How Randomness Can Free Us All

The Interwebs are all aflutter these days because Pat Robinson said that the recent earthquake in Haiti was due to the Haitians making a pact with the devil.  Now there is so much wrong with that statement it’s hard to know where to begin.  However there are far more capable commenters and bloggers out there who have dealt with this extensively so I don’t really feel like I have much to add.

This whole unpleasant business does however perfectly illustrate why randomness is good.  If you accept that the universe is a random and sometimes cruel place, you free yourself from the primitive superstition that bad things only happen because someone angered the gods.  Pat Robinson is a prime example of this mindset but the truth is that he is just a very visible symptom of a disease prevalent throughout Christianity.  Something bad always has to be someone’s fault.  This gets especially bad in Pentecostal/Charismatic circles.  Earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks can apparently be blamed on gays, abortions and people not believing the Bible like they should.  Miscarriages, diseases and cancer can similarly be blamed on everything from the premarital sex you had as a teenager to the demons living in ornaments you bought from the (evil) East.  No theory can ever be too convoluted, no idea too crazy. 

There is a twofold evil to this line of thinking.  Firstly there is the guilt it induces.  Someone is to blame and usually that someone is YOU.  If you prayed more, believed harder, lived more purely, tithed more often, pled the Blood, anointed your house, confessed more positively and wrote more letters to the editors about the swearing on TV – none of these bad things would have happened!!  Then there is the slimy, horrible conclusion this line of thinking inevitably leads to – that if you just do enough things right, bad things will never happen to you.  If you read your Bible, pray, name it, claim it and write a check to my ministry, you will be shielded from everything bad.  This is why I find this entire mindset to be stupid, evil, disgusting and wrong (not to mention utterly unbiblical).

Simply by accepting that lots of things in this world is out of your (or anyone’s) control can free you from this burden.  There is a lot of randomness in the universe and sometimes that randomness screws you over.  El Niño events can cause droughts and floods half a world a way, movement of the earth’s plates can cause earthquakes, a small genetic copy error can cause birth defects just like it sometimes causes cancer.  Sometimes you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Sometimes, bad things are simply random chance events.  They didn’t happen because you (or anyone else) did anything wrong and nothing you could have done could have stopped it from happening.  Nothing.  It is the great common denominator in humanity – terrible things happen to us all and it is often for no reason at all.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m certainly not suggesting everything happens randomly.  I certainly believe in causality.  Only a complete idiot would deny the existence of cause and effect in our universe.  But sometimes – oftentimes – that cause has nothing to do with you and is utterly out of your control.  I guess that is what it all comes down to in the end – control.  If everything bad in our lives is due to some divine hissyfit or demonic activity then we have control back again, don't we?  Cast out the demons, calm down the Lord and all will be well again, putting us back firmly in the driving seat.

Problem is we are not in control and no good will come from pretending we are.  Some things happen because of us and others just happen to us.  All we really have control over is how we react.  So why not stop reacting like cave people?  Bad things do not happen because the gods are mad at us.  Randomness happens.  Good news is that it is not always bad, good things happen randomly too*.

So if something happens, go ahead and look for a reason – after all if you are somehow causing your misfortune you really should stop – but if there is no apparent cause, don’t invent one.  Accepting the sometimes random nature of life and our own lack of control can free us to instead focus our energies on the things we actually can control.

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EDIT:
It would seem I owe Pat Robertson an apology of sorts.  After reading this article on the history of Haiti it seems that their seemingly endless misfortune really was due to a deal with the devil.  Though not the devil Pastor Pat had in mind I think...
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*This isn’t always good news to everyone though, much of the Psalms for instance consists of bitching about good things happening to people who don’t deserve it.  Oh well...

Persecution is all about you

My previous history blog reminded me of a bit of personal history.  Shortly before starting this blog I was watching the "That the World May Know" series by historian Ray Van der Laan.  I was watching this one section relating to the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire and there was this very emotionally stirring part where the group is sitting in a cave fugitive Christians once hid in.  One girl in the group survived some pretty brutal religious violence in North Africa and she was telling her story.  It was a very poignant moment - not a dry eye in the house.  As touched as I was at the time, there was an annoying voice in the back of my mind with an uncomfortable question.  At that point in time, there were fresh reports in the news about the religious violence against Buddhists in Thailand.  The question that would not leave me alone was this - would the people now weeping about the persecution of Christians shed any tears at all about the persecution of Buddhists?

