Oops… I Diddled Again

This is Carrie Prejean, who has recently been dethroned as Miss California.   She sued over the dethroning, but has since dropped the suit.  The whole mess started when she made drama for herself in answering a question about gay marriage:

Well I think it’s great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. You know what, in my country, in my family, I think I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman.

Meh.

Anyway, Carrie’s been something of a poster-child for the conservative right, and has gone out of her way to make sure everybody knows she’s a good Christian girl.  When she was dethroned, she sued, alleging that it was her Christian beliefs that caused officials to turn on her.  She said they told her she couldn’t mention Jesus at appearances.  Pageant officials had a different story, claiming that she had missed multiple appearances and was becoming increasingly difficult to work with.   (It’s worth noting that Donald Trump publicly defended her after she made the anti-gay remark.)

Anyway…

The whole thing was getting really messy.  Prejean had already racked up well in excess of a hundred thousand in legal fees, and both sides were hunkering down for a multi-year high profile case, and suddenly, the whole thing went away.  Carrie dropped her suit, and the pageant dropped its countersuit, which included money the pageant apparently paid to get bigger boobs for her.

Sheknows.com reports that the reason for this sudden change of tactic was that pageant officials had dug up a video of Carrie masturbating.

Picture this meeting… Prejean enters the conference room with her legal team and her mother. Pageant lawyers start the video, showing a totally nude woman from the waist down having a little private party, if you know what we mean wink wink.

Carrie said the video was disgusting and denied it was her… Until the camera panned up to her face. Busted! The holier-than-thou poster child for the conservative Christian right was caught red-handed in the most compromising of anti-Christian situations.

Whoops.

Carrie says the video was something she made for her boyfriend when she was seventeen.  This isn’t the first time she’s had to defend herself, either.  She also took some heat for a few old modeling photos showing her in less than a Conservative Christian state of dress.  Those photos were attributed to “youthful indiscretions.”  Nevertheless, the legal eagles advised her well.  Pageant contestants are required to sign statements to the effect that they haven’t been photographed nude.  This video counts as being photographed nude.  End of lawsuit.

I imagine there will be a few atheist bloggers who will cite this as another example of right wing hypocrisy, and I suppose they’ll be right.  Rush is a druggie.  Haggard likes cock.   Every Republican congressman has probably had a hooker, or at least an intern.

The thing is, I’m not ok with that approach.  Yes, the conservative Christians are hypocrites.  They like sex, drugs, and rock and roll as much as the rest of us.   The thing is, when we point fingers at them and call them out for hypocrisy, we’re actually validating their absurd moral standards.   You know what? Other than her absurd bigotry towards gays, I’m on Carrie’s side.  I’m sure her boyfriend had a damn fine time masturbating to the video she made for him — and that’s awesome! Yeah… I know… she was seventeen.  But we’re not talking about laws here.  We’re talking about a late teenager who was enjoying her emerging sexuality with a guy.  That’s the way things are supposed to work.

The pageant, however…   That’s another story.  They bought Carrie boobs.  Why?  Because men like to wank off while looking at girls with great boobs. But, it was really important to the pageant that they not promote the idea of women as sex objects, so they made her sign a piece of paper saying she’d never been a bad girl on film.  Even though they paraded her around on stage in front of everybody in this:

So, yeah.  I’m not ok with the pageant’s absurd double standard of enforcing the “good girl” image while simultaneously parading fifty one pieces of sexy meat across the stage.  At the risk of offending my feminist friends (I see you reading, GF…)  I’m perfectly fine with parading pieces of sexy meat across stages.  I just don’t like it when they pretend like they’re not doing what they’re obviously doing, which is selling sex.

Prejean has a book about her trials and tribulations, and I’m sure it’ll read like any one of a dozen in Sarah Palin’s Book of the Month club.  She’s sure she’s being silenced and harassed for her religious beliefs.   In briefly perusing the blogosphere, it appears that a lot of Christians agree.  I honestly don’t know if her ill-advised remarks were the cause of her dethroning.  Maybe so.  I suspect not, though.  I mean, didn’t we just try to elect a woman with exactly the same views to the vice presidency, and didn’t almost half of the country vote for her?

