermarket, etc. etc.

--Scott Aaronson

Along these lines, how can we know that God exists? Or Santa, or the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy. If you were anything like me, you figured out that the latter three were stories that your parents told you when you were young because they were part of your culture. You may have asked the right questions to figure it out or maybe a friend or sibling dropped the bomb and your world kind of unraveled for a bit. You may have needed to push a little farther to see exactly how much of your life up to that point was merely a lie.


When all your friends at school forsake Santa, the first is seen as the smartest of the bunch because he or she figured it out. Yet when someone forsakes God, it is a different story altogether. Anathema. Dissociation of friends and family. What is the difference here? Is it that God really exists and Santa doesn't? How can one make that claim? Scott Aaronson hit on the answer that sounds reasonable to me:

So we’re extremely lucky that science hit on a solution to these problems—the only workable solution, really—back in the 17th century. The solution is to open up every question to scrutiny, discussion, and challenge by any interested person. Assertions gain credibility by surviving public criticism—and that’s just as true in math as it is in experimental sciences. I believe many theorems even though I haven’t checked the proofs myself, because I know that if there were an error, then someone else could’ve made a name for themselves by finding it.

I didn't figure out that God was no different than the Santa Claus, but why? Because everyone else around me believed in God too. Maybe they were Catholic or Presbyterian instead of Mormon, but it's the same God. I didn't figure it out so soon because early on, all my elders believed in God (but not Santa Claus) so it was acceptable (and somewhat expected) for me to believe. If I had been born in Iran, I would no doubt have believed the good word of Islam (one variety or another).

If you move a continent or two over, you will find that their God may not by your God. Since both are making the claim that they are the one and only true God (I mean really, who wants to worship a God that says other gods are cool too), at maximum, only one of them can be true. It is still possible that neither are true. If we take all the gods of humankind and sit them in a room with each other, then use this idea that only one of a pair of them can be true until we have reduced the room to only one god, which god would that be? Then we take it a step further and invite someone into the room that does not recognize that god as his or her God and suddenly there are no gods in the room. Just like with science, we crowd source the best solution by having all interested parties attempt to debunk and find holes in theories, we have used the people from all over the world to show that none of the gods are the one and only true God. What are we left with then? Teapots, flying high in orbit, painted with invisible unicorns.

What are we really left with if nobody can really show that any supernatural power exists? Nature. How do we explain nature? Science. How can we trust in science? Test it again and again. Poke holes in it and disprove it where possible. Every time we tear down a theory or hypothesis, we count down one fewer thing that might be true. As each theory and hypothesis is confirmed by another test, we put one more nail in the coffin of the gods. Because the theories are repeatable and not merely the 'revealed truth' from god, others can experiment and show that they are real. No religion can do the same for their gods or beliefs.

Thus, in science we trust.

Q.E.D.

American Gods

This is a bad land for gods.... The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either you've been forgotten, or you're scared you're going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you're just getting tired of existing on the whim of people.

--Shadow in American Gods by Neil Gaiman

American Gods was a really fun read. I like the strange world that Neil Gaiman came up with. Or was he just writing the reality that he saw? That is what I would like to discuss here. Ever since the possibility that God may not be what I think He is, I started to wonder why religion and gods exist at all. This story explains many of my thoughts in a very artful way.

Gods started out as a way to explain all the things.

 At some point in our prehistory, one of our ancestors found the mental capacity to think about something besides survival; food, protection, and reproduction. They had questions like: why lightning? or what after death? or cause of random event? Maybe the first questions were even more basic than these. "Some external power makes it so" seems to be a reasonable answer when you don't have any other answer. As one person told another person this idea, it spread like wildfire because there was no evidence to the contrary.

People believe. It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.

--Shadow in American Gods by Neil Gaiman

We believe not because we want to believe, but because the evidence compels us to believe. It would have made my life a lot easier to just believe that God exists and not deal with the fallout with my believing family, but the evidence compelled me to believe that there probably (very, very, very likely) is no god, thus my exodus from religion. But when fire still seems like magic, and lightning can only be explained by supernatural powers, believing in a god only makes sense.

There are fewer things that need explaining.

