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.

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?

Remembering Biden

So, I just thought I'd make a quick summary of my takeaways from the Biden years, since someone asked me.

1. While Trump fumbled on the pandemic response, I do think Biden handled COVID very poorly, particularly in acting like the vaccine meant the end of the pandemic. While the vaccine was helpful (I got one, but never bothered with a booster since I got COVID anyway), the virus had already mutated to the point of being vaccine resistant. This was a known fact by health officials, but the Biden administration gave misleading information. Also under Biden, the CDC lowered the quarantine time from ten days to five days, not based on any science, but based on a request from Delta Airlines' CEO.
2. Leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Biden was shipping billions of dollars in weapons to Russia's border, and everyone was saying Biden was going to provoke Russia into doing something ugly. Russia invading Ukraine was exactly what Biden wanted: a proxy war to make Russia look bad and exhaust their resources without commitment of American troops. When Ukraine was willing to start peace talks, Biden talked them out of it. Biden wants war in Ukraine, and clearly doesn't care how many Ukrainians and Russians need to die for it. (He apparently also wants one in Taiwan, as we are shipping weapons there, despite the US not even recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation. This would be like China shipping weapons to Hawaii.)
3. Inflation was out of control these last four years. It wasn't a problem with the economy that Biden created, but was rather price gouging by greedy corporations. Yes, Biden didn't cause it, but he also didn't do anything to fight it.
4. The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, and while this was due to Trump stacking the Court, Biden didn't do anything whatsoever to respond to the crisis. Democrats could have killed the filibuster and pushed through a law protecting reproductive rights. Biden could have expanded the Court, as was done before in history. NOTHING was done.
5. Biden, who Democrats keep calling "the most pro-union President ever," broke the railroad workers' strike, which was largely about safety. Shortly after this, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, causing one of the worst ecological disasters in history.
6. Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, and while I do not condone the attack (although as an occupied nation undergoing ethnic cleansing, it was arguably not a war crime), Israel's response has been to murder somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 Palestinian civilians. This is absolutely genocide according to the United Nations' definition, and it has been chiefly powered by American weapons. No weapon has gone to Israel that was not approved by Biden.
7. Democrats keep saying the economy is great under Biden, but all I can seem to see is record levels of poverty and homelessness. I don't care how the stock market is while Americans sleep in the street, and the Supreme Court allows making it a crime. We have billions to support killing people in other countries, but can't afford to house our own people.

This is just off the top of my head; there's really so much more. And Kamala Harris said if she was in charge, she would have done nothing different. Is it really a surprise that Americans didn't turn out to vote for her?