Java on Religion
Brain Chip Boosts Mind Over Matter — Chicago Tribune - With a tiny electronic chip implanted in his motor cortex, a man paralyzed for five years from the neck down has learned to use his thoughts to operate a computer, turn on a TV set, open e-mail, play a video game and manipulate a robotic arm.
This is so cool. Go on. Go read the article. I’ll wait.
. . .
Done? Omigawd, that’s so cool, isn’t it? They put a teeny-tiny lil’ chip in your brain, and then you can move things like computer mice and robot arms and turn the lights off and on.
I. Want.
As a long-time Shadowrunner, I personally cannot wait until I can have cybernetic implants. Man, I want memory storage, I want cyber eyes, I want cyber ears, I want new legs, possibly new arms, data jacks, chip jacks, the whole nine frickin’ yards. I want it all. Mostly, though, I want hard drive. Possibly with an Internet link, for boring days at work. I’d love to be dealing with some asshat entitled customer while blogging in realtime about what an asshat said customer was. Or googling stuff, or paying my bills, or whatever. Bring on the cybernetics, folks! I’m all about it!
From Orac Knows (AKA Respectful Insolence) — apparently, the Hitler Zombie is loose in Michigan. This is extremely disturbing news, because I think the Hitler Zombie was in the restaurant the other day. There’s this old guy who’s always crawling up my ass about the dumbest things, and he has a little Hitler ’stache, and he certainly looks dead . . . crap. He always orders the beef tips and noodles, too, and that kind of looks like brains. Time to load ye olde shotgun.
Anyhow, I’m willing to bet that Granholm is sending flowery thank-you cards right this very moment to Adolph Mongo, because if he keeps that crap up, he’s going to hand her the election.
Ooo, here’s another good one about my home state: ID Legislation in Michigan — We’ve got a sudden rash of ID activity here in Michigan. The MCFS board got word yesterday that the House Education Committee in Michigan was going to hold a hearing this morning on HB 5251, a bill that would require the teaching of all the major ID arguments in public school science classes. We had thought this bill was dead in light of HB 5606, which was signed into law in April. But the pro-ID language had been taken out of that bill, so the sponsors of 5251 have revived it.
Dammitdammitdammit! How did I miss this? I could have added it to my weekly bitchfest when I emailed my reps! Arrgh! Now I have to email them all again. Dammitdammitdammit.
Moolenaar, you fucking turd. I would love to hear what my old high school science teachers think of you right now. Mr. Faber would string you up by your ears if he could get his hands on you. Well, okay, probably not. In reality, he would eat some chalk, and then lecture-ize you half to death on why ID is crap. (Mr. Faber ate chalk, because it’s a natural antacid, and he had ulcers from dealing with all us little junior high school punk idiots. It was a big gossipy rumor going around, and I asked him about it one day, being the forthright individual that I am. “Hey, Mr. Faber, everyone says you eat chalk. Why’s that?” So, he explained it to me.)
Intelligent Design. Good fucking Jebus. Get your religion out of my fucking science, already. Crap, crap, crap. You don’t even need to have a decent background in science to see that ID is crap. All you need is basic common sense. I already went over some of the common sense ways to tell that ID is crap, so I’ll skip the repeat.
I maintain that religion is a crutch for the weak-minded. The world is a tough, scary place, full of tough choices and scary consequences, and radical bad luck that comes flying out of nowhere for no good reason. Religion, particularly the fundamentalist, nutjob versions of it, offer a safe haven for those who don’t have the strength of mind to tackle the world head on.
Religion tells you that your craptastic bad luck, in the form of whatever currently ails you, is a “test from God”, or if that doesn’t cover it, that “we see through the glass darkly”, and therefore can’t understand why we got cancer. (Might be the smoking. Or the fried food. Or the air. Shit, just living causes cancer these days.) Religion tells you that your good fortune is a “gift”, from the same God who just gave you cancer, presumably, or the results of living “right”, IE, within the tenets of your chosen moral code. Religion takes all the tough choices away from you. You don’t have to think about anything, because your holy book tells you all the answers. You get to ignore all the debating and thinking, and skip right over to being righteously correct. I’ve often thought that being religious must make life an awful lot easier. It must be nice to not have to think, sometimes.
There is no such thing as the black and white world that religion presents. This world is one big shade of gray, and that makes picking out the “right” and “moral” choice difficult sometimes. What may be the “right” answer to a moral dilemma in one instance is not in another, if but one or two circumstances have changed.