 The gods (and mostly Yahweh, because he was the main God in the region at that time) started to loose their mighty grasp on the minds of their creators sometime around the Renaissance. People started to think, reason, and understand; science started to explain the mysteries of God. Copernicus, in my opinion, though he was a Christian, pried back the first finger of God, allowing later freethinkers to finish Him off. Stating that the earth is NOT the center of the universe starts one thinking about why God would have created humankind, the pinnacle of His creation, off to the side, putting the sun at the center of our galaxy instead. So maybe we aren't as important as we thought? As science and reason advanced, we found that lightning (and all weather in general) is not caused by a vengeful or loving god, but rather it is a natural part of the earth's ecosystem, water cycle, etc. The same goes for earthquakes and volcanoes, tsunamis and hurricanes. Not a vengeful god that is trying to punish us, but rather the earth, doing what it does without malice or forethought. Medicine has come a long way from humours and leeches to antibiotics and DNA sequencing. Thanks to Darwin, humankind no longer has reason to doubt that we are cousins to every living thing on earth.

Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.

--American Gods by Neil Gaiman

The gods are going extinct.

It would take hours to list all the things that were once ascribed to gods that we now have non-supernatural reasons for. The tenacious grip of god has turned tenuous. The gods of yesteryear are merely the stuff of myth and legend today. If it were not for the vast quantity of writing and digital caching of the Internet, they would fade away even faster. For this same reason, it seems that Yahweh (and Allah for that matter, though they are really just two names for the same God) have had a strong grip on the world because their stories are immortalized in the written word.

If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father....

--American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Someday, I expect, that even though it says in the writing that those books of scripture are the word of God written by his holy prophets, people will come to realize that it is just a story (and not a very good one at that). They will realize that religion is a metaphor, a tool that was used to calm the doubts and fears of the masses to allow civilization to flourish.

What is religion anyway?

Yes, I believe that we are genetically inclined to believe in religion. I think that Richard Dawkins has some great points in The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.  I think that religion evolved as a social mechanism to help mankind form societies where intelligence, peace and prosperity could thrive, thus further separating us from our cousins and reaffirming the dominance of our species. But, as Dawkins says in The Selfish Gene, "Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends." This is one of the dangers of religion: leaders wielding their power for their own ends, usually with detrimental effect to many others. Now that science has squeezed all the gods into the cracks of the unknown, another one of the issues I have with religion is that it reinforces ignorance and praises blind faith. I find it hilarious that many Mormons (members and leaders) are terrified of reading "anti-Mormon literature" because it can pull you away from the true teachings of the church. Yet, if there are things that are that dangerous to your "truths" you may want to examine those truths again to see if they match up with reality.

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.

--The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

As terrible as the phrase sounds (and I think the pointed wording was on purpose, because we all know that Richard Dawkins is an ass), it really rings true to me. I believed as a child with all my heart in the truth of the gospel as taught by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I knew it was true because I was taught that it was true. I had become a carrier to pass it onto my children as well. And I did. Isn't that how viruses spread? Or how 'viral marketing' works? One person to the next because of how great it is. When you are a believer, your religion is the one true religion and it is great, so you want to pass it on. The newly indoctrinated take over the cause and make it their own.

Now if religion did no harm, I would not have so much problem with it. But you saw how the gods in American Gods fought each other. Their subjects do as well. They are commanded by their gods to conquer other unbelieving nations and impose the good word on the infidels. Nearly universally, they oppress women and homosexuals (and every other minority). Because of this, I am somewhat anti-religious. Yes they do great good, but until we can convince the leaders of these religions of the need for HUMANITY, that there is no "us and them," that we should not be fighting, but helping, lifting up instead of oppressing, most all religions should be torn down.

Now I get off my high horse.

100 Reasons Why Dr. Hovind is Stupid

Sorry for the title, I know that is a straw man attack, but in his own words, he should be calling himself stupid. Really, though, the things Dr. Hovind preaches are ridiculously stupid. All of this to prove that his book of scripture is true.

