I heard about this story when one of the guys who works at our company mentioned it. Here in Texas at a community college a student stabbed 14 people. The co-worker, who is as Republican and Right-Wing as they come, made the comment, “See you ban guns, people will find another way.” A brief look at the comments at the bottom of the NBC story shows that his wasn’t an isolated feeling.
I didn’t respond to him, because i hadn’t actually read the story and I don’t like to argue when i don’t know any facts (odd, right?), and I didn’t just want to get into an argument over his false equivalency. But make no mistake, it is a false equivalence. In fact, if this were the type of story we read after stricter gun laws were in effect, I think the American people would be fine.
The key is right in the headline, “At least 14 HURT in stabbing…” (emphasis mine). I believe if you asked the parents from Sandy Hook, Aurora, Oak Creek, Tuscon, etc they would gladly have their children, brothers, sisters, wives, and husbands have been stabbed, go through a lengthy recovery, and STILL BE ALIVE!
I can’t imagine any of these people who are making “why aren’t you calling for the banning of knives?” comments, saying this to the faces of the Sandy Hook parents. Of course they wouldn’t. They’re not assholes, they’re just misinformed.
This coworker even repeated the banning guns myth. NO ONE is legitimately talking about banning guns! You may hear a few of the ultra-liberal pundits say it, but NO ONE in office is even remotely suggesting it. I’ve mentioned this before, to ban guns you’d need to pass a constitutional amendment! It’s the new death panels. It scares the right-wing so much that an idea like background checks becomes a partisan issue. According to this CBS/New York Times poll 9 in 10 Americans support Universal Background checks. That’s including 89% of Republicans. A Pew research poll found 85% favor private and gun show background checks. But looking at politicians in Washington you’d think Democrats were suggesting making Atheism the national religion (yeah, that doesn’t make sense on multiple levels). Seriously, 14 Senators want to filibuster the bill from even going to a vote.
What’s so funny about me having to argue this position, is that I’m fine with people owning guns and am planning on purchasing one myself. In fact, none of the proposed legislation would prevent me from owning one or more guns, or even make it harder for me to buy one. And anyone who tells you otherwise, is lying to you.
For those of you who may know Amazon and B&N, but not know what Goodreads is allow me to explain. Goodreads is a social networking site for book lovers. The site allows you to review books, share reviews and recommendations with friends, and follow authors you love. One of the great features is that you create virtual bookshelves for all your books. You can categorize the books into 3 main sections: Read, Reading, and To Read. You can also create lots of sub-categories with custom tags like: Zombie Fic, Police Procedurals, and Vaginal Fantasy (it’s another name for urban fantasy that deals with heroines who live in magical worlds and have a decent amount of sex: like True Blood’s source material the Sookie Stackhouse novels).
They even have an app, which is why I think this acquisition spells bad news for B&N. You see I’ve been a member of Goodreads since 2009. I love books. Whenever I’m browsing at B&N or Half-Price Books and see a book I would like to read, but am not going to purchase right then and there, I use the Goodreads app to add the book to my To Read list. The app has a barcode scanner that makes this process really easy. Sometimes at B&N I’ll leave the app open so I can scan multiple books during my visit. When I’m at Half-Price Books I’ll sometimes open the app and browse through my To Read list (which I’ve added a sub-category of To Purchase) and see if any of my listed books are available.
What the scanner app looks like
Every time I’m at B&N I think, “Why doesn’t B&N create an app like this?”. You see with Amazon purchasing Goodreads it will now have access to my To Read list (as well as what I’ve read and how I’ve reviewed it). While I created a To Purchase sub-category, I can easily see Amazon creating it’s own Add to Wishlist button.
Another great feature of the app is that it’s easy to access, so when I’m watching The Daily Show, Colbert Report, Up with Chris Hayes, etc I can quickly add books that are mentioned on these shows for future reading or purchasing. Now, with probably the push of a button, I could add it to my To Read List, click Purchase, and it will be on it’s way to my front door via my Amazon Prime account or straight to my Kindle.
