Abortion debate.

Ok, so the abortion debate is up now.

http://backpack.podbean.com/2012/10/22/abortion-debate-10212012/ 

Before reading any of my thoughts here, I suggest listing, otherwise a lot of this won't make any sense.

In most debates one realizes after it there were ways in which they could have responded or things that should have been said that were not.  This is even more true when the debate topic is complex and the discussion time is short.  So I am writing out my thoughts on the debate a few days after it, I will save this and post it after the debate has been put up because otherwise it would be unfair to both my readers and to Vocab.

So during the debate several things were brought up I want to comment on.

First, Vocab's use of what I think may rightfully be called a deepity.  He says that someone's rights should not change simply because their location has changed.  First off, it is a gross oversimplification of the issue to refer to the woman's uterus as just another location.  It's as if he saying, "I'm at the store", or "I'm in my home" or "I'm in a woman's uterus" are logically indistinct.  I'm sure there are some women out there who would be willing to point out that they are very different.

In addition to this, Vocab calls abortion murder as part of the same argument.  The problem is that he seems to be treating all killing as equal, but most rational people already admit that there are valid contexts in which we can kill another human being.  If I run out onto the street and shoot a random stranger I'll be charged with murder, but if that same stranger breaks into my house and I shoot him people think I'm a hero who defended his home from an intruder.  Odd that one of the main differences in these two scenarios is the other persons location, and another is the question of permission.  Context matters, and the pro-life groups seem to want to selectively pretend it doesn't.

My argument is that even if you treat a fetus as a human (Which I'll address this in a bit) the context of pregnancy justifies the abortion, now if one wants to argue that this particular context does not justify said action we can have that discussion, but this was not the argument Vocab made as far as I can tell, and would require him credit the issue with being more complex than most pro-lifers like to admit.  He seemed to be making a blanket statement that context doesn't matter at all when you kill another human being. This seemed bizarre to me, since I can think plenty of contexts in which society would say that killing a person is justified and therefore not actually murder.  I suppose it would be consistent if he takes the absolute position of a pacifist, but he never alluded to that and it would my first time meeting and evangelical who was also a pacifist.

Next, I tried to structure my own argument to avoid biology as much as possible.  One because biology is complex and can't really be adequately addressed in 45 minutes, but mainly because neither I nor Vocab are biologists and any thing either one of us say is going to sound the least bit intelligent to actual biologists. 

Of course he was determined to bring this topic up since it is basically the main argument the pro life stance has that isn't mired in religious dogma.  I think he believed he scored a major victory in this arena, but he seemed to do it by speaking about one thing in embryology and then stopping at that because it seemed to support his argument and ignoring the rest of the science.   Of course the point he brings up is that the fetus has DNA unique to either one of the parents.  Of course I was not going to be able to lay out the actual complexities of fetal development in five minutes and he seemed to treat that as a victory, which is because short sound bytes work better than evidence in debates quite often.

As an example there is a debate about whether or not a fetus is even conscience until the point of actual birth.  Many seem to think that the oxygenation level in the brain of the fetus is too low to support conscience thought in utero.  Any movements made by the fetus are easily attributable to autonomic responses, and as it has never been conscious the fetus can't possibly feel pain.  Also as a being that has never been conscious it is difficult to refer to them as alive.  Of course this may get into the rather hairy question of defining what consciousness (and what life) is, but neuroscience has certainly give us more insight into this question than religion ever did.

Further, studies have found that the neurological connections needed to be conscious or feel pain are not present until after 24 weeks.

Fetus not yet conscious at 24 weeks

One thing I brought up at the end was the need for a more reasonable approach, and that making abortion illegal would do little to stop abortions from happening.  That being the case I presented a case for several things which have actually been shown to lower the number of abortions (wider access to birth control, and better sex education for teens) and mentioned that I support those things and would certainly have no problem with the number of abortions going down, and that I thought it was odd that so many fundamentalists oppose those things given their proven effect. 

