Santorum In Defense of the Family

This is an unscientific response to a ridiculous claim.  Rick Santorum, who wishes to be the next Bishop In Charge of America (or whatever prelate his church might recognize) recently made the claim that Gay couples are going to destabilize the family in America in order to accommodate their lifestyle. We’ve all been hearing this claim now for, oh, since gays stopped sitting by and letting cops beat them up on Saturday nights without fighting back.  Ever since Gay Pride.  Even on my own FaceBook page I had someone telling me I was blinded by the “Gay Agenda” and that the country was doomed—that because of the Gay Agenda little children were being taught how to use condoms in school and this—this—would bring us all to ruin. So….okay.  How? If we collectively allow homosexuals to marry each other, how does that do anything to American families that’s not already being done by a hundred other factors? I’ll tell you what destablilizes families.  And I’m not genius here with a brilliant insight, this is just what anyone can see if they look around and think a little bit. Families are destabilized over money.  [More . . . ]

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What Most Sets of Commandments Get Wrong

I recently read Penn Jillette's 10 Commandments for atheists, written as a response to a challenge by Glenn Beck. Most of Penn's rules made good sense. But one went off the rails, I opine. He included one found in most mistranslations of the Christian Ten: "Don't Lie." Penn explicitly adds the caveat: "(You know, unless you're doing magic tricks and it's part of your job. Does that make it OK for politicians, too?)" But the premise is basically flawed. The original line in Exodus 20:16 (KJV) is Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. This is a very specific form of lie. Even too specific. Not only is it an injunction against perjury, but only against perjury against your landholding neighbor, as opposed to people from other places, or to property such as women and slaves. Of course we all must lie on occasion. How else can we answer, "Isn't she the most beautiful baby ever?" or "Honey, do I look puffy?" Would it be false testimony to confirm a harmless bias one on one? Yet I suggest that the proper commandment should be, "Don't bear false witness." Period. Don't testify to things of which you are not absolutely sure; that you have not personally experienced. Not in a public forum. Don't repeat "what everybody knows" unless you preface it with an appropriate waffle, such as "I heard that someone else heard that..." But this might make it difficult to testify to the all-embracing love of a demonstrably genocidal God. A Google image search of "Testify" gives mostly Christian imagery.

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Extremely long odds say that you should not exist.

For me to exist, my mother and father had to meet each other, which is a rather unlikely thing to have occurred in the scheme of things. Even assuming that they met, they would also need to mate at just the right time, and then the right sperm (out of hundreds of millions in each ejaculation) had to fertilize the right egg (or which there were many thousands of candidate eggs).  But the same thing had to happen to each of their parents, and their parents, and so on. How many sets of parents did this need to happen to? Quite a few--consider my earlier post, "Ancestors Along the highway." Before all of those parents came onto the scene, the right non-human ancestors had to meet and mate, and before them . . . [skipping way back] the right sponges had to have offspring, and the fungi before them. Had any of these organisms been eaten as prey prior to having offspring, I wouldn't be here.  If any of them had succumbed to disease prior to having offspring, I wouldn't be here.  If any of them had broken a leg or gotten lost in the forest, they might not have gotten around to mating on that critically important date and time (from my perspective).   The adventures of Marty McFly ("Back to the Future") barely scrape the surface. The seemingly impossible hurdles faced by each of us are addressed by a well-constructed website, "What are the Odds," which stirs quite a bit of eye-popping mathematics into the description. Wait until you get to the bottom of the page to read about the trillion-sided dice. Actually, "What are the Odds" overstates the odds that you or I would exist, because there's far more to being "you" than your biological substrate. If you were raised in a war-torn region rather than a suburban American school, you would be a very different version of you. And ask yourself whether you would be you even if a few of your closest, most influential friends or acquaintances weren't around to influence you. Or what if you hadn't happened to read some of the ideas that most influenced you, or if even one or two of those important character-building events that defined you (joyous or tragic or in between) hadn't occurred? Thus, it's almost impossible that you should be here reading this post. Then again, you are here, because all of the antecedent events necessary to make you actually did occur. I don't know what lesson one is supposed to draw from this idea that it is essentially impossible that you should be here.  Perhaps it's merely an excuse for a healthy dose of humility.  It also seems to me that working through this thought experiment is good for one's mental health, at least once in a while.  I consider it an existential vitamin that I should take periodically.

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The case for less-is-more democracy

I have long been fascinated by the herd instinct of human animals. What could be more obvious than the fact that we mimic each other for all kinds of reasons, even for reasons that seem absurd to outsiders. Further, we follow each others’ lead even while we chant that we are “individuals.” In reality, many of us panic at the idea that differences among the citizens. How dare some citizens question even some of America’s war efforts! That is “unpatriotic.” How dare some Americans encourage multi-culturalism! Gay marriage? Forget it. And don’t ever forget that the United States is the world’s greatest country—let us all say that in unison! For many of us, everybody has a categorical moral duty to fall in line on all matters relating to God and country. Perhaps I find the topic of the human herding so compelling because of my own personal instinct to aversion to joining groups. For reasons I don’t understand, I instinctively rebel against many efforts to convince me to go along with “everybody else.” I’ve been this way ever since I can remember. Going along with the crowd is not something that gives me joy and comfort. Rather, it makes me feel wary and out of control. If people at my workplace were to announce that next Wednesday will be “Blue Shirt Day,” I’ll go out of my way to not wear blue. I perplex those who root for the home town sports teams and I don’t join political parties. I commonly hesitate to join in most displays of patriotism, including America’s warmongering. This is not to say I’m immune to such impulses, but it is fair to say that where many other Americans revel in community bonding, I tend to fight inner battles while questioning the need. Instead of joining in, I tend to question. [More . . . ]

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