Now, I don't know the answer.  I honestly like to think that these good people would care about persecution not their own.  There are large groups of Christians though who I have serious doubts about though.  Often times when I hear Christians talk, I get the impression that they believe religious persecution is only a bad thing when it happens to Christians.  Any sane person should be able to see the problem with that but I think the most ironic part is the fact that these Christians are missing is that all religious persecution concerns Christians.  Whenever someone is persecuted, jailed, beaten or discriminated against  simply due to their beliefs then it concerns you directly.  If it can happen to anyone else then it can happen to you.  Persecution is always wrong, no matter who it happens to.  How is this not obvious?

You would think that due to everything Christians have had to suffer in their history they would have truckloads of empathy for everyone else suffering the same tragedy.  Instead you find them acting like it is not a tragedy at all!  Whenever Christians act as if they are the only people on the planet who ever suffered persecution, or worse when we try to pretend we are being persecuted when that is clearly not the case (recent case study here) it just makes me sick.  But it gets far, far worse when we act as if people of other faiths deserve to be treated badly.  There seems to be this pervasive notion that Christianity should be fully protected by the might of the law from anything that makes it even mildly unhappy while all other beliefs should only be grudgingly tolerated by the law - provided they never do or say anything that a Christian disagrees with.  That is stupid and evil and the fact that otherwise intelligent people can act that way frightens me.

Did Jesus not teach that we are to treat others the way we would wish to be treated?  Did the founder of the Christian faith not say "in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you"?  Does it not stand to reason then that if you are a Christian you should oppose all persecution on the basis of belief?  If you don't oppose it when it happens to others, what right have you to cry foul when it happens to you?  If you act like it doesn't matter when others are persecuted, others may act like it does not matter when you are persecuted.  If you think persecution of other faiths are deserved then perhaps you deserve it too.

Persecuting someone simply due to their beliefs is always wrong, no matter if the person being persecuted is Atheist, Baptist, Catholic, Hindu or Muslim.  It doesn't matter if you disagree with their beliefs.  It doesn't matter if they persecuted you in the past.  It doesn't matter if they never spoke up for you.  All that matters is that is always wrong to persecute someone for their faith.  Always.  If it is true for you then it is true for everyone.

Persecution of others always concerns you.  Martyrs matter.  If it can happen to anyone then it could happen to you.  If someone else is a victim then so are you.

History lessons

Due to my procrastinating ways I have had to spend most of my December holiday wading through 2000 years of Church history so that I can finish an 8000 word essay on it by the end of this month.  Now I have always loved history but for some reason have never spent that much time getting to know Church history and I have no idea why.  I'm really glad I was finally forced to study it though because it has been fascinating.  Anyway, the assignment requires that I not only report on Church history but that I also indicate the lessons I have learned from it.  Call me cynical but I doubt that some of the lessons I took away from my study would earn me good marks, so instead I decided to jot them down here.

 I learned that the biggest changes were often made by those who had no intention of making big changes.  Those who tried to start new movements and sects more often than not end up as short lived footnotes in the history books.  The lasting changes sometimes happen more or less by accident.  Luther and the other Reformers never intended to start the Protestant faith.  All Luther set out to do with his 95 Theses was to try and fix something he saw as broken in the Catholic Church.  All the Reformers wanted was, well, reform.  They liked the Catholic Church just fine, they just thought it had started to go astray and they were trying to fix it.  Of course that well meant suggestion went down about as well as husband making a well meaning suggestion that his wife perhaps lose some weight would.  Similarly the Wesley brothers never intended to form the Methodist Church.  John was an Anglican priest and remained one to his death - he really only intended for his movement to be a society within the Anglican church.