Recently, I watched 100 Reasons Why Evolution is So Stupid, a talk by Dr. Kent Hovind given in Coeur d'Alene, ID, sometime ago. What a joke! Apparently he thinks that if he makes stupid little jokes then people will believe whatever he says. Even as a lay person in the world of science (geology, biology, and physics), I was able to debunk almost all of his arguments as he brought them up. The things people will believe! People living alongside dinosaurs. Ha!

Then I read How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments? by Dave Maston. Now we have some real arguments.

I can't stand the way young earth creationists attempt to use "science" to prove their stance is correct. The biggest blunder is that they seem to cling onto the one, obviously incorrect piece of evidence that does not fit with the rest of the very cohesive mountain of evidence. My biggest laugh was all the incorrectly radiometric dating blunders; living mollusks that are millions of years old, etc.

Anyway, if you are up for a good laugh and have a bit of spare time, give those two a shot.

Root of All Belief

I am at root a physical thinker and learner, but when that is not possible, I think my next best learning language is visual. I can't listen to people drone on and expect to learn half of what is expected. I didn't have a physical representation of God, revelation, the spirit, priesthood, etc., to see how it all related, so how better to know what I believe that to map it out visually.

I planned this great little application (originally php, later javascript) that would allow me to add 'Tenets' and relate them to each other logically (IF -> THEN, AND, OR, NOT, etc.) to make a web of belief. It was a great idea, but really flawed at its root: I didn't have absolute knowledge of much at all in which to ground my beliefs; I really only had a belief with some certainty.

It turns out that I was not the first one to come up with the idea of probabilistic logic. When I read about it, I was amazed at how well it fit my problem. All I had to do was make my Tenets application into a probabilistic logic network. Then I could see how much I really believe.

By this time, I had already pretty much come to the conclusion that my beliefs were all rooted in the idea that God exists. If God exists, it would make sense that God would want to create wonders (earth, the universe, and mankind) and would want to talk to us through revelation. Mormon theology is deeply rooted in revelation; prophetic and personal. From there, we get all other manner of beliefs: priesthood, miracles, ordinances, church organization, etc. We can trace it all back to God. If God doesn't exist, then it is all moot. Thus my radical change from a believing Mormon to an atheist, agnostic, or whatever. It's not that I found a religion that explains my purpose better, it is that I don't believe in ANY religion. As Dawkins put it, I had already stopped believing in all the other gods (thought of them as nice, interesting, or weird myths) and just took it one step further to stop believing in the last god that I had held onto since my childhood.

Since I had ruled out the root of all belief, my religious views crumbled and I kind of found my Tenets application no longer necessary. But I was thinking that someday it might be nice to revisit and put scientific discovery in where God once was. How do I explain the universe now? Someday when I get around to it, I will dust off my javascript skillz and make something cool.

The Impossibility of Atheism

Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

--Isaac Asimov

Logically speaking, it is impossible to prove the non-existence of something. Or is it? Where is the logical flaw in:

1. If A then not B
2. A
3. Not B

Where A is some natural phenomenon, B is the existence of God.

All we have do is find something that is incongruous with the existence of God and poof! God formally no longer exists. Philosophically speaking, I am in way over my head here.  People have been working on this problem for thousands of years. So really all this does is show that my thoughts really aren't any higher than your thoughts.

The book "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" gives way better proofs than I could come up with. Well, it rebuts all the proofs for the existence of God that are very clever, showing that none of them hold water. But still, none of them prove that God does not exist. It just shows how hard it is to prove that God does exist (even though logically speaking, that is supposed to be the easier case to prove.)

In the end, I don't think it is necessary to prove one way or the other. God has failed to give sufficient proof of his/her/its existence and science has done a great job of providing evidence that God did not take part in X physical law. Or more correctly, science has provided evidence that God was not required to take part in X physical law. When I look at the human eye, I see a very flawed, yet quite wondrous organ. But when a intelligent design believer looks at the human eye, they see the hand of God. We see what we want to see, believe what reinforces what we already believe and leave the rest of it outside our boxes.

So I think I will join Isaac Asimov and say that for all intents and purposes I am an atheist. If God really wants people to believe, he/she/it will have to do a lot better job of providing evidence of existence. And don't tell me that God can't provide evidence of existence without taking away our agency. An all-powerful, all-knowing, omni-present God should certainly be able to provide a way. If not, they lack the power to convince me.

