Yams for All

We need to change how we think about childbearing.

Having a child is probably the single most expensive decision someone in the developed world can make.  Once a child is born, one becomes responsible for that child’s food, shelter, emotional support, education, and a thousand and one other needs harder to anticipate and describe, sometimes through socialized systems that ease access to various goods.  The guardians of children become their first and fastest path toward accumulating the possessions that they will then use to gain their first taste of independence.  Parents and other caretakers and among the most important fonts of culture, moral growth, and personal development that any person will ever have.  The enormity of the caretaker’s role is so well understood that it routinely features in sexist writings that insist that women should be content with that specific influence on the future and desire no additional option or greater agency than that.

But there is one situation in which that understanding is ignored: the decision to have a child.

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Yams for All
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Animal Form and Function 8: Vertebrata

The last session in my dissection course is a two-part dissection of a pig and a frog.  This one goes into much greater detail than any other dissection in the course, so there’s rarely time for a protracted video presentation at the end.  Still, I keep a good selection of surprises for my students.
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Animal Form and Function 8: Vertebrata

Big Tent, No Flap

Every young association, whether as trivial as collecting fans of a particular author’s writing or as grandiose as an emergent political ideology, sooner or later has to decide how it feels about issues outside its original mandate.  Labor unions have to decide how they feel about the food in workplace cafeterias.  Book clubs have to decide how they feel about treating gay people badly.  Political movements have to decide how they feel about anthropogenic climate change, whether their country should react to the ongoing clusterfuck in Ukraine (and if so, how), and whether they think it’s okay that American political orthodoxy still imagines that preventing pregnancy in the unwilling isn’t part of the healthcare system’s responsibilities.

And the atheist movement, if there is a single thing that can be called such, has had to sort out its sentiments on a variety of issues.

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Big Tent, No Flap

Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist

TodayChristian.net seems to think they have a set of questions that “Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…”  They’d better be very interesting to warrant that mess of capital letters and using the word “atheist” like someone who doesn’t know English very well.  Let’s see what these stumpers apparently are.
1.       How Did You Become an Atheist?
2.       What happens when we die?
3.       What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!
4.       Without God, where do you get your morality from?
5.       If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?
6.       If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?
7.       Where did the universe come from?
8.       What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?
9.       What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?
10.   If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?
Sigh.  Here we go.

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Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist

One School System

One of the triumphs of the human race was the invention of public schools.  With the spread of public school systems around the world, no longer would the children of farmers and blacksmiths receive only the training their parents could provide or afford to hire.  No longer would learning for learning’s sake be firmly closed to those without independent wealth or unexpected patronage.  The lot of all people was no longer simply to learn a trade and be content with that much knowledge.  The expectation arose that people would enter adulthood with a basic understanding of art, literature, music, mathematics, history, and many experimental sciences.  Later revisions and additions would make it possible for children to complete schooling with a basic familiarity with classical Western philosophy and levels of math and science that would previously have required connections in august institutions like Oxford University.

A lot of societal changes presaged this shift in human society.  In the west in particular, the Industrial Revolution and subsequent urbanization made the propagation of farmhands and apprentices far less necessary, created a middle class that expected more for its offspring, and created a demand for educated professionals that could not be fulfilled in other ways.  The history here is massive and convoluted enough that almost anything can be linked to this social revolution with enough effort, but that history is not at issue here.

This revolution also had a dramatic effect on the role of religion in society.  Religious organizations have a long history as the core of educational systems.  In societies lacking public schools, it is usually not secular charities and benefactors that fill the gap and provide basic learning to the masses, but clergy.  In countries where public systems exist in urban areas but have not yet penetrated into less developed regions, churches and mosques often fill the gap.  In places where ethnic minorities have separate infrastructure, church and school functions are often deeply intertwined as part of what makes these groups distinct from the surrounding society.  This has given and continues to give religious institutions enormous power to shape each succeeding generation of students…dramatically reduced in societies that have managed to implement secular public school systems.  Secularism, when it works, cuts religion out of the system; socialism makes the system available to anyone, preventing religious organizations from keeping their niche by being more easily accessible.

This has enabled the public school system to become much more than it was.  As a shared time of growth and experience for the majority of a country’s youth, school became where people acquired their sense of what it means to be a citizen of their country and the heritor of its culture.  It also became the primary means by which people would learn how our world functions.  School serves many purposes, depending on the priorities of those running them and the pundit consulted: babysitting to make the workforce possible, training future workers for basic jobs, breeding moral and upright citizens, or even conferring advantages not shared by those outside the system.  But that function—bringing to the next generation an understanding of our place in the universe, how our universe functions, and how to gain further understanding—is incredibly important, and becomes more so as more and more available futures demand such understanding.

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One School System

Shifty Lines: The East African Federation

Most of the stories in Shifty Lines are and will be about separatist conflicts.  Particularly in Africa, though, the simple separatist concept does not accurately reflect the goals of the border-rearrangement movements.  While this is fairly obvious in North Africa, where two of the major ethnic groups with nation-state aspirations are spread across multiple countries, eastern Africa presents a different case.  In East Africa, like the Caribbean, a large-scale effort to combine several countries into a single federated state is underway, and stands a decent chance of success.

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Shifty Lines: The East African Federation

Handle Effect

There’s a platitude that believers like to use to comfort each other in the face of adversity: “God only gives us what we can bear.”
I shudder every time I hear that.  Like Søren Kierkegaard’s mouthpiece Johannes de Silentio, I skip whatever solace believers find in that idea, and go straight to the horror.  It’s poetic shorthand for a longer thought: “This is happening to you because God thinks you’ll eventually come out okay.”
Think about that.
This is happening to you because God thinks you’ll eventually come out okay.
Out there somewhere, a cosmic calculator has determined that I have some threshold of suffering I can endure without breaking, and has responded to that information by burning my crops and giving my mother cancer.

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Handle Effect

Caring So Much It Hurts

[Spoilers for Series 2, 3, and 4 of Doctor Who follow.]

Ania and I watched the new series of Doctor Who a while back.  We never finished it, though.  We had a lot of trouble sustaining interest through Matt Smith’s tenure as the Eleventh Doctor.  Eleven was a cocksure weirdo who spent entirely too much time leading armies into battle while wearing “pacifism” like a badge and not enough doing the things that made us fall in love with David Tennant’s version.

The Tenth Doctor cared so much it hurt.

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Caring So Much It Hurts