Here I am, stealing Billy Graham’s mail again. It’s from December 12th:

Q: I know God has forgiven me for all the bad things I did when I was young, but will I ever forget them? They haunt me all the time because I know my life would have been much different if I just hadn’t chosen to go down the wrong road. — Mrs. A.J.

I’ll answer this in a very roundabout way. A favourite book of mine is one called Uhura’s Song by Janet Hagan. Dr. McCoy is down on a colony world dealing with a pandemic so Kirk and company wind up taking another doc with them in search of the origin world that might have a cure. Only a few locals suspect an origin world even exists, one of those being Uhura’s friend, a singer/songwriter from the colony and now a victim of this plague. Uhura’s only clues come from songs her friend secretly shared.

The locals on the origin world turn out to have very long and perfect memories and pass all knowledge by song or “how it happened” verbatim stories. Uhura and the rest of the team have a hell of a time getting answers out of them, though, because somewhere down the line, people stopped sharing some of that information, deliberately allowing history to be lost in the process.

Some stuff goes on, some dangerous travel goes on, and Evan, their substitute doctor, winds up with a case of the nerves after an animal attack that nearly kills her and a new friend. Later, Spock offers to tweak Evan’s brain and remove the memories that are troubling her (p.253). Evan can hardly believe Spock would suggest such a thing. She’s surprised that Vulcans wouldn’t have a taboo over that kind of mind manipulation, then quotes a Russian proverb: Not a word can be omitted from a song.

“Think, Mr. Spock. All I am is a collection of memories and experiences; that’s all I have to go on as I meet new situations. So anything I remember may be crucial to my survival. Can you sit there and blandly propose to … rob me of what is most valuable to me, to steal a portion of what defines me as a person?”
/snip
“That’s all I have, Mr. Spock. It’s all I am.”

Nobody can erase the past. Maybe we can pretend it didn’t happen, but the truth is, we are the product of our experiences and the experiences of those around us. That’s what shapes us. Regrets are going to be part and parcel of that because there will always be opportunities passed, risks not taken, fears allowed to flourish and arrogance allowed to bloom. The best we can do is forgive our past selves, make peace with our past selves and try to move forward.

Graham responds by quoting the bible instead of non-canon Trek, but makes the same points.

I often say in this column that you can’t change the past — and it’s true. But you can change the future, and that should be your focus. And one of the things you can change — with God’s help — is your habit of constantly dredging up your memories of the past. The Apostle Paul did terrible things as a young man, imprisoning Christians and doing his best to stamp out the church. But all this changed once he became a follower of Jesus: “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on … to win the prize for which God has called me” (Philippians 3:13-14).

Ask God to fill you with His love, and with the truth of His forgiveness in Christ. Then ask Him to help you to be grateful for your life right now, and to guide you in the future. Don’t yearn after the life you might have had (but never will), but “be content with what you have” (Hebrews 13:5).

As an atheist I tut the God need in this, but agree with the advice. Try to stop wondering what might have been. Think about what’s good now and what makes you happy, and who you love.

Your past made you who you are, but it can’t define who you are unless you let it.

Ooh, it has been a long time since I did one of these, but I saw this search result listed this morning and felt the urge:

why are fat people always get take away

When I used to do Weight Watchers, one of the ladies who ran the meetings was fond of the saying, “Food eaten in private shows up in public.” And it does, if people do a lot of secret/private eating and don’t burn off the excess calories at some point. Some fat people don’t like to sit and eat at a restaurant because maybe they’ve experienced dirty looks while trying to enjoy a hamburger, or whatever.

But it isn’t just a fat person problem.

People who feel too rushed to make a meal, or too lazy to prepare something healthy for themselves or their families are going to waste a lot of money on takeaways. It is not cheap to eat out or order in and what gets served is far from good for people, and often more than a person should feel compelled to eat in one sitting anyway.

Which can create a fat person problem where there wasn’t one.

