Being alive doesn’t make you “human”

It’s rare for columnists these days to wade into the abortion debate, so it’s worth noting for that alone.

But this column in the Edmonton Sun got SMU thinking about the cross-purposes nature of the abortion debate. This column represents the “women’s rights” argument. It doesn’t try to argue that a fetus isn’t a human being, it simple reflects the author’s own belief that the woman’s  rights are paramount.

It’s an intractable argument, because it has no rational basis. Simply ascribing one human rights over another is a form of social totalitarianism, without logical support, except perhaps in cases where both lives are in jeopardy from taking a child to term. It’s only logical to remove a fetuses “human rights” if you can logically argue that it has yet to develop into a “human.”

Just as intractable is the “pro-life” — or “anti-choice” — argument that life simply begins at conception, therefore all abortion is murder. It relies on the false premise that “life” is synonymous with “humanity.” And it’s not.

Not everything that has life is considered human, by definition. We separate humanity from other animals because of human traits, including self-awareness/consciouness of existence.

Look it up: most dictionaries will define human as a short form for “human being,” to merely describe the species, to be sure. But they’ll also define it as having the traits of the rest of humanity.

“Life” is not synonymous with “human” because people develop, biologically, in stages. For example, prior to the seventh month, most fetuses haven’t developed a connected parietal lobe in their brain, so they have no self-awareness, no consciousness.

To go beyond that biological reality — to go searching for some earlier, deitically-produced “soul — is to tred into the realm of blind faith, not logic.

Lacking the key trait that separates their cognitive developmental process from other animals, we can still call a second-term fetus “alive”. But it has no “human rights” because it simply isn’t human yet. It doesn’t meet the criteria.

This same cross-purposes argument is raised regarding people who are being kept alive. We recognize these people as human for the life they lived prior to becoming vegetative — but we assign their rights to someone else, because they have no logical way to exercise them themselves. One of those assigned rights is the right to decide if the individual lives or dies.

If a fully developed human who has lost the essential traits of their humanity doesn’t get to “choose life,” why  should a fetus that hasn’t even reached the potential to be self-aware?

Let’s put this another way: if a rancher aborts an early-stage calf fetus to save the mother, we don’t call that fetus a “cow.” We call it an aborted calf fetus. If people want to call the product of abortions “aborted human fetuses,” more power to them. At least it won’t continue the nonsensical notion that human rights begin at conception.

Christ gets crucified, once again

Oh, the irony.

After close to 2,000 years (give or take, no one really knows) of trying to cram Christianity down the throats of millions around the world imbued with common sense, the hordes of faithful have now spoken:

Comedy Central should just leave religion alone.

That was the general public reaction (y’know, the ol’ comment thang) to word that the network — famous for wussing out and censoring images of Mohamed — is considering a cartoon in which a resurrected Jesus Christ is portrayed as a slacker youth in New York, who doesn’t get along with his perpetually distracted father, who in turn is addicted to video games.

I kid you not. Sounds pretty damn funny to me!

In fact, I’m wondering if Trey Parker and Matt Stone are kicking themselves. They’ve been using JC as a character for years, and a spinoff was just sitting there, begging to be done.

Anyway, the general reactions ranged from hurt to bemused to disgusted. But that’s religion for you. The fact that multiple sects of evangelical Christianity spend much of their time trying to convert people doesn’t strike any of these people as ironic.

Selling religion is fine, you see, because — delusional and irrational or not — lots of people have it. Deriding it, on the other hand.

Well hell, that could lead to dancing.

Issues like this make me wish the average American knew more about the founding fathers, more specifically Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson loathed organizaed religion — he even rewrote the lessons of the New Testament into a reinterpreted Bible, taking out all of the mysticism and magical silliness.’

He would’ve loved the idea of a show that could make fun of religion. When asked about his support for Deism and Unitarianism — constructs allowing the practice of spiritual communalism without subscribing to a religious ethos — he remarked, “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.”

The modern translation of that is “any God who could’ve created as screwed up and complex a race as man would have appreciated it if we wondered if he was even there sometimes.”

But that would be rational. Whining about Comedy Central, for some, is just comforting.

Mommy, what’s an orgasm?

Evangelical Christian Charles McVety raised the alarm to the Ontario government’s plans to revamp  sex education curriculum in schools, but it’s not really fair to blame him entirely for the decision this week to shelve the changes.

The new curriculum called for teaching Grade 1 children the correct terms for private parts — penis and vagina. Grade 3 kids would have been inroduced to the concepts of gender identity and homosexuality, while Grade 6s and 7s would have learned about anal intercourse and vaginal lubrication. The education ministry posted the changes on its website in January, but it wasn’t until this week that any attention was paid.