I felt he pretty much dodged the question entirely by just basically reiterating that he thinks abortion is wrong and failing to address my point at all.  The best way of putting it, which of course I didn't think of at the time, was if the pro life groups got exactly what they wanted and abortions were totally illegal would this stop abortions?  No, in fact, statistics show that the numbers don't seem to change much.  Further, evangelicals have more recently been taking a strong stance against birth control as well, which will almost certainly increase abortions even with them illegal.  So is that it? Make abortion illegal and then pat yourself on the back and go home?  If your main goal is to decrease abortions why not do something that will actually do that, irregardless of the legality of the abortions?  I don't consider it my main goal to decrease the number of abortions but that number decreasing would not bother me if it was done in a way that respected women's rights and intelligently engaged the topic of sexuality.

Understand while I'm not accusing Vocab of this, my hypothesis is that evangelical's antagonism towards both abortion and contraception is part of a bigger issue.  They want everyone to act in accordance with the sexual values of their religion (even though statistically most of them don't measure up to those either) and they think by preventing access to anything that might negate the real world consequences to sexual behavior will push people to have less sex.  Mind you, they think this despite evidence that access to birth control and abortion does little to change the sexual behavior of the average person.  Oddly enough this ends up creating a situation where children are seen as one of the punishments for "immoral" actions like premarital sex, which is not exactly pro family.

Preacher gives interesting gay rights speech.

Came across this video last night.

I recommend watching until the end.  If only Shyamalan movies had such interesting twists.

I don't even know what to say.

Recently U.S. Representative Paul Broun, a republican from Georgia and who, unfortunately for the U.S., is a physician and sits on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee had this to say:

“God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I believe that the Earth is about 9,000 years old. I believe that it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually. How to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all our public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason, as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.”

U.S. Rep. Paul Broun: Evolution a lie 'from the pit of hell'

His beliefs are strange enough, the fact that this guy is on a committee that decides how to spend government funds on science and technology is downright disturbing.  He calls him self a scientist, but last I checked calling oneself a scientist requires that one actually does science.  Has Broun published in any peer reviewed journals?  Particularly on these young earth claims he is making?  He seems to think they are obvious but can't really offer anything of substance. He just says, "That's what the Bible says."

Of course the scariest thing about his statements is that he is basically openly admitting his dominionist leanings by stating his intent to use the Bible to decide how he will vote.  How do people come to wield so much political power in this country when they are so painfully ignorant, openly anti-science, and driven to use their religious beliefs as the basis for law?  

If you think that guy is bad, then this guy will really break your brain.  

Charlie Fuqua, Arkansas Legislative Candidate, Endorses Death Penalty For Rebellious Children In Book

Charlie Fuqua, is a Republican candidate for the Arkansas House of Representatives and thinks the U.S. government should reinstate the Old Testament law that made being an unruly child a capital offense.

Even though this procedure would rarely be used, if it were the law of land, it would give parents authority. Children would know that their parents had authority and it would be a tremendous incentive for children to give proper respect to their parents.

I am going to humbly suggest that parents willing to use this sort of thing as a threat to garner obedience from their child shouldn't be parents in the first place.

Who votes for these loons?

What I've been up to.

Sorry I haven't been posted so much lately.  I have been busy though.

First, this past Monday I was invited to debate the topic of abortion with local evangelist Vocab Malone.  The same one I debated morality with a few weeks ago.  I, unsurprisingly, have some thoughts about the debate that I have been writing down.  Should be a long post, but to be fair to Vocab as well as my readers , I'm going to wait until the debate is posted in a couple of weeks to post that up.

Click to see full size.

I just purchased a new guitar, my old one had been sold when I was out of work a year and half or so ago.

Pictured here, it's a Les Paul Standard Plus.  I've been annoying my neighbors with this, I'm sure they love me.

Maybe I'll post a video of my playing something if you asking nicely.







