A-fucking-men to this:

Atheism and children By Natalie Angier.

Of particular interest is the distinction she makes between being an atheist and an agnostic. She says something to the effect that given the Gods that current relgions let us choose from, she is undoubtedly an atheist. Yet she doesn’t shy from the possibility that there may be a lot we don’t know or can’t know about the true nature of the universe. I think that is a pretty fair way to put it.

As a father, I’ve wondered how to raise my child(ren) in light of my non-religious nature. People always say things like “You need to give them a foundation in faith from which they can explore, etc.” I wonder if it is not better to give a child a foundation of rationality with a wide open sense of what may be possible. I think regligious dogma is not a particularly great foundation for children to start from. The purpose of life, in my opinion, is to forever search to answer these questions. Once you think you know the answer you stop looking and that is a sort of death.

I’m not scared of the word atheist but I still don’t think it adequately says what I am. I don’t want to put limits on what may be possible. I am leaving myself open to anything. It’s just that the mythological religions of this world are, to me, among the least probable explanations.

The Bush Administration, as usual, is not talking about Social Security (hereafter SS) because they are concerned about what will happen 40 years from now. Gosh, it would be nice if they were. Name one other initiative of the Bushies that is concerned with the state of the country 40 years from now. There are none. There should be — namely, global climate change, but alas they conveniently ignore the growing body of science on that one. No, they are concerned about SS because their power base is as strong as ever and they wanna push through every possible ideological initiative while they can. What is the ideological motive here: they hate SS. Yuck, it even has the word “social” in it, as in socialism. This is an ideological attack on socialism. It is an entitlement and they hate entitlements on philosophical grounds. No matter that SS is one of the most successful programs the government has ever done, that it keeps people from eating cat food in their old age, assists people who are injured and can no longer work,etc. That is all beside the point to them. They hate social programs and they are attempting to use their power to eliminate this one.

First a little background on the problem: if we did nothing to SS in 40 years or so we would need to cut benefits by 30% or so. That is the worst case scenario right now if we do nothing. So when Bush says it will be “broke” in 40 years what he means is that the existing payroll taxes 40 years from now will only pay for 70% of the current benefits. That ain’t bankrupt, folks. Raise your hand if you’d rather get $0.70 than $0.00.

A very important point about SS is that it is not a charity program. Everyone gets it regardless of need and that is a Good Thing. This means the Right can’t prattle on about how it is wealth distribution. It is not. In fact, rich people pay a much smaller percent of their income into SS than non-rich people because you only pay in on something like the first $80k you make. So if you make $250k/yr you are paying very, very little into SS. So please, Rush, don’t give us this shit about this is some wealth redistribution scheme ’cause it ain’t.

In terms of the privatization scheme, there are a few problems with it. It’s not that it is an entirely insane idea, but there are problems. Problem one is, it is much more expensive. Administration of the SS system is very cheap compared to the average cost of managing, for example, a mutual fund or a stock portfolio. That’s because Wall Street manages the latter and everyone knows that the 11th Commandment is that Wall Street people must be rich. Financial managers are in the business of their own enrichment. Your average government worker is not.

Second, the financial markets are risky. Yes, you can get a higher return but it is at the cost of higher risk. When the dot com bubble burst some of my mutual funds went back to balances I had 10 years earlier. I lost 10 years of growth in some of these funds. What do we do with retirees whose nest egg evaporates a few months before they retire? Cat food? That defeats the whole point of SS. If we need a safety net to catch people who can’t live on their privatized SS income, we have gained nothing.

Privatization is a major change in philosophy. Instead of existing young workers helping to support the elders of our community, you have to save enough money to take care of yourself. While this doesn’t sound so bad the implication is clear: in the first case we take care of our old folks no matter what and in the latter case if they fail to take care of themselves, they eat cat food in their latter years.

I should probably write a separate post about it, but the problem with ideological initiatives is that they are not necessarily based on reality. Either privatization of SS will or will not improve our care of retirees. Whether it does or not is something that can be proven one way or the other. Ideologues base their solutions on a philosophy that is based on their abstract ideas of what is good and what is bad — it doesn’t take the proof into account. That is why the “cutting taxes solves all problems” philosophy of the Right is so annoying. This shit is measurable and whether you like it or not, the USA needs tax revenue. The no taxes ever approach is completely wrong but you’d never know it talking to one of these ideologues.

So, in summary, Bush is lying again. It’s not about avoiding an impending crisis it’s about eliminating an entitlement that has been very successful. I also think it is ideologically sound — I’ll take care of you when you are old and I am young and when I am old the young people will take care of me. Makes perfect sense to me.

