Quote-crazy

"I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking." - Carl Sagan

Oh, how I want to believe. How comforting it would be. Everyday it makes more and more sense. I'll never deny the possibility, no. For I am somewhat a non-practicing Muslim. The ambiguity in the origin of life permits this belief, and I'm content with that. The problem is, I can't seem to find it anywhere else.

What does happen when you die? It's elating to imagine you looking down at your feet, atop clouds beside pearly white gates. But what if it doesn't? Do you remember what your life was like before you were... two years old? No? Then why would it be odd to presume the same thing happens upon death? It does seem like an afterlife is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Sigh.

But what is our purpose? The multiverse hypothesis sounds so ridiculous. What's the point of all this? Space is too god damned big. Why is the universal speed limit the speed of light? What the hell is the point of all this...

It may be wishful thinking, but there are reasons to believe. Until discoveries come about that shatter contemporary thinking, I'm sticking to what makes me happy; there's not enough proof to tell me I'm full of shit.

Seems like there never will be.

Good night/morning.

Writing

My favorite paper from English this semester is the Moment in Life essay. Actually the paper on Constitution is probably my favorite, but that's not important now. This could either be fiction or non fiction. In reality, it's both. I kind of made up some quotes so it could pass for either. It's probably not even that great.

" I’ve been to plenty of weddings in my life. They’re all basically the same because our people are proud and traditional.

We’re from Plav, a small historical town, in the middle of everything. The town is literally at the borders of Montenegro, Kosova, and Albania. My ancestors have been living in that valley for the past 400 years. Life there is pretty laid back; laborers only work from Monday through Thursday, eat a lot of food, and joke around all the time. It’s like an American family’s utopia. The wedding ceremonies there are identical to the ones we have in America; it was created over there first, our people in America couldn’t give up their traditions, it helps many cope with homeland sickness.

At the wedding, my lips arch parabolically and my nose bellows air to avoid laughing as I sit and listen to drunken relatives converse about their past. I see my cousin, although, she likes it when I refer to her as a ‘sister.’ (We’re close since I went on vacation and met everyone the first time in 2000. Her father died that year, and I talked to her a lot; she began calling me a brother and it stuck.) Standing tall (especially because of her ornate wedding cake-like headdress which adds a foot but more about that in a moment.) behind a large table consisting of the bride, my ‘sister’, and recently married relatives by her side in extravagant outfits, covered with heavy silver and gold embroidery; clothes that Queen Elizabeth the First would wear but, only on official state occasions. I admit crying a little seeing my ‘sister’ standing tall like that, especially because of her past. But I toughed it out, you know, since I’m a beast.

“She’s so beautiful,” an aunt whispers, “So when are you getting married? Vee gonna find you a nice girl.”

That’s the crazy aunt. Always thinking about who and when others should tie the knot. It’s an obsession, and it’s hilarious. She’s dressed up in the same type of embroidered white garb with jingling gold ornaments on her head to complement the giant gold collar; indigenous to our people, and enigmatic to anyone else.

I shook my head, laughed, and didn’t bother answering the question--who could?

The method men Albanian use to get married is quite different from the American way. Albanian men who live in America go back to their home country and basically ‘pick out’ the girl they want to marry; the parents talk about it first, to see if she is from a good family. Then, the girl spends time with the man to see if she likes him. It’s nice since the girl isn’t forced to get married and the families bond as friends.

I could have been married this summer if I wanted to, which is frightening; but that’s the power of culture. Seeing my ‘sister’ standing there I try to see the world through her eyes, as a precocious nineteen year old. I feel like I’ve turned to stone looking at marriage eye to eye. This inner child in me, precarious and fearful, squeaks, “I don’t wanna.” But this fear is probably part of the process. What results from this bond is valuable, and most important: love, loyalty, respect, trust, and happiness.

Traditions and customs in the ceremony involve these elements. Throughout the night attendees from both sides of the family get up and dance in formed circles. They hold hands high and oscillate them as they maneuver and move in the circle, to show their approval and happiness for the to-be couple. As they spiral around each other they seem timeless, like a primitive ritual, going as far back as the days when a conch that plays the euphoric song of love when blown upon.

In the end, the husband and wife fill their cups with champagne, and entangle their arms as they drink. When the time came to cut the cake, my ‘sister’ took a slice and fed her husband, then vice versa.

Afterwards, the crowd forms a large circle and the lights dim; the two dance in the middle and whisper into each others ear. Perhaps they were dreaming about the future. More likely, they were savoring the moment. Like a first kiss, a dream was falling into place becoming reality. All of that fantasizing she did as a teenager I remember, about sincerity, honesty, and the importance of true love; how beautiful, how becoming, how real.

Before leaving, I filter my way through the crowd to reveal myself and my ‘sister’ spots me, “There you are! Ha ha, so what do you think? You’re next! Vee gonna find you a nice girl!” "

Influences

I'll be listing quotes which influence of have influenced me. First off we have a Q&A between Carl Sagan and an inquirer at the Gifford Lectures.

"Questioner: I'd like to ask you about why you think any omnipotent being would want to leave evidence for us.
CS: I think I entirely agree with what you say. There is no reason I should expect an omnipotent being to leave evidence of His existence, except that the Gifford Lectures are supposed to be about evidence. And I hope it is clear that the fact that I do not see evidence of such a God's existence does not mean that I then derive from that fact that I know that God does not exist.
That's quite a different remark. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Neither is it evidence of presence. And this is again a situation where our tolerance for ambiguity is required."

If you want to be amazed, read those Q&A sections. Carl was a walking encyclopedia. I can't imagine how much studying Carl did. It's like he knows every damn subject in-depth and his ability to respond to questions I find hard to understand quickly is inspirational. I have this feeling in my gut like, damn, I want to be that. Or know all of that.

The first piece of evidence that made me switch, I'll always remember. In Daniel Dennett's Show me the Science he mentions my previously strongest held creationist argument: the eye. Now that I understand natural selection and everything, like I'm supposed to, I can't believe I 'fell for it'.

Here's the excerpt:

"A creationist pamphlet sent to me some years ago had an amusing page in it, purporting to be part of a simple questionaire:
Test Two
Do you know of any building that didn't have a builder? [Yes][No]
Do you know of any painting that didn't have a painter? [Yes][No]
Do you know of any car that didn't have a maker? [Yes][No]
If you answered YES for any of the above, give details:

Take that, you Darwinians! The presumed embarrassment of the test-taker when faced with this task perfectly expresses the incredulity many people feel when they confront Darwin's great idea. It seems obvious, doesn't it, that there couldn't be any designs without designers, any such creations without a creator.

Well, yes--until you look at what contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt: that natural selection--the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge--has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs.

Take the development of the eye, which has been one of the favorite challenges of creationists. How on earth, they ask, could that engineering marvel be produced by a series of small, unplanned steps? Only an intelligent designer could have created such a brilliant arrangement of a shape-shifting lens, an aperture-adjusting iris, a light-sensitive image surface of exquisite sensitivity, all housed in a sphere that can shift its aim in a hundredth of a second and send megabytes of information to the visual cortex every second for years on end.

But as we learn more and more about the history of the genes involved, and how they work--all the way back to their predecessor genes in the sightless bacteria from which multi celled animals evolved more than a half-billion years ago--we can begin to tell the story of how photosensitive spots gradually turned into light-sensitive craters that could detect the rough direction from which light came, and then gradually acquired their lenses, improving their information-gathering capacities all the while.

We can't yet say what all the details of this process were, but real eyes representative of all the i intermediate stages can be found, dotted around the animal kingdom, and we have detailed computer models to demonstrate that the creative process works just as the theory says.
All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this one gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements accumulate--this was Darwin's insight--eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer.
Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye's rods and cones(which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating a blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of the hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process. If you still find Test Two compelling, a sort of cognitive illusion that you can feel even as you discount it, you are like just about everybody else in the world; the idea that natural selection has the power to generate such sophisticated designs is deeply counterintuitive.

The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.

Intelligent design advocates, however, exploit the ambiguity between process and product that is built into the word "design." For them, the presence of a finished product (a fully evolved eye, for instance) is evidence of an intelligent design process. But this tempting conclusion is just what evolutionary biology has shown to be mistaken.