I think everyone needs to rethink food habits. Figure out what’s a bad habit and work at replacing it with a good habit. This also includes me, I’ll admit. I’m bad for snacking after work instead of making a meal. I probably eat more calories with snacking than I would if I just made dinner. And I never seem to feel like I’m done if I’m snacking, whereas I would if I had a plate of food and emptied it.

Stuff to think about.

Better late than never. So, about a dozen of us found space at a local cantina a couple nights ago to chow down on some good food and talk about how crazy other cultures are. We hit on a few strange things North Americans believe but a couple of the girls each had trips to the East and stories to tell about their experiences in Tibet and Taiwan. We also talked about the sad state of Africa with their child witch hunts and albinos being cut up and sold for their (not so) magical parts. I left when talk turned to chiropractics, but only because I was tired. Apparently Canada has been allowing that body cracking for children and babies but is going to start insisting on some evidence that it’s scientifically useful. They never thought to insist upon evidence based treatment before? Scary thought.

Anyway, the woman who’d been to Tibet suggested an interesting theory to explain how superstitions may have developed. First she mentioned London Zoo’s behavioural click training of Lucifer, an Asiatic lion they have (catalogue number 666):

Sound quality’s poor, but when Lucifer responds to the clicks and sit commands, the actual purpose of the paws up routine is to make sure they’re not getting damaged by paddock life, and allows the trainers to eyeball his overall health, without having to drug the big guy every time they want a good look at him.

Then she mentioned some studies done with pigeons. B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning experiments were originally designed to see how well rewards could be used to create a desired behaviour.

If the goal is to have a pigeon turn in a circle to the left, a reward is given for any small movement to the left. When the pigeon catches on to that, the reward is given for larger movements to the left, and so on, until the pigeon has turned a complete circle before getting the reward.

That’s also called positive reinforcement. But Skinner didn’t stop there. He also checked what would happen when the reward wasn’t obviously connected to a behaviour, but instead connected to time of day.

In six out of eight cases the resulting responses were so clearly defined that two observers could agree perfectly in counting instances. One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return. The body generally followed the movement and a few steps might be taken when it was extensive. Another bird was conditioned to make incomplete pecking or brushing movements directed toward but not touching the floor.

In English: whatever behaviour a bird was engaged in at the time the food appeared (grooming, turning, etc) would be repeated if the bird associated the act with the reward.

So how screwed up do they get when rewards are even more random and not happening in timed intervals? Bird brain chaos. So long as the reward comes soon enough after the act (some birds would do the action 5 times in 15 seconds) the conditioned behaviour gets cemented. If repeated acts don’t net them any food, they stop assuming that behaviour will get them what they want.

Which leads to the idea of superstition in human beings. A book I need to borrow again is Amen, Amen, Amen by Abby Sher. Abby grew up with a serious case of OCD, made worse by the death of loved ones, and began assuming her ritualized behaviours would somehow make a difference for who lived and died. That’s a very extreme case, but superstition works much the same way.

Someone who just sat through a porn movie and then had a tornado rip through the yard might bizarrely assume the porn movie had something to do with it. That seems to be the idea in the head of Tifatul Sembiring, Indonesia’s Minister of Communication and Information Minister. Immoral behaviour causes hurricanes and other natural disasters.

Irony – an information minister spreading misinformation as truth. But how many superstitious locals will take him up on that and actually think what they like to do in their free time is going to bring bad weather to their island? What century are we living in again?

The woman who’d been to Taiwan talked about their superstitions around the number four, since it sounds very similar to their word for death. They’ll build narrow fourth floors into buildings just so people can’t actually use them, but so people living or working on the fifth feel like they’re really on the fifth instead of the fourth with another name. People don’t even want their ID cards to have any 4s in them. Crazy, but true.

And entrepreneurs take real advantage of people and zany beliefs about lucky numbers and other nonsense.