I've also been playing Skyrim again lately.  For those of you who aren't gamers two expansions came out for it in the last month.  So I had the job of killing vampire hordes who were threatening to blot out the sun or something like that.  I also found the time to build a kick ass house for my character. 

Yes, my virtual avatars live much better than I do, but on the other hand they amassed their large fortune by killing dragons, trolls, and undead.  I would totally be willing to do that, but since none of them exist in real life I have to settle for being tech support.

How to say something about your product without saying anything.

There is a commercial 5 hour energy has been playing on my Hulu account quite a bit lately and I found it pretty funny. They asked 3,000 doctors (though didn't say how many actually answered) and the response?

Over 73% of doctors would recommend a low calorie energy supplement to their healthy patients who use energy supplements.

The way this is worded they basically said nothing of value.  The doctors say they would recommend a low calorie supplement to people who are already using one to begin with, so there is no way to determine if these doctors would recommend it to people using nothing at all.  Perhaps they only recommend it because it is better than using high calorie supplements that also do nothing, if the patient is going to use energy supplements anyway might as well turn them onto something low calorie right?

In addition they don't mention the 27% (a still pretty significant number) who didn't recommend it even within the very limited confines of the statements phrasing.  What were their reasons?

Unfortunately shady advertising techniques like this one are used precisely because they work on enough people enough of the time to make it profitable.  Laws can be useful to limit what advertisers claim to a certain extent, but as with this example it is often easy to come up with ways to say things that, while not outright lies, are intentionally misleading, thus circumventing the laws.  This is one of the reasons that education in skeptical thinking is so important.

Egyptian atheist arrested for posting ‘Innocence of Muslims’ on Facebook

So this happened:

Egyptian atheist arrested for posting ‘Innocence of Muslims’ on Facebook

 

The video in question that he posted, kinda silly, but has caused riots all over the Middle East.

 

 

 According to the article:

Alber Saber was arrested on Friday after his mother called the police out of fear of the crowd outside their home. Saber was arrested under the rarely used law that prohibits insulting religion

 Free speech doesn't fly in Egypt either apparently.

A Facebook page has been created in support of freeing him, I don't know how much good it will do but go click the "like" button if you have time.

https://www.facebook.com/FreeAlberSaber

Sandra Fluke is the real misogynist according to LifeSiteNews.com

 Sandra Fluke’s war on womanhood

So Sandra Fluke made a speech at the Democratic National Convention.  I didn't really watch much of the DNC myself because I generally have better things to do, but when I ran across this article on LifeSiteNews, a super pro life site.  I decided to check out her speech, since according to them the speech was full of "venom" and Fluke was "disgruntled and disillusioned." So I decided to look up the video and see for myself.

You can see it here:

It didn't really strike me as that bad. 

Of course they choose to quote Kirstin Powers statement about how women should "visit Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and then see how she feels about how the US treats women"  A statement I find ridiculous.  Treating women better than Saudi Arabia is a pretty low standard.  I would like to think our country would aim a bit higher than that.  Also, Fluke's statements were pointedly directed at the senates failure to include women on a panel discussing contraception issues, so it is not as if she was simply tilting at windmills, she had a concrete example to point to.

However the article gets even more bizarre.  The writer of the article (most likely a man given the name Peter) seems to have decided that a woman cannot truly be a women unless they are having children, and somehow allowing them to decide when and if they reproduce makes them sexual servants of men.  Does he really think that atheists and feminists are just having one non stop orgy? 

A couple of quotes:

Women like Fluke who accept this detestable lie, have thereby rejected the glorious beauty and radiant splendor of what is really at the core of a woman’s being, namely her profound ability to procreate

This is downright creepy, and are not even necessarily accurate.  Did this guy actually ask if Fluke ever intends to have children?  I don't personally know, but I do know the choice should be up to her and perhaps the man she has sex with.  Not some random person on the internet who has decided that not reproducing is some black mark on a woman's reputation.

