Monday, December 30, 2024

Abortion and the Bible

I'm a cisgendered man, I've never had an abortion, nor will I ever. But I am a Christian and have studied the Bible and ancient Palestinian culture.

In Genesis 38:24, Judah finds out his daughter-in-law is pregnant from being a prostitute, and orders her killed immediately, with no thought of waiting for the birth of the "innocent baby".

Exodus 21:22-25 outlines the penalty for making a woman have a miscarriage, and the only punishment is for whatever damage was done to the woman.

Numbers 5 has instructions to the priests on how to induce a miscarriage in an adulterous wife, the only passage in the Bible clearly about abortion.

Numerous passages in the Bible have God ordering the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child of a nation, which would certainly include killing pregnant women.

Despite the fact that Jews believed in the first century (and still do to this day) that a fetus does not have a soul until it draws its first breath of air, and therefore abortion (which was certainly around in the first century, including what we call "late-term" abortion") is not murder, Jesus never bothered to correct this doctrine, even though he actually took time in the Sermon on the Mount to say that calling someone a fool was the equivalent of murder.

Anti-abortion Christians love to quote Jeremiah 1:5 "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." They claim that the fact God knew Jeremiah before birth proves that life begins at conception, but God is omniscient; he knew Jeremiah, you, and me all before he even created the world, as Ephesians 1:4 "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love:" shows. Does this mean life begins "before the foundation of the world"? That would be nonsense. Show me a place in the Bible where God "knows" a fetus that is miscarried, stillborn, or aborted, and I'll buy that logic, but *spoiler alert* you won't find that in the Bible.

All that said, I actually want to see abortion rates go down, because I don't believe abortion is healthy for the pregnant woman, and I see it as a sign of society in decline when abortion rates are high. But make abortion illegal, and women just get illegal abortions. Take away the causes of abortion, and abortion goes away on its own. As a society, we need to fight poverty, have solid sex education in all schools, supply the public with cheap or free contraception, give everyone affordable medical care (especially during pregnancy!), have cheap child care and early childhood education, and take rape more seriously as a crime. THOSE are the things that will stop abortion, so when will so-called "pro-life" activists petition the government for those things?

Sunday, December 29, 2024

About my father

My father married my mother in the late 1960s; she was 17 and he was 34. She was a Unitarian Universalist and he was a Jew. My mother doesn't say so, largely because of her love for her children, but it was probably one of the biggest mistakes of her life.

My sister was born nine months to the day after the wedding, one day after my mother's 18th birthday. I was born about two and a half years later. Sometime between, my mother converted to Judaism, and in the process became probably more knowledgeable about the religion than my father was. I'm pretty sure my father had a very secular Jewish upbringing; he hardly spoke any Hebrew, and didn't seem to understand kosher rules. (My mother told me one time my father asked for a ham sandwich for lunch, but he wanted it on matzoh because it was Passover.)

My parents divorced when I was two. I actually have two faint memories of them being together; in both of them, they are fighting. My mother didn't tell me until years later that the reason she left was because he was physically abusive. She took us kids and went back to her parents. On the first day of my sister's first grade, my father showed up and took her from school. He hid her away somewhere and came to take me; I also dimly remember this happening, and my grandfather blocking him from coming in the house. Eventually, the court gave my father custody of my sister and my mother custody of me. There was a joint custody arrangement that focused on Jewish holidays; if Passover fell on school's spring break, we would spend that week with my dad, and if Hannukah fell on the winter break, the same. I took a lot of flights as a child, as my father lived in Silicon Valley, and my mother lived in the greater Los Angeles area.

My father was abusive, mainly emotionally and not physically to us. (He actually spanked me just one time, but I honestly feel it was appropriate and I respected him for it.) My sister told me one time she forgot to take out the trash the day before her birthday, and that next morning, dad dumped the trash on her bed and told her that her party was canceled. Most of my fights with my dad were over food, as I was a picky eater, and he wouldn't accept it. If I didn't clear off my plate, he would often save my leftovers to serve to me at the next meal, refusing to give me any other food. This was a battle we both lost, as he wouldn't get me to eat it, and I would starve until my visit was over. One time, I remember completely finishing everything on my plate and he loaded me up with seconds I didn't ask for; when I didn't finish, he refused to give me dessert. This happened to be at my aunt's house, and everyone in the family told him he was being unreasonable, but I got no dessert anyway.

