Atheism: My Reasoning

Author's note:  Please, for the love of (insert deity, belief structure or candy of choice here) remember that what you read below is ENTIRELY MY OPINION.  If you believe in something that contradicts my beliefs, feel free to post a comment, I will respond in kind.


...In the beginning, there was nothing.  Which exploded.
-Terry Pratchett


I've often told people I don't believe in God, which is true.  I've also qualified that with the statement that I don't believe in Han Solo either, but a lot of people seem to think he exists too.  Both are fictional characters (and Han's ship is cooler), they've just managed to get really popular.  But my mindset goes further than that, I don't believe in God or gods because there aren't any.  There are no psychics, there are no prophecies and there's nothing supernatural about the planet I inhabit.  The world that I see is unique, beautiful, ever changing, mind-numbingly strange and completely explainable, it just takes a long time to do so.

It's said that a god or gods can only exist in the margins.  This means that anything that isn't explained by modern science or human knowledge must be God.  Lightning once came from Zeus on Olympus, the sun was formerly the domain of Ra, fire was stolen from the gods in countless folk tales and myths.  This boundary has been getting pushed back for centuries, ever since we learned that the Earth is not the center of the universe or even our own solar system.  Since the Renaissance, human knowledge has advanced to frightening levels, extending human life, learning a great deal about our world and even how to make peanut butter M & Ms.*

The neat thing about all that is humans figured it all out.  We had no help, no divine inspiration, no etherial cheat sheet.  I've heard theories that aliens must have assisted ancient cultures build their structures; The measurements are too precise, they say.  I think this is honestly insulting to say about the race of beings to which you belong.  Maybe we were a little more anal retentive about stones back in the day, maybe we actually spent a fuck-ton** of time trying to get things right or maybe people are actually smarter than people give people credit for being (if you've worked out what this sentence means, add 3 IQ points to your score).

Saying that science doesn't have all the answers is completely true.  We don't.  Ask any scientist, he'll admit that he doesn't have all the answers.  "But," he'll come back with, "we're learning more all the time."  Then go ask a priest.  He'll hold up a millennia old book and claim the answer is God.  Religion hinders science by taking away the need to explore.  If you have faith, you have the answer to all of the following questions:

• How did we get here?
• Why are there so many different kinds of animals?
• Where did these massive bones buried in the ground come from?
• What made me think of this new invention?

Believe it or not, they all have the same answer: "God did it."  You're done!  No need to study, learn or try to figure things out.  Thanks for playing, go persecute/convert some heretics.

The world is confusing enough as it is, do we really need something spiritual to keep us all in check?  Ask a Bible thumper, next time you see one, why the damn book is so important.  They'll tell you it's the divine word of God, that it teaches you how to be a good person, that it is the foundation of our law and order.***  If they're REALLY crazy, they'll tell you that if it wasn't for the damn Bible, they'd go around raping and stealing and killing.  Run from these people.  Quickly.  They're saying that, if not for their invisible friend telling them "NO," they wouldn't care about other people's suffering or pain.

I'm a moral person, so I think.  I've never believed in a god, I've never felt anything I couldn't explain and I've never needed an imaginary friend to guide me.  Despite my Atheism, I've never fired a gun, never had a drop of alcohol or other mind altering drug, never intentionally hit anyone in my life.****  I don't believe in God, but then I also don't believe in Satan, demons, angels or the Loch Ness Monster.  You're responsible for your actions, choices and morality.  Attributing anything to a higher power lessens the thing being attributed.  God didn't help you get a touchdown or beat cancer or get over your dangerous habits; YOU did, and the people around you probably helped.

Planet Earth is amazing.  It's a one in a million lucky shot that we're here at all, which makes us feel very special and makes us think there MUST be a plan, some divine idea or reason for our existence.  Consider the possibility that there isn't.  The world is still beautiful and tomorrow the sun will still rise and set (unless you're reading this at the South Pole currently).  What is lost by saying the world is godless and purposeless, that it's just HERE and nothing more?  Roses still smell lovely, ice cream still tastes great and a sunset is still a sight to behold.

Finally, all cultures since the dawn of time have wondered if there is such a thing as a soul and what happens to it when you die.  Deep down, most people think the answer is, at the very least, something rather than nothing.  In a spiritual sense, everybody is living for the afterlife.  In my view, the soul is something that is created by the sum of your experience.  It is everything you've seen, done and been that has made you the person you are today.  It's also a fairly brief thing to have, a soul.  When you die, it ends.  There is no where for it to escape to, it resides in the neurons that fire in your brain.  Without blood and oxygen, it stops working and ceases to be.  Some would view this as a hopeless statement, but I see it in this way...

