Does life begin at conception?

Okay, let's break this down. The most common thing I hear about a fertilized egg being a "person" and how life "begins at conception" is this argument that "it's a living thing in a woman's body that has different DNA". There's a big problem with this.

That's also an apt description of a cancerous tumor, or a parasite. If this is really what you have as your argument, then you are effectively arguing that we shouldn't treat cancer and we shouldn't try to remove a parasite. Is that what you want?

"But the 'unborn baby' has human DNA!" you respond. Yes, this fertilized egg has human DNA, but do you really want to call anything with human DNA a "person" and claim that killing it is "murder"? Biologists and doctors estimate that fully half of all fertilized eggs fail to survive nine months for purely natural reasons, most of them from simply failing to implant. That means that every time you have unprotected sex and the woman is fertile, there's a 50% chance that you are committing murder. All that "trying to have a baby" stuff? You're a serial killer.

Oh, it gets worse. So much worse. You know what else is alive in a woman's body that has different human DNA? Egg cells. They're alive, and each one is a potential baby. If you're a woman who has a menstrual cycle, once a month your body releases one (at least, could be more; I have fraternal twins) egg cell, which has about 24 hours to live and get fertilized. Every time you ovulate and you don't get pregnant, you've committed murder, at least according to your logic. It was alive, with its own human DNA, and you murdered that "unborn baby".

But of course, it's so much worse for men, because, according to the internet, "A healthy adult male can release between 40 million and 1.2 billion sperm cells in a single ejaculation." Each one is a living thing with its own unique human DNA, and how many will actually end up fertilizing an egg? This isn't murder, it's fucking genocide. Hundreds of millions of "unborn babies" with every single ejaculation.

Is this ridiculous? Yes it is.

Now those of us who are a little more sane about these things say that saying a fertilized egg is a person is like saying throwing a couple eggs with flour and sugar in a bowl is a cake. A cake and a person are both things that start with certain ingredients, but take time and a process in order to be complete. A bag of flour is not a cake. Flour, sugar, and eggs in a bowl is not a cake. Flour, sugar, and eggs mixed together in a cake pan and set in a cold oven is not a cake. That cake pan ten minutes later in a warm oven is still not a cake. It's not a cake until it has spent the full time at the full temperature in the oven and has been taken out. Then, and only then, is it a cake.

So it is with a baby.

Leap year: no exceptions!

I can't resist the odd siren call of posting on Leap Day. However, I can't think of a post topic that is apropos.

And maybe that's the topic?

When I was very young, I guess I must have been about eight, I remember being introduced for the first time I recall to the concept of leap years. I was born in a leap year, as of course were many of my friends throughout school, being roughly the same age. In college, I had a friend who was actually born on Leap Day, making today either her 36th birthday or 9th, depending how you choose to look at it. (I did call and wish her a happy birthday, and actually got to celebrate her 5th birthday with her more or less, living with her in the same house at the time.) You'd think having a birthday of the 29th of February would be really cool, but despite the assurance of Cecil Adams, my friend only really felt like she was truly having a birthday on the actual 29th, and so only got a "real" birthday every four years. Thus, you are different, but in a way that isn't so much fun.

But back to my own youth... I recall thinking that it was odd but cool that some years were different. I really had no idea that the year had a (fairly) constant length, and that most years were 365 days, but some years were 366. (My own children, who are four-and-a-half are just now beginning to grasp the concept of seven-day weeks.) Those odd years seemed quite special, and of course, that odd day in itself. I also was quite taken with the concept that while years divisible by four had an extra day, years divisible by 100 did not. And yet, the year divisible by 100 that I eventually would experience would be an exception. So although leap years were an exception to the general rule, 2000 would be an exception to the exception to the exception. Somehow, I wasn't sure whether this was as cool as a regular leap year.

So I often thought, how interesting it would be to live in 1900, when there would be a year that was not in the regular cycle of leap years! Why was this exciting? Simply because it was something different! Of course, I still had something to look forward to in that I would be living through the change to a new millennium! Surely that was cooler than the change to a mere century. But 2000 seemed so far away, and of course then we'd have to live through the horror of intelligent computers killing our astronauts to keep us from knowing about space aliens, or something like that.