Not to mention Amazon could offer me discounts on my To Read list, similar to how they currently offer me discounts on items on my wishlist. B&N could have had me, while I was in their store scanning books, adding to my B&N wishlist and offering me discounts to get me to purchase from them. They missed an opportunity.
What this shows is that Amazon is looking to the future and how to interact with readers. Amazon is paying attention to the larger world in which it’s customers exist and trying to ensure that when you think about buying a book (digital or physical), you first think of buying it from them.
We’ll see if my predictions about changes to Goodreads will happen, not to mention changes I haven’t even thought of.
As sad as it makes me to say, Barnes and Noble just came a little closer to death. I’ll miss having an actual bookstore to go to.
This brought up one of my least favorite types of journalism: Science and Medical writing.
The problem is that journalists don’t really understand science or how studies are done. They also look for attention grabbing headlines.
I have a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology because the University of Texas at Austin didn’t offer a Bachelor of Science at the time I got my degree. I wanted to do experimental psychology. One of the phrases I heard in every Psych class I took was: Correlation does not equal causation. Just because two variables correlate (increase or decrease together) doesn’t mean that you can tell which one causes the other.
For example, mothers who listened to Mozart while pregnant had children who were several IQ points higher than those that didn’t. So does that mean listening to Mozart will make your kid smarter? Or, does that just mean that parents who listen to Mozart are smarter and thus pass on those genes for intelligence on to their kids?
The fact that journalists like to see causal links (as do most humans) leads to the conflicting headlines we used to get about butter being good for you, or bad for you, no, use margarine, no margarine is bad for you. You get the point.
The problem isn’t that the studies were wrong. The problem is that studies are there to gather evidence, not form ultimate conclusions.
The sugary beverage study is a good start, but is not the final word.
Now, after reading all that you may think I don’t believe that sugary beverages cause diabetes, obesity and other diseases. I do. I stopped drinking soda (aside from the occasional drink – no more than 16 oz per month or two) about a year or two ago. I have acid re-flux and I just can’t drink sodas anymore. The fact that my body essentially told me to stop drinking Dr. Pepper isn’t evidence that soda is bad. There are people who drink soda till they’re 90. It’s my biology and genetics that make it so I can’t drink that delicious Dr. Pepper anymore. Mmmmm, Dr. Pepper. Sorry.
Why do you want to hurt me, Dr. Pepper?
We know sugar is linked to diabetes, and that soda is linked to obesity. I don’t doubt any of that. My problem is that every article written treats this study as if it were a scientific law like the law of gravity.
The part about the article that irked me probably the most was this section:
In 2010 in the U.S., the researchers report that 25,000 deaths were linked to sugary beverages; these drinks were associated with 133,000 diabetes deaths, 44,000 heart disease deaths and 6,000 cancer deaths.
You see what the author did there? 25K deaths linked to sugary beverages. The other numbers make it seem worse. 133K diabetes deaths, 44K heart disease, 6K cancer deaths. Now the numbers linked to sugary beverages in the US seem a lot higher. That’s 180K deaths right there! But that’s worldwide.
How many diabetes deaths in the US? Heart disease?
According to the CDC in the U.S. deaths in 2010 (same year as the study used) for each of those diseases was:
Diabetes – 69,071
Heart Disease - 597,689
Cancer - 574,743
That totals 1,241,503 deaths of which 25K are linked (meaning sugary beverages were consumed in “excess” I’m guessing) giving you 2% (if I did my math right) of deaths linked to sugary beverages. Or, if you wanted to spin it another way: 98% of these deaths had no link to sugary beverages. To put the numbers into bigger context in 2010, 2.4 million people died in the US. 38K by suicide. Maybe mental health is something we should be concentrating on more than what people are drinking.