Christian and Muslim groups threatened to pull their kids from school in a day of protest, but their threats alone would hardly have been enough to get the government to flip-flop. Truth is, most regular folks were uncomfortable with the idea, too. We’re squeamish with sex talk because we think it’s dirty. And we think it’s dirty because we learn most of it from hushed conversations on playgrounds instead of in classrooms.

Felicity Morgan, who objected to the changes, told TV news that she wanted to be the one to give her daughter information about sex. But will she tell her daughter about blow jobs? Will her daughter feel comfortable asking her what blow jobs are? Unlikely. She’ll learn about them, along with accompanying misinformation, from her friends.

I grew up in a progressive household. I was taught where babies come from when I was four, yet most of my early knowledge about female anatomy came in Grade 3 from a stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines at my friend’s house. The magazines belonged to my friend’s mother, who was single. This didn’t seem unusual to me at the time, suggesting I could have benefitted from some instruction on sexual orientation.

I wondered what “gay” meant the following year when I heard it mentioned on the 1970s sitcom “King of Kensington.” I could tell it was something sexual from the way it was talked about on the show, so I knew I didn’t want to ask my parents about it. I didn’t want to risk embarassment by exposing my ignorance to my friends, either, and I eventually figured it out myself by listening to older kids tell gay jokes.

It’s not exactly the best way to learn. But that’s how it always goes. And if it went that way for me, what hope does Morgan’s daughter have of it being any different? Religious groups say they object to schools teaching their children about concepts thet don’t approve of. But scrapping the changes to sex education dooms another generation to dangerous ignorance.

South Park creators hate virgins, paradise

Of all the dumb moves guaranteed to provoke dumb responses, inciting nut-job Muslims to attack the creators of South Park has to rank right up there.

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To the idiot running Revolutionmuslim.com: these are Americans you’re talking about. In the Middle East, perhaps theocratic dipwads can use the threat of violence to scare people into believing/behaving. But over here, it just makes them violent right back.

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In fact, over there it just makes them violent right back, too. The difference is that, thanks to a myriad of concurrent freedoms, people in the U.S. have the right to bear arms. So, look for a nutty Christian to go after a nutty Muslim if the threat ever turns into reality. In fact, I’d say the dude who wrote the post, Abu Talhah al Amrikee, might wanna up his home insurance, because the nuts on the Christian side are just as nutty as he is.

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What these sheep took offense to was a broad parody during South Park’s weekend episode in which major religious “prophets” are lampooned, including Mohammed (peace be upon everyone and all that.) Noting that using his image has led to murders in the past from said orthodox nutjobs, creators Trey Parker (left) and Matt Stone had Mohammed dress up in a mascot-style bear outfit.

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Look, we know you believe in raptures and virgins and one-world caliphates that prepare everyone for some mystical, magical paradise beyond the stars….but you’re a bunch of fruitcakes. There’s no proof other than blind faith behind any of the major religions, and you can deny that until you’re blue in the face, while rational people look on and wonder why anyone would want to become blue in the face.

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The vast majority of South Park’s targets deserve it (including Richard Dawkins, whose sociological ideas we often agree with, but who has the graceful approach of a lame rhinocerous in a glass-blowing factory). Few deserve is at much as Mormons and the Scientologists, because they proselytize more than most. But pretty much all religions get the same treatment, including atheists (really? Creation from nothingness? Physical impossibility. Something had to come first, so call it ‘God’ whether you anthropomorphize the image or not, and get over yourselves.)

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So rather than waste precious air pointing out once again the foibles of orthodox religion, I’ll leave the last few words on this to the unusually astute commentators who posted after a CNN story on the issue:

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From poster Neil: you watch media in the US and in other countries which allow freedom of expression, you will see numerous examples of comments and cartoons (including South Park) wherein the author treats Jesus in a way that the most devout christains would find offensive. That is exactly what was contemplated by the First Amendment to the US Constitutition, which Revolutionmuslim. com seeks the protection of when spewing its hate and thinly-veiled threats but abhors when someone says something that offends.

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From poster Evan:
This was a joke on extremists who use anything as a reason for violence. “You made fun of me, therefore I’ll kill you.” This is not a rational thought process and needs to stop. And I see these same people are asking about how we would feel if they made fun of Jesus. You obviously have not seen the show. They do make fun of Jesus, and every single group you can imagine. That is their point, and you missed it entirely.