While my father worked as a disk jockey in the early years of his marriage to my mother, eventually, he got a nursing license. He seemed to really love the job, and took a lot of pride in his work. He worked in the emergency room most of the time, I think, as he often had stories of people coming into the hospital in very bad shape. Something that my father managed to drill into me effectively was a fear of motorcycles. He somehow found out that my stepfather had a motorcycle, and he always told me that he wanted to take me on a tour of the ICU to see all the mangled bodies of people who had been in motorcycle accidents. I would always turn him down and assure him I didn't need to be convinced, and I really didn't. I've only been on a motorcycle once in my life, and I was terrified.

While I tend to say a lot of bad stuff about my father, because I think it's the traumatic stuff that sticks in your head, I think the majority of the time I spent with him was positive. He had a great sense of humor and was always trying to find fun things to do with us. I really loved my dad and looked forward to visiting him, despite knowing there were bound to be unpleasant parts to every trip. He knew I liked visiting (and I think my sister did too after my mother regained custody years later) but wouldn't want to live with him year-round.

Most of the family was convinced he had undiagnosed mental illness of some sort. Part of that problem was his apparent inability to understand that love wasn't like pie where he had to compete with my mother for his share of our love. I truly loved him as much as I loved my mother, but could never convince him of that. He spent far too much time trying to convince me that my mother was a terrible person, something my mother never did in return. The fact that I preferred to live with her convinced him that I didn't love him enough, and his insecurity showed. One time, he actually offered to buy me an Apple II computer if I agreed to live with him. I was dismayed that he would stoop to bribing me for choosing him; although I knew what bribery was, I couldn't put into words what I felt, as I didn't want to put it that bluntly.

We went to synagogue with my father, and as a child, I was just as curious about religion as I am today. I would often ask him questions about Judaism, to which he would usually tell me not to question. I thought you weren't supposed to ask questions as a Jew, which was very unsatisfying for me. I really believe that if my questions had been answered, I'd very likely still be an observant Jew today. I realized as an adult that it was just my dad's ignorance that stopped my questions, and Jews are actually generally encouraged to question. My father should have directed me to ask the Rabbi instead of shutting me up, or maybe supplied me with books about Judaism. I actually believe I learned far more about the Jewish religion after I became a Christian than before. Knowing so little was a big part of why I left Judaism.

When I was twelve, my father called me on the phone and told me he had just returned from a trip to Israel. He had decided that in order to be a good, observant Jew, he had to go and live there. He asked me if I was coming with him. My mind reeled at this question. Leave everything I had ever known behind? I'd never been outside California, much less the country. Do they even speak English in Israel? My Hebrew was very meager. Except for apparently my dad now, all of my family was here in America. I told him no. "You don't love me then," he said, and hung up. Nobody in my life has ever approached saying anything that hurt me as much as those five words. It was like being stabbed in the heart.

I canceled my bar mitzvah, and walked away from Judaism. I realized that everything Jewish I was doing in my life was to please my dad, and not to please God, so why bother? For years, I called myself an atheist, although it wasn't that I didn't beilieve in God, I just didn't believe in religion.

Somewhere around 25 years later, my sister informed me that she had discovered that my father had moved back to the US, and had lost his nursing license. There was a legal document describing an incident when he was working at a nursing home, and after an elderly patient soiled himself, my father beat him with his fists. We didn't attempt to reconnect.

At about 30 years, he wrote my sister and me letters expressing a desire to catch up with us. It didn't seem particularly sincere (he said he had been searching for us for years, but my mother had the same mailing address she had when I was twelve), and both of us forgave him for the hurt he had inflicted on us 30 years previously (which he claimed to not recall, perhaps sincerely, perhaps not) and told him we were only interested in reconnecting if he truly wanted it. He didn't write back.