Yes, eyes are for seeing, but these and all the other purposes in the natural world can be generated by processes that are themselves without purposes and without intelligence.

This is hard to understand, but so is the idea that colored objects in the world are composed of atoms that are not themselves colored, and that heat is not made of tiny hot things.

In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach."

Those words influenced me. I remember how I fought them until I thought about what my friend was trying to tell me all along. Do you think I said,"Eureka!"? No it was more like, "I'm an idiot!"? I don't like being so hard on myself, but that was necessary. I'm really nothing special. That's why I want to be somebody. I'm nothing special, but I'm also not normal. I love saying that. I'm not normal. It intrigues others, I can see their eyebrows raise in the corner of my eye. Moving on...

This next quote comes from Theodosius Dobzhansky's Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution:

"Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light it becomes a pile of sundry facts some of them interesting or curious but making no meaningful picture as a whole.

This is not to imply that we know everything that can and should be known about biology and about evolution. Any competent biologist is aware of a multitude of problems yet unresolved and of questions yet unanswered. After all, biologic research shows no sign of approaching completion; quite the opposite is true. Disagreements and clashes of opinion are rife among biologists, as they should be in a living and growing science. Antievolutionists mistake, or pretend to mistake, these disagreements as indications of dubiousness of the entire doctrine of evolution. Their favorite sport is stringing together quotations, carefully and sometimes expertly taken out of context, to show that nothing is really established or agreed upon among evolutionists. Some of my colleagues and myself have been amused and amazed to read ourselves quoted in a way showing that we are really antievolutionists under the skin.

Let me try to make crystal clear what is established beyond reasonable doubt, and what needs further study, about evolution. Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can be doubted only by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or to plain bigotry. By contrast, the mechanisms that bring evolution about certainly need study and clarification. There are no alternatives to evolution as history that can withstand critical examination. Yet we are constantly learning new and important facts about evolutionary mechanisms."

That's all folks.

Papers

All right, the semester is over and I'm free for a while. I suppose I'll share some essays written for my English class. It's a long ass paper about the Constitution. Have fun reading it, haha.

"Where is the world headed? Currently, our government is making a mockery of our Constitution. Sometime in the future, if we follow this path, the U.S. may become a police state. Consider these lyrics, “…Cops tape the scene up, gunner downs 9; they're chasin' away kids playin' hop-scotch in his chalk outline. Two F-16's screech an iridescent sky, look down we're not in Iraq we're in NY! Rats in the streets we move underground like earthworms two coasts couldn't abort Satan in his first term. The army in the subway walkin' with toolies(note: Uzi-gun). I'm on the train with the back of the dollar bill still talkin' to me. Drive with my left I know what's right my weapon hand, like the map of DC streets still shows a pentagram. License on the car window when I pass through you've seen the news, no joke, New York pig department will blast you. My Weatherman party is invite-only soldier cuz with one wave of King G Dub's scepter it's over. The right to assemble puts the bureau's team on you. Look into my file and nod to this while Jell-O screams on you."[17]

That’s America’s future: a police state; an abject form of government. We can prevent this. It is America’s future only if we succumb to the whims and lies of politicians. But if we want America to go in the right direction we have to know where we are and where we’re going to get there. There’s only one document that can show us this.

The United States Constitution: a timeless masterpiece that exudes liberty. It is the metaphorical chain that constrains an incessant leviathan of power. Today it seems that beast has broken free of his bonds. How so? A pertinent quote may well explain how, "I prefer a man who will burn the flag and wrap himself in the Constitution to a man who will burn the Constitution and wrap himself in the flag,"(Craig Washington).

Since 9/11, many political pundits claim there will never be peace in a post 9/11 world; we should all stay locked up in our homes, be terrified, and let the government take care of us. Some of us, however, have a problem with the measures the government utilizes in order to "keep us safe."

But, we must never let go. Vandals have tried to tear the fabric of the Constitution since its inception. Just because someone says a slave is three-fifths a person doesn't make it so, nor that they should be slaves in the first place. Just because someone says gays shouldn't marry because it's sinful doesn't mean gays shouldn't have the right to get married. These statements come from people who simply don't understand the Constitution or choose to ignore it for their own personal benefit. You can't claim to be defending every American's rights saying those kinds of things because that technically would make you a hypocrite and perhaps a liar. Unfortunately for many, this isn't a theocracy. If you enjoy that kind of life, there are numerous settings in the Middle East you may be more at home in.

This isn't a tirade on religion. I include that second example because religious ideas, like the flag image in the quote, can also be wrapped around a man. Furthermore, 9/11 is the “flag” politicians cover themselves with while burning the Constitution. We shouldn’t allow this event to act as a springboard for Constitutional annihilation.

Today we see many flag-drapers ‘burning the Constitution.’ I don't want to live in a "your papers, please" surveillance state because it's one of the signets of fascism, "In a free society, the government responds to citizens — laws and government adjust as people go about their lives, change their views, culture, ways and means. Government follows populace. In a fascist society, the citizen responds to the state, or loses primary rights and privileges. You are either within the State or outside the State. Populace follows government. The State becomes the focus, not the individual. [1]"

There is no reason to live in a state like that. We have to understand a few things, first of all, if we're going continue to fight whatever we're fighting. The first thing that we should do, which makes sense, is to figure out who exactly are our enemies. Now, our president has given us a vague ten letter word, 'terrorists,’ which can be interpreted in so many ways just like George Bush’s favorite text: the Bible.

We should remember the statement as the CATO Handbook on Policy points out, "the joint resolution approved by the Senate and the House of Representatives authorized the president,

'to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,’[18]"[2]

The source quoted comments that the U.S. should, "...not to wage an amorphous war on terrorism or evil or to unnecessarily conflate the terrorist threat with rogue regimes that seek weapons of mass destruction...focus the war on terrorism only on the Al Qaeda terrorist network and not expand it to other groups or countries that have not attacked, or do not represent a direct threat to the U.S....recognize that much of the war on terrorism will not involve large-scale military action but will emphasize diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement cooperation with other counties...make domestic counter terrorism to find Al Qaeda operatives in the United States a top priority for the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

The writers also emphasize that we, "must not engage in actions or follow policies that create sympathy and recruits for Al Qaeda; that is, we must avoid needlessly giving Muslims reasons to hate America." We should also, "improve relations with foreign intelligence agencies in order to be able to share information about suspected Al Qaeda operatives. (Such cooperation should be limited to intelligence and law enforcement; the U.S. military should not become involved in fighting other nations' wars for them.)"[2] Note: the point of pointing this out is because it mentions who our enemies are. It can’t be any U.S. citizen picked out of a pile. The government needs to be careful and calculated with who the ‘terrorists’ are, and the difference between them and U.S. citizens.

Now that we understand who our enemy is, the U.S. can focus its efforts and waste less resources. The next thing policymakers should do is reduce the budget for national defense, "from the current sum of more than $400 billion to about $200 billion in increments over five years... and make it clear that the reduced budget must be accompanied by a more restrained national military posture that requires enough forces to fight a major war anywhere in the world."[3]

Advocates like Ben Cohen, the Ben in Ben and Jerry's, show us in simple terms, in Oreos, how much better it would be for America if it spent some money appropriated for defense into other domestic destinations like education, health care, world hunger, and other beneficial causes. We don't need to spend money on weapons and things in our geopolitical situation. Putting it into these other areas almost seems like it would guarantee a tremendous improvement which would be great news for the people of America. We're not going more in-depth because the focus here is on the Constitution, this is a basic wrong that accompanies our focused war on terrorism and the in-depth details aren't necessary.

The next measures seem counter-intuitive. Legislators should, "make it clear to the public that homeland security efforts cannot make the country absolutely safe against possible terrorist attacks...and ensure that civil liberties are not sacrificed for unneeded and ineffective homeland security measures."[4]

The writer, on behalf of CATO, explains the situation well in his piece's final paragraphs,

"Finally, all homeland security actions must take into account civil liberties implications. We must heed Benjamin Franklin's admonition that 'they that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' Before the government infringes on civil liberties, it must pass a litmus test: the government must demonstrate that any proposed new powers are essential, that they would be effective, and that there is no less invasive way to accomplish the same security goal. Ultimately, we must remember that although terrorists may take advantage of our liberties to exploit vulnerabilities in our society, our liberties are not the problem in trying to defend against terrorism. In the final analysis, homeland security means securing the Constitution and Bill of Rights, not just the country itself."(Italics for emphasis)[5]

That's how it should work today, instead of how it is: rambling on about how unsafe we are and that our liberties may also be an enemy because of the way terrorists exploit them. CATO’s italicized final analysis is what I am adamantly advocating.