Taiwanese customers indicated they would be just as willing to pay NT$ [New Taiwan dollars] 342.63 (approximately $10) for a pack of eight tennis balls as they were to pay NT$227.10 for a pack of 10. To put that in perspective, consumers who held positive superstitions about the number eight were willing to spend 50 percent more on 25 percent fewer units–all because in Chinese, “eight” sounds like “prosper” and “wealth.”

Well, somebody’s prospering and wealthy, but I doubt it’s the buyer in this case. Sheesh.

Anyway, think about the power of the mind vs the nature of reality today. What are you believing for no provable reason?

I found a stat in a book I’ve now lost track of that stated that George Washington was bossing people around by the age of 15 for good purposes, and that most of the people on the Mayflower were in the early 20s and girls were old maids by the age of 25 and people still live with parents into age 30 now, but usually guys.

Maybe I saw that on the internet somewhere. I’ll have to look later. For now, two links – one to the Vancouver Sun: “Young adults more likely to get angry” and a history of adolescence as a means of describing the years between 12 and 20 anyway.

Are we letting kids be kids for too long?

A petition is going around in California to ban divorce.

The U.S. divorce rate is 47.9 percent, according to data provided by the National Center for Health Statistics reports. That figure, however, does not include California, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Louisiana and Minnesota because those six states no longer report their divorce rates to the center.

California stopped because of budget problems, said Ralph Montano, a spokesman for the California Department of Public Health.

While most people would not support banning divorce, it does make sense for couples to be educated about the financial and emotional commitments of marriage, said Dan Couvrette, chief executive and publisher of Toronto-based Divorce Magazine. The publication has a circulation of 140,000, including a regional edition in Southern California.

“It’s a worthwhile conversation to have,” said Couvrette, who started the magazine in 1996 after going through his own divorce. “I don’t think it’s just a frivolous thought.”

It’s set up by a comedian who wanted to satirize the sanctimonious bullshit behind the ban on gay marriage and point to some statistics that really do exist as proof that “traditional” marriage is in trouble with or without allowing gay marriages. Gay marriage can’t possibly “destroy” traditional sacred marriage any more than people in those marriages can now.

Child pornography is illegal and perverted and obscene and worth fighting against. People who film it, sell it, and buy it to watch need a good long stay in PMITA prison and perhaps some of their most favourite body parts should be fed to hungry badgers without cutting those parts off their bodies first.

Pornography with consenting adults is legal entertainment (and a serious money making industry, I might add), and not to be confused with any illegal perversions people may want to do and film for money.

Should kids have access to pornography? Technically they should be 18A or Restricted, yes? But really, sex is such a natural part of life that it would make more sense to let a kid sit through a porn film with a parent to explain why it has very little to do with the very real and natural art of lovemaking. The kid in this scenario would be horribly embarrassed to watch it with a parent and would probably get ill at the thought of trying to watch another one alone some other time. A past experience will always flavour future experiences, after all. A little education can go a long way.

Porn Awareness Week was suggested by f-ckingc-nts.com to counteract WRAP’s attempts to stamp down on pornography in general. It’s part of a Morality in Media movement, apparently. From a recent news release on that site, two thirds of U.S. adults claim internet porn is immoral and not harmless entertainment.

Morality in Media president Robert Peters had the following comments:

“There is a perception held by many that hardcore adult pornography has become acceptable in American society. But the perception is false. This is not to say that there isn’t a market for hardcore adult pornography. There is. But what primarily fuels the market is sexual addiction, not casual viewing. Furthermore, just because a person experiments with this material or on occasion succumbs to the temptation to view it does not mean he approves of what is viewed or of all pornography, especially when online hardcore adult pornographers often promote their products aggressively and deceptively.

No definition is provided for what constitutes “hard core” pornography, just that “most of” what’s commercially sold would be considered hard-core. If the telephone survey takers didn’t provide a definition, or description for that matter, then it would have been up to the person who answered the phone to independently decide what “hard core” meant. I don’t know what would classify as hard core. I’ve never watched a whole porn film and I suspect many of the people who were called could claim the same.