Now at about 40 years on, this week my sister received a letter informing her that a reading of my father's will is taking place in mid-January, so it seems he is dead. I didn't know how I would feel about this until now. It seems I feel nothing. I loved my father very much, but perhaps he died to me when I was twelve years old, and he hung up that phone on me. I wish I could have told him that he was being unreasonable, and we didn't have to end our relationship because he was leaving the country. I wish I could have told him that if my mother had gone crazy and decided she needed to join her ancestors in England, I would have moved in with him. I wish he had known that I loved him as much as I loved my mother, and in the time he was in my life, one of the driving emotional needs in my life was to have him approve of me and be proud of me, and it was sad that that never seemed to happen.

.נוח על משכבך בשלום, אבא

Sunday, December 22, 2024

So, how about that antisemitism?

No, seriously, there were a couple of very significant posts from Caitlin Johnstone recently that talked about antisemitism, and I think both of them were misunderstood. A more recent one said that antisemitism was simply not a problem in the world anymore, and a lot of people were outraged by it, because that's not true. However, I think they were missing the point she was making, which was that there's hardly anyone who hates Jews the way the Nazis did. Yes, there are people who dislike Jews, but it's either a mild dislike, or it's for a reason other than simply that they are Jewish.

Which leads to the other point she made, which was just an aside in a longer post from earlier. I think people skimmed over this point, largely discounting it, but I think it's highly troubling. She talked about how Zionists worldwide are pushing this idea that anyone who criticizes Israel is by definition antisemitic. We see it here in America where there was actually a non-binding resolution in Congress that declared criticism of Israel to be antisemitism. The problem with this (other than the fact of its ludicrousness given that many Jews actually consider Israel to be illegitimate) is that if you keep saying this, eventually people who (rightly) hate Israel are going to decide that since they're beinge labeled antisemites, they must actually hate all Jews.

Johnstone talked about it like a possibility, but it's my personal view that this has already come to pass. It was over a month before Johnstone wrote that when I saw something on Quora where an anti-Israel group had posted something that was...well it was essentially pro-Nazi. I commented on it that they should take it down because it was legitimately antisemitic, and the response I received was, "So? They're going yo call us antisemitic anyway, so who cares?"

It seems like since then I've seen a barrage of antisemitic posts and comments that express hatred towards Jews on the whole due to the unsavory nature of Israeli Jews. Now all Jews get painted with the same brush, and it's an ugly one. Just today on Substack, someone responded to one of my comments with, "Time to renounce your Judaism entirely?" I've been seeing this sentiment a lot lately. I am Jewish by the fact that both of my parents are Jews, but people keep urging me to stop being Jewish.

The thing is, as I keep pointing out to these people, Jews are both a religion and an ethnicity. In fact, (while the weren't called "Jews" back then) Jews were an ethnic group *before* they were a religious group. That goes for whether you believe the Biblical record, which has them as a group with common ancestry coming out of Egypt and then being presented with the law on Mt. Sinai, or whether you believe anthropologists, who suggest they lived in ancient Israel before developing the religion.

Anyway, I can denounce the religion, but I don't feel I can denounce my ancestry, as much as many people seem to want me to. Anyway, I'm seeing a lot of hatred directed at Jews online, but whenever I ask for clarification, I get told about terrible things that Jews do. These terrible things are not within my personal experience of Judaism, but rather indicative of what I hear about Israelis and Zionists: a Jewish supremacist attitude. I continue to insist that this is not how all Jews are, but honestly, it's a large enough portion of the world Jewish population (maybe even a majority?) that it's hard for people to separate it out. "Why would you want to associate with this?" people ask me, and I don't want to associate with it, but I nonetheless am a Jew.