I think this whole situation is a great example of how incredibly screwy humans get when they pretend at Conservative Christian Morality.  The anti-gay remark really doesn’t have much to do with it.  The pageant is pretending like it’s not peddling sex, and the contestants are pretending like they’re not using their bodies to get ahead in the world, and all the guys watching are pretending they hate it, even though they’ll be thinking about Miss California while their slightly pudgy wives go down on them later, even though they don’t like giving oral sex anymore…

Couldn’t we just admit that pretty women get ahead by selling sex?  I think it would be ok if we just admitted that.   It’s almost comical how we dance around the obvious.   Does anybody anywhere actually believe these girls haven’t had lots of wild sex with men who aren’t their husbands?  Does anybody think pageants will be “wholesome” so long as we don’t have video proof that these girls have sex?  Everything in this entire situation comes directly from a bogus moral standard.  Prejean’s anti-gay bigotry, the pageant’s pretense at non-sexuality, the fact that anyone cares that she made a video or that she masturbates — all of this is just moral claptrap, and the whole damn issue would be moot if we as a culture just accepted human sexuality for what it is.

 

Human Nature and Unconscious Natural Selection

Since I began writing about the evolutionary drives behind human behavior and desires, I’ve had various friends and internet friends come to me to ask my opinion on why they or their significant other is feeling the way they feel about a certain situation.  In most cases, it’s pretty easy to make a guess, since most of our dating conflicts come down to a pretty small set of competing drives.

There is one concept that has been difficult to convey in several instances, though.  This is the irrelevance of our conscious motives and desires.  In part, I believe the difficulty stems from our human tendency to elevate our consciousness to some kind of magical status, where we have risen “above the animals,” and have learned to subdue our drives and pursue more “enlightened” activities.

In fact, it is generally accepted across most “human sciences” that our unconscious evolutionary drives are much more involved in our day to day life than we think, and our conscious perceptions can sometimes be more like an interesting veneer on top of the real foundation of our actions.  (I must add the disclaimer that scientists are in far less agreement about specifics of how conscious and unconscious motivations work.  Most good scientists are careful to add disclaimers of their own.)

The example I want to use today is a common source of conflict between men and women in dating situations.   In long term relationships, women often complain that men don’t spend enough time with them, or neglect them.  Men complain that their mates demand too much of their time.  As relationships mature, these complaints tend to escalate.

Explaining this conflict in evolutionary terms is not difficult.  Males who have offspring with multiple females have more offspring, which is an evolutionary win.   Females who get males to devote all or most of their resources to their own offspring score an evolutionary win as well.  These are conflicting goals, and there will naturally be some tension in relationships because of it.  (Remember that these are not the only competing goals, but for the sake of explanation, I’m grossly oversimplifying things.)

David Buss, et al, found that the generalization I made above about men and women’s time demands are true.  Women do become more demanding of their mates’ time, and the effect increases over time.  Men do often feel “trapped” by their mates, and pursue various strategies (poker night, business trips, affairs, etc.) to “get away.”

The thing is, when women are interviewed about this effect, they often say exactly the opposite thing — they want a man who is independent, self-sufficient, and driven at work.   The truth is that women do want those things in a man, but in many cases, they pursue strategies which seem designed to squelch the very things they looked for in the first place.  This is an example of unconscious evolutionary forces working in us.

Remember that emotions are nature’s way of getting us to do things we wouldn’t logically do otherwise.  If you’re a woman, and have ever “smothered” a boyfriend or husband, think about why you did so.  If you’re like most women, you did it because of strong emotional reactions to his absence.  You felt lonely, or anxious, or perhaps his presence was like a drug that gave you an emotional high, and when he was gone, you felt like you needed another “fix.”   You certainly weren’t thinking to yourself:  ”Self, I think it would be a good idea to demand so much of my man’s time that he grows to resent me and tries to get away from me.”  But in many cases, that is exactly what women do in relationships.

Similarly, men often go into relationships with the best of longterm intentions.  They believe they’ve found the one, and they’re committed to changing their philandering ways, “settling down” and raising a family.  Then, as time passes, they slowly slip back into old patterns, and the next thing the poor women know, their men are home one or two nights a week, and have commitments with “the guys” or work so often that it almost seems like they’re single again.

