When the science is not the question

In this news story the Virginia government has taken legal custody of a 16-year old in order to force him to get conventional cancer therapy. The youth sought out alternatives after his bout with conventional therapies. The state stepped in and a judge overturned his parents and his decision to go for alternative treatment.

While I am in no way a supporter of alternative or pseudoscience medicine I am a supporter of individuals freedoms. The boy (as I gather from the story) is not being pushed by his parents and is 16 not 8. The state should not be allowed to step-in in such a case. It is a violation of the parents rights and the teens. Yes, he will most likely suffer the consequences of his actions but it's his life and it's up to his parents to guide him. I would not have the same opinion if the boy was under 10-13 or so. The issue is not whether the science is right it is whether the state gets to decide for you what treatment to get. Hopefully they will get out of this and set a precedent for this to not happen again.

How Religion started a never ending war

The current Israeli conflict with Lebanon and all the other is caused by the fact that Israel was a mistake. Why did they pick the land they now occupy? Religion. I can't think of a better example of why religion should not be involved with politics!!

The only solution for Israel in the long term is to make Lebanon dependent on Israel. If people in Lebanon start getting services and money from Israel, the Lebanese people will turn away from Hezbollah to the better offer.

Civ and history has shown us that large militaries are a deterrent but they are also a tool that begs to be used. The problem is that these forces are not the right tool for the job.

Why Religion oppose stem cells OR How to remove most of religion's power

Stem cells represent the most powerful medical technology since immunizations. Finally we will have the means to fix people not patch and drug. For this reason religion must fight against stem cells to the very end or lose most of it's influence. People as animals seek security from the world since many things try and kill you (bacteria, predators, diseases etc). Religion offers a comfort that there is a referee who may save you or will give you infinite rewards when you die. The first one is more powerful since no [functioning] biological entity wants to die. So religions helps people cope about death. But as has been happening in the last centuries science has started understanding the [real] world and is piecing together how and why things fall apart and how to fix them.

Increasingly people are less religious since is offering more and more salvation from harm. With stem cells suddenly science is given a parts factory for the human body. Praying to sacrificing animals makes people feel better when there is something they can't fix (like a severed spinal cord) but what is even better is the ability to fix these things! Why bother praying when you can go get fixed! When science offers real salvation (like saving a child from diseases) instead of magic words religion will lose it's influence in this area. This will leave religion for poverty, but with wealth (health insured) people losing religion less money will go to religion and it will starve.

So even though it is in the interest of removing suffering and helping the meek become strong religion must oppose it or be ready to evolve.

Morality

All definitions of morality center on categorizing actions either right or wrong. For religious people it is simple: Do what holy-thingy says and what you are told is good and everything else is wrong. Having a god gives right and wrong an absolute scale since the god is absolutely right and everything opposite is wrong. Without a god things become relative and not so simple. Since there is no god the scale must be graduate to something such as benefit to the individual or perhaps benefit to one's kin. The point is it becomes relative. This means terms like right and wrong become relative and morality becomes ethics.

This is further complicated since our biological systems are designed to be binary (right vs wrong) since we get rewarded for some behaviors and guilt for others, but the rational mind must learn to overcome these. For instance eating fried food (by default) sends "right" signals since all organisms try to gather and consume as many calories as possible. Today we often train ourselves to feel guilt afterwards since our rational minds know we aren't starving and we could have made a healthier choice. Similarly the desire to categorize everything into right and wrong must be overcome so that the action can always be critically examined.

For this reason I pose that absolute morality does not exist (only personal morality) for atheists.

We are all related

If you try and draw a complete family tree backwards (from you to your parents to your grand parents etc) it grows exponentially. Eventually the number of people in your tree would have to exceed the population of the planet at that time. This means everyone alive today has at least one person in history we are all some how related to. It seems so counter-intuitive but there you have it as was recently shown in a Nature article (see This for summary). Now this is far from the proverbial Adam or Eve, but as the article mentions, pure religions or races are therefore impossible. So next time you feel ashamed of your family/relatives remember everyone is your relative!

Religious Market Share

Why do I find it so amusing to learn about the religious market share? What I mean by this is how different churches fight each other for the limited number of religious people. It really seems like they are in a state of natural selection. They fight each other, gain territory, diverge into two or more separate "species", etc. I guess it is most amusing since it is primarily one religious denomination making fun of another. This is amusing since it is nonsense vs nonsense and comforting since they are busy fighting amongst themselves to bother with us heretics.