“Those harmed by the proliferation of hardcore adult pornography include women (many of whom are still in their teens) who ‘perform’ in this material, individuals of all ages who become addicted to this material, women whose husbands are addicted to this material, women who are raped, sexually assaulted or sexually harassed by males addicted to this material, children sexually abused by men who use this material to arouse themselves and to groom their victims, children sexually assaulted by other children who act out what they have viewed in this material, and females trafficked into prostitution to gratify the sexual desires of men who act out what they have viewed in this material.”

And the following is also true:

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread eaters.
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after only two days.
12. Most American bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

Is bread why people commit crime? Probably not. Is pornography? Probably not. Does pornography alter how people view women? Probably. But a guy who’d abuse a woman would still treat a woman like shit whether he watches any porn or not. Abuse is all about having power over people. The people who only feel powerful when they bully or assault someone else are going to be drawn to entertainment that glorifies that distorted world view and helps them justify that behaviour.

But here’s the thing sites like Morality in Media keep missing – it’s all about choice and letting people choose for themselves what they will and will not see or do. There’s more than porn on hotel televisions. Don’t go looking for the porn just so you can complain that there’s porn to be had and write complaint letters to the Marriott about how much porn they have on tv (which Morality in Media did). Cosmo is not the only magazine for sale at supermarkets either (which they also complained about).

Magazines and TV are optional entertainments. You don’t like what’s in it, don’t watch it, or make your own stations and publications for people instead. And if they don’t want to watch or buy it, they won’t. The choice will always be the consumer’s.

I don’t particularly care for how overtly sexual advertising has gotten, either, but I think it’s just as damaging (or worse) for kids when adults hide sex away and treat it as sinful to enjoy it, to experiment with it, and to crave it with their partner, married first or not.

Consumers don’t have to put up with it with all the advertising. We can picket if we want, write letters. Complain about content, write articles about obscenity laws and immoral hellishness all we like. It’s also up to the maker of that product to choose whether or not to care about what the people think. If enough people stood up and said they didn’t want to see or buy it anymore, and if sales tanked enough to prove people were truly fed up and serious, then maybe they’d change some things. But while sex sells, they’re gonna sell it.

(Edit: Just thought of something — has anyone interviewed these kids to see what they think of the ad and its message?)

I like the new ads, myself.

A couple kids jump around looking happy and the sign says “Please don’t label me” so how does a newspaper report on the new ad?

Children who front Richard Dawkins’ atheist ads are evangelicals

No they are not. They are children who happen to have evangelical parents. Parents who are likely telling their children they are evangelical and aren’t going let those kids decide for themselves who or what they will be. Those kids will become evangelical because it’s the only word that’s ever been applied to them and they may never get a chance to look at themselves as something else and become something else.

Their father, Brad Mason, is something of a celebrity within evangelical circles as the drummer for the popular Christian musician Noel Richards. Now a web designer and photographer, Mr Mason has been supplementing his income for years by providing photographs to agencies who sell them on to newspapers and advertising campaigns.

He said: “It is quite funny, because obviously they were searching for images of children that looked happy and free. They happened to choose children who are Christian. It is ironic. The humanists obviously did not know the background of these children.”

I think it’s ironic how the point is getting missed. Don’t label the kids. Raise them as you see fit, but don’t label them. Teach them everything you value about manners and kindness and generosity and Jesus and God if you feel you must, but don’t label them Christian before they can even understand exactly what that means. It’s more than “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

He said that the children’s Christianity had shone through. “Obviously there is something in their faces which is different. So they judged that they were happy and free without knowing that they are Christians. That is quite a compliment. I reckon it shows we have brought up our children in a good way and that they are happy”

That’s so dumb. Obviously they look at the pictures and think some holiness shines through that even atheists subconsciously pick up on and mistake as natural childhood joy. The sign is suggesting we raise kids without stamping a label on their brains while we do it. When we look at kids are we really supposed to be able to see at a glance what religion those kids have been brought up in like it’s some kind of badge of honour to know God and Jesus personally? I just want to see kids having fun, making friends, and getting ahead in school regardless of what faith has been shoved down their throats in the meantime.