As I read through advice columns and singles magazines while planning this article, I noticed the near ubiquity of the “blame game.”  Men blame women for being insane, irrational, or manipulative when they display smothering behavior.  Women blame men for lacking moral integrity when they don’t maintain the same level of devoted interest they displayed at the beginning of the relationship.  In most cases, the advice experts hand down to both men and women is “Buck up, do what you know you are supposed to do, and stop whining about your emotions.”

In practice, I suppose this is relatively sound advice, especially if children are involved.  However, I think it’s a worthwhile exercise for us to practice avoiding the blame game.   The conflicting drives men and women experience in mating relationships are not “character flaws.”  They’re part of what makes us human.  More dramatically, the conflicting drives of males and females are literally the cogs that keep humanity going on the treadmill of evolution.  These competing drives may be inconvenient for us individual humans who are having a hard time in our relationships, but they are an integral part of the mechanism which keeps the superorganism — the species — competitive in the natural environment.

Rather than “fight the system,” I think it’s better to rethink the system.  Rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole, perhaps we can begin to reassess and redefine our goals as committed mating partners, and create environments which minimize the instinctive conflicts which will certainly arise.   More knowledge is more power, and this is just one more example of science showing us the mechanism behind the motivations.  Rather than trying to overcome and “power through” the mechanism, we have the ability to work within the system — “human-ness” — and make informed decisions about what we can realistically expect from ourselves and our mates.

 

 

Saint Damien’s Heel

Saint Damien’s heel bone will be enshrined in Hawaii after his recent canonization. Damien, née Joseph de Veuster, was a Belgian priest who dedicated much of his life to caring for leprosy patients in Hawaii.  Eventually, he succumbed to the disease himself.

By all accounts, Damien’s work with the leper colony was instrumental in improving the quality of life for all of the inhabitants.  It seems unquestionable that he believed that he would contract and die of leprosy when he volunteered for the assignment.  When he did contract the disease, he worked tirelessly until his death.

Father Damien was a good man.

Still, as I read the story of his canonization and the various religious celebrations surrounding it, I am left feeling a certain amount of disquiet.  There are those who will argue — fairly convincingly — that the canonization process is a useful tool that serves a very beneficial purpose.  It is good that we remember those who have gone above and beyond the normal day to day altruism all of us display.  Role models are one of the most effective ways to instill a heightened sense of altruism in people.  We remember George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, and other historic figures not just because they did big things, but because the big things they did made life better for a lot of people.  It appears that human society always has some social mechanism for remembering and encouraging emulation of heroes.

In a lot of ways, this is what canonization does.  Of course, we could pick apart the process as largely political, and we would have a long list of grievances against the “intent” of canonization when we were through.  A lot of saints were assholes.

Then again, there are those who remember Oliver Cromwell fondly.  Andrew Jackson may be a hero to Caucasian Americans everywhere, but the natives have good reason to view his contribution to humanity with a bit less rosy tint on the lenses.

I think that what makes me cringe a little bit when I think about saints is that there’s an anachronistic and religious aura to it.  These people were “more than men.”  They possessed “goodness” in a way that other people didn’t.  They were “above the flesh.”

History books are beginning to abandon the traditional gilding of biographies in favor of a more balanced approach, where historical figures are seen as regular humans — some of whom admittedly did do heroic things, but who were nonetheless human, with their own faults and flaws.  I think this is a good thing.  In general, I’m in favor of the demystification of… well… everything.

It seems to me that it’s more realistic and attainable to memorialize plain old ordinary humans, some of whom drank to excess, beat their wives, fathered illegitimate children with slaves, cheated on their taxes, and got preferential treatment because of family wealth, but still did a lot of very good things for their fellow man.  The truth is, everybody does both good and bad things, and every historical story has other perspectives which might not be nearly as pretty.

When it comes down to the nuts and bolts, I guess I don’t have any major problems with canonization, aside from the praying and genuflecting before rotted body parts.  We should remember our heroes.  However, I wish we could move towards remembering them as fallible humans.  I have known a lot of people who have done very good things for others and still felt a profound sense of guilt for not being good enough.   Some have even made their own lives miserable because they were measuring themselves against an impossible standard of goodness.