I learned that many of the sainted leaders in the Christian faith were anything but sainted.  Martin Luther?  Kind of a douche!  Anyone who disagreed with him on anything was attacked from a dizzying height.  From Anabaptists to Jews, anyone who crossed him had to face his wrath.  I found some wry amusement reading one author defending Calvin burning at the stake a Spanish heretic who sought sanctuary from the Inquisition in Geneva.  His defence was basically that it wasn't so bad because that was common church practice at the time and Calvin was really just doing what everyone else was doing.  Wow...  

That leads me to arguably the saddest lesson from Church History, that when it comes to persecution, Christians are fast learners.  You would think that after nearly three centuries of almost constant persecution of the most brutal kind imaginable, the Christians would be the one group who would grasp just how precious religious tolerance in society is.  You would think that, but you would be wrong.  In almost no time they went from being persecuted by the Pagans to being the ones persecuting the Pagans.  Why would the very people who experienced the horror of the Empire razing their churches and burning their Scriptures find it so easy to legislate against the Pagan faith, burn down the sacred groves (as a form of evangelism no less!!) and order the closure of the schools of Greek philosophy?

I learned that Christianity was at its best when it had no power, when it exists as a counter-culture movement.  There was a time when the Christian faith was one of beautiful simplicity.  But boy did that go spectacularly south when the Christians gained the upper hand!  I read that a recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical.  Now contrast that with the perception of the Pagan Governor Pliny around 111 AD who described Christians as follows:

"on an appointed day they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak, and to recite a hymn by turns to Christ, as to a god, and to bind themselves by an oath, not for the commission of any crime but to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery and breach of faith, and not to deny a deposit when it was claimed".

That's right, we somehow went from a point where the persecutors of Christianity basically described them as "a bunch of weirdo's really into being good and not committing crimes" to a point where Christian seems to be a synonym for "bigoted hypocrite".  It seems that power is like crack to the Church - once it gets a taste it just craves more and from there its a terrible spiral downward.  Before they had power Christians worshipped Jesus with simple adoration and focused on doing good and having character.  After gaining the upper hand the simplicity was replaced by endless bickering over theological minutia, various schisms and much ugliness.  I really liked the way Shane Claiborne put it, "Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination".  One of the worst ideas of all time was spreading Christianity by legislation.

The monastic movement especially gave me a lot of "what if's" to ponder.  For the first time, I think I grasp the "why" of it better.  As decadence grew in the Roman Empire and with Pagans and Barbarians being forced into the Church - which partially paganized Christianity - monasteries became havens for men and women who were serious about their faith.  But what if they instead stayed and tried to make a difference?  What if they tried being the salt and light in a dark world like Jesus commanded instead of running from the scary darkness?  How different would our history have been if generation after generation of the brightest, most moral and sensitive people of the land didn't go live in isolation and die childless?  Would the Dark Ages even have happened?


So what did I learn from Church history?  That the Church should stay out of politics, say no to power and instead stay humble, trying to end poverty not purgatory.  That Christians should remember the atrocities committed against them and let that motivate them to oppose those atrocities when they are committed against others - whether they agree with those others or not.  Most of all I learned that the Church is not great when it arrays itself in gold and power.  The Church is great when it follows the lead of its Founder, when it does good, cares for the outcasts and the marginalised.  The Church will be great when it starts treating others the way it would like others to treat it.  When it brings change through kindness and self sacrifice, not through intimidation and legislation.   Especially when it leads by example, offering light and warmth to world in need.

But then, I could be wrong.  After all, I've only been studying Church history for a month now

God hates recliners

A couple of interesting stories came to my attention lately

Tillmon Webb of South Carolina injured his knee and chose a very novel way of dealing with it – he sat down in his recliner and waited for God to heal him.  According to his wife: “He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God and he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn't think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people.”  So then, wearing nothing but a blanket, the 33-year-old didn't move from that recliner for the next eight months.  He insisted that his wife not call for help but after 8 months she did finally call an ambulance.  Greenwood County authorities say they found Tillmon covered with sores, and that he appeared to weigh about 800 pounds. They say he was stuck to his chair, and they had to saw the recliner apart. They cut a large hole around the front door to get him out.  He died at the hospital.  You can read the entire story here.