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From DaveC:
Mohamed was as insane as was Jesus. Dudes, there is NO GOD. Grow up; this is the year 2010 and it’s time to stop believing there is a magic man in the sky who reads your minds 24/7 and will give you goodies after you die. You have one life to live and it’s on the earth and it’s now. Now run along and live a true life and not the fairy tale of the Bible, or Qu’ran, or The Book of Mormon.

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And the last word, from Bruce Roll:

Personal beliefs are not public facts. All followers of every religion should spend less time memorizing their respective sacred texts and more time studying their religion’s actual history. A religious devotion is no basis for murdering and/or maiming fellow human beings.
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I have had enough of devout extremists threatening everyone’s safety, because a non-believer had the audacity to question their religious beliefs. To me, the three most repulsive words in the English language are Evangelical, Orthodox, and Fundamentalist.

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The United States of America is a democratic republic, not a theocracy. We should stand by our constitutional freedoms and not bow to the will of ignorant religious zealots

Why fluffy is God

The Lord works in mysterious ways. It was Gary Cooper’s last line at the end of “Sgt. York” when he returned home from WWI and found the government had built him a brand new farmhouse. The Lord was rewarding him for ignoring “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and picking off 25 Germans with an American Enfield rifle. Mysterious for sure.

You may be wondering why the Lord is good to your neighbour considering all the sins you’ve observed him committing through your binoculars. How do you unravel the Lord’s mysterious ways without professional help? Where do you find Fred, Velma, Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby in the Yellow Pages? So many questions.

The answer, friends, to God’s mysterious behavior is so alarming that you’d better make sure you’re in a calm, safe place before reading any further. Are you safe. OK, good. God isn’t really as smart as everyone makes Him out to be. Don’t believe it? Why else would he make genitals so vulnerable and logs accross rivers so slippery?

Essentially, God is like your cat. He quietly prowls around and pounces when he finds prey. It’s the luck of the draw who he gets and he loves to play with his catch. The more you struggle, the more fun Whiskers and God have. So take my advice — if God has you under his paw, play dead and scramble under the sofa when he gets bored and starts licking himself.

God, like your cat, is also mostly interested in who is feeding him. If God is rewarding a Toyota executive with a pool full of bikini hotties while punishing you with chemotherapy, think feline. Have you fed God a fish lately? You could win God’s favour by emptying your bank account into a collection plate, but remember that like cats, God is fickle. He may scratch your face in bed the morning and ignore your snoring partner because he knows you are the one who provides the Tender Vittles.

Cat worship died out in ancient Egypt, I think, because it was too scary. Bad, bad things happen in the world and it’s much more comforting to believe there is a guiding force like God giving it order and justice. But there isn’t any justice when it comes to earthquakes, birth defects or gas chambers. Still, most people would rather blind themselves to reality and explain “God’s” actions as being “mysterious.”

Shitty things happen in the universe for no good reason. Cat worship is actually more logical than current religions when you think about it.

Check this one out….

Got to give props to “unreasonable faith” for this killer post…..#mce_temp_url#

Martyrs can’t be wrong

Am I really an atheist? We get such a bad rap this time of year. The hyper-religious claim I can’t possibly be one. Look, they exclaim, you’re eating a Cadbury cream egg!

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Canadian writer Michael Coren has just taken aim at atheists in a piece where he denounces some notable non-believers for questioning the existence of Christ. At first he attempts to rationally debate the authenticity of historical texts written a considerable time after Christ’s death. But then Coren asserts that since so many early Christians were willing to die for their beliefs, their martyrdom must be considered evidence of Christ’s authenticity and that he was indeed the messiah.

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Let’s be clear. Fervent belief in Jesus and the resurrection doesn’t make it any more true than your neighbour’s adamant belief he was abducted by a UFO and anally probed by extra-terrestrials. Does the world really need more young men strapping bombs to their bodies in return for scores of virgins in the afterlife? Thank-you, Mr. Coren, for offering evidence that those girls in heaven exist. (Just to be on the safe side, I think we ought to ban anyone with Coren’s essay on their computers from boarding aircraft.)

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Coren isn’t the only one who equates numbers with truth but he ought to know better. As an atheist, I’m hardly afraid of polls. I don’t wish to slam democracy here, but if the majority was always right, then chocolate eggs would be good for us and Nickelback would be cool.

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I admit I occasionally doubt my atheism. Sometimes I pick up pennies for good luck. And I often catch myself believing that bicycles have souls. Musicians feel the same about guitars. Everybody talks to their cars, especially old, and sputtering about-to-die cars. We coax them up hills with an encouraging, “You can do it, sweetheart!” I do, at least.

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Religious folks say this shows I’m part of the majority which believes in a higher power. Not really. When I really examine the issue, I realize that I’m only projecting human qualities onto inanimate objects. Bicycles and guitars only have souls as far as our hearts are concerned. My mind is rational enough to know better.