I don’t have a good ending for this so I just leave you with a comic from one of my favorite webcomics XKCD about this same subject, only more concise and wittier.
This is what I think of most studies when I read them
I’m a huge fan of the television show Veronica Mars. I didn’t watch it when it aired, so I guess I’m part of the problem. I watched the first two seasons on DVD and then waited about 6 months before watching the final season, because I knew once I was done, I was done. The 3rd box set included a preview of what we would have gotten had the series continued, Veronica Mars, FBI.
I’m writing about this for three reasons
I love the show and am super-excited to see the movie
I follow crowd-funding news and this is a big milestone
The way it was funded may mean big changes for the future of film and television
I loved the show. Keith Mars (as played by the wonderful Enrico Colantoni) is the type of father I’d like to be and I’d love to raise a daughter as smart and independent as Veronica Mars. The show was witty and well-written. Nancy Drew for the 21st century. It followed what I like to call the Whedon story arc, which is one overarching theme/mystery/villain for the season, with minor mysteries solved each episode, but every few episodes reveals a clue that leads to the climax at the end of the season. It’s a great way of doing a serial story-line but still making it OK to miss one episode. It was one of the best shows not enough people watched. According to Wikipedia the final season had only 2.5 million viewers (Walking Dead Season 3 premiere got 10.3 million and this year opened with 12 million, American idol averaged 20 million in 2012.) The thing is that’s still 2.5 million people who loved the show.
This is the second part of my blog posts about being an atheist.
So, if you read the last post you got a little glimpse into what made me an atheist. This part is about how I dealt with suddenly being in a world that had no god. For those who are agnostic or atheist and read this you’re probably thinking, “What’s the big deal?”. When you’ve believed as long, and as deeply, as I did; it is kind of a big deal. I know some religious people who can’t even fathom a world without god, it just doesn’t make sense to them.
(I want to take a moment here to make it clear I don’t speak for any other atheists but myself. Just as I don’t believe any one Christian speaks for all Christians.)
Living without God
This was not an area where television or movies could help. If you look at TV and movies, they have no idea what atheists are like or how they think. House, MD was the closest media has come to accurate portrayals of our beliefs, but they clothed those ideas in a drug-addicted narcissist. That’s a role-model. The most famous and beloved atheist is probably Joss Whedon.
But that’s now. When I was turning 18, I couldn’t even name an atheist. People who didn’t believe in god were evil (or highly illogically, satanists). So I had to find my own way. Fortunately, I was exposed to existential philosophy at this time thanks to a great High School English teacher. Here were a group of people who were finding ways to exist without god.
Philosophy of the Absurd
When I was in High School they happened to offer for one year a class called Humanities. It’s where I first read Paradise Lost (a favorite epic poem), Dante’s Inferno, and The Stranger by Albert Camus. Discovering Existential Philosophy was to have a profound impact on my life, specifically Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Absurd.
I loved the Stranger, and I immediately picked up The Plague and the Myth of Sisyphus. To give a ridiculously simple explanation of Absurdist Philosophy: If life has no meaning imposed upon it by external/supernatural beings, then we must impose our own meaning on life. The premise Albert Camus starts with in the Myth of Sisyphus is if you discover there is no point to life, no Ultimate Reward (heaven and hell), then is it justifiable to commit suicide? He argues that while this is a valid choice, it’s the wrong one. Camus argues that you should live in spite, or to spite, the fact that life has no meaning (imposed externally).
Like I said, that’s over-simplifying it, and it’s my interpretation, but that’s what I got from studying his works. You should go out and enjoy life, because there is nothing after. This short period of time you have on Earth should be enjoyed to the fullest, because there is nothing else. You’ll not be rewarded with anything but oblivion by working yourself to death in a job you hate. Find a way to do what you love, because this is all there is.
I’ve tried as much as possible to make most of my decisions based on that view of life. I enjoy my job and the work I do (I wish I got more recognition for my accomplishments and more money, but don’t we all). I enjoy my free time. I don’t get involved with people who will test my patience or annoy me.