This of course leads us into which laws infringe on our liberties and what we should do about it. The most important is Habeas Corpus. It's basically the writ by, "which detainees can seek release from unlawful imprisonment."[6]

James Walsh's Liberty in Troubled Times expands with the title 'Why Holding You Without A Charge Is So Bad',

"Some argued during World War II-- just as some argued after 9/11-- that temporary violations of constitutional rights are not a big deal. And, they argue, this is especially true during wartime, when the whole American system that recognizes and supports constitutional rights is endangered. Those people were--and are--fools. Next to killing its own citizens, imprisoning people without charges is the world thing a government can do. It is the most literal infringement of liberty. On a more abstract level, it assumes that the state's prerogatives come before the individuals constitutional liberties; this is the all-too-common epitome of statist arrogance,"[7]

Further, in the conclusion, “The government's suspension or disregard for Habeas Corpus is always troubling...but it isn't a new problem... The U.S. Constitution is full of Habeas Corpus protections, both explicit and implicit. The 5th Amendment requires due process--from arrest to trail to jail; the 6th Amendment requires a speedy trail before a jury of your peers. The 8th Amendment prohibits excessive bail and unusual punishments...In times of war most of all, constitutional rights need to stand strong. If they don't, the state has no cause to continue fighting."[8]

The second document we should investigate is the infamous Patriot Act. The Patriot Act has some good reasons for its existence and numerous reasons which really tick Americans off. Basically, the good should stay and bad should go away. For example, Representatives Sensenbrenner and Conyers found out a couple of interesting points like how the Justice,

"Department had used the Patriot Act for non-terrorism cases (drug violations, credit card fraud, theft from a bank account, a lawyer who defrauded his clients)."[9] In Liberty in Troubled Times Walsh's conclusion is the appropriate one, "In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans wanted their government to do something. John Ashcroft's Justice Department was very savvy at producing that "something." As time moves away from 9/11, the need for "something" diminishes...and the Patriot Act should, too... Maybe the worst effect of the Patriot Act is that it gave state agencies one more excuse to be secretive. It has encouraged the Attorney General to be uncooperative with the head of the House Judiciary Committee. A few parts of the Patriot Act are important tools for fighting terrorism--the ability to use roving wiretaps and the increased flexibility in using evidence gained from FISA search warrants in domestic prosecutions are reasonable changes. But, in 2005, the rest should fade into sunset."[10]

CATO says a rather concise, "Policymakers should not make the mistake of underestimating the American people. Of course, the electorate wants safety, but it wants the federal government to secure that safety by fighting the terrorists themselves, not by turning America into a surveillance state. [11]"

The American people want reasonable measures in America, as we see; they don't want Orwell's 1984 society. Walsh also deduces, "History suggests that those fundamental liberties will rebound. They did after the statist power grabs that produced Adam's Aliens and Seditions Acts, Lincoln's suspension of Habeas Corpus and Roosevelt's imprisonment of Americans of Japanese extraction. Current laws like the Patriot Act will likely join those measures in the reject bin of U.S. legal history. [12]"

Third, we have Posse Comitatus. What is it? Well it basically prohibits our military from carrying out law enforcement tasks inside the United States. The reason for this is quite simple as Walsh writes how,

"This comes down to the issue of rules of engagement. Civilian law enforcement requires the recognition of and focus on individual rights; it seeks to protect those rights, even if the person being protected is a criminal suspect. Prior to the use of force, police officers attempt to de-escalate a situation. Police officers are trained to use lesser forms of force when possible to draw their weapons only when they are prepared to fire. On the other hand, soldiers are trained to use deadly force. Escalation is the rule. In an encounter with a person identified with the enemy, soldiers need not focus on--or even recognize--individual rights. And the use of deadly force is authorized without any aggressive or bad act by that person."[13]

What I hate the most about this law is what Walsh says would be a logical extension: martial law,

"Some fear that the logical extension of the erosion of the Posse Comitatus Act and the Bush Administration's desire for secretiveness is--and there's no way to report this without sounding like a conspiracy nut--martial law... The details of martial law exist currently in the law. Section 32 CFG 501.4 of the Code of Federal Regulations states, tautologically:

'Martial law depends for its justification upon public necessity. Necessity gives rise to its creation, necessity justifies its exercise; and necessity limits its duration. The extent of the military force used and the actual measures taken, consequently, will depend on the actual threat to order and public safety which exists at the time.' Virtually any military officer in a position of authority can make the decision to declare it. The Code states: 'In most instances, the decision to impose martial law is made by the president, who usually announces his decision by proclamation, which usually contains his instructions concerning its exercise and any limitations thereon. However, the decision to impose martial law may be made by the local commander on the spot, if the circumstances demand immediate action, and time and available communications facilities do not permit obtaining prior approval from anybody.'

Most of the Code of Federal Regulations is made up of dry, legally-precise technicalities. The sections on martial law are distinctive because they're so vague."[14]

Walsh's conclusion is one I agree with,

"In the United States, the Posse Comitatus Act and the tradition of civilian control of the military are strong deterrents to the coups and military juntas that plague so many developing countries. But Americans need to be careful to maintain these deterrents. There's nothing in the American water or Americans' genes that make us free. Our institutions and laws do that... The erosion of liberty--like all erosion--is difficult to recognize because it goes so slowly, so gradually. Bright lines can help prevent erosion. The Posse Comitatus Act and the Freedom of Information Act are two such bright lines. People who love liberty should protect these bright lines jealously."[15]

The final problem we have to deal with is with National ID cards. They provide a negligible amount of security for a rather large amount of privacy. It makes no sense to use them. Cato’s handbook on policy goes well in-depth so I may as well make their argument mine,

"Every policy proposal should be carefully examined for effectiveness and consistency with our values and freedoms. A national or uniform ID system offers less protection at greater cost to freedom than it appears to. Verifying identity is just one, fallible, way of attempting to secure transportation systems and infrastructure. A national or uniform ID system would be a small but significant step toward future impingements on freedom, including mandates that all Americans carry identity cards at all times, the creation of an internal passport system, and government tracking of individuals' travels and financial transactions...

Indeed, past incidents of terrorism have been carried out by people born and raised in the United States, people who had been issued proper, fully valid identification. Knowing who a person is reveals little about his plans or motivations, and a national ID system would do nothing to distinguish first-time terrorists before they attack. Terrorist recruits or people who newly adopt terrorist methods will not be revealed by a national ID system until after our security has failed and disaster struck...Proponents of national ID systems point to countries in Europe, such as France, that already have national ID card systems. But the experience of those countries is nothing to brag about. The people in those countries have surrendered their privacy and their liberty, yet they continue to experience terrorist attacks. National ID cards simply do not deliver the security that is promised."

What I find most important is the reasoning in third paragraph,

"In the countries that already have the national ID card systems, the police have acquired the power to demand identification at will. Implemented widely, such power would become an "internal passport" system. "Your papers, please" could again become a familiar request, harking back to the worst totalitarian states of the last century. Americans are rightly suspicious of national IDs for this reason. A uniform requirement to carry and produce identification could quickly devolve into a comprehensive tracking mechanism, used by government at first to investigate ordinary crime but over time to systematically track and control ordinary, law-abiding citizens."

Therefore, "It is very important that policymakers not lose sight of what we are fighting for in the war on terrorism. The goal should be to fight the terrorists within the framework of a free society. The federal government should be taking the battle to the terrorists, to their base camps, and killing terrorist leadership; it should not be transforming our free society into a surveillance state."[16]

All of these cases brought up infringe our Constitutional freedoms. Constitution burners: flag embracers and religious zealots, tend to be unscrupulous. They contend that our Constitution holds us back from safety and “freedom.” It makes me sick to see this case of ironic intuition. It’s sad how 9/11 is used by these zealots in an attempt to proselytize its citizens. Banning gay marriage? Is this some kind of joke? It’s practically guaranteed by the Constitution, if anything. There are no double standards in the Constitution. Everyone is equal and able to pursuit whatever their heart desires so long as it doesn’t infringe the rights of others. If politicians can’t understand that they are hypocritical. If somebody swears to uphold the Constitution but doesn’t why isn’t he punished? Maybe the great American experiment was destined to fail. I won’t give up on it, though.