This, I think, is one of the fundamental flaws in the traditional Christian position on morality.  It puts an impossible standard in front of us, and tells us that anytime we do not attain it, our flawed human nature is to blame.  When someone does do something really extraordinary, we still can’t give them credit, since it was God bestowing upon them a supernatural ability to be better than human.

The reality, of course, is that humans deserve all the credit for both the good and the bad things they do.  Morality is relative, and there is no such thing as “perfect goodness” towards which we are striving.  Those who do great good do so because they are human and have the instinctive drive to do good.  Those who do great evil do so for exactly the same reason.

In truth, when we demystify morality and credit human nature for human goodness, we are doing two really wonderful things.  First, we are allowing people to take credit for their own actions.  Secondly, we are removing the guilt and stigma from people who ought to be proud of their own accomplishments but are instead riddled with guilt over any perceived shortcomings they see when they compare themselves to “perfect good.”

Obama Opposes UN Anti-Defamation Resolution

Thankfully, there is some sanity in the U.N.  The Obama administration has announced that it is strongly opposed to a resolution that would condemn negative speech against religions.  Hillary Clinton said in a news conference that such a resolution would be a major blow against free expression and speech.

She’s right, of course.  Everyone, theists included, should be opposed to any sort of limit to what can and can’t be said about religion.   Protestants should be well aware that some of their very own doctrines could be considered defamation of Catholics.  Many protestants believe that Catholics are heretics for praying to Mary.  Are protestants everywhere prepared to leave it in the hands of a judge to determine whether one of the tenets of their religion is too defaming to be allowed?

It should also be noted that this kind of “protection” from criticism is completely contrary to the search for truth.  If Islam, or Christianity, or Buddhism is true, then the way to find this out is to engage in unfiltered, unflinching dialog, and to respond to criticism.

Furthermore, consider the human rights violation inherent in a gag order on free inquiry and criticism of religion.  Suppose that Christianity is true.  Jesus is God, and anyone who doesn’t believe in him is going to burn in hell forever.  Now, consider the implications if we lived in an Islamic country where it was illegal to criticize the Muslim faith.   In effect, the law is sentencing people to hell, since it doesn’t give them a fair chance to learn that Islam is wrong and Christianity is right.

Of course, that goes for any religion.  If we cannot have open, critical dialog about religion, then we cannot hope to reasonably discover the truth.  There is no reason to allow one religion to strong-arm the rest of the world into silence.

Christianity in the News

I’m just going to pass along two stories today.  Partly, this is because I’ve just been too busy to keep updated this week, but I do think it’s important for us to remember that there are two discussions going on in the freethinking community.  It’s fine for me to argue with Alison about the causes of hatred and oppression committed by religious people.  It’s a worthy topic.  Beyond that, though, there is the reality that regardless of the actual cause, there is still a real and dangerous threat being posed by the religious right in America, and all freethinkers should be concerned by some of the actions being taken in America right now.

STORY NUMBER ONE

We’ve heard this story before, but this time it’s not a Catholic, and it’s teenage girls instead of boys.  A trusted church leader was using his position to have sex with underage girls, and recruit them into a “secret order” that was supposed to help “save mankind.”

This story bothers me on two counts.  The first is that this man is not a teacher.  He is not certified to teach by the state, but because he is at a private religious institution, he is able to circumvent the rules.  This is a legislative issue, and it should be addressed.  I have no problem with the existence of religious schools, but if a school — any school — is selling themselves as offering a genuine education, then their teachers should be required to play by the same rules as anyone else.  Education is too important to just let this kind of nonsense slip through the cracks under the guise of religious freedom.  Religious freedom is one thing.  Education is another.

Secondly, this story bothers me on a critical thinking level.  The article mentions that the abuser read Bible verses to the girls to convince them that joining his “secret society” (having sex with him) was not only ok, but a good thing that would be part of God’s will.  I’m not going to claim that this guy would definitely not have been able to convince them to have sex with him otherwise, but it’s hard to imagine the religious indoctrination playing no part at all.  They have been taught a system of authority their whole life .  The Bible is the authority, and God’s word is law, regardless of what the evidence says.  When someone uses the Bible, which is entirely left up to interpretation, as an authority, it’s easy to understand why it could help with the manipulation necessary for this crime to occur.