To quote a line from Joss Whedon’s Angel: If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.
Moral Living, or “What stops you from robbing banks?”
The one thing that really fascinates me about religious people’s view of atheist is the idea that we can’t live moral lives without rules from GOD. Every government class I took, from High School to U.T. made us read John Locke and his Two Treatises on Government. The reason for this is that he laid the foundation for natural laws that didn’t require a deity.
Now John Locke wasn’t an atheist. He was a religious person who believed that atheism would lead to chaos. However, he believed you had to separate religion from government. He preached tolerance for all religions and knew how a theocracy could lead to tyranny. So he came up with laws that could be universal and free from religion.
Basically, and again I’m going to grossly over-simplify his writing, we all are free to do whatever we want, as long as we don’t interfere with other’s rights to do what they want. Governments are created to ensure that “might doesn’t make right” when deciding whose rights are violated. So theft is wrong because while I may have a right to own a television, by stealing yours I’ve violated your right to own a television. Likewise, murder is wrong because it would violate your right to live. He also goes into explaining punishments, but I won’t get into that here.
So Locke set out a political philosophy that gives an intellectual, not a religious, grounding for moral behavior. There are many other philosophers who did the same, but Locke’s principles are ones that guide me, personally.
Oh yeah, there are two other reasons I don’t commit murders, rape, or rob people. First: I have no desire to do those things. Stealing, murdering, and any crimes for that matter are just something that don’t have any appeal to me.
Second, there are laws at the local, state, and federal level that you have to follow whether you believe in god or not. I don’t want to spend ANY time in prison or pay any fines associated with doing whatever the hell I feel like.
Moral living is surprisingly easy without God.
Life is Precious
One of the other really illogical misconceptions about atheism is that life is more precious to those who believe in God and Heaven than those who do not. This never made any sense to me. If you believe that life begins at conception, that the moment sperm meets egg a soul is implanted, and that this soul will live on Earth for about 80-100 years (barring some major accident or illness), and after that will live for ETERNITY in Heaven, why is life precious?
This soul, uniquely implanted, did not exist for billions of year (or thousands if you’re really hardcore fundamental), will only inhabit an earthly body for at most a hundred years and will spend infinity in the afterlife, why would it care about “life”. It would be like a person placing undue importance on the first 2 years of their life.
Now granted, the first two years a child’s life are really important, developmentally. And maybe that’s it. Our earthly life is important because it’s essentially our “try-out period” for whether we get to go to Heaven or Hell. But, that doesn’t explain why funerals aren’t joyous affairs. Why don’t we celebrate with singing and dancing. As far as we know, our loved ones made it to Heaven. It should be celebrated with parties and drinking. It’s like getting into your first choice college, marrying the love of your life, and getting that big promotion all rolled into one! Everyone should be super-happy and only bummed that the deceased got to go there first.
I know why I spent hours depressed and drunk after my best friend died. They now only existed in my memory. Their consciousness has been wiped from existence. I will never again hear their voice, share a joke, go drinking, or share a secret with them. They’re gone.
So for me life is EXTREMELY precious. It’s all we have. There is nothing else. To take someone’s life is to delete them like a file that can’t be recovered.
It’s yet another reason to enjoy life as much as you can. You could cease to exist tomorrow, and you won’t even get to have regrets, because you’ll just be gone.
Dealing with Death
As depressing as that last section was, I’m going to get even more depressing. As you can imagine I have a hard time dealing with death. I don’t want to die, not ever. I hope for the singularity and some way to extend my life beyond it’s natural expiration date.
I sometimes get panic attacks at night as I realize that no matter how long I extend my life, at some point due to entropy, I will cease to exist. It’s frightening to contemplate nothingness. The only consolation is that when it happens, I won’t have to think about it, because I will no longer “think”.