Gerald Coates, the leader of the Pioneer network of churches, which Mr Mason and his family used to attend before they moved to Dorset, said: “I think it is hilarious that the happy and liberated children on the atheist poster are in fact Christian.”

And I think it’s hilarious to see the point getting missed again. Stop calling the kids Christians. They are kids first and foremost. Make sure they’re happy, healthy, fit, and eager to be in school. They shouldn’t need to be branded like cattle before they get there.

The British Humanist Association said that it did not matter whether the children were Christians. “That’s one of the points of our campaign,” said Andrew Copson, the association’s education director. “People who criticise us for saying that children raised in religious families won’t be happy, or that no child should have any contact with religion, should take the time to read the adverts.

“The message is that the labelling of children by their parents’ religion fails to respect the rights of the child and their autonomy. We are saying that religions and philosophies — and ‘humanist’ is one of the labels we use on our poster — should not be foisted on or assumed of young children.”

Read more about this at Atheist Bus – the official website.

It sounds like Christian Brothers is offering a hefty apologetic sum to victims of child abuse in Ireland. But does it make up for years of pain, heartache, and fighting for justice? Probably not.

The Brothers said that €34 million in cash would be used to help victims of abuse, whose plight was identified in a government report in May. However, the move was criticised, with one victims’ group describing it as “mere smoke and mirrors”.

The Ryan report chronicled cases of tens of thousands of children who suffered systematic sexual, physical and mental abuse over decades at residential homes run by 18 congregations. It concluded that the Brothers order was responsible for most of the cases.

€127 million worth of property is part of that deal, too, but I don’t know what that includes, or how much good that does. Along with money, the Brothers are releasing an interim report regarding legal cases brought against them on behalf of victims.

Its publication was delayed by several years after a lengthy legal battle waged by the Brothers to withhold the names of all its members, dead or alive. An agreement was eventually struck in 2004, allowing the Brothers’ institutions to be identified.

More than a thousand witnesses testified to abuse in 216 schools and residential settings between 1914 and 2000. More than 800 individuals were identified as physical or sexual abusers — an extraordinary number compared with the handful of prosecutions and convictions. Ninety per cent of witnesses reported physical abuse while half reported sexual abuse.

“Acute and chronic contact and non-contact sexual abuse was reported, including vaginal and anal rape, molestation and voyeurism in both isolated cases and on a regular basis over long periods of time,” the report said.

The commission found that the worst offender was the Brothers’ order, which ran most of the institutions for older boys, while the another Catholic order, the Sisters of Mercy, which was supposed to care for girls, also came in for heavy criticism.

The Magdalene Sisters was based on girls from one of those schools. That’s one of the saddest movies I’ve ever watched.

Well anyway, it’s a start. Apologies are a place to start. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

I still think I can still offer some commentary on Olivia Judson’s take on an Evolve-By Date.

I’ve written before about what an important book it was and why it mattered so much, so I won’t do that again now. Instead, I want to mark the occasion by looking at the limits of evolutionary potential.

To see what I mean by this, consider the following paradox. Whenever we do evolution experiments in the laboratory or on the farm, we can cause pronounced and rapid change in the traits we are interested in — we can evolve bigger horses, smaller dogs, cows that make more milk, viruses that thrive at higher temperatures and so on.

That’s not natural evolution; those are examples of genetic engineering. That’s human beings forcing their way into a species’ inner workings to manipulate natural ability until it results in what might be a very unnatural ability. Evolution is the natural process by which a species adapts to its environment over time. Specialized breeding and gene tweaking and drugs work faster than evolution does. Every breed of dog or cow or horse or sheep or chicken out there has been humanly guided into those breeds over hundreds of years. Just look into the history of husbandry.

Nature maybe could have changed these animals, given thousands of years, or it might not have. If there was no need for the animal to change that much, it wouldn’t have changed. Humans wanted them to change, so we changed them.