This is yet another example of how the thought process associated with faith based reasoning is inherently flawed and dangerous.  Would these girls have been abused without Biblical indoctrination?  I don’t know.  But I do know that without faith based reasoning, these girls would have had one less mechanism for the abuser to exploit.

STORY NUMBER TWO

The Family Research Council is (predictably) outraged by Obama’s attempt to extend HHS (Health and Human Services) resources to gay and lesbian seniors, who have unique needs (largely because they can’t get married).   The real punch in the nuts is when the FRC has this to say:

Of course, the real tragedy here–apart from the unnecessary spending–is that, given the risks of homosexual conduct, these people are less likely to live long enough to become senior citizens!

Right.  Because AIDS is a scourge sent from God to punish these people for their sexual preference.

This is just hate.  It’s bigotry and hate, and it’s intolerable in legislation.  I don’t know if the program being presented is a good one or not, but this isn’t about supporting or opposing legislation based on its merit.  It’s about continuing to discriminate against gays because they’re gay.

Think about it.

What does it matter if there are not as many aging gays and lesbians, and what does it matter if more gays and lesbians die of AIDS than heterosexuals?  If there is a need among a group of Americans, then the need should be addressed.

Again, I can’t say for certain that there would not be this much opposition to helping gays without religious indoctrination, but it’s hard for me to imagine that it wouldn’t be lessened.  As evidence for this supposition, I offer myself.  When I was a Christian, I was anti-gay.  Why was I anti-gay?  Because I was taught to be so.  I never thought about it.  Never considered it.  Every church I had been to as a child taught that homosexuality was an abomination, and it goes without saying that you shouldn’t do anything to encourage abomination.

Today, I’m an outspoken advocate for gay rights.  I changed my tune after I left religion and noticed that not only was there no empirical reason to discriminate, but there was actually a whole biology library full of evidence that homosexuality is a normal part of nature.

Oh, there were people who tried to cure me of my bigotry when I was a Christian.  They told me that all the biological evidence was against me.  Do you know what I told them?  You can guess easily enough:

I told them the evidence was wrong.

Of course the evidence was wrong.  It was wrong because the Bible was right, and that’s the way it was.  So… yeah.  I’m not bigoted towards gays now, and I was while I was religious.  My justification for bigotry was the teaching I received based on the Bible.  When I dropped that worldview, it soon became obvious to me that I don’t bear any innate hatred or bigotry towards gays.  In fact, I rather like the company of a number of gay people, and take great joy in hearing of their romantic successes.

Religious training made me a bigot.  Leaving religion returned me to a state of non-bigotry.  I don’t know how else to say it.

In any case, whether you believe religion causes bigotry or not, this kind of opposition to legislation must be shouted down.  It’s wrong, regardless of the cause.

 

Emo and Lo: Passionate Platonic Cuddling?

I’m going to stray a bit from my usual style of trying to relate everything back to evolutionary drives.  I was reading some articles from Emo & Lo, and was struck by Abby Spector’s article about passionate cuddling.  She says:

It has been exactly a year since I last had sex. I didn’t intend on taking a vow of celibacy. Like belly button lint and shocking celebrity deaths (RIP Jacko et al), it just happened. My labido (sic!) turned off. Kaput. I don’t miss the bruised hipbones, condom debates, or dirty sheets. Hell, I don’t even miss the whole penis and vagina part. All I want is a sweaty body pressed against mine. Unfortunately, it is hard, daresay impossible, to get passionate cuddling sans sexual intercourse. Believe me. I’ve tried.

This is not an uncommon thing to hear, unfortunately.  She goes on to explain all the reasons why she is ok with being celibate, but wants intimacy.  Her story is a little out of the ordinary since she doesn’t just want tender, reassuring cuddling.  What she wants is, frankly, sex without intercourse.

We learn a great deal about why she might be “over” sex.  She’s apparently not had very much in the way of healthy, positive sexual experiences that left her wanting more:

I have been with seven people. Out of all seven, there is only one I don’t regret. The others weren’t bad. Actually, most of them were quite good. My mind just wasn’t there to enjoy it. I now realize that there are other, less self-depreciating ways to ease my insecurities. Flirting, French fries, and good friends fill my voids.