Thomas Jefferson said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” It’s unfortunate that “we” the people are going to have to do this sooner or later; but, this tree is suffering from a drought.

Works Cited:

[1] http://susiemadrak.com/2005/08/19/09/06/your-papers-please-2/
[2] CATO Handbook on Policy: Chapter 49 ‘Dismantling Al-Qaeda’
[3] CATO Handbook on Policy: pg. 511
[4] CATO Handbook on Policy: pg. 501
[5] CATO Handbook on Policy: pg. 508
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
[7] James Walsh’s Liberty in Troubled Times: pg. 130
[8] Liberty in Troubled Times: pg. 134
[9] Liberty in Troubled Times: pg. 238
[10] Liberty in Troubled Times: pg. 241
[11] CATO Handbook on Policy: pg. 204
[12] Liberty in Troubled Times: pg. 328
[13] Liberty in Troubled Times: pg. 146
[14] Liberty in Troubled Times: pg. 148
[15] Liberty in Troubled Times; pg. 150
[16] CATO Handbook on Policy: Chapter 27 ‘National ID Cards’
[17] http://www.songmeanings.net/lyric.php?lid=3530822107858581264
[18] http://news.findlaw.com/wp/docs/terrorism/sjres23.es.html"

Amputees

Wow, more reason for my lack of faith: http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/god26.htm . It makes very good sense. I'm all for science, but I still think until they figure out "Why are we here?" through the origin of the universe, there is still reason to believe in God. I'll don't think I'll ever fully let go, but there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not imposing any belief system on anyone, like the Christians do. I'm just hopeful, you know, to keep happy.
I already finished my first semester, which was marvelous. I'm pretty sure my GPA is like a 4.0, so I'm glad. Gotta keep it up, and if I'm lucky, and maybe if I'm lucky enough I'd go to Yale for the final two years. Maybe I'm stretching. I don't really think so. Well, hopefully my credits would transfer over with no problem. It's not like I'm taking any bootleg courses, they're all grand. I suppose I really would just do it for the title. Alumi of Yale, whatever. If I get in, swell. Maybe I'll talk to my advisor about it.
Well um, that's it. I have to study. Bye now.

Balkans - Israel

At http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5012690.stm there's an interesting comments section filled with many points of view about Montenegro's independence. Perhaps Kosovo is next, but a lot of people say the repercussions are far-reaching, and the result is a bunch of unorganized tribal states. That statement made me think: What if the countries of the Balkans at least begin cooperating and started their own "EU"? Perhaps, BU, for a Balkan Union. A lot of the comments I see show that Serbs are sorry, except maybe the nationalists, and overall the only people that really hate each other are the nationalists. Still, if people have some sort of union and begin doing business it might ease the tension and hate people have for each other, yet we're are so alike. It would be nice if that whole area was just one country, under a name and leader a majority of folks like. It could be like a mini United States, accepting all cultures and peoples. Wouldn't it be nice? I think so.
Although I'm losing my faith, (after watching some videos of terrorists beheading people) I'll still say Inshallah, I hope one day the hatred there will be a thing of the past.
I've never seen something so vile as those terrorists beheading people in the name of Allah. Fucking religion. “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” I'm not saying those terrorists doing that are good people, but perhaps they once were. That's the point, the power of belief broke my heart and left me wobbling in awe. I literally was shaking and making weird ass noises, I had no control over my self. I think it was the Eugene Armstrong video that killed me.
God. Isn't here. Please don't watch the video. After that I looked through all of the Palestinian arguments against Israel and saw what it was. Crap. Perhaps Israel came and took Palestinian land, well America did the same thing to the Indians and everyone laughs about it now.
Those animals in the videos do not deserve freedom, or even their own way of life, I want the Jews to wipe out all of the terrorists. I guess the only thing Palestinian innocents can do is emigrate and let Israel do what they have to. I'm not saying Israel should take control of the Middle East, no. I'm not even sure what they should have, but the priority is to kill all the terrorists. After innocent people emigrate out of the terrorist influence, the terrorists will die quicker with lack of support and new recruits. Every person will know what kind of bastards they really are. Oh I didn't even mention the terrorists killing Iraqi security forces. You know, the newly trained troops who want to protect their homeland. Those are the terrorists I'm talking about. Killing people of their own religion, sect, and ethnicity just because they have a different uniform.
I have nothing else to say besides: Religion sucks. There are so many sick people in this world.

Rates

I read somewhere that, I'm guessing, Christians believe that a .0001% prayer answer rate is a very high success rate. But that would mean 99.999% of the time He won't. But, as we know .99999999 = 1. Or for the math nubs: 1/3 = .3333 and 3/3 = 1. Therefore, according to that 'prayer rate' God doesn't answer prayers. Which... sucks.
Carl Sagan is changing the way I think, and I'm only two episodes into Cosmos.

Furthermore

At this moment I have 13 simultaneous downloads for each part of the Cosmos documentary series by Carl Sagan. I only watched a 3 minute clip and I felt that was enough to download all... 8 gigabytes of it. He was really something.
Oh, and I've also found this website: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/ which is an 'index' to creationist claims. It basically destroys everyone I've used, besides the ghost and some of the Qu'ran stuff.
Science has a really deep and warm place inside my heart, no matter how hard it is to understand. I feel really enlightened, and the thing is, I still feel like I know so little.
If this blog to be analyzed sometime in the future, it would probably be best used as a perfect example the power of belief by an ordinary (I mean, awesome) open minded person. All while... I end up becoming the person I used to despise. I may still sound a little libertarian, but I'm also becoming what I used to hate: a liberal. I'll just say I suppose, I'm a bit left leaning libertarian. Perhaps I'll end up a full one, but I'll still retain some things the CATO institute showed me. You don't know how hard it is to just cough that out. My life is like is some ridiculous journey through knowledge, all thanks to the internet. Man, am I glad I have it. I look around everyday, looking at peers. So many of them are so lost: doing drugs, not caring about life, stupid shit like that.
I'm listening to the Amelie soundtrack, it's pretty; if that's a proper adjective able to describe music. It makes me happy. Well, I have to do this homework that I should have done before. I don't understand how I can sit down and read stuff from a computer all day, but can't sit down with a book and read it for more than an hour. If I can break that habit, I'm set for life. I'd only need to study and really get the facts into my head.
I'll post later after finishing watching that movie (grammar?), I presume.
See you.

Evo

I was thinking I would write something about evolution and stuff. I guess I'll just provide some links that I haven't even read:

http://www.morocco.com/forums/al-quran-coran/22533-salaam-quran-almost-demands-believing-into-evolution-proofs-here.html
http://islamtomorrow.com/science/

It says, "Allah is - Al Khaliq" (The Creator)
It also says, "Allah is - Al Bari" (The Evolver)

Sure religious people will argue all they want to support their beliefs. I, like Dawkins, want the truth. Many people are content with interpreting a book and hoping its right. If you're so sure about your truths against evolution shouldn't you be ecstatic instead of disdainful towards science? You can be a Muslim and believe in evolution, but even if you're not, you should at least use science to figure out the truth. Blah, I'm not a true believer in all of it. I'll leave it to the intellectual titans to battle it out, like in that post before. I've got studying to do.

Wait

I'll post as soon as I wake up. Meanwhile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xxLfsZmD9M
James Blunt, the "You're Beautiful" singer, actually fought for Kosova with NATO. Respect.

A lot of people really don't like politics at all, but... I like it. I want to make a difference, but it's tough. I need a voice, and a brain; I'm not a great debater. Most of my knowledge is rudimentary in a sense that I'll need to Google to find out the exact stats. I guess I should attempt to remember some facts when I argue. Fin.

Upcoming

This is a reminder to myself to write about what the Qu'ran says about creation and its interpretations, as well my own spin.