And this is the terrible part of it: I don't believe for a moment that this was the way Judaism was ever meant to be. In Genesis chapter twelve, we read

The Lord had said to Abram, "Go from your country, your people and your father's household to the land I will show you. "I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."
Israeli Jews seem to focus on the "whoever curses you I will curse" part, while I think we miss out on the "all peoples on earth will be blessed through you" which is far more important. Are people being blessed by Israeli Jews? No, I don't think they are at all. In fact, I believe that Israeli Jews are becoming a curse to Jews elsewhere in the world who are being hated by our association to them. As one antisemite said to me recently online, "But the truth is that the ‘good’ jews have never waged war on the ‘bad’ jews to stop them from making ‘the jews’ look bad." The problem with this is that unlike the "bad" Jews, the "good" Jews don't have an army.

Israel is dragging Judaism into a cesspool of evil that fewer and fewer of us seem to be able to escape, and furthermore, it even seems like they are possibly dragging the rest of the world into World War III. I wonder where God is in all of this.

Saturday, December 07, 2024

Dreams

I'm fascinated by dreams. I do love hearing about other people’s dreams, because it seems we all dream in ways that are peculiar to the individual, but I'm also fascinated with the process of analyzing my own dreams, particularly when I can remember them well. This post is going to be a random analysis of a dream I had years ago that I still remember very well in part because I documented it in detail after I woke up. I most definitely dream in color Reading the description of the dream actually won’t be necessary for this post, I think, as it's all pretty abstract anyway, but it will probably make it make a bit more sense.

So, one of the things about my dreams I find interesting is backstory. The dream described was only about ten minutes long, I'd say, but there is definitely more than ten minutes of understanding packed into it, and it's interesting how it can be both detailed and patchy at the same time. I'm in a room that's my bedroom, and while the room has no analogue in my waking life, I know the room intimately, not just the furniture, but what's concealed behind the furniture, what can be found outside its two doors, one leading into the rest of the house and one leading into the back yard. I know I live here with my “family” yet somehow, I'm unclear on what the word “family" entails. I know the personality, mannerisms, and recent actions of my three roommates (even the one who never makes an appearance in the dream), but I don't know any of their names. It's interesting that in the dream, there is acceptance of the bizarre fact (in what I sometimes call “dream logic" as in something that makes perfect sense in the context of the dream somehow) that one can travel from the United States to China by simply crawling over the fence in the backyard, and my roommate has access to military-grade weaponry. All of this is simply accepted as established in the course of the first minute of the dream.

The glass shards, while taking up just a small part of the story, are very unsettling. They are cutting my hands, mouth, and feet, and there is actually a lot of blood and pain involved, although I just take it in stride (literally, at the end of this portion) and continue the Sisyphean task of cleaning them up as they never seem to get better. I feel like I hear a lot of people talking about nightmares like this, where there is something unpleasant that they need to do, but can't make progress concerning.

When I leave the bedroom, something markedly different happens. I walk into a room, and while I know the room (despite once again the room having no real world analogue) I have no idea what's going on in the room. There are many people who I don't know, and most of the people I do know are there for unknown reasons. There's actually a rather surprising sheer number of people for such a small room; it's not a particlularly large living room, but there's at least 20 people here, along with two very large objects that nobody is standing close to. The almost indescribable mass on the coffee table is also a complete surprise, although given its level of bizarre, perhaps my muted response is a bit of “dream logic” as it's perhaps not unheard of that something like that would appear in the living room. When my mom says it's a “school project”, I immediately understand it's something she made for one of my younger siblings. (I don't have any younger siblings in real life, and while I was unclear as to the complete family structure I have in the dream, having younger siblings is somehow understood.) It's interesting what will and won’t surprise you in dreams.

I guess it's a bit of “dream logic” that I don't question my mother going to get a vacuum cleaner to clean up what is largely a liquid mess, and one that would surely be beyond the capacity of the vacuum, as it covered the whole of the coffee table over a foot in thickness. However, the buffalo carcass, in contrast to the people, is not a surprise to me. Of course I hunted a buffalo for dinner and dragged the whole thing home myself and butchered it in the living room, because I recall doing this, and it's a perfectly normal thing for me to do! Also, of course, after taking meat for dinner for a handful of people (all these people in the living room weren't here for dinner) we're just going to toss the rest in the garbage! Peak “dream logic”!