When I look back over my life, I can’t find any stretch of six out of seven sexual partners I regretted.  One or two, sure.  We all have sex for bad reasons with the wrong person at least once, right?  But there’s something much deeper going on here.  Abby’s felt bad about 86% of the sex partners she’s ever had!  She’s already given us a serious clue as to why that might be.  Look at the language she uses:  self-depreciating; filling voids;  easing insecurities.

Later she gives us more clues:

Cuddling is usually expected to lead to sleepovers (or at least that’s what they do in the movies). I have never been a big fan of sleepovers. Something about them seems threatening.

She goes on to say that she’s only actually slept with one out of her seven sex partners.  She fears the vulnerability of going to sleep with someone.  She uses more “danger words.”

More importantly, though, sleeping requires an extreme release. You have to succumb to fatigue. Masks come off, swords are put down, and you enter another state of mind.

I feel badly for Abby.  Her words paint a clear picture of sex as a battle… an obstacle… a threat.  I have no idea what has brought her to this place, and don’t care to speculate, but I do hope she finds a way to bridge the gap between whatever she fears from intimacy, and the closeness she still craves.

At this point, I confess, I am giving in to a temptation I hoped to resist.  I’m going to go ahead and mention that Abby is majoring in Feminine/Gender/Sexuality Studies.   I’m not sure if it’s a relevant point or not, and I am going to resist the temptation to write her off as an angry ultra-feminist.  I don’t know that for sure, but damn, it’s hard not to notice the subtext when she talks about sex.  Look at the words she uses:  ”Penis and vagina.”  How very clinical.  ”Bruised hipbones.”  ”Dirty sheets.”  ”Condom debates.”  But when she’s talking about non-sexual passionate cuddling, she says she misses the “sweaty sheets.”   Her words betray her true feelings.  Dirty sheets vs. sweaty sheets.  Doesn’t this strike you?  The sheets are exactly the same from both activities (unless her men are fond of ejaculating on sheets), but she associates them with two very, very different feelings.

Finally, she ends her confession like this:

Cuddling provides something else. It is a mirage of love. It’s two people wanting comfort instead of carnal pleasure. A good cuddle requires spending time with someone. Nobody is being “used” or objectified. It’s meant to be soothing, with just a hint of sexy.

Fuck forking and scissoring. The only utensil I need right now is a spoon.

Again, we learn something about the connections in her brain.  Cuddling equals love.  Sex equals “carnal objectification” and “using” people.  What a shame.  I don’t feel like I need to counter her on this.  Most of us have felt the intense and intimate love when we are literally inside of another person.  We know that it can be a beautiful, giving thing, and that there is beauty in knowing that someone else views us as a very desirable object.

What can we say about this?  Sex can be dirty and ugly and mean.  The human mind is a fragile thing, and some things, once done, cannot be undone.  For  my part, all I can say is that I believe in the truth.  Sex is neither inherently good or bad.  It just is.  Our human brains are neither good nor bad, but they work in very specific ways, with predictable results.  It’s my belief that the unflinching study of humans — especially the human mind — is our best weapon to stop bad things from happening to people.  We need to understand morality, emotion, sex, mating, and all the other parts of the human experience for exactly what they are.  Every layer of woo that we pile on top of our existence just prolongs ignorance.

Again, I don’t know what taught Abby that sex is dirty, confrontational, demeaning, and a band-aid for insecurities.  Unfortunately, her belief is now her reality.  In truth, sex can be pretty much the complete opposite of all of those things, and there are an awful lot of people whose lives are filled with emotionally healthy, happy, intimate, passionate sex.  But… it’s all in how we perceive it… and how we perceive it is usually directly tied to how we were taught to perceive it, either intentionally or just through observing those around us.  What higher mandate could there be for teaching human sexuality openly, honestly, and without religious or political flinching?  What we teach people about sex literally shapes their whole lives.

The Tree of Life is very big

http://www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/antisense/tree.pdf

You’ll have to zoom in for quite a while before this PDF starts to make any sense to you.  Look in the upper left quadrant for “You Are Here.”

This is from the laboratory of Hills and Bull at the University of Texas.  I am led to believe that this is part of an attempt to construct the most massive and up to date representation of the tree of life around.  In scrolling around this circle (and unfortunately, getting this song stuck in my head) I was reminded of a few things that have given me pause.