For example, one of my counter regulars, Fundamentalist Bill, presented a news story he’d heard about to me one day. I’ve got no way to verify the accuracy of his story, so we’ll just take it as a random “fer instance” type of thing. He asked me one day what I thought of this story: there’s a lesbian (?) couple in California, one of whom works in a city job, and gets city insurance. The other half of the couple is half-way through the operation to become a man. The city-worker gets fired and loses her insurance, thus rendering her partner stuck half-way to being a man. The couple is suing the city to continue the insurance, so the partner can finish up the operations and what-have-you. Fundamentalist Bill wanted to know what I thought of the law suit. (Just to put old Bill in his place for you, Bill hates gay folks, because his religion tells him to. He claims he doesn’t hate them, just that it’s a sin, yaddayaddayadda, but y’know, a lot of what comes out of his mouth sounds like hatred to me.)
So I say, to F. Bill, “Well, what are the circumstances? What did the lesbian get fired for? Was she fired because she was in an alternative lifestyle partnership, or because she was an incompetent dipshit?”
Bill responds that the lesbian was fired for regular reasons, being an incompetent dipshit, whatever. Not fired for being a lesbian in a relationship where her partner was transsexual.
”Then the lawsuit is crap, and the partner’s life sucks.” I responded. “Now, if they’d fired her for being a lesbian with a transsexual partner, then yeah, they should continue the insurance and pay for the operation to be finished, because they fired her for prejudiced reasons.”
One simple circumstance in the story, the reason for being fired, changes my response to the story. For Bill, nothing changes his response. The operation shouldn’t be finished no matter what, because it’s a “sinful” relationship between two messed up fags, both of whom are going to hell, for various reasons.
I don’t talk to Bill much anymore. He makes me want to slap him. I need my job.
The world is full of problems that don’t have easy answers, and religion offers easy answers. How do we handle gay marriage, gay partnerships, gay rights, etc. Religious answer: We don’t. It’s sinful and corrupt, and they don’t deserve any rights and privileges, because they’re hellbent sinners causing God’s wrath in the form of hurricanes and global warming (which doesn’t actually exist, until it’s needed to be another sign that God’s mad at us). Non-religious answer: Give the gays their rights. Let them get married and have insurance and so forth. It doesn’t harm anyone if two men or two women in love get married and share insurance. Let them adopt kids, so long as they pass the same testing that hetero couples have to pass. Let the kids have a loving home. Jeez, who cares if the kids do turn out gay, like the fundamentalists claim will happen? Does it really matter, as long as they grow up loved and happy and well-adjusted?
Does anyone notice that this is the exact same argument that we had over first bi-religious couples, and then bi-racial couples, by the way? Just curious.
The question: Abortion. Religious answer: Murder. Non-religious answer: An alternative that we sincerely hope is rare, but that should remain available, because sometimes “Ooops, right now!” is not the best time to have a kid. We may or may not approve of the choice for ourselves, and frankly, whether or not we take advantage of that choice for ourselves depends entirely on the circumstances we find ourselves in at the moment. For example, if I’d been knocked-up by the ex — straight to the local abortion clinic. Knocked up right now by my wonderful husband? Whoa. Maybe not so much with the abortion clinic, although it would be damned tough financially, and put a serious crimp in our lifestyles. We’d really, seriously have to think that one over. Dunno if I could, even if it would be a tough haul financially. And of course, the religious answer to all those thorny circumstances: don’t fuck if you don’t want babies.
Well, that certainly makes things easier for me and Art. I’ll go wake him up from his nap right now and tell him we don’t have to worry about getting pregnant anymore, because the Bible says not to fuck if we aren’t having kids. I’m sure that’ll go over real well.
Life is tough. Life is scary. Religion makes things easy, wraps your life up in a nice, warm, cozy, soft blanket. Being an atheist means that you have to consider all sides of a moral dilemma, all sides of a debate, evaluate the evidence critically — really fucking think for yourself, and decide for yourself what the right choice is, and then proceed through with it, even if it is hard, even if you don’t necessarily want to. For example, from Orac Knows (AKA Respectful Insolence) again, the issue of Starchild Abraham Cherrix, this little kid who went with bullshit alternative medicine to treat his lymphoma instead of conventional chemo, because chemo makes you feel bad, and useless herbs and prayers don’t make you lose your hair, barf, and feel like shit. Starchild’s probably going to die because of a stupid decision, because this kid didn’t have the balls to feel like shit for a couple of years, so he could hopefully, and more likely live to adulthood. (And, his parents should be beaten for letting their kid die due to stupid alternative medicine.) Chemo sucks. I watched my grandpa go through that. But that’s what you do if you want to live. You don’t drink licorice tea and pray. You suck it up, wear fun ball caps to hide your bald head, and cope, and with luck, you live.
Religion has no further place in this world. It’s a crutch, and we need to kick it to the side, learn to walk on our own, learn to face the tough choices and think them through for ourselves. Religion is Mommy and Daddy (mostly Daddy), and we need to grow the fuck up, put it in a home, and learn to live like adults.
And now here’s another tough choice this little atheist has to make — get off the computer and go do her housework. Heh.