So then the dream shifts to another surprise, and one that I once again react to in a rather subdued manner given its bizarreness, the thing under the kitchen counter, and what following it reveals. There's this entire ecosystem of plants, animals, and fungi, none of which I have ever seen before (in the dream or out), some of which is bioluminescent enough to allow me to observe it in that small space. And here comes the “dream logic”: it's obviously all about faulty plumbing, right? It's just a leak, and our lack of thoroughly cleaning up after it! But once I get the flashlight, I realize it's more than just a leak, as there is somehow water in a large puddle (or even a lake?) that stetches, via a crack in the wall, well beyond the confines of the kitchen into unknown space past the wall.

So the dream concludes (although it's not much of an ending narrative-wise) with this mystery door. Of course I remember the conversation with the landlord over it from years ago (backstory again) , but now I'm not satisfied with ignoring it anymore. For the sake of what I saw under the kitchen counter, I have to know what is behind it, because I suspect it's more than just a crawlspace. Is it strange in the dream that I can break down a door so easily? How sturdy is this door supposed to be anyway? It's clearly in a state of disrepair, that's clear enough, so maybe it’s not so dreamlike. And then the dream just ends. Not many of my dreams have a satisfying narrative structure, starting out of nowhere (which I understand is common for dreams) following a plot that barely deserves to be called that, and then simply ending. Whatever I saw beyond the door was so shocking and indescribable that I just woke up. A lot of dreams end this way for me. And so does this post.

Thoughts?

Monday, December 02, 2024

For the love of money...

I've always had an uneasy relationship with capitalism. I actually don't understand the love of money at all.

Sometimes I wonder if it was an irregularity of my brain that I was born with or if it was learned at an early age, because I always got the impression that while my father loved me, he loved money more. My parents divorced when I was only two years old, and I would see my father on occasional visits. When I visited, he was always working long hours at his job, bragging about how much money he was making; I would wonder why he didn't cut back on work or even take a vacation while I was around. I vowed that I wouldn't be like him when I grew up.

Anyway, I actually have a hard time understanding money on a deep level. I understand that there are wants and needs in my life that I can acquire with money, but still have a hard time seeing the need for acquisition and saving of money. I have to remind myself when looking for work that I need to consider how much money a job will make in addition to whether the job will be pleasant; in fact, sometimes it's more important, I guess.

I do have a hard time understanding why the needs in particular are not something one acquires whether one has money or not. It seems deeply wrong to me that we withhold food and medical care from people who don't have money, and I tend to distrust people who are okay with this. I'm not okay with it at all.

I wanted to tell a bit of a personal story, though; it's sort of a story about how all of this broke me.

Years ago, I was out of work and searching. I wasn't really worried, because I've always managed to find work, and, of course, I don't worry about money. However, I was married with two kids, and I recognized there was a need. I had good marketable skills; I had a lot of IT experience, and I'd been working for about a decade as a database programmer. I knew there was a good job out there somewhere.

A friend from church told me there was an opening at his company for a database programmer. It was quite a distance away, but he was sure the pay was good, so I went and interviewed. The interview was full of red flags. When I had studied database administration at Oracle years before, I had an instructor who gave us some advice. He said, "If you ever get an interview for a job, and they can't fully articulate what they want, don't take the job. It's going to go poorly, and it's going to be a waste of your time and their money." In the interview, I kept asking for specifics, and they kept giving me vagueness. "Well, we're sort of... We're thinking along the lines of... We know we're going to need a database for part of what we're doing."

I said I'd consider it, and went home. They seemed very interested in me, and kept sending me emails asking if I was interested, and what salary I wanted. So there were two problems: One, I didn't think this was a goid idea, both because of the vagueness, and the commute (it would be about an hour via train). Two, they kept asking me to name a salary, but I had always been told to never be the first one to talk about salary, because they would work down from your number.