In the laboratory, in other words, evolution has huge potential. But if it has that much potential — how come organisms keep going extinct in nature? In other words, why does evolution keep failing?

Evolution isn’t failing. Humans are. Humans killed off the dodo. That’s not the fault of the dodo. There was no way the species could have evolved in such a short time into a critter wise enough to hide or run from human beings. Humans knock forests down with little regard to what kind of species might rely on it. Humans want the pelts, teeth, bones, eyeballs, feathers, blubber, off all kinds of animals often without caring about poaching laws. There’s big money to be had if something’s hard to get. Humans got it into their heads that rhinoceros horns were an aphrodisiac. The rhinos are incapable of debating that. Tigers can’t stop people from taking their penises for the same reason. And plants are also at risk of extinction.

The question matters as never before. We humans are busily changing the environment for most of the beings on the planet, and often, we are doing so very fast. To know what effect this will have, we badly need to know how readily different creatures can evolve to deal with changes to their environment. For if we’re not careful, many groups will soon be faced with an evolve-by date: if they don’t evolve rapidly enough to survive in this changing world, they will vanish.

Look at the trouble Florida residents have with alligators. Land developers encroached on the swamps they’ve lived in for thousands of years and now there’s a swimming pool where a nesting site used to be. You can’t explain to an alligator that it’s time he moves on. If he even understood the concept, what land is left for him anyway? Cities have wild cat problems for the same reason. They’ve spread into the areas cougars used to have to themselves so they’re adapting in a way humans don’t like very much at all. Raccoons do the same. I’ve heard they’re quite nasty and destructive once they squat in an attic or under a porch and are hellish to get rid of. Animals are incapable of evolving into anything else that would save their lives. All they can do is attempt to change the way they behave, but since a lot of that relies on evolved instinct, fat chance. Evolution isn’t a Kevlar vest they can strap on to stop bullets. Everything can adapt to a point, but humans are unstoppable unless we stop ourselves.

Suppose you put bacteria into test tubes where their usual sugar source is in short supply, but an alternative one — which they can’t consume at all — is abundant. (If you put them with just this alternative source, they would all die of starvation at once.) Then, you can watch how long it takes for the bacteria to evolve so they can digest the alternative. The answer, in one famous case, was more than 31,000 generations! Which just goes to show: just because a particular trait would be useful does not mean that it will soon evolve.

To me, all this is a bit sobering. If most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a useful new trait — they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that — if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment — many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.

Sobering thought indeed.

Since this is a Catholic conundrum, the answer is obviously Communion.

Shea, who has left the Catholic church, says he doesn’t understand why Tobin is targeting Kennedy.

“Everybody, including these priests, deserve Communion. Because that’s the whole point of it. That’s part of the point of the church. I don’t think anybody should be disqualified from it,” he said. “It’s politics. I think the bishop’s playing politics.”

The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts called Tobin’s action an “act of courage, fidelity and charity, intended to prevent scandal and sacrilege.”

“Bishop Tobin is being a good pastor by urging Congressman Kennedy not to commit the mortal sin of receiving Communion while in a state of grave sin,” said the league’s executive director, C.J. Doyle.

Sinners like Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy who supports the abortion rights. It’s a mortal sin to swallow the Savior.

Know what the article is really about? 125 priests in Rhode Island are accused of molesting children and Tobin is choosing to pick on a politician rather than clean house.

“He claims that it’s important that we protect the unborn. But it’s equally as important to protect those who have been born and those young children who have been raped and sodomized by clerics and priests. But yet he seems to protect those clerics,” said Ruth Moore, of Hull, Mass.

The group called on Tobin to publish the names of priests from the diocese who have been convicted of or admitted molesting children, or if a thorough investigation has turned up credible evidence of child molestation, even if no conviction resulted.

The diocese has said in court papers that 125 of its priests have been accused of molesting children. While many of their names are known from lawsuits and news accounts, others have never been released.

But all the priests deserve Communion because “that’s the whole point of it.”