Don’t be fooled, Bush is hurting America again.

Bush’s inaugural speech was typical of a scared and stupid man.

First of all, I’m not willing to take as a basic tenant that there is gathering evil in the world poised to overwhelm us. That’s crap. Yes, we have made a lot of enemies but by far the world is a peaceful place full of our allies. Bush has created and inflamed our enemies and now uses that fact to bolster his power base.

Second, the Orwellian repetition of the words “freedom” and “liberty” was suspicious at best. Actions speak louder than words and what is happening in America, Iraq and around the world is the Bushies erosion of both of these concepts. Freedom, according to Bush, is something that is apparently only granted to people that agree with him. To be a suspect in this administration is to be guilty. Due process is gone, basic issues of privacy are gone and we send the marines to negotiate with those who disagree with us. That is why he needed to chant those words over and over to try to hypnotize us — because he is lying. The goal of this administration is crystal clear: control the world’s resources for the benefit of the richest people in the history of the world.

I do not support this president, I do not support this administration and I look forward to the day when history regards him as the worst president in the history of the USA.

In regards to the Supreme Court decision ruling that “textbook stickers referring to evolution as ‘a theory not a fact’ are unconstitutional”, the Discovery Institute says: “The bottom line is that what matters in science is evidence, not motives. In science you follow the evidence where it leads no matter the presumed motives of the scientists. There are more than 300 scientists who doubt Darwinism, that’s evidence that proves this is a scientific debate.”

And the competing theory is…nothing! There is no alternative scientific theory of how we got all these animals and plants and stuff. There is only an anti-theory which is it certaintly can’t be evolution. The alternative to Darwinism is currently nothing. Intelligent design is not a scientific theory. People don’t write papers with evidence and experiments that are peer-reviewed and debated and published like scientists do. Creationists just write op-ed pieces and lobby school boards. I repeat, there is no other theory to teach! These people are arguing against evolution because they can’t argue (scientifically) for anything else. Creation and intelligent design are not science. Believe them if you want, I don’t care, but we cannot teach them as science.

I don’t think science is at odds with religion — they are entirely separate things. Science is interested only in what you can “prove” and what you can predict. The word “prove” is always in quotes because in science you can’t really prove things are true, you can only prove what is not true. We often take observational evidence as proof but the underlying physics that explains why we observe what we do can never be proven, per say. It can only be supported or refuted by evidence. Example: matter is made of atoms, atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons and all of these are made of quarks (except electrons). How do we know this? We don’t. We have a model that explains what we observe very, very accurately. We can predict things with this model to a high degree of accuracy. Is our model of the atom “true”? We don’t know. All we know is it correctly predicts the results of experiments.

Evolution is another such theory. Is it true? We don’t know. We do know that it fits the evidence. It is a scientific theory in that it is based on sciences like genetics, evolutionary development, cell development and archeology. We have a model that explains why some animals are very similar and others are very different. It explains why we don’t see modern humans 100,000 years ago in the fossil record. The theory of evolution is based on the fundamental scientific tenant that whatever happened happened in a way that can be explained, in this case in terms of biology and physics.

So if creationism is to be a science it has to be a theory of biology and physics. If you want to believe that God pointed his finger and Adam appeared, that is fine, but it is not a biological/physical theory, it is religion. The theory of intelligent design is not a theory of biology or physics, it is based on a premise of a supernatural will and that takes it completely out of the realm of science. There is no scientific theory of creation because it’s not science. Note that the theory of evolution does not in any way imply that the hand of God was not somehow involved, only that, if so, God did his work in a intelligent and organized way which, when studied, yields beautiful physical relationships such as those we have discovered.

Children have a wonderful innocence that is plain to everyone. There is no evil in the heart of my little 9-month old boy. I look at him, though, and I know that someday there will be evil in his heart. I don’t mean big, horrible evils, I mean the little everyday evils that we all have in us. Selfishnesses, guilty pleasures, insecurities and less than honorable intentions. We all deal with our imperfections and our fairly consistent ability to not be the people we aspire to be. Someday all of these wonderfully innocent little children learn evil. Innocence is lost and this little bit of everyday evil takes its place. But something also is gained. You wouldn’t want these children to be innocent forever. The wonderful quality of innocence becomes the rather uglier quality of ignorance. Children grow up and as they do they are ever acquiring knowledge. Innocence is traded for knowledge. Evil, if you will, is part of the deal when you gain knowledge.