I’d love nothing more than to be proven wrong about the afterlife. I’d endure an infinite number of “I told you so’s” coming from family and friends.
I’m a little jealous of family who found consolation in the idea that grandma and grandpa were watching over them, or that through prayer they could communicate with them. The idea that, “we’ll all be together again someday”.
I just don’t believe that.
Mind you, I don’t disabuse them of their beliefs. I’m not an a-hole. I just can’t join in. It would be easier for me if I could believe, but you can’t go back.
Happy Ending?
As depressing as all that last part about death was, I’m actually a fairly happy individual. The other part about Albert Camus’ writing is that it was about enjoying life. There is a freedom that comes from realizing that “life has no meaning”. I try to do the things I enjoy as much as possible. My pleasures are fairly simple and easy to achieve. I love books, movies, and television. I love working out. I enjoy spirited debates with my other best friend. I enjoy tasting new foods, being exposed to new ideas, and, hopefully down the road, seeing new places. I enjoy challenging myself to be better at my job. I love my current apartment and being surrounded by my 700+ books (I dislike moving, but enjoy that I make enough money to pay people to move my ridiculously heavy books for me).
So while death may be like this entity waiting on the edges to take me, until it does, I’m going to enjoy every minute that I’m here on this lovely planet. And I hope you will, too whatever your beliefs.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to publish this. I haven’t “come out” to my parents as an Atheist. My close friends know my beliefs, but not much of my family beyond my sister. Ironically, my mom would be totally cool if I came out as gay. Actually, more people would vote for me for President if I were gay rather than Atheist. My mother knows I’m not religious, but I’ve not told her I don’t believe in God at all. So if you’re reading this and know her, keep it a secret. If she wants to bury me according to her Catholic or Christian beliefs, let her. Though hopefully I don’t die first.
A note before I get started, I’ll be publishing this in two posts. This post will be about how I decided to be an Atheist, the next will be how I live as an Atheist (how Albert Camus helped me through).
A little background
So as mentioned my mother is religious (as is my entire family). My mother was a Catholic, my father is a Methodist, but I’ve never seen him actually practice. I think he believes in god, but doesn’t feel the need to go to church or anything. I was raised Catholic. I was baptized, did communion and confirmation. I played in the church choir. I did my Sunday school classes and really believed there was a God in heaven and a soul in my body. I believed there was good and evil and that the Devil existed. When I did my confirmation and they asked me to renounce Satan, I honestly did.
Around my Senior year I started to have questions. I naturally think a bit analytically. My first two problem questions came when thinking about the fact that environment can have an affect on your personality. I’d started to read books on sociology. If a person is born in a certain environment you can predict the probability they will commit a crime. Then I took that idea further, if you’re born to a family that was Muslim or Hindu, then that’s the religion you were going to believe in, the same as I believed in the Christian God and Jesus. According to my beliefs if you weren’t baptized and didn’t accept Jesus, you were going to Hell. If I could understand that this was wrong, why wouldn’t God? I couldn’t condemn a people to death simply because they were born in the wrong country to the wrong family (I use “wrong” speaking from the point of view that my religion is the right one, and country being that the U.S. is overwhelmingly Christian).
If God is Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omni-Present, and Omni-Benevolent how could he not see this?
Then there’s the problem of brain damage or genetic preconditions. What if you’re more prone to violence, and you’re raised by violent parents in a violent environment? God could just say, “Sorry, tough luck getting dealt that hand. It’s Hell for you.”
That didn’t make sense.
A soulless creature
Like I said, I’m also very analytical. Most people probably never stop and think, “If I lose an arm do I lose part of my soul?” It may seem silly, but I kept going. How much of my body could be cut off before I would have no soul? How tiny is the soul? If I were just a head that was alive, or just a brain, would I still have a soul?