The debate hit TIME magazine, and it's fascinating to hear the opposing voice, Francis Collins. Both men make sense, but, judging by the interview, Francis won. I would post the argument, actually nevermind, I found it. Here it is:

"The following is the cover article from TIME entitled God vs. Science (11/13). Enjoy this debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins:

We revere faith and scientific progress, hunger for miracles and for MRIs. But are the worldviews compatible? TIME convenes a debate.

There are two great debates under the broad heading of Science vs. God. The more familiar over the past few years is the narrower of the two: Can Darwinian evolution withstand the criticisms of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the Book of Genesis? In recent years, creationism took on new currency as the spiritual progenitor of “intelligent design” (I.D.), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality. I.D. lost some of its journalistic heat last December when a federal judge dismissed it as pseudoscience unsuitable for teaching in Pennsylvania schools.

But in fact creationism and I.D. are intimately related to a larger unresolved question, in which the aggressor’s role is reversed: Can religion stand up to the progress of science? This debate long predates Darwin, but the antireligion position is being promoted with increasing insistence by scientists angered by intelligent design and excited, perhaps intoxicated, by their disciplines’ increasing ability to map, quantify and change the nature of human experience. Brain imaging illustrates—in color!—the physical seat of the will and the passions, challenging the religious concept of a soul independent of glands and gristle. Brain chemists track imbalances that could account for the ecstatic states of visionary saints or, some suggest, of Jesus. Like Freudianism before it, the field of evolutionary psychology generates theories of altruism and even of religion that do not include God. Something called the multiverse hypothesis in cosmology speculates that ours may be but one in a cascade of universes, suddenly bettering the odds that life could have cropped up here accidentally, without divine intervention. (If the probabilities were 1 in a billion, and you’ve got 300 billion universes, why not?)

Roman Catholicism’s Christoph Cardinal Schonborn has dubbed the most fervent of faith-challenging scientists followers of “scientism” or “evolutionism,” since they hope science, beyond being a measure, can replace religion as a worldview and a touchstone. It is not an epithet that fits everyone wielding a test tube. But a growing proportion of the profession is experiencing what one major researcher calls “unprecedented outrage” at perceived insults to research and rationality, ranging from the alleged influence of the Christian right on Bush Administration science policy to the fanatic faith of the 9/11 terrorists to intelligent design’s ongoing claims. Some are radicalized enough to publicly pick an ancient scab: the idea that science and religion, far from being complementary responses to the unknown, are at utter odds—or, as Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has written bluntly, “Religion and science will always clash.” The market seems flooded with books by scientists describing a caged death match between science and God—with science winning, or at least chipping away at faith’s underlying verities.

Finding a spokesman for this side of the question was not hard, since Richard Dawkins, perhaps its foremost polemicist, has just come out with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), the rare volume whose position is so clear it forgoes a subtitle. The five-week New York Times best seller (now at No. 8 ) attacks faith philosophically and historically as well as scientifically, but leans heavily on Darwinian theory, which was Dawkins’ expertise as a young scientist and more recently as an explicator of evolutionary psychology so lucid that he occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University.

Dawkins is riding the crest of an atheist literary wave. In 2004, The End of Faith, a multipronged indictment by neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, was published (over 400,000 copies in print). Harris has written a 96-page follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation, which is now No. 14 on the Times list. Last February, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett produced Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which has sold fewer copies but has helped usher the discussion into the public arena. If Dennett and Harris are almost-scientists (Dennett runs a multidisciplinary scientific-philosophic program), the authors of half a dozen aggressively secular volumes are card carriers: In Moral Minds, Harvard biologist Marc Hauser explores the—nondivine—origins of our sense of right and wrong (September); In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (due in January) by self-described “atheist-reductionist-materialist” biologist Lewis Wolpert, religion is one of those impossible things; Victor Stenger, a physicist-astronomer, has a book coming out titled God: The Failed Hypothesis. Meanwhile, Ann Druyan, widow of archskeptical astrophysicist Carl Sagan, has edited Sagan’s unpublished lectures on God and his absence into a book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience, out this month.

Dawkins and his army have a swarm of articulate theological opponents, of course. But the most ardent of these don’t really care very much about science, and an argument in which one party stands immovable on Scripture and the other immobile on the periodic table doesn’t get anyone very far. Most Americans occupy the middle ground: we want it all. We want to cheer on science’s strides and still humble ourselves on the Sabbath. We want access to both mris and miracles. We want debates about issues like stem cells without conceding that the positions are so intrinsically inimical as to make discussion fruitless. And to balance formidable standard bearers like Dawkins, we seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony—that, indeed, science is of God.

Informed conciliators have recently become more vocal. Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden has just come out with Evolution and Christian Faith, which provides what she calls a “strong Christian defense” of evolutionary biology, illustrating the discipline’s major concepts with biblical passages. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson, a famous skeptic of standard faith, has written The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, urging believers and non-believers to unite over conservation. But foremost of those arguing for common ground is Francis Collins.

Collins’ devotion to genetics is, if possible, greater than Dawkins’. Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute since 1993, he headed a multinational 2,400-scientist team that co-mapped the 3 billion biochemical letters of our genetic blueprint, a milestone that then President Bill Clinton honored in a 2000 White House ceremony, comparing the genome chart to Meriwether Lewis’ map of his fateful continental exploration. Collins continues to lead his institute in studying the genome and mining it for medical breakthroughs.

He is also a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science’s largely agnostic upper reaches. His summer best seller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press), laid out some of the arguments he brought to bear in the 90-minute debate Time arranged between Dawkins and Collins in our offices at the Time & Life Building in New York City on Sept. 30. Some excerpts from their spirited exchange:

TIME: Professor Dawkins, if one truly understands science, is God then a delusion, as your book title suggests?

DAWKINS: The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.

TIME: Dr. Collins, you believe that science is compatible with Christian faith.

COLLINS: Yes. God’s existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer. From my perspective, God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God’s existence is outside of science’s ability to really weigh in.

TIME: Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, famously argued that religion and science can coexist, because they occupy separate, airtight boxes. You both seem to disagree.

COLLINS: Gould sets up an artificial wall between the two worldviews that doesn’t exist in my life. Because I do believe in God’s creative power in having brought it all into being in the first place, I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God’s creation.

DAWKINS: I think that Gould’s separate compartments was a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp. But it’s a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion does not keep off the scientific turf. Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.

TIME: Professor Dawkins, you think Darwin’s theory of evolution does more than simply contradict the Genesis story.

DAWKINS: Yes. For centuries the most powerful argument for God’s existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.

COLLINS: I don’t see that Professor Dawkins’ basic account of evolution is incompatible with God’s having designed it.

TIME: When would this have occurred?

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that’s a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

COLLINS: Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? I don’t think that it is God’s purpose to make his intention absolutely obvious to us. If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?

TIME: Both your books suggest that if the universal constants, the six or more characteristics of our universe, had varied at all, it would have made life impossible. Dr. Collins, can you provide an example?

COLLINS: The gravitational constant, if it were off by one part in a hundred million million, then the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When you look at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt the view that this was just chance. But if you are willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event—namely, our existence.

DAWKINS: People who believe in God conclude there must have been a divine knob twiddler who twiddled the knobs of these half-dozen constants to get them exactly right. The problem is that this says, because something is vastly improbable, we need a God to explain it. But that God himself would be even more improbable. Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill. The other way is the multiverse way. That says that maybe the universe we are in is one of a very large number of universes. The vast majority will not contain life because they have the wrong gravitational constant or the wrong this constant or that constant. But as the number of universes climbs, the odds mount that a tiny minority of universes will have the right fine-tuning.

COLLINS: This is an interesting choice. Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can’t observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses. So Occam’s razor—Occam says you should choose the explanation that is most simple and straightforward—leads me more to believe in God than in the multiverse, which seems quite a stretch of the imagination.

DAWKINS: I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine. What I can’t understand is why you invoke improbability and yet you will not admit that you’re shooting yourself in the foot by postulating something just as improbable, magicking into existence the word God.

COLLINS: My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else. God is the answer to all of those “How must it have come to be” questions.