For 3 months Estelle Walker holed herself and her 5 children up in a cabin and during this time she made no effort to find food for any of them.  Instead of looking for a job or even asking for help she instead chose to wait on God to provide food for them. By the time police were at last summoned by neighbours, investigators found the children so malnourished they had difficulty talking.  You can read the full story here

In 2000 a young man noticed a bump on his neck.  Instead of going to the doctor he instead chose to spend the next eight years of his life in various prayer lines, prayer circles and spent a substantial amount of money on various “healing resources” from international Word of Faith ministries while the bump kept getting larger.  That young man was me.  Luckily my story had a happier ending than the previous two because I eventually got out of the prayer line and into the doctors office and it turned out I did it in the nick of time – by that time the tumor had started to squeeze my arteries and I was in immanent danger of a stroke.  Here is a picture taken around my 30th birthday which finally frightened me enough to take action:

 

 See as much as I would like to point at these people and call them names, I can’t because I am guilty of the same thing they are.  We all depended on a miracle when we didn’t need a miracle.  Tillmon Webb just had a torn ACL, hardly a lethal injury!  Estelle Walker was a qualified teacher who could easily have earned money for food and failing that she could have asked friends, family, her ex husband or anyone at one of the two churches within walking distance of the cabin for help.  All I had to do was just go see a doctor.  So why didn’t we?  Why the steadfast search for a miracle when the miracle clearly wasn’t coming – or needed?  I don't know about the other two but I'm normally a reasonably intelligent person.  How could I be so monumentally stupid then?  We were all holding the idiot ball, no point in pretending otherwise.  Whatever else we may have been we certainly acted like gullible retards.  However I do feel that the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement should shoulder a share of the blame here.  I don’t know about Mr Webb and Mrs Walker, but I know that the churches I grew up in, the books I read and the televangelists I watched all taught that we should expect the continual miraculous working of God in our lives.  More damning however is the common Pentecostal/Charismatic teaching that you should ignore circumstances, push past your common sense and close your eyes to the warning signs and just keep on believing for your miraculous breakthrough no matter how unlikely it looks.  To do anything else is to lack faith and if you don’t have enough faith you can forget about your miracle.  If you had spent any time in the Charismatic movement, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  Practical solutions are bad, faith in unnecessarily miracles are good. 

What stings the most is that this wasn’t just bad thinking, it was all bad theology too.  This is a religious idea with no backing in the Bible.  Yes, the Bible does say to trust in God but yet if you read the Bible you will see that the people in it still planted crops for food and still built walls and watchtowers to protect their cities (something I blogged about previously).  I bet you if you sat me or Tillmon or Estelle down and asked us about why evil exists we would have all explained the importance of free will and making the right decisions to you.  Likewise if you asked us about salvation we would have told you how important it is to make the right decisions because what you do has great impact on your life.  Yet when we had to make a choice to make a much needed impact on our lives we chose to do nothing instead.  How did we miss something so obvious?

Taking responsibility for your actions and their consequences isn’t just common sense, it’s Biblical too.  In the parable of the talents, Jesus doesn’t praise the servant who hid his talent, He praised the one who took what he had and worked with it.  The servant who hid his money didn’t get rewarded with a miraculous increase, no only those who earned an increase received it.  Then (as Tim recently reminded me) there is arguably one of the best Biblical examples of taking responsibility – Nehemiah.  Nehemiah didn’t receive an angelic visitation, he didn’t hear the voice of God and no prophet came to give him a word.  Instead he saw that there was something that needed doing, he realized he was able to do it and he then went ahead and did it.  When things started going wrong he didn’t quit either.  He didn’t try to back out by claiming that what he was doing must not be the will of God somehow.  Instead he got creative and he worked harder and he succeeded.  Now that is an example worth following!