Telling Mom: Revisited

Mom, it's okay. I'm okay. I'm an atheist.

--The Thinking Atheist

This is the sort of conversation I had with my mother in person. It hurts more than words can say. People can say terrible thing (me included) in situations like these. I wish sometimes that it hadn't gone down like it did. I hope when my kids come to me with something, I can react differently.

Yes this is staged, but it rings so true.

Cell-icide: drawing a line in the sands of abortion

What bothers me is that if a rover
on Mars discovered a single cell organism,
the science world would be abuzz
about the discovery of life.

But discover a single cell organism
in the human uterus, and they refuse
to recognize it as life.

Hypocrites.

--Repeated again and again on the internet

I recently saw (for the thousandth time) this comment on Facebook. This pro-life argument lacks steam because it's not that I don't recognize the fertilized egg in a uterus as life, it's that I don't recognize that it is human. So terminating its life is no different to me than pulling a carrot from the ground, using anti-bacterial hand wash or squishing a mosquito. The true hypocrites in this are those that refuse an abortion to 'save a life' when the mother may die or the child, when born, may die an early death anyway from some terrible debilitating disease. Who are you to sentence a mother to death or another human to lead a life that he never would have chosen to live?

I think we can all agree that killing humans is bad. The big question then becomes, "What is a human?" The North Dakota 'Personhood Amendment' would define that a fertilized egg, or zygote, is human and therefore unlawful to abort. I think they could go farther. Even human egg cells are alive. They respirate just like any other human cell. Human sperm cells are alive as well. In some religions it is already unlawful according to God's laws to 'spill seed' or masturbate. Enlisting a federal ban on masturbation might help prevent killing all these innocent sperm. We should also take this procreation debate one step further and ensure that no human egg cells are wasted; we should ban menstruation. It would be required for all women of menstruating age to become pregnant to prevent the loss of the precious life of these human eggs.

Sound a little bit crazy to you? Me too.

I don't know a man alive who would vote on a *secret ballot* for a ban on masturbation in order to 'save seed.' Maybe publicly they would support a ban, but not when it comes down to the actual vote.  And I am sure that all pro-life women would support a ban on menstruation requiring them to be constantly pregnant to save their eggs from certain doom and destruction.

Let's get real. We need to draw a line in the sand, but let's do it with logic, not emotion; science, not god.

What IS the difference between the amoeba on Mars and a human zygote? Potential. The amoeba will not grow into a multi-cellular, intelligent, life form. I am going to pull a fast one and swap out that amoeba for a chimpanzee zygote. Now, both will grow into multi-cellular, intelligent, life forms. The only difference is that one will grow into a human and the other a chimpanzee. Since we kill chimpanzees all the time, it is okay to abort a chimpanzee embryo. Wait! We kill humans all the time too....

If we use DNA to compare the difference between the human and chimpanzee zygotes, we find that we share 98.7% of our DNA in common with chimpanzees. So we are really close. At the zygote, blastocyst and embryo stages, I am pretty sure that it would be impossible to tell a chimpanzee from a human. Well other than the obvious fact that chimpanzee embryos grow in a chimpanzee uterus. It should be possible to find some point at which it is obvious that a human fetus is really a human fetus by observation.

Just because it looks like a human does not necessarily make the thing a human. Can it sustain life outside of the uterus? If no, I would still argue that it still has a parasitic relationship with its host. Why didn't I say mother? Because theoretically we could come up with some machine that could serve as a host to a fetus. Doctors can already keep a fetus alive long before the 40-week mark.

We can take this too far in the other direction too, though. A one-year-old child cannot survive on his own. He requires food, shelter, protection, and love. That sounds like a parasitic relationship to me. So really only independent adults are human. You don't like your needy teenager? Abort him!

It turns out that we can really draw a line in the sand anywhere from pre-conception through early adulthood. Almost all using the same logic. The saddest part of this is that while we debate this, people are dying; people are getting killed. Abortion clinics are getting bombed. Teenage girls are dying from back-alley abortions gone wrong. Where is the humanity. I don't care if you believe in a god or not. Do you love your fellow humans? Maybe you don't believe that it is right to have an abortion. So don't have an abortion. But understand that maybe someone else has a different point of view on what a human is. Maybe you are not human to them.

