FIREBLIND.COM

So I’ve lately been reading The Blind Watchmaker, which is an attempt to explain some of the bigger questions of evolution to the non-scientist. It’s easily one of the three most important books I’ve read in the last 10 years. One of the chapters is about how the idea of “miracles” and how the seeming impossibility of life forming without supernatural influence both extend from the same “quirk” in the human brain.

Basically, what the author is pointing out is that our brains are specialized to comprehend time scales and odds within the context of our own existence. If we lived much longer, or much shorter, our brains would be better at comprehending risks and probability according to that time line.

To get the ball rolling, let’s start with a simple example of time perspective. Let’s say that you and I live together. For some reason, it’s perfectly normal that just before you get home from work, I smear my nude self in honey, put on a funny hat, and hide in your closet. Everyday you open the closet, and everyday I jump out and say “Ooga booga”. After 4 years of this, I decide to vary things up and instead of saying “Ooga booga”, I say “wogga wogga”. You would probably say to yourself something like “well, that’s surprising. Usually he just says ‘ooga booga’.” The next day I go back to “ooga booga” and do so for the next three years until I bring out “wogga wogga” again. This time, you’re surprised again, but less so, because you now understand that there are odds of me doing this every few years.

The human animal becomes more surprised by events the longer the time period is between experiences, and is incredibly surprised if the time period is greater than our lifetime. If something happens every 5 minutes, for instance, we stop being surprised. The human mind builds up an experience “database” and checks it whenever something happens. If the database doesn’t have an entry based on the expected frequency, it gets surprised.

Let’s do one more quick example to help with this: you and I both know that large meteors don’t hit the earth very frequently. In fact, they happen so infrequently that it’s possible that no human has ever experienced this. If one were to hit tomorrow, it would be surprising. If one hit the next day, it would be less so, and if they hit regularly, you’d eventually just get used to it and learn to cope with small bits of the earth being wiped out on a daily basis.

If we lived a very long time–say 100 million years–things like large meteor strikes would be not all that surprising. In addition, we’d probably expect to get hit by lightning occasionally, and might look forward to our next six royal flushes.

If we turn now to miracles, it’s easy to see that miracles are nothing more than the brain being surprised by a lack of frequency. We’ll do two of these and then I’ll let you go back to cleaning up the honey from your closet.

First, let’s pretend that your dumb ass is changing the oil in your car by holding the car up with two wicker baskets. After a little while, the baskets give way and you now have an axle pressing your head into the concrete. Your 12-year-old son hears the commotion, runs out, and mustering all of his strength and adrenaline, manages to lift the car just enough for you to roll out of harm’s way. You can only imagine how many headlines around the world would note this as a “miracle” and might even include anecdotes about angels helping the boy or something (nevermind that the angels didn’t stop you from using wicker baskets in the first place).

Or, to use a real-life example, let’s look at Jenna Giese, the first ever known human to survive an onset of rabies without a rabies vaccine. In a nutshell: she got rabies from picking up a freaking bat that fell from the roof of her church, and for various unknown reasons, she survived. To religious people, this was treated as an amazing miracle. God had saved this girl.

I suspect that if you and I lived several hundred years, it would be fairly common for us to hear about both of these scenarios. In fact, I would argue that these are not miracles at all, but rarities that in fact demonstrate possible evolutionary improvements in action.

Jenna underwent experimental medical treatment that may have saved her, though it hasn’t saved anyone else yet. Perhaps she had a special gene that better enabled her to fight off such an infection. If she were to later have kids, and these kids got the same gene, and human kind fought a colossal battle against Archibald, the Bat King and all of his bat soldiers tried to give us rabies, it’s possible that Jenna and her offspring could end up being the saviors of mankind. All the chicks would dig her son, and he’d bang a bunch of them and pass on the gene to their illegitimate kids. Then, during the great bat wars of 2059, we’d do even better because more humans would have the gene. Plus, all these kids that don’t have a father at home would probably be better with guns. Thus, you can see the onward march of “progress” of natural selection selecting humans with rabies resistant genes as a result of an outside pressure (in this case, Archibald’s mighty sky demons and their anti-human SR9 bat copters, capable of killing thousands of humans that are not rabies resistant).

The kid that pulled you out of the car might possess “better” adrenaline and muscle systems that are stronger. In both cases–stronger muscles/adrenaline or genetic rabies resistance–the happenings might be incredibly rare (perhaps 1 in 1 billion). But, given enough people and enough time and given the way in which humans evolve, these things are increasingly possible given a large enough time line. Miracles then, are nothing more than the result of a quirk of a human mind specialized to evaluate probabilities on a time scale relevant to its own existence. Similarly, given enough time and the right materials, it’s very possible that life should spontaneously arise without outside influence. Nevermind that the odds seem unfathomable to us; our scale for “surprise” is too small.