So finally, I made a decision. I'd ask for more than I thought they would give me, and when they refused, I'd turn the job down. So I told them I wouldn't do the job for less than $70k. They offered me $73.5k. It was nearly twice what I'd ever made on a job before. I felt like I couldn't turn down the offer, so I agreed.

I showed up for work not knowing why I was there, and I told everyone who was supervising me, and many of my coworkers. Surely someone would tell me what I was there for. The first few days nothing much happened, which wasn't highly irregular. I figured it would take time. I got to know my coworkers, sat in on some meetings, took tours around the buildings. (It was actually an interesting place to work, as they were a contractor that mainly designed amusement park rides, including for Disneyland. There are rides currently at Disneyland that I saw visualized on computer screens before they existed.) I was told someone would get together with me and talk to me about my role in the larger project. Any day now.

And days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. I spent a lot of time blogging (late 2008) and going to lunch in restaurants that I could suddenly easily afford. Nobody ever came to tell me why I was there. I idly wrote some code, and looked at databases which were already in use, not really knowing why. Every day was eight hours of "work" with a one-hour break in the middle, and two hours of commute, leaving very little time for my family. I felt like I had become my father.

Finally, one day I came into work, and I couldn't log into the system. I went to IT, but nobody could help me, or even explain what was wrong. I did literally nothing that day. The next day, my boss called me into his office and explained that they didn't need me anymore. They gave me a good chunk of severance pay and kicked me out. The train that would take me back home would arrive at the station around 5:00. So I waited and reflected on the months that I had just wasted of my life.

I had earned a good sum of money doing nothing. Isn't that the dream? Isn't that what you strive for in a capitalistic society? For a time there, wasn't I a success story? It didn't feel that way at all.

I found in the days and months that followed, that this had broken me. If this was success, I wanted no part of it. Like most people, I was afraid of failure, but now, in addition, I was afraid of success. I didn't look for another job. I fell into a deep depression that worsened as the days went by. A year later, my wife had left me, and I was homeless. I eventually went back to live with my mother for a handful of years before I recovered, but I think there's a part of me that will never recover, even though now, years later, I'm back with my family and working full-time. (Although I'm not working with databases anymore, despite feeling back then that it was my calling.)

I don't know if there's a lesson in this, besides to be careful about accepting a job just because it pays well. I still don't like money, although I have to live with it. 1 Timothy 6:10 says, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." I believe this deeply. I believe that so very much of the evil that is done in the world today is being perpetuated by men who love money more than anything. We live in a system that rewards this pathological greed, and many people look up to the billionaires, despite the fact that they are the cause the problems of our society, and not the immigrants or the LGBTQ community.

Do you love money more than you love people? I think a lot of people do, and it makes me angry and sad and sick all at the same time. It's just pieces of paper.

Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Mass Extinction Event

It's odd; for the longest time, I always thought the climate was the most important issue in the world. It makes sense, really. If we lose control of the climate, other issues simply do not matter. Human beings create a mass extinction event, likely taking ourselves down with it. Ice caps melt, sea levels rise, ecosystems are destroyed, and weather becomes increasingly chaotic. What could be more important to address?

And then, there was genocide. The whole world is going to hell, but one people on the globe is getting there first. I find that I hardly ever think about the climate anymore, because all I can think about is the suffering of the Palestinians.

My wife says it's ruining my mental health, and there is nothing I can do to stop it, but I can't look away. On October 7th, 2024, my email inbox was flooded with reports from independent journalists about the state of things in Gaza one year in. I couldn't open a single one, because it actually physically hurt at that point to read anymore.

It was my government making this happen. My Congressional representative and Senators voting for another shipment of billions of dollars in weapons, and my President signing off on it. These were all Democrats, who so many of my fellow Americans assured me were the good ones.

“Israel has a right to defend itself!” I was told by many. It seemed to me that helping Israel defend itself should look like shipping Israel a bullet for every member of Hamas, and telling them to aim carefully, not giving them 2,000 pound bombs to drop on hospitals and schools. Yet the President told Netanyahu to stop dropping our bombs on hospitals and schools, and by the way, here are some more bombs; we'll send you more when you run out.