Personally, I don't believe that abortion is a good practice. If you don't want to have a baby, don't have unprotected sex. But I can't fault a person for drawing the line at 10 or 20 weeks because I really don't know if that is a human yet. Because there is so much gray area in this matter, it is hard to say exactly where to draw the line. I don't want to snuff out human life, but I don't yet really understand what it means to be human. I am on a journey of learning to find that answer for myself. In the mean time, I don't plan on killing anybody: pro-life or pro-choice.

Green Tea and Nachos

We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding. Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.

--David Richo

I needed to use the facilities. I walk to the nearest location, but lo and behold, they are closed for cleaning.  I turn around and hit the down button on the elevator. I was planning on only going down one floor, but a lady walks up to use the elevator too. Guessing that it is more likely that she is headed to the ground floor, I press that button because there are facilities that I can use on the ground floor too, right next to the elevators.  Once I have finished with my business, I head to the café, thinking that while I am down there, maybe I can grab a cup of tea and let my brain unwind a bit. Tea instead of coffee both because of the hour and because if I choose green tea, it is zero calories instead of half-and-half plus sugar in my coffee. I get a cup of green tea (which tastes like alfalfa hay in my opinion,) and run into a co-worker while waiting for the tea to steep. We talk for 15 minutes, during which time I empty my cup. As we are leaving, it turns out that the café has out a table with complementary DIY nachos. I can't say no to free nachos. I get some. So green tea and nachos for me because I had to use the facilities at exactly the time they were closed and happened to have a fellow elevator passenger that was probably headed for the first floor.

Was I meant to get tea and nachos today or was it just a coincidence? No matter what you believe, I thought it was an interesting cascading chain of events.

Ethical Omnivore

I was poking around on the interwebs and found a New York Times article encouraging readers to write a 600-word essay on why eating meat is ethical.

I am only a year late for entering the contest, but I still felt compelled to write something.

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I was once a Christian who believed that God created mankind and gave us dominion over the beasts of the field.  We were to be good stewards over the earth; being kind to the animals and only using them prudently.  My family raised beef cows for food and as part of our family's livelihood.  There was nothing wrong with this picture.  When I grew older and realized that not all cows lead as happy lives as the ones I raised, I tried to buy meat only from local, more trusted sources instead of CAFOs.  I also started eating less meat when I realized how wasteful (in terms of energy) meat is compared to plants.  I was at peace with my food habits; eating mostly plants, but some meat too.

Then I lost God.

My basis of morality was suddenly no longer on the shoulders of an omniscient being; it was mine alone to bear.  When I realized that for the most part nothing changed, it was not too bad.  Then I realized that I am not a vegan.  I kill (or more correctly, pay others to kill) animals for my food.  Killing is wrong; that is one of my morals.  Knowing that my nine-year-old daughter has a way with reasoning, I put the question to her:  "Is it okay to kill animals for food?"  She answers without hesitation, "Yes.  They kill each other for food too."  So we can kill them, but they cannot kill us, I think to myself.  I ask, "Is it okay if an animal kills a human?"  Her head cocked to the side, with a quizzical look on her face, "Yes."  Obviously a stupid question.

From the mouth of my family's ethicist, it *is* okay to eat the flesh of other animals so long as they are allowed that same privilege.  When a mountain lion mauls your child and eats him for breakfast, there is no need for alarm.  Run!  Don't shoot unless you need to eat breakfast too.

Is eating meat unethical because it requires the death of another animal?  All animals die.  You are an animal and you will die too.  Eating plants requires us to kill living organisms too; does that make eating plants unethical?  A cow that lead a happy life, eating grass and resting in the shade of a tree does not care a whit what happens to his muscle tissue after he dies.  Really, what is so different between plants and animals?  We are all made of the same DNA.  We are all alive because of the energy of the sun.  We are all cousins; trees, fish, monkeys, humans, grass, lichens, etc.  If eating animal flesh is wrong, I would argue that eating plant flesh is every bit as wrong.