DAWKINS: I think that’s the mother and father of all cop-outs. It’s an honest scientific quest to discover where this apparent improbability comes from. Now Dr. Collins says, “Well, God did it. And God needs no explanation because God is outside all this.” Well, what an incredible evasion of the responsibility to explain. Scientists don’t do that. Scientists say, “We’re working on it. We’re struggling to understand.”

COLLINS: Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned. But I do object to the assumption that anything that might be outside of nature is ruled out of the conversation. That’s an impoverished view of the kinds of questions we humans can ask, such as “Why am I here?”, “What happens after we die?”, “Is there a God?” If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it doesn’t convince you on a proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, you can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion.

DAWKINS: To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God—it’s that that seems to me to close off the discussion. TIME: Could the answer be God?

DAWKINS: There could be something incredibly grand and incomprehensible and beyond our present understanding.

COLLINS: That’s God.

DAWKINS: Yes. But it could be any of a billion Gods. It could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri. The chance of its being a particular God, Yahweh, the God of Jesus, is vanishingly small—at the least, the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that’s the case.

TIME: The Book of Genesis has led many conservative Protestants to oppose evolution and some to insist that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

COLLINS: There are sincere believers who interpret Genesis 1 and 2 in a very literal way that is inconsistent, frankly, with our knowledge of the universe’s age or of how living organisms are related to each other. St. Augustine wrote that basically it is not possible to understand what was being described in Genesis. It was not intended as a science textbook. It was intended as a description of who God was, who we are and what our relationship is supposed to be with God. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

DAWKINS: Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it. However, what Dr. Collins has just been—may I call you Francis?

COLLINS: Oh, please, Richard, do so.

DAWKINS: What Francis was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues … It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he’d save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day. Why bother with these clowns?

COLLINS: Richard, I think we don’t do a service to dialogue between science and faith to characterize sincere people by calling them names. That inspires an even more dug-in position. Atheists sometimes come across as a bit arrogant in this regard, and characterizing faith as something only an idiot would attach themselves to is not likely to help your case.

TIME: Dr. Collins, the Resurrection is an essential argument of Christian faith, but doesn’t it, along with the virgin birth and lesser miracles, fatally undermine the scientific method, which depends on the constancy of natural laws?

COLLINS: If you’re willing to answer yes to a God outside of nature, then there’s nothing inconsistent with God on rare occasions choosing to invade the natural world in a way that appears miraculous. If God made the natural laws, why could he not violate them when it was a particularly significant moment for him to do so? And if you accept the idea that Christ was also divine, which I do, then his Resurrection is not in itself a great logical leap.

TIME: Doesn’t the very notion of miracles throw off science?

COLLINS: Not at all. If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.

DAWKINS: If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen which we by the lights of today’s science would classify as a miracle just as medieval science might a Boeing 747. Francis keeps saying things like “From the perspective of a believer.” Once you buy into the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific—really scientific—credibility. I’m sorry to be so blunt.

COLLINS: Richard, I actually agree with the first part of what you said. But I would challenge the statement that my scientific instincts are any less rigorous than yours. The difference is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is. TIME: Dr. Collins, you have described humanity’s moral sense not only as a gift from God but as a signpost that he exists.

COLLINS: There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years—some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology—relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. But if you believe, and Richard has been articulate in this, that natural selection operates on the individual, not on a group, then why would the individual risk his own dna doing something selfless to help somebody in a way that might diminish his chance of reproducing? Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our dna. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That’s the opposite of saving his genes. We see less dramatic versions every day. Many of us think these qualities may come from God—especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn’t matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn’t cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

COLLINS: For you to argue that our noblest acts are a misfiring of Darwinian behavior does not do justice to the sense we all have about the absolutes that are involved here of good and evil. Evolution may explain some features of the moral law, but it can’t explain why it should have any real significance. If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil. But for me, it is much more than that. The moral law is a reason to think of God as plausible—not just a God who sets the universe in motion but a God who cares about human beings, because we seem uniquely amongst creatures on the planet to have this far-developed sense of morality. What you’ve said implies that outside of the human mind, tuned by evolutionary processes, good and evil have no meaning. Do you agree with that?

DAWKINS: Even the question you’re asking has no meaning to me. Good and evil—I don’t believe that there is hanging out there, anywhere, something called good and something called evil. I think that there are good things that happen and bad things that happen.

COLLINS: I think that is a fundamental difference between us. I’m glad we identified it.

TIME: Dr. Collins, I know you favor the opening of new stem-cell lines for experimentation. But doesn’t the fact that faith has caused some people to rule this out risk creating a perception that religion is preventing science from saving lives?

COLLINS: Let me first say as a disclaimer that I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach.

TIME: But to the extent that a person argues on the basis of faith or Scripture rather than reason, how can scientists respond?

COLLINS: Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. So such discussions between scientists and believers happen quite readily. But neither scientists nor believers always embody the principles precisely. Scientists can have their judgment clouded by their professional aspirations. And the pure truth of faith, which you can think of as this clear spiritual water, is poured into rusty vessels called human beings, and so sometimes the benevolent principles of faith can get distorted as positions are hardened.

DAWKINS: For me, moral questions such as stem-cell research turn upon whether suffering is caused. In this case, clearly none is. The embryos have no nervous system. But that’s not an issue discussed publicly. The issue is, Are they human? If you are an absolutist moralist, you say, “These cells are human, and therefore they deserve some kind of special moral treatment.” Absolutist morality doesn’t have to come from religion but usually does. We slaughter nonhuman animals in factory farms, and they do have nervous systems and do suffer. People of faith are not very interested in their suffering.

COLLINS: Do humans have a different moral significance than cows in general?

DAWKINS: Humans have more moral responsibility perhaps, because they are capable of reasoning.

TIME: Do the two of you have any concluding thoughts?

COLLINS: I just would like to say that over more than a quarter-century as a scientist and a believer, I find absolutely nothing in conflict between agreeing with Richard in practically all of his conclusions about the natural world, and also saying that I am still able to accept and embrace the possibility that there are answers that science isn’t able to provide about the natural world—the questions about why instead of the questions about how. I’m interested in the whys. I find many of those answers in the spiritual realm. That in no way compromises my ability to think rigorously as a scientist.

DAWKINS: My mind is not closed, as you have occasionally suggested, Francis. My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about, nor can you, nor can anybody else. What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up. When we started out and we were talking about the origins of the universe and the physical constants, I provided what I thought were cogent arguments against a supernatural intelligent designer. But it does seem to me to be a worthy idea. Refutable—but nevertheless grand and big enough to be worthy of respect. I don’t see the Olympian gods or Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of that grandeur. They strike me as parochial. If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed." Taken from: http://jonathanbstclair.wordpress.com/2006/11/06/god-vs-science/

The next post will be really original and awesome, I guess.

take care, nubs

What's next?

This is going to be an interesting post. Well, I've been seeing a ton of information about our origins. And, it's hard for me to disagree. Besides my 'ghosts' argument for religion, there's only one more that could hint at some supernatural being. That would be the Qu'ran. Now, if you're reading fabricated quotes, but mostly ones taken out of context, from the Prophet of Doom: you've been misinformed.
The Qu'ran is possibly the only reason I still believe. There's a lot of information about the 'miracles of the Qu'ran' and stuff like that. The book is considered too well written. There's too many amazing features about it. Especially since it was written by someone who was illiterate for a good portion of their life.
I can understand though how these scientists come up with the conclusion that there is no god.
Richard Dawkins does a pretty good job of explaining how it all works. Watching the new South Park was really awkward. In two episodes they changed the way I felt about atheism and our existence. It's weird as hell, though. It would make more sense if humans didn't have the amazing ability to think and use all of their knowledge. If humans we're just like monkeys, throwing shit everywhere, killing and raping; then it would make a bit more sense. Why exactly are we the only species that can think like we do? With a conscious and everything. Shouldn't there be other animals that could do the same? Like in South Park's Go God Go with the Sea Otters. Man.
Can it really be so? I'm a believer in science and religion, yet it's hard to choose.
I've got quite a good quote here,
"The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality."- George Bernard Shaw
Damn. It is a good quote. The one thing I don't like about religion as well is its intent to halt science. This point in history is a very important point indeed. We have the internet, science, and reason beginning to conquer the world's minds. I've never felt so worthless, though. I could go ahead and just jump off a building, what would it matter? Well, for one, science is a tool that can help us understand the world. With that, we can appreciate its complexities. We also have pleasure, how pleasurable is jumping off a building? Well, it is pleasurable appreciating nature. With feelings and sensations, and all that good stuff. If you're born you should make the best of it. If you're like me you can be like that guy in one of my previous posts. You can be agnostic as well, always open to the possibility of a heaven if you do actually end up being questioned by the big guy. I think there's nothing better than that as a religion. An agnostic atheist: you appreciate science and its complexities, and at the same time there's this possibility of happiness on the other side. It's like the best of both worlds. Although, I'm like 60/40 if it's possible to put it into a ratio. Man, what a world we live in...