Then science made it even harder. If you can extrapolate through mathematics and sub-atomic particle collisions that some particle does or does not exist, why can’t the soul be discovered? If the soul leaves your body and enters heaven, by what process does that occur? Shouldn’t we be able do detect some sort of energy as a byproduct of this movement from earth to heaven. I’m assuming this is some sort of inter-dimensional transfer, wouldn’t there be quite a bit of energy given off? There are more scientific explanations for how the TARDIS works than the soul entering Heaven.
Forget Evolution, basic physics is what’s really the problem with faith. You can easily reconcile God and Evolution. Heck, I can even accept there might be a God, but the soul and heaven: no proof, no evidence.
How can there be a god with no Soul or Heaven? Simple, think about video games. The Sims is a self-contained world created by people, but when a character dies in a video game…they cease to exist. (granted they could be backed up on another computer and allowed to run again, but we’re talking copies which gets more complicated) But even then we’d see some code and understand what’s happening. This is where physics and math come in. Physics are the laws (code) of the Universe and the language they’re written in is Math. The fact we find no code that shows how we are backed up onto God’s external hard drive leads me to believe he isn’t backing up his data. So a god could have created everything with the Big Bang and then left it all alone (the blind watchmaker if you will). In fact, for us to know there is a god would require what happens in the bible, him telling us he exists. Burning Bushes, Talking Clouds, sending in an avatar, like Jesus(The trinity makes more sense in gamer terms – I’ll drop the computer metaphor now).
The Good Book is just that
Which brings me to the bible. The Bible would have to be true for us to know there was a God (at least mostly true). But why should we believe that The One True God sent his only son to Earth to die for our sins, but not believe that Zeus mated with an Earth woman and spawned Hercules.
I won’t go into more detail on the bible, but I’ve actual read a decent amount of scholarship since leaving college (I never took a class on it, because everyone who came from those classes sounded way too full of themselves – and I didn’t need anymore help in that regard). The bible as an ancient text is quite fascinating. The idea of Jesus as an historical figure is amazing. But to take the leap to the supernatural is one I refuse to make. There is simply no evidence of any supernatural forces here on Earth.
So what was I to conclude?
Faith is something I just couldn’t have. I simply can’t just “believe” in something without any evidence what so ever. We, with our little human brains, can explain nearly everything on the planet, but when it comes to God, Heaven, and Souls we fall back on “it’s magic”. I can’t do that. I came of age scientifically when we were searching for the Top Quark, which was discovered my freshman year of college. This is a particle that is not seen but detected by the signals they produce. It, and Higgs-Boson, show what science can accomplish. Science looks at data, makes a hypothesis, makes predictions, tests those predictions, and then either says, “this hypothesis is valid” or “we need to revise our thinking”. Faith just says, “this is the way it is” and ignores data, ignores predictions, and ignores conflicting hypotheses. That isn’t the way I wanted to live my life, nor how I wish to raise kids (if I ever have any).
So that’s it, that’s a synopsis of what lead me to atheism. Once you realize that there is no God, Heaven, or Hell, what do you do with your life? How do you live a moral life? How do you go on living? I’ll explain all that in the next post.
I’ve decided that “coming to take my guns” is the new death panels. Banning guns isn’t something that is even on the table, aside from liberal comedians and other uber-liberals. It’s something that would require an amendment and there are no where near the votes necessary to get that passed. And unlike a “sanctity of marriage amendment” that conservatives keep mentioning, I don’t think a single liberal is even suggesting an amendment that overturns the 2nd. So aside from limiting the sale of certain guns, no one is coming for your guns. You can keep your guns, it’s just going to be illegal to sell certain guns and background checks will be required. I don’t know where people keep getting these ideas. It’s like there’s this news channel that puts out misleading information.
One of my favorite pastimes is thinking. Sometimes thoughts run through my head and require me to actually research them. Other times I just need to write down a thought to make it clearer to myself, and to others if it was part of a discussion. Sometimes I just watch television or read an article and don't wish to bore other people with my opinion. When this happens it goes here.