Of course now, having lived through the supposed change of the millennium and the actual change on New Year's Day 2001, the concept sinks in to an older and more experienced brain that whether the year starts with a 1 or a 2, whether it's New Year's Day or Leap Day or my own birthday, it's just another day, and these divisions we give to the times we live in are completely arbitrary. The millennium passing was not very exciting at all, even with the specter of the Y2K bug hanging over us. Whether today is February 29th or March 1st, all that really matters to me on a personal level is that it's Friday, and the weekend will be here by sundown.

The thing is, there's something sad about that. Not that we can change it, but there's a beauty to a mind that can look at days, even a day as mundane as a day in 1900 that didn't exist, but fell between the crack of February and March. A few months after that leap year in my youth, I was starting third grade, a new year that happened to be in a new school, with a new teacher, and anything could happen. This month, I moved into a new office, many days I write a new blog post, my children learn new things in school, and day by day I feel what even on the most exciting days is, compared to that excitement of youth, a crushing boredom.

How would it feel to get that sense of awe back? Could you watch the sun set, and not just see it as a beautiful sunset, but with the beauty and awe that you might have had with the very first sunset you ever saw? Could I put my children to bed tonight and look at them with the same profound sense of raw, new love that I felt seeing them for the first time on the day they were born? When you're young, everything is new and exciting, but when you're older, there are so many exceptions to that sense of wonder.

Is it possible to find a way to live life and find exceptions to the exceptions?

Fireproof

A couple months ago, my boss was having me research info on fire safes. As with a number of businesses, we back up the information on our servers to a tape drive, and put the tapes in a small safe to protect them from fire and/or theft. If you're not familiar (which I'm guessing most people are not), fire safes are typically given ratings of one-hour, two-hour or three-hour, which is more or less considered the amount of time a given safe can sit in a typical building fire without the contents being damaged. My boss wasn't happy when I gave him the particulars of what these ratings mean on a more technical level, expressing that he wanted a safe that would offer complete protection and be truly fire-proof. I explained to him as it says on this website:

Remember, provided there is enough heat, NOTHING IS ACTUALLY FIREPROOF and everything WILL BURN.

As you likely have heard in the news, a large portion of Southern California is burning this week. Over thirty fires have consumed half a million acres of land (about half the size of Rhode Island), taken the lives of at least six people, injured over fifty firefighters, destroyed over 1,500 homes, and are still going at this time.

Like pretty much everything that happens around me, the fires caused some introspection and reflection. Even in areas like the one where I live that are not actually on fire, ashes fall continually, and the sky has been a brownish-orange for six days and probably will continue to be for some time even if the fires are extinguished soon. Everywhere is being effected.

But it did get a bit personal on Monday morning when I drove to work and found the street my office is on blocked off by police. I was a block away from work, and though I couldn't see the fire itself, I could tell from the smoke that it was just a block away again on the far side of my office. I was allowed through the roadblock and arrived at work where my boss informed me that we were not yet told to evacuate, but we knew there was a high likelihood of it as indeed, the fire was just a block away. He himself had gone to the roof of our building and taken pictures of the flames rising through the trees on a neighboring ridge earlier that morning.

I sat at my desk and took some time to survey the junk that usually litters it. Once the call came to evacuate, which was pretty much a sure thing, I wouldn't have time to grab more than one or two things off of my desk, so I decided to be preemptive and grab everything that was irreplaceable, put it in a bag, and take it to my car that moment. It stuck me as I was gathering up my belongings that there were some things that I brought to work with me because I thought they would be safer sitting in a drawer in my work desk than sitting in a drawer in a desk in my home. "What if something happened to my house?" I'd often thought in the past. "Better to bring this to work for safekeeping." Nothing of monetary value, just personal sentimental value. Now I had come to realize that work was not a safe place after all. About an hour later, in fact, my boss would be having me load office equipment into my car to take home for safekeeping, ironically including our fire safe.