Step one

"A Designer Universe?

by Steven Weinberg

Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Austin
Winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics.

I have been asked to comment on whether the universe shows signs of having been designed.¹ I don't see how it's possible to talk about this without having at least some vague idea of what a designer would be like. Any possible universe could be explained as the work of some sort of designer. Even a universe that is completely chaotic, without any laws or regularities at all, could be supposed to have been designed by an idiot.

The question that seems to me to be worth answering, and perhaps not impossible to answer, is whether the universe shows signs of having been designed by a deity more or less like those of traditional monotheistic religions—not necessarily a figure from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but at least some sort of personality, some intelligence, who created the universe and has some special concern with life, in particular with human life. I expect that this is not the idea of a designer held by many here. You may tell me that you are thinking of something much more abstract, some cosmic spirit of order and harmony, as Einstein did. You are certainly free to think that way, but then I don't know why you use words like 'designer' or 'God,' except perhaps as a form of protective coloration.

It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a special interest in life. Today we understand most of these things in terms of physical forces acting under impersonal laws. We don't yet know the most fundamental laws, and we can't work out all the consequences of the laws we do know. The human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. We can't predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain, even though we can't always calculate their consequences. I see nothing about the human mind any more than about the weather that stands out as beyond the hope of understanding as a consequence of impersonal laws acting over billions of years.

There do not seem to be any exceptions to this natural order, any miracles. I have the impression that these days most theologians are embarrassed by talk of miracles, but the great monotheistic faiths are founded on miracle stories—the burning bush, the empty tomb, an angel dictating the Koran to Mohammed—and some of these faiths teach that miracles continue at the present day. The evidence for all these miracles seems to me to be considerably weaker than the evidence for cold fusion, and I don't believe in cold fusion. Above all, today we understand that even human beings are the result of natural selection acting over millions of years of breeding and eating.

I'd guess that if we were to see the hand of the designer anywhere, it would be in the fundamental principles, the final laws of nature, the book of rules that govern all natural phenomena. We don't know the final laws yet, but as far as we have been able to see, they are utterly impersonal and quite without any special role for life. There is no life force. As Richard Feynman has said, when you look at the universe and understand its laws, 'the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.'

True, when quantum mechanics was new, some physicists thought that it put humans back into the picture, because the principles of quantum mechanics tell us how to calculate the probabilities of various results that might be found by a human observer. But, starting with the work of Hugh Everett forty years ago, the tendency of physicists who think deeply about these things has been to reformulate quantum mechanics in an entirely objective way, with observers treated just like everything else. I don't know if this program has been completely successful yet, but I think it will be.

I have to admit that, even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go, when we have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the world, because we will still be left with the question 'why?' Why this theory, rather than some other theory? For example, why is the world described by quantum mechanics? Quantum mechanics is the one part of our present physics that is likely to survive intact in any future theory, but there is nothing logically inevitable about quantum mechanics; I can imagine a universe governed by Newtonian mechanics instead. So there seems to be an irreducible mystery that science will not eliminate.

But religious theories of design have the same problem. Either you mean something definite by a God, a designer, or you don't. If you don't, then what are we talking about? If you do mean something definite by 'God' or 'design,' if for instance you believe in a God who is jealous, or loving, or intelligent, or whimsical, then you still must confront the question 'why?' A religion may assert that the universe is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other sort of God, and it may offer evidence for this belief, but it cannot explain why this should be so.

In this respect, it seems to me that physics is in a better position to give us a partly satisfying explanation of the world than religion can ever be, because although physicists won't be able to explain why the laws of nature are what they are and not something completely different, at least we may be able to explain why they are not slightly different. For instance, no one has been able to think of a logically consistent alternative to quantum mechanics that is only slightly different. Once you start trying to make small changes in quantum mechanics, you get into theories with negative probabilities or other logical absurdities. When you combine quantum mechanics with relativity you increase its logical fragility. You find that unless you arrange the theory in just the right way you get nonsense, like effects preceding causes, or infinite probabilities. Religious theories, on the other hand, seem to be infinitely flexible, with nothing to prevent the invention of deities of any conceivable sort.

Now, it doesn't settle the matter for me to say that we cannot see the hand of a designer in what we know about the fundamental principles of science. It might be that, although these principles do not refer explicitly to life, much less human life, they are nevertheless craftily designed to bring it about.

Some physicists have argued that certain constants of nature have values that seem to have been mysteriously fine-tuned to just the values that allow for the possibility of life, in a way that could only be explained by the intervention of a designer with some special concern for life. I am not impressed with these supposed instances of fine-tuning. For instance, one of the most frequently quoted examples of fine-tuning has to do with a property of the nucleus of the carbon atom. The matter left over from the first few minutes of the universe was almost entirely hydrogen and helium, with virtually none of the heavier elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen that seem to be necessary for life. The heavy elements that we find on earth were built up hundreds of millions of years later in a first generation of stars, and then spewed out into the interstellar gas out of which our solar system eventually formed.

The first step in the sequence of nuclear reactions that created the heavy elements in early stars is usually the formation of a carbon nucleus out of three helium nuclei. There is a negligible chance of producing a carbon nucleus in its normal state (the state of lowest energy) in collisions of three helium nuclei, but it would be possible to produce appreciable amounts of carbon in stars if the carbon nucleus could exist in a radioactive state with an energy roughly 7 million electron volts (MeV) above the energy of the normal state, matching the energy of three helium nuclei, but (for reasons I'll come to presently) not more than 7.7 MeV above the normal state.

This radioactive state of a carbon nucleus could be easily formed in stars from three helium nuclei. After that, there would be no problem in producing ordinary carbon; the carbon nucleus in its radioactive state would spontaneously emit light and turn into carbon in its normal nonradioactive state, the state found on earth. The critical point in producing carbon is the existence of a radioactive state that can be produced in collisions of three helium nuclei.

In fact, the carbon nucleus is known experimentally to have just such a radioactive state, with an energy 7.65 MeV above the normal state. At first sight this may seem like a pretty close call; the energy of this radioactive state of carbon misses being too high to allow the formation of carbon (and hence of us) by only 0.05 MeV, which is less than one percent of 7.65 MeV. It may appear that the constants of nature on which the properties of all nuclei depend have been carefully fine-tuned to make life possible.

Looked at more closely, the fine-tuning of the constants of nature here does not seem so fine. We have to consider the reason why the formation of carbon in stars requires the existence of a radioactive state of carbon with an energy not more than 7.7 MeV above the energy of the normal state. The reason is that the carbon nuclei in this state are actually formed in a two-step process: first, two helium nuclei combine to form the unstable nucleus of a beryllium isotope, beryllium 8, which occasionally, before it falls apart, captures another helium nucleus, forming a carbon nucleus in its radioactive state, which then decays into normal carbon. The total energy of the beryllium 8 nucleus and a helium nucleus at rest is 7.4 MeV above the energy of the normal state of the carbon nucleus; so if the energy of the radioactive state of carbon were more than 7.7 MeV it could only be formed in a collision of a helium nucleus and a beryllium 8 nucleus if the energy of motion of these two nuclei were at least 0.3 MeV—an energy which is extremely unlikely at the temperatures found in stars.

Thus the crucial thing that affects the production of carbon in stars is not the 7.65 MeV energy of the radioactive state of carbon above its normal state, but the 0.25 MeV energy of the radioactive state, an unstable composite of a beryllium 8 nucleus and a helium nucleus, above the energy of those nuclei at rest.² This energy misses being too high for the production of carbon by a fractional amount of 0.05 MeV/0.25 MeV, or 20 percent, which is not such a close call after all.