Lack of critical thinking skills, gullibility and bad theology are bad enough when they are on their own, when you combine them you set the stage for disaster.  Moral of the story, God hates recliners.  That personal responsibility you’ve heard so much about?  Take some.  You want something to happen, get off your lazy ass and do your best to make it happen.  Alternatively, you could just sit back and wait for God to take responsibility for something you should be taking responsibility for yourself.   I have to warn you though, it will be a really really really long wait!

Verily I sayeth unto thee, the world shall be thy urinal!

OK so when I ended my previous blog with the words:

“Honestly, who in their right mind would just base their behavior purely on some arbitrary thing they read somewhere?”

That was supposed to be a rhetorical question.  For serious.  But noooooooo.  Someone just had to step up (or is it down?) to meet the challenge like an acid tripping Don Quixote:

“Are male gynecologists professionals or perverts?

Jeremiah 17:9 reads, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”  What kind of a man would go into a profession of examining women’s private parts?  Don’t tell me that he is not made of the same sinful flesh that every other man is made of.  No man can look at pornographic images and not be affected.  This is why God commands us repeatedly to set no wicked thing before our eyes.

Because of years and years of looking at and touching scores of women inappropriately, the male gynecologist no doubt has a seared conscience and a perverted mind (I will not go into detail of what goes on in the doctor’s office for decency’s sake, but any woman who has been there knows what I am referring to.).  His view of women and the marital bed has certainly been warped by his indecent involvement with countless women. 

May God help preachers in this generation to make the Bible their authority, not tradition, and call this ungodly practice what it really is – sin.  Any doctor that looks upon and touches a woman’s private parts in his office “hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”  Sir, if you let your wife go to a male gynecologist, you need to get right with God.”

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking “he got that from The Onion or some parody site, no way is anyone in the real world that dense.”  Yes gentle reader, you would be forgiven for thinking that but no, sadly for us as a species this is totally legit and what is more, it is only one section from a longer article.  Read it at your own peril here.

with thermonuclear fire

After running into this over at Fundies say the darndest things I felt glove slapped.  This is the kind of statement that manages to push almost all my buttons (not the good ones, the flashing red ones behind the glass with the sign that reads: DO NOT PUSH).  In one short sermonette this guy managed to mix legalistic religion, braindead literalism and complete ignorance and then boil it down to a thick sludge of toxic stupid which he then proceeded to pour out all over a group of people I have a world of respect for – doctors.

See unlike the reality challenged Pastor Steven I have some experience in this matter.  To be fair, I’ve never been to a gynecologist (for reasons I would hope are obvious) but I did have to go in for not one but two lifesaving surgeries.  Now seeing as how I am without medical and can’t afford a private hospital I had to go to a state hospital which happens to be a teaching hospital.  Both times I went my entire surgical team (except for the Professor) consisted entirely of young, attractive female surgical interns.  Now when they wheel you into surgery wearing nothing but an ill fitting little robe thing that doesn’t close at the back you may choose to cling to some vague hopes regarding modesty.  However when you wake up naked and catheterized you have to deal pretty quickly with the fact that a whole group of attractive twentysomethings just saw you naked (and clearly not at your best…).  You know what was awkward about that the next day?  Nothing!*  These ladies were barely out of med school and they were completely and utterly professional with not a trace of weirdness regarding the human body.  How much more then the men who spent years as practising OB/GYN's??

So then, to not only spout a bunch of ignorant BS wrapped in Bible verses but to call these people I owe so much gratitude to and have so much respect for a bunch of sick perverts was like talking trash about my dead mother.  Them’s fightin’ words!  It was going to be on like Donkey Kong!  I was ready to go off big time and point out that if this is representative of what Independent Baptists believe then exposing children to Independent Baptists should be considered child abuse.  But then I realized why the name Pastor Steven L. Anderson sounded so familiar.  You may remember him as a minor viral video star from not too long ago:





It was kind of a surreal Wizard of Oz type moment when I looked behind the curtain and realized the guy I was about to unleash the blogging fury on was the guy who thought that a verse saying:


Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone., 1 Kings 14:10

Was a command from God for him to go forth into the land of the Germans and stand up for sheer manliness by standing up to pee!  LIKE A MAN!!!

and yet somehow Past Steven manages to fail even stronger...