So, next time the virgin Mary appears in your toilet after a particularly exciting meal, keep in mind that she’s probably heading out to the ocean from any number of households in the world, not just yours. Given the amount of humans eating meals, given the amount of meals we eat, and given the length of time humans have been doing this, it’s quite likely that the ocean is full of Marys, bobbing around and just waiting for someone to sell them to Golden Palace.

As you may recall, back in May there were pro-illegal immigrant demonstrations in various places, but most notably in Los Angeles. They almost went off without a hitch, until the police moved in late in the day with some fierce overzealousness and shot up some peeps with rubber bullets. That, and shoved around some reporters and old people (etc). As I recall, no one was seriously injured. Given that my memory is about as good as Paris Hilton is monogamous, however, it’s possible all of LA was nuked and I wouldn’t recall it.

As you might have guessed, the lawsuit lottery apparatus is in full effect. I heard a soundbite from one of the lawyers today, in which she said something to the effect of “Despite being harassed and threatened, these people have still bravely decided to pursue justice”. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist is more or less correct. She’s saying that the police actions were an attempt to silence her clients, and despite the fact that they’re going to be under threat of continued violence by the Man, they’re still going to fight this out in court so that justice can be achieved.

I think this is the first time I’ve cussed in one of these blogs, but I think it’s warranted here: Of course they’re going to fucking pursue this in the courts. 1) The police weren’t trying to kill them or “silence” them. 2) The police aren’t going to continue to harrass them. 3) LA generally doesn’t pursue illegal immigrants, no matter what the circumstances. 4) Filing a racially based lawsuit in Los Angeles, especially if it involves the police, is a veritable gold mine for the plaintiffs. The tort system in LA has gone freaking nuts.

This has nothing to do with what happened in the park that day, but has everything to do with trying to cash in like opportunistic bastards. It would be far braver of these people NOT to pursue this in court, as that might show some real damned courage.

I don’t understand how draining the city’s coffers dry in any way helps make stuff like this better. It takes money out of badly needed programs and redistributes it into the hands of a few people.

Now, I should note that I have not seen a dollar figure yet. I would bet your left nut, however, that it’s going to be astronomical. If Brandy or bloody Tennie Pierce are any indications, LA is going to be defending itself against claims for hundreds of millions of dollars.

I have no problem with lawsuits of this nature in principle. If you are injured, you should be entitled to compensation for the injury, expenses, and income lost. I’m even ok with some punitive damages. But it makes no sense in this day and age to let plaintiffs get away with highway robbery against nervous municipalities. If any of these lawsuits ask for any significant amount of damages, I say fuck the plaintiffs. They’re brutalizing the city and its (literally) poor citizens far worse than the police did to them.

There have been times when I’ve had fairly heated debates with friends of mine who also happen to be atheist/agnostic/skeptical. Given that I come from a strong Christian background, I understand religious arguments very well. My friends, however, generally don’t, and so many of them reject religion based on what they see as its “stupidity” or “backwardness”. An example might be the relatively condescending tone the bible takes towards women, or similar stances in Islam.

One of the things I’ve always tried to point out to them is that if god exists, he can pretty much do anything he wants (”If God, then anything”). If there really is an all powerful god, there’s no reason he couldn’t dislike gays or prefer that men dominate women. It seems silly to me, but it’s his prerogative.

Occassionally, despite my best efforts to resist criticizing religion based on some of its sillier rituals or beliefs, I have to laugh at some of the more inane ones out there. Take this condominium complex in Florida for example. It’s primarily populated by orthodox Jews, who are prohibited from doing any kind of work during the sabbath. Apparently, it’s also against the law to do anything that would “create energy”, including pushing an elevator button (we’ll ignore the high-school drop out that wrote those words in the article).

Now, seriously, I have to ask: in what imaginable way could the creator of the universe possibly benefit from such strict adherence to sabbath law? For that matter, what does he get out of you not working at all on the Sabbath? Is god really so petty that he actually needs you to take a day of rest to commemorate his lazy ass not working an extra day so that we would all have had rocket cars from Day 1? You think we have a cool universe now? Just imagine what we would have if not for that stupid 7th day!

Then again, what do I know? God really could be hanging out in his house outside of the universe, wringing his hands at the very possibilty (!) of Itzak Spiegalman contemplating how bad he needs to push the elevator button. “Oh noes!!!!”, god may cry, “if Itzak pushes that button I’m done for! Done for I tell you! What ever will I do if he completes an electrical circuit and takes an elevator up to his condo?”