Or is eating meat wrong because we *kill* the animal?  If I were that cow, I would certainly rather die at the mercy of a gun than be torn apart by wolves.  Just because death by wolves happens in nature does not mean it is the best end.

I believe that you should be vegan not because it is more ethical, but because it is a more healthy lifestyle.

You know what really is unethical?  Treating animals poorly.  The pain and suffering that animals in so many CAFOs and slaughter houses go through is unethical.  A quick, painless death is not so unethical; it is the most that I can hope for when my time is at an end.

The Gay Gene

K0k bL0k  - a smart blog

I had a pretty early exposure to homosexuality due to my dad being gay. Long story short, the LDS church's policy at the time was that if you were leaning to the gay side of the path, get married and have kids and all that straight sex will get you on the right path. Eventually, my dad left his wife and children so he could pursue his gay lifestyle. (No hard feelings, read on, Dad.) While the LDS church no longer pushes this as the current 'cure' to being gay, the church certainly does not have a very gay-friendly environment; they say you can be gay as long as you don't act on your feelings.  Wow. That's so magnanimous.

When I was a kid, I believed that being gay was a choice. To be honest, I didn't really spend much time thinking about homosexuality, other than the strong link in my head to 'bad.' I didn't drink colas as a child because they were 'bad' too, but a modern analogy might be deciding on your favorite cola: most people like Coke, some like Pepsi, and even smaller numbers choose Dr. Pepper, RC, or cheap knock-offs. What I didn't see until my teenage years was the HUGE social stigma against homosexuality; even if being gay is just a choice, you don't get shunned by friends and family for choosing to drink a Pepsi. Not the same.

Well, if it were just colas, you can acquire a taste after a time. You could forget how you like that twist that Pepsi has as an aftertaste. The bold tang of Coke might persuade you to only drink Coke (especially if all the Pepsi was gone from the fridge.) Since being gay is NOT a choice, my dad's only real choice was to either live with the mental anguish of being squished into the straight box or to leave his family and be happy. My mother remarried and I had a wonderful childhood, so really, I think things turned out best for everyone involved. Now I have a good relationship with my gay dad.

In high school, we learned some about evolution and genetics. Enough to make ill-informed decisions, I think. I decided that homosexuality could most definitely not be genetic, and MUST be a choice. Why anyone would make that choice, I don't know, because it seems so weird from the straight side of the path (so says the 16 year-old Mormon brain). Plus, look at me, my siblings and I are all straight (insufficient empirical evidence.)

There very well could be a gay gene. Some scientists say that they have found one (a gene that is passed on from your mother) that is linked to "increased fecundity" in women. This would cause the women to be more attractive to men, have an easier time with childbirth, etc. If this gene has the side-effect of pushing men to the homosexual side of the path, it still helps the mother have more children, thus increasing her chances of her genes being propagated.

From reading more on genetics and evolution, it seems that all things are possible as long as evolution can find stasis along the pathways of that change. All genes are 'trying' to survive, as much as a gene can try. Really, it is just a matter of genes that don't survive disappearing from the pool. If a gene and its alternative allele can strike a balance with one not completely obliterating the other in terms of reproductivity, then it will survive. This goes for all sorts of things you can imagine, from homosexuality to male-pattern baldness to the propensity to bear twins. This is not to say that the only factor is genes, but I think that there is likely a genetic basis. Environment likely also has a role in shaping what for each individual defines a 'normal' and 'healthy' attraction and relationship.

In the end, I think it matters less WHY a person is homosexual than how we treat them. Does it really matter who a person is attracted to? Does it hurt you personally if your child/friend/neighbor/coworker is homosexual? Genetically speaking, heterosexually inclined people should be unconcerned that there are homosexuals because it means less competition in terms of offspring, given that only heterosexual sex causes offspring. Are gay people less human? In many states, they are by law. If a gay man ignores his homosexual tendencies and lives the straight life, does that make him more human? It seems to come down to majority rules without minority rights. Nothing a little bit of tolerance, understanding and humanity can't fix. Love thy brother. And his husband.