After realizing who I was dealing with my rage subsided and (after a whole lot of snickering) I realized that my rhetorical question was indeed still a rhetorical question.  See I would bet all my lands and livestock** that Past. Steve here didn’t believe one thing, then one day opened his 1611 King James Version Bible and then totally changed his beliefs on it all based on what he read.  No he always believed the way he did – clearly he remained stuck on the picture 12 year old boys have of gynaecology – and then just found whatever justification he could scrape from the Bible.  This is clearly a man with some serious issues and the Bible had nothing to do with it.  Because that is how things work in the real world.
    




*Well there was the pre-op prostate check which I daresay was at least a little bit awkward for everyone involved.  But I’m talking post-op here.
** Disclaimer:  I don’t actually own any lands or livestock

Of Lions and Stepfathers

Seeing as how I very recently blogged about the whole “Darwinism inevitably leads to  Racism & Genocide” claim I was hoping to never ever have to write about this again.  Then in the aftermath of a debate between PZ Myers and Jerry Bergman on the topic "Should Intelligent Design be taught in the schools" I read the following in an email response by Ross Olson of the Twin Cities Creation Science Association (who organized the debate):

“The only point at which the crowd got rowdy was with the mention of evolution's influence on Hitler. Actually, that issue is not solved by shouting because there is a strong case that the desire to improve the race leads to eugenic and ethnic cleansing policies. Indeed, your claim that morality comes from our culture needs to answer the question, "What if my culture is the Mafia?" Other evolutionary apologists have candidly pointed out that the only morality that can come out of evolution is that I leave my genes, as many of them as possible, to the next generation.”

I was in the middle of my usual response to claims like these – a deep sigh and a facepalm – when I suddenly realized I could think of a better example than the one I gave in my previous post on the matter.

OK, let’s forget about evolution for a moment.  Any Creationist worth his/her salt will tell you that Evolution is not a scientific fact because it’s not observable and repeatable etc.  So let’s look instead at a scientific fact no one can deny.

Lets talk about lions.

Could you be any more majestic?

You think “lion” you tend to think of an animal with nobility, majesty, fierce power and beauty - and they are certainly all of those things.  Admit it, that's the kind of animal you would like to associate yourself with right?  But wait, there is one little thing about lions that they may have glossed over in The Lion King.  See there is something that happens in the wild that you probably won't enjoy seeing.  From time to time you find that the resident males in a pride will be driven off by other males and these new males will take over the pride.  Once that happens their first order of business will be to kill off all the cubs in their new pride ASAP.  This in turn leads to the females in their new pride becoming sexually receptive again and mating with the males who just killed their babies, bearing the new males new offspring.

If this was you and your mom met someone new you would look nervous too.

This is a reasonably well known - though understandably not popular - fact about lions.  We may not like to think of it much but it is a fact and in case you have trouble believing my claim I have included several sources at the bottom of this post.  A simple google search will find you even more.  Anyone who knows about lions from PhD's to Game Rangers will confirm that.  I'm not going to embed a video because (trust me on this) it's not pretty to watch but if you really need to see it for yourself, a couple of those links have video footage or alternatively you can simply go to Youtube and search for “lion infanticide” or “male lion kills cubs” and you will find plenty of documentary footage.  Heck if you still don't want to believe all that just go into the wild and study lions for yourself, you are bound to see it.  It's not like we are talking about the exception here, more like the rule.  This is a fact.  Not a nice one, not a pleasant one and certainly not an easy one to watch but an undeniable fact.

So if you are a Creationist and you think that an acceptance of Evolution inevitably leads to racism, ethnic cleansing and school shootings how do you react to this fact?  Do you think that this will inevitably lead to stepfathers killing all their stepchildren?  Should this fact not be taught in school for fear that it may cause the bloody collapse of the foster care system?  Now to be fair I used to be a Young Earth Creationist myself once so I don’t want to set up a strawman argument here.  I know the Creationist position is not so much that everyone bases their ethics and morals on nature (though you would be excused if you weren’t clear on this just from reading Creationist propaganda pieces) but rather that unless you believe that God supernaturally created human beings as and that we as His special beings therefore get all our morals and ethics directly from Him as our Creator, there is nothing stopping people from basing their ethics and morals on nature (or whatever they find to their liking).  I’m guessing there are a lot of non-creationist stepfathers out there though.  Do you honestly believe that if they all knew about this fact about lions the streets will be running red with the blood of stepchildren?  If you actually believe that then you (my hypothetical Creationist friend) are seriously out of touch with reality.  Here is why.