I started to think about it all. I already knew that home was not safe. I don't have a safe, so important documents are kept in a cardboard box. Put the box on the floor, and it will be destroyed in a flood. Put the box on a high shelf and it will be destroyed in a fire. Put the box in my car and it will be destroyed in a car crash. Put it anywhere at all and it could be stolen.

Is buying a safe the answer, though? Testing safes for effectiveness is a very lengthy process, and few safes that are not priced at hundreds of dollars make it. They put them in furnaces to simulate fire conditions; then while still hot, they drop them from a certain height to simulate a collapsing building; then they submerge them in water to see if they keep watertight because no doubt the firefighters will dump hundreds of gallons of water into your office building to stop the burning. If you didn't choose a safe that was good enough for the sort of fire that hit your building (which of course, you can't predict), then your stored materials will be melted, charred, smashed and soaked.

But how much is enough to spend on a safe? As the quote above indicates, despite the fact that you can be very dedicated to finding a way to protect yourself from fire, there is a chance that some sort of catastrophe will come that will burn not just your documents, but the safe itself! Sure, it's not likely, but it is possible.

The point of all of this is that in the midst of worrying throughout the rest of the day about the thousands of dollars of office equipment and confidential information of clients that were loaded into my car, I realized I could guarantee no safety. Everything that I own, and everything that my employer had put me in charge of, all of it had potential to be lost, damaged, stolen or destroyed. What's a person to do?

There is a principle that Jesus taught, and I think it's one of a handful of principles that have practical application for all people, not just those who believe in Christ's deity. Yet it is not such an obvious one like, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," or "Thou shalt not kill." In Matthew 6, Jesus said,

"Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I think most people think of this as a spiritual thing, and if you are a Christian, you definitely should, but there is a completely mundane and practical application to this. Buy yourself some fancy clothes, and eventually, they will rot away and go out of style. Buy yourself a cool car, and eventually it will break down and become a pile of scrap metal. Put your money in the bank and the bank will go under due to bad business decisions or embezzlement, the bottom will fall out of the value of the dollar, the stock market crashes and the real estate bubble bursts. Every worldly possession you have can, and eventually will go away.

But if you invest in educating children? If you invest in saving the environment? If you invest in peace, love, understanding, and all sorts of other hippy-dippy stuff like that? The return on that sort of investment is worth more than any amount of money.

A friend of mine remarked that when he watches the news these days, and sees people evacuated from fire areas, repeatedly they so often seem to cry out that they have lost "everything." He wondered to me, "Don't they still have their lives? Don't they still have their families? Don't most of them have insurance that will allow them to rebuild most if not just about all of what they did lose?" It would be a tragedy if I were to lose all those material possessions, no doubt. But so long as I have my wife, my children, and my God, I have all that I truly need. And even if I did lose my family, I would have the fond memories of the joy we shared. No fire can take that away from me.

Don't fear the reaper

"If I were an atheist, I don't know why I wouldn't just kill myself," the speaker declared. People in the crowd shouted back incredulous responses, and the tone of the whole open-air discussion made a poor turn. It was years back when I was in college, and the speaker was a professional evangelist/apologeticist who at the time had a great deal to do with myself eventually becoming a Christian, despite a number of things he said that day that were offensive to many in the crowd, even myself.

The thing is, though, that particular statement did not offend me. In a way, it was something that I had contemplated myself at times. The odd thing about so many religions (and I'm including atheism under that umbrella for the sake of this discussion, whether proper to do so or not) is that from a certain perspective, it seems like suicide is the ultimate logical expression of faith. Nonetheless, as a subject that is sort of a subset of the ideas in my previous post on practical religion, it is interesting that people of just about all religions are, contrary to this, far from likely to commit suicide.

While far from the first time the concept was presented to me, the example from Buddhism may be the best. See, the central idea behind Buddhism (of the standard non-Tibetan variety) is actually a very atheistic one. An enlightened Buddhist will come to realize that God does not exist, material possessions are not important, and in fact, their own sense of self is essentially an illusion. The true goal then, is to realize that this world is nothing but illusory suffering, and to become released from it by denying its existence. The logical question that is often asked by non-Buddhists is, if the goal is to release yourself from the illusory suffering of this imagined material plane of existence, wouldn't the easy thing be to just kill yourself? After all, (non-Tibetan) Buddhists don't believe in reincarnation, so suffering would simply cease, right?