• There is no afterlife, there is no reincarnation.  THIS is all we get.  When your gone, the only things you leave behind are the memories of the people who knew you.  All you can do is try to make some good ones.

Hope this wasn't too heavy a post.  Thanks for reading, hope I kept it entertaining up until that last bit.

*Peanut butter AND chocolate all in a candy shell?!?!?! Simply amazing...
**This is not profanity for profanity's sake, a fuck-ton is a technical term.  It's larger than an ass-load, but is smaller than a shit-load.  Above that you get things like a fucking ass-load, a shit-ton and a metric fuck-ton.
***Refer them to Exodus, the book of Job and most of the rest of the book where people are killing each other and God is smiting the innocent.
****At least, not with the intention of causing pain; Everyone does playful jabs.

Would Vegetarians Eat Meat if No Animals Were Killed?

Welcome!  Or welcome back, as the case may be.  Today's blog is about the things we eat.  If you don't want me to frank about food, please stop reading here.  I'll do my best to be as un-frank as I know how.  I might try being jim about it... or maybe steve... I like steve.

One of the key problems of human existence is that we need to eat to live, yet some of us have developed sympathy for the creatures we consume.  This is one of the main drives of the vegetarian movement, an attempt to limit the amount of animals killed by eating less meat.  That's like trying to keep a democrat or a republican from being elected by not voting for them; You have a slight effect, but it's really just for you.  Vegans are people who take it a step further and won't even have anything with animal products in it, like eggs, milk and cheese.  Vegan is such a strange term that I find it easier to call them herbivores, which is a term I learned about when studying dinosaurs for a creature that only eats plants.

Moo?

As a point of argument, everything we as humans eat came from something that was alive.  Meat, eggs, yeast in bread, grain in cereal, apples from trees.  Plants just don't have faces or make noise when you take their sexual organs off their branches and stalks* and generally don't die when you harvest off them, so it's more bearable.  There is precisely one exception I've managed to find to this rule, which is salt.  Salt is a naturally occurring resource that is mined the world over to make french fries and popcorn taste better... Except in France of course.

What it all boils down to, as I see it, is that some people say that eating animals is "wrong" or "unnatural."  All of that is inherently funny because animals, frequently, eat other animals.  In fact, certain species of ant will invade a termite colony and capture the termite queen so that she produces more termite larvae.  Not to raise them, just to eat them, kinda like cattle farming.  Of course, no one will win an argument using ants, they aren't people.**

However, here's an interesting thought experiment: What if we could have meat without killing any animals?  The ethical argument would go away completely and we could enjoy some guilt free prime rib.  Plus, if we had a way of producing it without using animals, we could remove the costly and land consuming need for huge livestock farms and put that land to better use in the future.***  A couple different scientists around the world are trying to accomplish that very thing.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110130/sc_nm/us_food_meat_laboratory_feature

Cluck?

As you may read in the article, assuming you READ the article, you'll notice that the programs outlined in the headline are currently unfunded.  However, it's theoretically possible to take a gene from the meat of a cow or chicken, grow it in a laboratory and produce animal meat without the animal.  The same techniques are being tested to grow new organs for people using their own genes.

Imagine it, the ability to "grow" food without having to grow plants, feed those plants to an animal, wait for that animal to grow to the right age and size, kill the animal, remove the important meat parts and then have dinner.  I'd be curious to see how many ex-vegetarians we'd have in this country.  I'm sure PETA would still have a problem with it, exploiting animals for our own usage, but who really cares about PETA anymore?****  I'm a Person Eating Tasty Animals.

Anyway, let me know what you guys think about growing cultured meats (meaning meat grown in a lab, not meat that can tell you which operas are the best to attend) and I'll try to keep the interesting stuff a-comin'.  Time to go hunt and gather some fried chicken.

*Which is essentially what fruit and vegetables are.  Think about that next time you have a salad.
**Unless you have an aunt in the slaughterhouse industry.  Then the analogy works... sort of.
***Well, better use than a huge manure production facility, I suppose.  There will always be a need for bull shit some where.
****Aside from crazy celebrities who are in it for the media attention.