I regard the Bible as basically mythology, especially the old testament. The story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent sums up the above paragraph vividly and succinctly. Do you take a bite of the apple? Do you trade innocence for knowledge? Or do you stay in the garden of ignorant paradise?

I choose knowledge.

This parable is still a very apt topic today. Some people want to legislate us into this ignorant paradise. No premarital sex, no drug use, no abortions, no homosexuality. While I know these are not always ignorant people, they sometimes are admittedly wildly optimistic about their desire to see us legislate the ideal world. I choose knowledge. Kids will have sex, people will abuse substances, women will decide whether to remain pregnant and a certain percent of the population will be gay. These are facts. Our policies must be based on and address the world as it is, not as we wish it would be. We bit the apple. Now let’s use the knowledge.

The creationists are at it again. They just can’t stand the fact that science continues to ignore their mindless devotion to the Bible. Let me try be clear on this one, folks: science cannot and should not take into account magical omnipotent beings when we devise theories to explain natural phenomena. Yes, there may be a God and he may have done magical omnipotent things. We haven’t found them yet. Instead we’ve found a lot of very logical, consistent things like gravity, quantum mechanics, relativity and jillions of other scientific/mathematical explanations. God was clearly a physicist. He rarely and perhaps never pulled rabbits out of hats. So-called intelligent design is not a scientific theory. In a nutshell intelligent design says that something as complicated as a watch, for example, implies the existence of a watchmaker. This is a circular argument because clearly something as sophisticated as a watchmaker implies the existence of a watchmaker maker. If life is so sophisticated and complicated that it takes a magical omnipotent being to have created it, science would then have to turn to the important question of where magical omnipotent beings come from. We are, as Carl Sagan used to say, skipping a step and trying to explain the universe on physical ground rather than try to explain God on physical grounds. This is as it should be.

The theory of evolution is not a threat to religious people. Religious people have nothing to gain by forcing scientists to accommodate their religious views. Science cannot remain science if it has to take into account random miracles by an otherwise completely scientific God.

I take these truths to be self-evident.

She lost control of her SUV while driving west and the vehicle hit a median and rolled over, authorities said. She wasn’t wearing a safety belt and was thrown from her vehicle, landing in a traffic lane where she was struck by a westbound semitrailer truck.

(From the Minneapolis Star Tribune.)

You’re not safer in your SUV if you don’t wear your seat belt! No offense to this poor woman, but you have to be a complete idiot to not wear your seat belt. You can roll your car and walk away with your seat belt on and you virtually always die if you get ejected from the vehicle. Presuming that you don’t want to die I highly suggest that you wear your seat belt 100% of the time.

I would kill someone if i had to, no question about it. It would take extreme circumstances. I would be defending my life or my family or my freedom. It would be unquestionably a last resort. It may seem a little obvious but war is killing and when you agree with a war you are essentially saying by proxy that you are willing to kill over this. You are willing to kill people over the issues at hand. You can characterize it as an act of self-defense, which is fine, but you are still saying that you think this is something we gotta start killing people over.

I say this because I think many people don’t realize the immense responsibility that comes with wielding military power in the world. If we are a moral people we need to keep very close in our minds and hearts that when the US military kills they are doing it with our blessing. You and I are authorizing the violence.

If we separate ourselves from the violence that our military creates, we risk using it far too frivolously. It’s not just the enemy that gets hurt during wars. We are creating a whole new generation of vets with the sometimes deep scars of war to wrestle with the rest of their lives. Worse, dads and moms are not coming home to their young children in home after home across this country, because you and I ordered them over to kill people in Iraq.

We should all be doves, we should all be anti-war just like we are anti-killing. We should use war as a last resort. There are necessary wars, where we would all agree that violence was unavoidable. The US needs to actively work toward a world where there needn’t be necessary wars. We can’t do this when we are ourselves defending and expanding our interests with violence.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found a four fold increase in the risk of an accident for people who drive while phoning — the same risk as driving with a 0.08 blood alcohol level, the legal limit.

This shit has gotta stop. There is no worse place to talk on the phone than in your car. You cannot safely operate a cell phone and a car in modern traffic conditions at the same time. No phone call is worth people dying for so get over how god damn important you are and turn your full attention to the road. Driving is ungodly dangerous. It is the leading cause of death among the non-elderly. Yet no one treats it as if it was dangerous. Quit fucking around with your kids, quit talking on the phone, quit eating, doing your make-up and reading and fucking god damn fucking drive.