July 20th, 2006 at 8:13 am
Hey, you. I wanted to say that I only wish my religious beliefs made life easy for me, or made me unable to think for myself. We’ve talked about this many times in the past so I’m not going to go into a lot of detail again.
I think what happens with a lot of people is that they get “saved”. Then they never really read the Bible or other books, but just rely on what they hear once a week from the minister, or from what they hear on tv, whatever, and they never really know what they’re talking about. They stay little babies, never growing up, but spewing their opinions all over the place. Never mind if they’re wrong.
My life is very tough, and has been very scary. Religion definitely doesn’t make it any safer or easier. I still have to think, make decisions, and sometimes talk to a kid who prayed and prayed that God would take away their homosexuality, but He didn’t, and the kid wants an answer as to why. Religion didn’t keep me from being homeless, from being hungry, from being angry, frustrated, hurt, jealous–you name it. What it does is give me a reason to go on living, I guess. A joy deep inside when nothing is going right and I should be miserable.
Danny
July 20th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
I don’t know if these comments get emailed back or not, so I emailed you, too.
Danny, you and your family, and folks like you, are the minority. By far, the vast majority of the religious people I’ve dealt with, online and in real life, have been of the fundamentalist, non-thinking sort that I’m talking about in the post. In fact, in my life, I’ve met exactly three people who would A) admit to being religious, and B) were also decent, intelligent people. Two of them, you and Flamingcat, I’ve never even got to meet face-to-face.
Most of the people I meet who believe in one god or another do so because they were raised that way, and never gave much more thought to it than that. It’s not a big factor in their lives. If you ask, they’ll say, “Why yes, I believe in God!”, but they never really thought about it much. Many, many others that I meet and deal with, on line, out and about, in the restaurant, are of the sort who are using their religion as a bludgeon and/or an excuse not to have to think about things too much.
The first two years I went to GenCon, religious folks of some sort — I don’t remember their religion anymore — were picketing the convention hall. I was told that it was a fairly regular occurance. They seemed like decent enough people, but to a man, thought all us gamers were, at the least, hellbound heathens, and that the majority of us were baby-eating seriel killers. None of them wanted to actually get to know any of us. None of them wanted to actually learn about the games we liked to play, or why we played them, or anything like that. They just wanted to “save” us. The second year I went, I actually talked to few of them, asked them why they were there, and so on, why they thought we needed saving. I couldn’t make any headway with them. I couldn’t make them understand that the majority of us con folk were decent people, a lot of us with kids and family. I couldn’t get them to understand that even though some games involved made-up gods and worlds and so on, that they weren’t “evil”. On the other hand, I could see that the twenty or so folks picketing and handing out flyers were probably decent enough folks with family and jobs and whatnot, and probably thought that they really were trying to help us out. They weren’t “evil”, just ignorant, and unwilling to fix their own ignorance.
Just like F. Bill, for example, who is a decent enough old fart, with a nice lady who is his wife. He’s a funny guy, with funny stories about when he was in the army. He’s quite intelligent about a lot of things. He loves dogs, which is big points in his favor. He’s got a really nice mutt of an old dog, whom he still calls his “puppy”, and dotes on. He’s also the same guy who made a young woman cry out in our parking lot because she was saving a handicapped parking spot by standing in it. She was saving it for her handicapped father. Still, Bill went up and yelled at her for it until she cried. He did that on Sunday morning, arriving at the restaurant after he’d gotten out of church. Bill’s just a guy, a decent enough guy as long as you don’t talk politics or religion with him. He’s got a lot of good things about him, and a lot of bad things about him, just like you and me and every other person out there. But he uses his religion like a bludgeon against anyone who won’t agree with him, and refuses to admit that he might, in fact, be less than perfect when it comes to the tenets of his own religion.
July 21st, 2006 at 7:49 am
Yeah, I know what you mean, I really do. I deal with people like that all the time, and it makes me sad that Christianity is reduced to, well, stupidity and crap. In my mind, though, the fact that there are hypocrites and idiots within my religion doesn’t negate my beliefs. I know what it’s like to try to get through to someone who is stuck in his or her beliefs, and to get so frustrated because they’re not listening. I’m not just talking about non-Christians, either.
I most definitely think that people need to understand their beliefs, not just parrot them at others. The only way to do that is to study, and people don’t want to take the time for that, and it’s sad. I think one thing that’s helped with my family is that whenever a kid has a question, like say about Wicca, we studied it together. I can explain why I believe the way that I do. And I hope my kids always ask questions and learn more because I think it’s really important.
I used to game all the time, and never thought about going to hell. I used to drink all the time, too, but that’s another story. Personally, I gave it up because I was spending way too much time role playing, and needed to get myself and the kids on track. That’s just me, though. But if people knew more about gaming and gamers, as well as the Bible, well, they’d probably still protest because that’s how things are.