Like I said, If God then anything. At what point, however, do you stop and ponder the stupidity of religious minutia and wonder if all of this petty nonsense points to taking a religion too far, or perhaps points to the seemingly very human origin of such insipid rigidity?

So a friend of mine came over today and messed with my doll. The one that’s already going to kill me. As you can see in the above photo, she’s made it even worse than it was before. I think the look of the doll is worse, but now it’s probably really pissed off because she shoved its eyes back in all dumb.

I’m home alone tonight and have been merrily wasting away the evening watching ATHF and reading The Blind Watchmaker. Every time I go out to the kitchen, it looks like the doll has rotated more in the direction of my bedroom than it was previously. It probably doesn’t help my imagination to do all the crazy distortion that I did in the above photo. Then again, if I were a doll, I think i’d like to look as punk rock as possible, and you have to admit: that picture is pretty punk rock. I’m mean: for sheez dawg! It even looks like there’s blood (or perhaps ketchup) coming out of it’s mouth!

As I type this, it’s approximately 00:33. There is no one else in the house besides me. If I’m dead tomorrow, stay the heck away from this doll, unless you too want to become another statistic of the mummy’s curse! It’s what killed Clarence Darrow, and it’ll get you too!

On a different note, here’s a fun website you should visit.

While on the roof of the building where I work–because the A/C unit to my NOC decided to go belly up on one of the hottest bloody days of the year–I was chatting with a co-worker about a few things. Before long, the conversation turned to “miracle” cures for various ailments, and I outed myself. No, not as as a genetically defective “gay” (lol, btw), but as an atheist.

My coworker became very interested, and began to pepper me with questions. I don’t remember what prompted the response, but I must have asked him something about proof. To which he responded along the lines of “but if you had proof, you wouldn’t need faith.”

This is something I’ve heard before, and is pretty much the crappiest argument out there for why god doesn’t peek his head through the clouds from time to time and say “sup, my negroes?” It’s more or less the theological equivalent of saying “if you stopped disliking being raped, you might enjoy it.” Um…maybe it’s a little different, but not much. The only reason people have faith in anything is because that anything hasn’t given them any reason to know. If you had proof, you wouldn’t need faith. You would, as I said, just know.

In my book, proof is way the hell better than faith. Let me give you an example. Let’s suppose that you and I are standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. I tell you that the Grand Canyon has magical powers, and that if you jump off the edge to retrieve the Flintstones Push Pop that I just threw off said edge, the GC would carry you safely down to the bottom to get that icy goodness. You’ve known me for like 60 years, and that Push Pop really would taste good, so you’re trying really hard to believe me. I promise you that if you only have faith, the GC will in fact violate the laws of gravity and bring you pleasantly into the outstretched arms of your strawberry lover.

In the real world, you and I both know that the moment you step off that edge, you’re going to fall straight down and totally ruin that Push Pop with your stupid dumb-ass blood. You didn’t have proof, but you had faith that I wouldn’t lie to you. Too bad. Me and your girlfriend will now go to the liquor store and buy more Flintstones Push Pops and make out. She’ll get like lemon flavor, and I’ll get cherry, and the flavors will mix into an exquisite orchestra of sugary nirvana. We’ll break up a few months later, but not until after we have one more sad make out session.

As usual, I digress. You had faith without proof, and you died. Idiot. If I had jumped off and had been carried down safely, you would have had proof that you could probably do so safely as well.

So you see, faith is pretty much only made up by people who want to make out with your girlfriend. No, wait. I mean, faith is made up by people who have have no real answers and are only making stuff up to placate you.

In any event, my friend was basically saying that if god manifested himself, it would some how ruin “something”, though what that something is, I’m not sure. If the Bible is correct, ol’ Yahweh was pretty much manifesting himself all over the place in days of yore. I’m convinced that the flood was him changing the sheets, so to speak. Skeeeeeet! (Holy crap, did I actually just type that? Anyone know the exact definition of blasphemy?)

If god was able to do all sorts of crazy stuff in front of the eyes of primitive man in the old days, he should be able to do some really cool stuff now. Burning bush? That’s only because raves hadn’t been invited yet. Killing babies like crazy every time a prophet or messiah comes along? That’s nothing to what he could do with modern genocide. Instead, god contents himself with cheap parlor tricks, like curing rabies or not saving boats full of drowning Christians. Heck, even I can not save 2,000 drowning people, and I pretty much suck. I mean, I would actually let you jump off the Grand Canyon and steal your girlfriend!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that faith is pretty much dumb. I’ll let kids have faith in stuff, because they’re pretty much all dumb anyways. Actually, most adults I know are borderline retarded too, so maybe they should get a pass also.