Remember when they taught you in grade school that you were a mammal?  I do.  I seem to also remember that at no point in time did that cause me to reject my moral upbringing, renounce my faith or change my feelings on genocide.  At no point did I figure this logically inferred that I needed to act like any mammal other than the human mammal I had been my entire life.  Similarly when I later learned that I was mostly water it never made me want to run away from home to go live in a pool.  Neither did learning that humans were carbon based make me want to burn people for fuel.  Now let’s imagine for a moment that I was either moronic enough or insane enough to actually think and do these things – would that make any of the scientific facts I just named any less true?  No.  Totally, absolutely, positively not.

Seriously I can't stress the "no" part enough here

So for the millionth time, can we please drop this whole “Evolution is wrong because it would turn people into amoral eugenicist genocidal monsters” line of argument?  It has absolutely no basis in reality.  None.  At all.  Science doesn’t work that way, reality doesn’t work that way, morals don’t work like that and neither does ethics.  The veracity of our scientific ideas do not stand or fall based on the moral implications someone may or may not derive from it.  So pretty please, why not just let this entire stupid argument go?  In real life, people just don’t act like that.  Oh we learn from nature and we do apply scientific principles to our lives all the time, I’m not arguing that.  Take this lion infanticide thing for example.  We see it applied all the time.  When a new CEO, president or even pastor takes over then usually the first thing they do is to kill off all the pet projects of their predecessor and start their own – we've all seen it happen I’m sure.  But you know what we never seem to see?  Loving stepfathers who upon learning that lions kill their step-cubs decide that this must apply to them too (because it is a scientific fact after all) and then proceed to murder their stepchildren, thats what!  Doesn’t matter if you believe in God, evolution or the Celestial Teapot, that is just not how reality works!

Honestly, who in their right mind would just base their behavior purely on some arbitrary thing they read somewhere?




Sources:
Wikipedia article on infanticide
The Lion Research Centre
Prides, Coalitions and Infanticide Among Lions
The African Lion - Infanticide & Female Response

Intermission

I was going to do my usual kind of blog post today but I simply can't.  Not today.  I simply do not have it in me to deal with fundies, dissect antiscience, discuss bad religion or to be snarky with anyone today.  I am too happy for any of that.  I am filled with deep joy and deep gratitude.  Today I just want to watch the Boom-de-yada video on a loop and play Beethoven's Ode to Joy for the entire neighbourhood!  Seriously, if you don't know it, look up the lyrics, especially the verse that goes:
"Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!"
and then tell me thats not 7 kinds of awesomeness right there.  See today is the day I got to wake up and know that I have been officially cancer free for one year.  So all my usual sarcasm, my questions, my opinions about life and struggles with my own stubborn faith can wait for another day.  Today I'm taking an intermission.



You know yesterday in the waiting room over at Nuclear Medicine there was this middle aged lady.  She said she had a singing and dancing ministry and asked if she could sing us a song.  She did that and she did the interpretive dance that went with that and if this was any other day I would be telling you all about that in the most amusing way I could manage.  But not today.  Not regarding this lady.  Sure, she was full of all the usual Pentecostal weirdnesses that I usually like to poke some fun at but she was still wearing the bandaid from where the chemo needle went into her veins and I could never mock someone like that.  When I think of her I feel nothing but deep compassion.  We do what we have to do to survive the things that happen to us sometimes.  Over those things we have no control.  How we respond is all we have left in times like these.