• In the paraphrased words of Richard Dawkins, there are a lot more ways to be dead than alive.  For every organism on the outside of this circle, there are thousands with names of their own that are extinct.  If the diversity of life on earth is staggering, the diversity of no-longer-life is Brobdingnagian.
• This circle is a great way to illustrate the concept of “transitional organisms.”  If we were to draw a concentric circle at any point inside this one, it would represent a moment in time.  If we could transport ourselves to that moment, every animal and plant we saw would look exactly like a “fully formed species.”  Each one would be adapted to its surroundings.  Yet, if we move inward or outward for any geologic difference, we would no longer recognize what had earlier seemed to us to be clearly delineated species.  Instead, there would be a whole new set of “clearly defined” species.  Finally, if we were to draw another circle on the outside, it would represent the future.  The same process we can see on the inside would continue, and we would see new animals and plants that look just like fully formed species.  In short, life is transitional, and there is no such thing as a non-transitional organism.
• It’s impossible to know how far the line for “Homo sapiens” will extend into the future.  What we do know for certain, however, is that one of two things will happen to it.  Either it will dead end, or it will change.  That’s a really hard thing for most of us humans to grasp.  We think of ourselves as being… well… HUMAN… as if there’s something magical about it.  However, if life on earth survives another five hundred million years (or a billion, or two billion), Homo sapiens will be a geological curiosity.  Perhaps our descendants will be smart enough to figure out that we are their ancestors.  Or, perhaps a drastic change in the environment will make it impossible for us to survive, and our line will end.   If we survive, maybe we will look very similar in half a billion years.  It’s worked for cockroaches and crocodiles.  But in the end, the simple math of natural selection will prevail.  We will not stay the same forever.
• While this diagram obviously doesn’t include every single species in existence, it’s helpful for us to be able to see just how close we are to other animals we consider quite different.  Above Homo sapiens is Mus musculus.  That’s a house mouse, if you didn’t know.  Typhlonectes natans is a rubber eel.
• 

For me, this kind of visual illustration of the staggering diversity and complexity of life is enough to make my head spin.  Yet, the basic process that drives the whole thing is simple enough that a grade school child can understand it.  From utter simplicity comes unimaginable complexity!  We know this concept even if we don’t acknowledge it.  The computer I’m typing today’s entry on is a complex machine, capable of retrieving information from virtually anywhere on the planet nearly instantaneously.  It is a marvel of function.  And yet…

At its core is a system of two numbers.  Everything reduces eventually to 1 or 0.  On or off.

Who says we need the supernatural to experience a sense of awe?!  The natural world is amazing enough, and has enough mysteries for my lifetime, and yours, and for all our collective children until humans are no more.

True Believer’s Rant

I normally let theist rants go without comment, since I prefer discussion and debate to ranting, but I’m feeling snarky today.  True Believer responded to my Atheist turns Theist thread.

Ok, so why are there so many atheists-ridiculing-religion bloggs popping up lately? I got little theory on that. It may be because atheistic people tend to be attention hungry. It’s only natural, considering amount of egoism that is required for a fulltime atheist to be able to produce enough ignorance to stay such.

Since it’ll be without doubt too abstract for you materialistic simpletons, I reckon we’ll definitely need a scientific study on smart arsing, attention whoring and their relations to atheism, because I wont be able to clarify it to you otherwise. Let’s drop this for now and wait for study results.

Seriously, I for example don’t give a fuck about atheism. Why do you keep tagging it as religion? DO NOT WANT! You are only proving your already obvious moral and educational deficiency. Atheism is NOT RELIGION, and morons aside, your artificial relation between random “comical” objects and objects of religious worship isn’t funny to other people. It’s just pitiable instead and also exceptional basis for a decent anti-atheism rant.

Now that you’ve seen it in its entirety, I’ll respond to it point for point.

Why are there so many atheist blogs lately?  There are several very good reasons.  First, because blogging has become much more accessible and popular in the last several years.  According to Wikipedia, the first mainstream blog was published in 1998.  In 2007, it was estimated that there were 112 million blogs.  It’s estimated that between fifteen and eighteen percent of Americans are either atheist or nonreligious.  If there weren’t a lot of atheist blogs out there, we’d be quite shocked.