I was raised Jewish, and my family talked often about the atrocities of the Nazis during the Holocaust. It's hard for me to understand how the descendants of the survivors of that horror could be so willing to turn around commit their own genocide. To dehumanize a people from within their own land and force them into ghettos and methodically extinguish their lives? I can't fathom it.

Netanyahu referred to the Palestinians as “Amalekites", the people God told the ancient Israelites to destroy utterly, leaving not a man, woman, or child alive, not even their livestock would be spared. I don't believe God has spoken to Netanyahu; the Palestinians are not the Amalekites, but drawing that parallel should be terrifying to anyone familiar with the book of Samuel. I know many of the people in the United States government who are supplying these weapons are not ignorant of the significance of Netanyahu's metaphor, but they continue to support him.

I still worry about the climate sometimes; it's still an issue, and it's still getting worse. However, we are creating a mass extinction event right now, on the other side of the world, quite intentionally. Our leaders are quite happy with it, it seems. The people of the world watch the death and destruction on our phones and protest, but the people who could stop it have no intention to do so. Many of them think that God is on their side. It's hard to believe in God these days, like it's hard to hold onto hope. Maybe the climate will fail us before the last Palestinian is dead in some sort of ironic justice for our hubris.

I don't have a good way to end this piece, because there doesn't seem to be a good way to end this situation.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

The Watch on the Beach

I was having a rather interesting conversation with several friends on Facebook the other day about how some people see God in the world around them. It's a subject that's probably worth a post in itself, but there was a specific aspect of the conversation that got me thinking about the subject of the evolution/creation debate, which I haven't written on in a long time, but I wanted to revisit. I should say upfront that I've come to a point in my life where, while I still believe in God, I'm pretty firmly on the evolution side of the debate, but there are still interesting aspects to the conversation nonetheless.

The thing that came up in the conversation was an argument that I myself have used in the past, and it's a classic creationist parable. Imagine you're walking on the beach. As you walk along, you see something shiny in the sand at your feet. You reach down and pull it out of the sand to find it's a gold watch. Do you say to yourself, "Amazing! The random action of the tides and the sand has fashioned this timekeeping device!"? Of course you don't; you recognize that you're holding an object that has been designed.

So now, the argument turns to the human body and asks, do you realize that even on the cellular level the human body is a far more intricate and amazing piece of machinery than that watch? Cells processing minerals, nutrients, and strands of RNA, joined togather to make organs that serve larger, specialized purposes, all fitted together within your skin to make a large, incredibly complex machine that has the ability to do everything that a human body does. How can we look at this amazingly complex piece of machinery and say this was the result of random chance?

That's the Intelligent Design argument, but we know it's evolution; we have mountains of evidence, including fossils of so many of the intermediate species that evolved from simple single-celled organisms to something fish-like to something reptile-like to something rodent-like to something ape-like to what we are now. We know, minus a few minor details, how we got from simple life forms to homo sapiens, and a designer is actually not necessary for the process. Yet it bothers me still.

Why do we look at the watch and say it must have a designer? It really is so much simpler and easier to construct than a human body. You could take apart a watch, and if you were particularly clever, you could figure out how to put it back together, or even build one from parts you made yourself. Nobody could do that with a human body. Even the collective knowledge of all the scientists in the world today couldn't figure out how to build something like a human being from scratch.

The watch itself is also the product of evolution in a sense. Watches are probably never designed completely different from any watch that came before, but were built as improvements on prior designs. It occurred to me that if clocks had been invented in the southern hemisphere, they would run counterclockwise (although we wouldn't call it that) because the earliest clocks were based design-wise on sundials, a kind of proto-clock. However, that evolution was certainly guided by intelligence, although obviously not by a single supernatural one.

So, this is the thing: a watch is complicated enough that we say it must have had a designer, but does there come a point of complexity where we say something is beyond the scope of a designer? What is the basis--separate from knowing an object's history--for judging whether it had a designer?