So in this spirit of kindness and giving I am instead choosing to take an ad break.  Didn't see that one coming did you? Yep, just when you think I'm going to zig, I zag!  Now I realise that easily 90% of the people who show up at this blog do so because they were googling "Christian Clipart" and Google Images sent them to my Heaven and Hell blog.  But for my actual regular readers - I ♥ you both btw!! - I do want to just take a moment to recommend a book.

My bookshelf has been getting a little crowded and I'm considering a better system for my small (yet growing) personal library.  Yet at the same time I'm a little hesitant because looking at it is kind of like looking at the tree rings of my own journey of through life.  There are definite phases of my life represented there - the hyper charismatic days with Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland.  The really strange days of esoteric prophecy and visions with Rick Joyner and Paul Keith Davis.  There are a bunch of books on relationships, figuring out your life purpose, dealing with money, being a man, science vs. faith - all representing things I desperately tried to understand (so yeah, several books on figuring out women) at one or other point in life.  At the moment the older, rigid apologetics tomes have given way to more humorous and gently questioning books by the likes of Rob Bell and Don Miller and the drier works on Bible Doctrine to books delving deeper into the Hebrew roots of Christianity with a freshly growing collection of books on science, skepticism and critical thinking growing right alongside it.  I was chatting to RandomSue (who should strongly consider blogging again, srsly!!) yesterday and something she said made me realise something interesting about my books.  We were talking about Rick Joyner's books and how it never made much sense to her and suddenly I realised just how cliquey those books made a lot of us Christians at the time.  See those books (and several others on my shelf) you couldn't simply discuss with just anyone.  You could only talk about it with other Christians and not all other Christians at that.  It had to be likeminded Christians who were at your "level", people who were into the things you were into and "got it" the way you "got it" (would be very hard to define the "it" in question though so I'm not even going to try).  Basically you could only talk to people who read the things you did and liked them the way you did and it fostered this whole attitude to the rest of the world of "Tee hee, we are totally into something you can't begin to grasp!”.  This was a fundamentally retarded way of going through life now that I think about it.  There is a sharp contrast between those books and the ones I'm into these days.  In fact that's one of the things I like about my current reading list, it doesn't have that problem.  When I find something interesting in there, odds are it will be interesting to others as well - regardless of their faith, lack of faith, denomination, church attendance or level of "spiritual maturity and insight".

That is why I would like to just recommend Donald Miller's latest book "A million miles in a thousand years".  Now if you happened to have read my blog post about The Secret you would know that I have a deep and abiding hatred for books that offer you a magical way of changing your life for the better.  I hate pretty much all self-help books (with the fire of a thousand suns!!!) and I'm very much not fond of motivational books* and speakers.  Seriously, I get immediately suspicious of any book people call "life changing".  So I'm not going to make that claim about this book - the book certainly doesn't claim it about itself - and I'm not going to tell you that its going to transform you into "your best self" or any other Oprah-esque BS like that.  All it is, is a simple, very well written, very honest account of a man who wrote an autobiographical novel (Blue like Jazz) which became successful and was offered a movie deal.  As he starts working on the screenplay for his own life he realises just how boring and unfulfilling his life had become.  So as he learns the principles of storytelling and movie writing he starts applying them to his own life and they actually work.  Now I know what you are thinking - that sure does sound like a self help book with a magic formula.  It's really not.  Yes, in the book Don gets off his couch, loses some weight, meets people, starts relationships and becomes someone a lot less boring but it doesn't promise to do the same for you.  It could possibly but that would be up to you.  But at the very least it could give you a different perspective on your own life, why you are the way you are and why other people behave they way they do.  I don't lightly call things profound, but I found parts of that book to be very profound.  It also made me change a few things in my own life.  One of the reasons I'm not blogging as much as I want to is because I'm trying to change my own procrastinating ways and putting a bit more effort into my studies these days.  I'm also trying to get out of the house more and spend more time with my friends.  So far, I'm liking what reading this book has done for me.  Try it, who knows, you may just find it meaningful to you too.

*I do own Lance Armstrong's Bio and it is inspirational but I still maintain that if you want to give it as a motivational gift, give it to a single mother raising a son, not a cancer patient.  I think she would get the most out of that book.  However that too is just my unqualified opinion!