Women like Fluke are not fighting against the alleged “War on Women”; they are in fact its biggest perpetrators. Contraception and abortion have separated women from their true selves. Depraved men, capitalizing on this unnatural separation, have used and abused women’s bodies like never before. Women are commonly degraded as objects for recreation, pleasure, and profit.

This quote is dripping with weird sex negativity, he seems to think that any sex that is not purposed to be procreative is dirty.  It seems to bother him that women might have sex for any other reason.

He seems to fail to understand that each woman is an individual, if one wants to have children that is fine, but it is also fine to not have children. No matter how he tries to spin it, he is ultimately saying that he will let women choose as long as they make the choices he has already predetermined are right for all women. 

Atheism+ and in-group/out-group dynamics.

I honestly wasn't really planing on writing anything about atheism+.  Not that I didn't generally agree with  most of the ideas there, but I didn't really think I had anything brilliant to say on the topic, but then I thought of something, so here I am.

I've been told in several conversations in the last couple of months that the movement I am part of is some isolationist sub culture.  There are critics out there of both atheism and skepticism as movements who suggest that we are nothing but a bunch of sycophants patting each other on the back for being more brilliant than everyone else.

I'd like to tell those people they have no idea what they are talking about, but while I think they are not entirely correct I can't deny that the criticism does have some merit.  Those self congratulatory tendencies are a part of human behavior that all of us, including myself, have indulged in from time to time.  In my defense I think I do it a lot less now that I did when I was a fundamentalist Christian, but whether that difference stems from my lack of religion or just generally being more mature than I was at 21 years old, I can't say. However, any movement of a significant size is going to have a certain number of people who seem to spend more time congratulating each other for being in the "know" than doing anything of significance.

When Jen McCreight posted about atheism+ on BlagHag last month I quickly noticed that there were some people on both sides who devolved into name calling, which was bad, but I also noticed that a lot of the people against atheism+ were going off into conspiracy theory territory, which was really bad.  I read way to many  blog comments of people saying that atheism+ was some secret conspiracy of leftist feminists and communists who are trying to steal the movement.  It seems to me the goal of most of the people promoting atheism+ is to promote more diversity in the movement, but the people who don't like the idea are claiming that it is promoting divisiveness.   Truthfully I would full well admit that it no doubt will cause a certain amount of divisiveness, but to some extent that is OK.  The guy who asked if it was moral to rape a SkepChick, for instance.  I don't mind making him feel unwelcome in my circle of friends.  In fact, if you don't make those sorts of people feel unwelcome, you may end up with no one but those people. Just look at what happened to Chat Roulette for an example of how this happens.

So this brings me back to something I thought of while I was trying to answer some of these accusations.  I remembered the moment in time when I began to consider being activist about my atheism.  I had been an atheist for several years by this point, but I wasn't really concerned with what anyone else thought of me or my beliefs.  I certainly didn't care one whit about feminism or other issues back then.  One day I was on YouTube and happened across a video taken from CNN.

A video of this to be exact:

The discussion was one of study that had been done showing atheists were the most disliked minority.  The three people who were asked to speak on this (all Christian) explain that no such discrimination exists, and then rant for about 4 minutes about how any atheist who thinks differently was whiny and should shut-up.  By the end of the video I was angry, and for a bit I wasn't even sure why other than the absurdity of what they said.  Then it hit me that this was what it felt like to be marginalized, to be discriminated against.  The people with the power and authority had just said that my opinions and my feelings didn't count.  I should just shut up and let them have their way.  This video convinced me that things needed to change.

There is the reason that I think atheists should be concerned with social justice for all people, One, because otherwise we run the risk of running roughshod over other peoples civil rights in the defense of our own, and two, because we need to recognize that we are not the only ones to have problems.  Why do we fight?  Why do we advocate for skeptical thinking? Is it so we can pat each other on the back and feel superior to others, or is it to make the world we live in a little better?  If it is the former then we really are just another smug sub-culture and our movement is meaningless.  If is the later then I see no reason not to apply skeptical thought to the problems of social justice we face.  This is what Atheism+ means to me.