And not that it matters to whether it’s true or not, Mr. Coren, but I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

The pope, pedophiles and pragmatic pluralism

There’s a fair body of both social and biological science now to suggest that, however it comes about, most humans are cognitively wired to accept irrational beliefs.

But it often requires a stark level of realism to break through the mental defensive shell erected around that belief, with the end result cognitive dissonance — the emotional quaker a person goes through when they can no longer rationalize having faith in something and suddenly lose its emotional support.

A former mormon bishop once said that realizing his faith was based on lies was like having the world pulled out from under him, like he had no understanding of humanity or his role in it, for months.

Like most intelligent men who are nonetheless capable of becoming captive to faith, he’s happier since living such a strident orthodoxy, although has somewhat lapsed in that he immediately turned to capitalism as a replacement.

People: all systems of faith, economics and politics are created by us. We’re flawed, so none of them are perfect.

The question is how imperfect, or blind to those imperfections, a faithful person is willing to be. This Dallas Morning News article outlines the crisis of faith people around the world are experiencing as it becomes more evident daily that high-ranking Catholics — and quite possibly Pope Benedict himself — helped cover up, or wilfully ignored, years of system child abuse.

This guy, creepy? No way!

The article is crap, replete with specious examples of crises of faith that, regardless of the cause, have long-existed in the church. But the end result is interesting: people don’t lose their faith in a higher power, just their faith in a particular religion.

If you’re a pragmatic pluralist — someone who accepts we’ll likely never understand our origins or which side of the atheism/theism argument is correct — it’s neat to see people realizing they can use the ceremony, community and decency inherent to many moderated religions, and discard the divisive, insulating effects of orthodoxy.

This is not new. Many religions have can thank their lucky starts they embraced religion and reform early on, and consequently are represented by entire congregations of agnostic supporters. For example, there are more than 40 synagogues across North America that are home to “secular humanist judaism,” the practice of elements of the faith, but with an acceptance that religion is created by man in an attempt to understand his origins.

On the judeo-christian front, there’s unitarianism, which is rooted in the Jeffersonian tradition of taking the logical communal lessons from the Bible and applying them humanely …without arrogantly assuming a super being that looks like us (or we like him, six of one, half a dozen of the other) is in charge of everything and created it all.

A few years ago, the author and lecturer Dr. David Wulff told me it all comes down to the same thing: a need for comfort and security.

“In religion, you have a magnet that draws people together: there’s mystery, there’s the promise of a form of immortality, there is hope for solutions to complex problems,” said Wulff.

“A lot of it is very pragmatic. It’s been argued that religion is what we do when there are no real answers left. And you see that reflected all the time: when people are trapped in a mine and there’s nothing the people trying to save them can do, they pray. The fact that it’s so often ineffective doesn’t seem to matter, given the comfort that it brings them.

“I’m thinking back to a study done in the 1970s by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in which they trained interviewers to go into nine congregations and interview members to find out why the church was important to them and what about it was most important.

“And what the people kept saying over and over again was that it was the sense of caretaking, first towards the congregation by the minister, and then between the congregation itself. Whenever one of the interviewers would suggest there was something wrong with the answers, because they didn’t discuss the church’s ‘justification by faith’ doctrine, or God or Jesus, they would remark that there was no better conversation stopper than the actual theological questions.

“So despite the church’s belief that all of these important doctrines, rules, codes and traditions were important, inevitably the congregation wasn’t concerned with that. They were much more concerned with one another.”

Oh, that is just so gay

….and when it’s a case this asinine, there IS something wrong with that.

We here at SMU are not even remotely homophobic, given that the bulk of evidence strongly supports the contention people are born gay. That would be like being “heterophobic”: stupid and irrational. Being gay may not be that common but it certainly is biologically normal, so get over it, ya weenies.

Having said that, even numerous members of Canada’s uber-concious LGBT community think Lorna Pardy is immensely full of shit.

The B.C. woman’s story is outlined in Canada’s National Post today. She has helped run a Vancouver restaurant into the ground after Pardy, who is gay, was heckled there by a comedian. It’s a comedian witnesses say she was heckling and insulting for several minutes as well, but we digress.

Here's a solution to the problems of over-sensitive lesbian hecklers, like Vancouver's Lorna Pardy: only hire gay comedians, like Ellen DeGeneres or Rosie O'Donnell! That way, when they make jokes about lesbians, no one will be offended! In fact, let's never mix people together who are different. Let's keep all the colors separate, the genders, the sexual identities. Good grief, what a bunch of horseshit.