Well, the enlightened person realizes that this is false. If your material and mental self is but an illusion, then aren't you kowtowing to the power of that illusion to solve the problem by material means? Maybe if you could simply cease to live that might be acceptable, but to, say, take an illusory knife and slit your illusory throat? It's not the terminology a Buddhist would use, but that would be admitting defeat. In fact, the true Buddhas that have been enlightened realized that leaving the physical plane was not as great a thing to do as to stay and teach others that have not yet found enlightenment! Oddly enough, although this seems self-sacrificing, I wonder if an enlightened Buddhist would agree, since there is no "self" to sacrifice.

Which hints at the state of affairs for a Christian, both on an individual scale, and on a grander one. If going to Heaven to be with Jesus is the greatest thing a Christian can attain, then why not kill yourself after you give your life to Him? In the Bible, Paul addresses the matter (although the passage is not discussing suicide, but execution):

"For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your joy in Christ Jesus will overflow on account of me." -Philippians 1:21-26

Yes, while it seems a Christian might desire to die, the fact is, we remain because there is still work to be done here on earth, and it wouldn't be right to take the "easy" way out. Some religious leaders have claimed that a suicide cannot go to Heaven, since that would be a type of murder, and one that can't be repented of. I don't think this is true, but one can see a certain arrogance in the idea of claiming to be a follower of Christ and deciding on God's behalf when it's your time to go to Heaven.

And as I said, this is also perhaps a reason for the long delay before the "second coming" of Christ. I've heard many a pastor say that every day Jesus delays His return, many, many more people have a chance to turn to Him and be saved. (It may beg the question that if indeed this is so good, why would Christ ever return? No matter for this discussion.)

A Hindu, or member of some other religion that does believe in reincarnation might also be tempted to leave a life of suffering to re-enter with a blank slate, but most belief systems that include reincarnation don't include the idea of being born with a blank slate, but must reap the rewards of your past life, so ending one life with a selfish and violent act is not likely to put you in a better place.

So, back to the atheist, the one that started the discussion. Why is it that I (and the speaker) say an atheist might desire suicide? Well, the world is full of suffering and strife (a belief common to all the religions mentioned here) and one of the main things we strive for in this life is to escape from this (ditto here). If you truly believe there is nothing, absolutely nothing in store for us after this life, then why not simply go to oblivion? I've always thought, why would an atheist be afraid of dying? Ceasing to exist couldn't possibly hurt, right?

The counter-argument that I think would be the most popular is that since there is no afterlife, then this life is all we have. Why give up everything for nothing? There seems to be some reason in this, certainly, but then, well... Maybe it's a bit of a linguistic problem rather than a real problem, but if you cease to exist, then there is no "you" to have lost any "life". Really, you can't lose your life, can you? You can only stop being you in a very final manner by cutting off your life. You don't cut it off from yourself, but from everyone else, because you're not there after life exists. So is life what you have, or what you are? Either way, is anything really lost to you?

So why do atheists not long for death? Do atheists, like Buddhists, want to keep living to spread the atheistic Gospel to the masses? Or is it merely a biological directive built into us by evolution that tells us to keep existing as long as we can, so that we can keep the chance to propagate our genetic materials in one way or another? Maybe the atheists are the right ones, and it's more straightforward to them. The rest of us need to invent reasons why we want to live, while they simply know that we want to live just because it's human nature.

You know, there's a big part of me that doesn't want to publish this post. It's probably vain conceit on my part, but I fear I may drive some atheist somewhere to kill themselves, which I certainly don't want to do. Most likely, any atheists that read this will either laugh at it, or be somewhat offended, or maybe they'll give me better answers to my questions and make me feel like an idiot (it's not hard to do, and I wish more people would tell me I'm full of it--and why--just so I know people are reading this). But whatever people do in response to this or any other blog, I hope they find a reason to live, whatever it may be.

But also, don't be afraid.