This conclusion about the lessons to be learned from carbon synthesis is somewhat controversial. In any case, there is one constant whose value does seem remarkably well adjusted in our favor. It is the energy density of empty space, also known as the cosmological constant. It could have any value, but from first principles one would guess that this constant should be very large, and could be positive or negative. If large and positive, the cosmological constant would act as a repulsive force that increases with distance, a force that would prevent matter from clumping together in the early universe, the process that was the first step in forming galaxies and stars and planets and people. If large and negative the cosmological constant would act as an attractive force increasing with distance, a force that would almost immediately reverse the expansion of the universe and cause it to recollapse, leaving no time for the evolution of life. In fact, astronomical observations show that the cosmological constant is quite small, very much smaller than would have been guessed from first principles.

It is still too early to tell whether there is some fundamental principle that can explain why the cosmological constant must be this small. But even if there is no such principle, recent developments in cosmology offer the possibility of an explanation of why the measured values of the cosmological constant and other physical constants are favorable for the appearance of intelligent life. According to the 'chaotic inflation' theories of André Linde and others, the expanding cloud of billions of galaxies that we call the big bang may be just one fragment of a much larger universe in which big bangs go off all the time, each one with different values for the fundamental constants.

In any such picture, in which the universe contains many parts with different values for what we call the constants of nature, there would be no difficulty in understanding why these constants take values favorable to intelligent life. There would be a vast number of big bangs in which the constants of nature take values unfavorable for life, and many fewer where life is possible. You don't have to invoke a benevolent designer to explain why we are in one of the parts of the universe where life is possible: in all the other parts of the universe there is no one to raise the question.³ If any theory of this general type turns out to be correct, then to conclude that the constants of nature have been fine-tuned by a benevolent designer would be like saying, 'Isn't it wonderful that God put us here on earth, where there's water and air and the surface gravity and temperature are so comfortable, rather than some horrid place, like Mercury or Pluto?' Where else in the solar system other than on earth could we have evolved?

Reasoning like this is called 'anthropic.' Sometimes it just amounts to an assertion that the laws of nature are what they are so that we can exist, without further explanation. This seems to me to be little more than mystical mumbo jumbo. On the other hand, if there really is a large number of worlds in which some constants take different values, then the anthropic explanation of why in our world they take values favorable for life is just common sense, like explaining why we live on the earth rather than Mercury or Pluto. The actual value of the cosmological constant, recently measured by observations of the motion of distant supernovas, is about what you would expect from this sort of argument: it is just about small enough so that it does not interfere much with the formation of galaxies. But we don't yet know enough about physics to tell whether there are different parts of the universe in which what are usually called the constants of physics really do take different values. This is not a hopeless question; we will be able to answer it when we know more about the quantum theory of gravitation than we do now.

It would be evidence for a benevolent designer if life were better than could be expected on other grounds. To judge this, we should keep in mind that a certain capacity for pleasure would readily have evolved through natural selection, as an incentive to animals who need to eat and breed in order to pass on their genes. It may not be likely that natural selection on any one planet would produce animals who are fortunate enough to have the leisure and the ability to do science and think abstractly, but our sample of what is produced by evolution is very biased, by the fact that it is only in these fortunate cases that there is anyone thinking about cosmic design. Astronomers call this a selection effect.

The universe is very large, and perhaps infinite, so it should be no surprise that, among the enormous number of planets that may support only unintelligent life and the still vaster number that cannot support life at all, there is some tiny fraction on which there are living beings who are capable of thinking about the universe, as we are doing here. A journalist who has been assigned to interview lottery winners may come to feel that some special providence has been at work on their behalf, but he should keep in mind the much larger number of lottery players whom he is not interviewing because they haven't won anything. Thus, to judge whether our lives show evidence for a benevolent designer, we have not only to ask whether life is better than would be expected in any case from what we know about natural selection, but we need also to take into account the bias introduced by the fact that it is we who are thinking about the problem.

This is a question that you all will have to answer for yourselves. Being a physicist is no help with questions like this, so I have to speak from my own experience. My life has been remarkably happy, perhaps in the upper 99.99 percentile of human happiness, but even so, I have seen a mother die painfully of cancer, a father's personality destroyed by Alzheimer's disease, and scores of second and third cousins murdered in the Holocaust. Signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden.

The prevalence of evil and misery has always bothered those who believe in a benevolent and omnipotent God. Sometimes God is excused by pointing to the need for free will. Milton gives God this argument in Paradise Lost:

I formed them free, and free they must remain
Till they enthral themselves: I else must change
Their nature, and revoke the high decree
Unchangeable, eternal, which ordained
Their freedom; they themselves ordained their fall.

It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors?

I don't need to argue here that the evil in the world proves that the universe is not designed, but only that there are no signs of benevolence that might have shown the hand of a designer. But in fact the perception that God cannot be benevolent is very old. Plays by Aeschylus and Euripides make a quite explicit statement that the gods are selfish and cruel, though they expect better behavior from humans. God in the Old Testament tells us to bash the heads of infidels and demands of us that we be willing to sacrifice our children's lives at His orders, and the God of traditional Christianity and Islam damns us for eternity if we do not worship him in the right manner. Is this a nice way to behave? I know, I know, we are not supposed to judge God according to human standards, but you see the problem here: If we are not yet convinced of His existence, and are looking for signs of His benevolence, then what other standards can we use?

The issues that I have been asked to address here will seem to many to be terribly old-fashioned. The 'argument from design' made by the English theologian William Paley is not on most peoples' minds these days. The prestige of religion seems today to derive from what people take to be its moral influence, rather than from what they may think has been its success in accounting for what we see in nature. Conversely, I have to admit that, although I really don't believe in a cosmic designer, the reason that I am taking the trouble to argue about it is that I think that on balance the moral influence of religion has been awful.

This is much too big a question to be settled here. On one side, I could point out endless examples of the harm done by religious enthusiasm, through a long history of pogroms, crusades, and jihads. In our own century it was a Muslim zealot who killed Sadat, a Jewish zealot who killed Rabin, and a Hindu zealot who killed Gandhi. No one would say that Hitler was a Christian zealot, but it is hard to imagine Nazism taking the form it did without the foundation provided by centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. On the other side, many admirers of religion would set countless examples of the good done by religion. For instance, in his recent book Imagined Worlds, the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson has emphasized the role of religious belief in the suppression of slavery. I'd like to comment briefly on this point, not to try to prove anything with one example but just to illustrate what I think about the moral influence of religion.

It is certainly true that the campaign against slavery and the slave trade was greatly strengthened by devout Christians, including the Evangelical layman William Wilberforce in England and the Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing in America. But Christianity, like other great world religions, lived comfortably with slavery for many centuries, and slavery was endorsed in the New Testament. So what was different for anti-slavery Christians like Wilberforce and Channing? There had been no discovery of new sacred scriptures, and neither Wilberforce nor Channing claimed to have received any supernatural revelations. Rather, the eighteenth century had seen a widespread increase in rationality and humanitarianism that led others—for instance, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan—also to oppose slavery, on grounds having nothing to do with religion. Lord Mansfield, the author of the decision in Somersett's Case, which ended slavery in England (though not its colonies), was no more than conventionally religious, and his decision did not mention religious arguments. Although Wilberforce was the instigator of the campaign against the slave trade in the 1790s, this movement had essential support from many in Parliament like Fox and Pitt, who were not known for their piety. As far as I can tell, the moral tone of religion benefited more from the spirit of the times than the spirit of the times benefited from religion.

Where religion did make a difference, it was more in support of slavery than in opposition to it. Arguments from scripture were used in Parliament to defend the slave trade. Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment. "

Man... I hate being uncertain. Everyday it seems like I want to be an atheist, but there's something holding me back. I need to do more research. If I ever have a kid, I hope he/she understands how important knowledge is. In the future I'd be scared if I was dumb because I'd be considered expendable. Globalization will be the new natural selection; instead of genetic adoptions it'll be competitive among the living. What do I know? It's probably just a spurious glimpse of the future. Save us socialism!!! Eh. Yea, right.

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
- Thomas Sowell"