She admits restaurant owner Salam Ismail is not a homophobe. She admits he is not a bad man and he was not even in the room when she was heckled. Nevertheless, she brought a human rights tribunal complaint against Ismail, claiming she should be awarded damages for pain and suffering.

The backlash against Ismail from the gay community shut down his restaurant , which until that point had actually hosted a night specifically for Vancouver lesbians — the homophobic bastard! — and has left Ismail with $13,000 in debts. His legal fees are now being paid by his brother, a city businessman.

So, just a case of poor judgment, perhaps, on Pardy’s part, particularly given that witnesses said her group was heckling the comedian (and his mother)  viciously prior to the incident? Ismail must have some role, right?

Uh, nope. In her own words: “”He wasn’t there at all,” she testified yesterday. “I didn’t see him anywhere.” She also said the restaurant owner was “nice” and “not the target” of the protests that …. shut his restaurant down.

Soooo, when a civil court would likely laugh her all the way home, she instead….takes it to a B.C. human rights tribunal?!?

Next week on Jerry: Parents of children who sue after getting wet at theme parks

Ann Coulter vs. intelligence

Sometimes, watching the ideological left get played like a fiddle by the more sociopathic elements of the right makes for interesting fare.

Take Ann Coulter. Oh please, Death, take Ann Coulter. (Ok, so we’re agnostic here and shouldn’t anthropomorphize Death. But you get the point.)

Last week, Coulter gained international headlines by  cancelling her own speech at the University of Ottawa, claiming death threats from students. Given that there likely isn’t a day that goes by without Coulter having her life threatened, it was a pathetic excuse, spun beautifully into “see, Liberals don’t like free speech.”

Of course they don’t. Nobody who’s ideologically entrenched — conservative, liberal or otherwise, likes free speech. That’s brain chemistry and conditioning for you.

But it’s also besides the point: the only real scandal here is that a supposed insitute of higher learning, the U of Ottawa, would book such a vapid assclown in the first place. Coulter is an old-fashioned provocateur, with a penchant for making her bones off of supports on the right. Her entreaties to kill muslims and jail liberals are comically stupid, the kind of nonsense that has no basis in rational thought.

So free speech wasn’t really the issue. The issue is why a university would book a demagogue in the first place.

Hmm…..let’s see: money, maybe? Attention? The kind of prestige one gets from being on CNN and Fox (even for something heinous)?

There’s an example that plainly  illustrate the stupidity involved in “The Coulter Effect”, the willingness of some members of society to  band with anyone they think might bring them personal gain. The first comes from the classic Monty Python movie “The Life of Brian.”

Brian of Nazareth, reluctant prophet, falls out of a window while hiding behind a curtain. He lands in a public square, where soapboxes have been set up so that people who have an opinion can rant without causing any public distress (sort of an early-stage internet.)

Is the guy on top any less sensible than Ann Coulter? Hell no. In fact, his insistence that "there will be in that time, rumours of things going astray" is more rational than anything Coulter's ever spewed. And still a University gave her a paid forum. Maybe it's a function of better hair.

All of the other prophets are irrational, rambling, idiotic:

Prophet 1: “And the bezan shall be huge and black, and the eyes thereof red with the blood of living creatures, and the whore of Babylon shall ride forth on a three-headed serpent, and throughout the lands, there’ll be a great rubbing of parts. Yeeah…

Prophet 2: “For the demon shall bear a nine-bladed sword. Nine-bladed! Not two or five or seven, but nine, which he will wield on all wretched sinners, sinners just like you, sir, there, and the horns shall be on the head, with which he will…”

Prophet 3: “There shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi– with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril that, in that time, shall the third one…

Notably, even in Biblical times, almost everyone watching is laughing at them. But  no one is offering them a broader pulpit and a fat cheque for their silliness, because rambling either sociopathically or nonsensically about issues of faith and politics is something the terminally dim just do.

So why did the U of Ottawa think giving Coulter a more prominent — and easily manipulated — soapbox would, in any way, be educational or thought-provoking? How did elevating this fool to the level of someone to be taken seriously benefit students, on any level?

Even Coulter’s most ardent defenders — mostly idiots on the right who rushed to her “defense” without even checkinf first who cancelled the speech — did so under protest. Columnist after columnist defended not what she says, but her right to say it.

When even other ideological demagogues think someone is vapid and full of shit, what exactly is that person doing being booked at an institution of “higher learning” in the first place?

Probably for the same reason that U.S colleges give free rides to basketball players who can barely spell their own names: money and celebrity.

The whole lot of them should be post-secondarily institutionalized.