Incidentally, I did a search for “Atheist Blog” on google and 22,300 hits were returned.  A similar search for “Christian Blog” returned 224,000 hits.  Christian blogs apparently outnumber atheist blogs by about 10 to 1, which would seem to indicate that per capita, there are actually more Christian blogs than atheist blogs.  Perhaps, TrueBeliever, you are just experiencing something known as cognitive bias.

As for your theory that atheists are attention seekers at a higher rate than theists, let’s consider.  How many atheist tracts have you been handed in your life?  Personally, I’ve never had the experience, and I’ve never handed one out.  On the other hand, I toss Christian tracts from under my windshield wiper at least once a week.  If a week goes by where I don’t see someone out witnessing for Jesus, it’s quite surprising.  There are seven channels on my satellite package devoted to nothing other than Christian programming, and at least two others that are descended from religious channels.  (Hallmark, for instance.)

It’s been a little difficult for me to find an accurate count of churches in America, but it appears there are over 300,000.   Granted, all of them are probably not as advertising heavy as the Lakewood Church, listed as America’s largest, with over 43,000 in attendance each week.  Still, churches are in the business of growing and gaining converts.  There are denominations which teach that Jesus put the blood of sinners on the heads of the faithful, and anyone who does not go forth and preach the gospel to all men is guilty of sending his fellow man to eternal damnation!

And you’re suggesting that atheists are attention whores?  Do a quick search on Amazon.com for Christian books.  (Here.  I did it for you.)  Over a hundred thousand books about Jesus.  Atheist books?  Yeah… that would be a little over a thousand.  A hundred to freaking one ratio, and atheists are the attention whores. Got any bridges you want to sell me?

It’s only natural, considering amount of egoism that is required for a fulltime atheist to be able to produce enough ignorance to stay such.

It turns out that there are no tax breaks for atheists, but Christians get to run enormous financial empires tax free.  It’s not that full time atheist writing takes egoism.  It’s that it requires another full time job to make ends meet.

Since it’ll be without doubt too abstract for you materialistic simpletons, I reckon we’ll definitely need a scientific study on smart arsing, attention whoring and their relations to atheism, because I wont be able to clarify it to you otherwise. Let’s drop this for now and wait for study results.

Who’s being the smart-ass?  You’re the one who just threw a blanket over all of us atheist writers and lumped us all as attention whores, and now you’ve got the audacity to admit in as many words that you have no idea whether that’s true or not because you have no evidence??

Seriously, I for example don’t give a fuck about atheism.

Yeah.  You care so little you just had to come onto an atheist blog and run your mouth.  I’m buying it.

Why do you keep tagging it as religion?

ME?

Kiddo, take a look around the blogosphere.  CHRISTIANS are the ones who say atheism is a religion.  In fact, I have said repeatedly on this very blog that atheism is definitely not a religion.  In fact, it’s not even a philosophy.  It’s just a binary qualifier for the existence of exactly one belief in an individual’s mind.  That’s all it is.

You are only proving your already obvious moral and educational deficiency. Atheism is NOT RELIGION, and morons aside, your artificial relation between random “comical” objects and objects of religious worship isn’t funny to other people. It’s just pitiable instead and also exceptional basis for a decent anti-atheism rant.

I dunno.  I got a lot of laughs from most of the people I’ve shown.  Might it be that you’re a little upset that someone’s picking on you and you have no response to their point?  Why don’t you prove me wrong!  Explain to me why his logic is wrong and the exact same logic proves that God heals sick people.

Anyway, thanks for weighing in.

I should have been a poet

This fellow expresses my exasperation with an awful lot of armchair pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo about ten times better than I could ever hope to articulate.  It’s nine minutes long, but well worth it.  Even if it makes you feel like you should be wearing a beret and snapping your fingers.

Atheist Turns Theist

It’s important to always try to represent both sides of a debate fairly, so I thought it would be nice for me to highlight an atheist who used evidence to convert to theism.  I’m not going to add much.  I think his argument is one of the best ones I’ve heard in a while, and I’m going to spend the next few days contemplating my own atheism.