Pictures

They say that you can't always believe what you see, but then they say that seeing is believing. It can get confusing, but the fact is that it really depends on how well yours eyes and brain work together. Some people are blind because their eyes don't work, while others simply can't see because the nerves don't work that carry information from the eyes to the visual cortex of the brain. Even so, almost all "seeing" happens in multiple places in the brain. Instant recognition of my child's face, or the immediate urge to run from a wall of fire has everything to do with unconscious decisions made by various parts of my brain that take information from all my sensory organs and make a judgement on what I see. 

For example, I can see a huge wall of fire, but since I can't feel the heat I can recognize that the wall of fire right in front of me is only on the screen of the movie theater. I feel a small bit of anxiety for the characters of the movie, or awe for the spectacle, but none of the fear I would feel if my sensory organs could tell me that my eyes were seeing a fire that was "wanting" to kill me.

Last night my wife's sister-in-law sent us the photos she took of our family and I kept zooming in on my face in the ipad screen. I'm not vain, but I did not recognize the man. My wife chuckled over my shock, but what I didn't tell her was that the man I see in the mirror every day is a monster. The horror of what I feel every time that I look in the mirror or that I feel when I recall my mental image of myself is now commonplace to me, but looking at my image on the ipad screen helped me see that I cannot always trust the image my brain makes of me. 

It was at that moment that I realized that my wife means all the good things she says about me. I really am an intelligent, loving man, who is successful in his chosen field. I am a little overweight, but I really can be called good looking. I really admire the man in the photograph, but I am struggling to see that he is the same guy I see in the mirror. I have read that depression messes with your perceptions of reality, but it really hit me last night how badly my depression messes with how my brain instinctively interprets what it sees. I need to remind myself that my brain tends to wear the wrong type of shades...

Its Time For the Media to Take Responsibility... I'm Looking at You, Facebook Friend

It happened again, a stupid statement was made in my presence and I couldn't hold back. I opened my big mouth and responded. I can help it. Stupid stuff drives me crazy.

Who is the real truth-teller?

A coworker informed me that he can't use Snopes.com anymore because they are funded by some political organization.
Really.
He honestly said that.
I looked at him dumbstruck, insisting he couldn't be serious.
"Well, where do you think they get their money?" He shot back.
All that advertising. They get so many clicks they could ask anything they want and get it.
"Do you honestly trust Snopes?" Was his next question.
I had to tell him I don't. The simple fact is that I trust no one. Zilch. Nada. I don't believe a word anyone tells me, and, honestly, I don't see how you can trust anyone yourself.

There was a time when the American public could sit in their living rooms and listen to the radio or watch the TV and expect truth. You could grab a paper and read through their headlines, and generally expect the facts would be in certain sections while pure opinion and speculation lived in its own page or two. Those days are gone. News today is more likely a few facts mixed with opinion and rumor.

The Colonial Version of Facebook

The current information age reminds me of the days of old when the only printed objects in the pioneer home would be the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress. News or current information was hard to come by, and the traveling peddler would bring a welcome change and a chance at news. Of course everyone knew that the peddler would tell whatever tale he could to keep your attention long enough to sell you something, but some news was better than nothing at all so people would be willing to risk the misinformation for the chance at getting anything. I can imagine when the man of the house came home after the visit from the peddler the family would spend hours trying to tease the truth out of all the tales told by the traveler. Imagine what it must have been like for all the rumors to develop when all these people living so isolated came to town for the rare visit and all the stories collected through the year were disseminated and dissected along with whatever out of date newspaper made it to the outpost to help everyone figure out where the truth really fit. I'm sure some things believed to be true never even happened. I couldn't blame them back then for believing untruths. They were at the mercy of travelers and their imaginations.

Fast forward to today and things are so much the same and so much different. I remember when I first learned to use a Boolean search with Lycos.com or Excite.com to find exactly what I wanted to find. My first big urban legend to bust using these tools was the silly Betty Martini article on Aspartame that was being passed around by email. I tackled crazy rumors about vaccines and then found myself a friendly ally in Snopes.com, which was a bulky website that took a little bit of skill to navigate in the early days, but focused more on the "why" of all these false rumors than the "what" was really true. Those were the fun days. Someone would include me in some stupid forwarded email chain with a "breaking news" story that "the media" wouldn't share, and I would do a quick search and respond with a link to a Snopes article or write a little note of my own showing the research I did to disprove the rumor. It didn't take long for those forwards to get to my wife's email, but never make it to mine. No one likes to look stupid.



Now the peddler with the rumors for anxious ears roams the internet, and misinformation abounds. The purpose of the peddler remains the same- to get your eyes to hover long enough to buy whatever they are selling. Back in the pioneer days it may have been tin, but now it is advertising dollars and, even more frightening, ideology. My social media of choice is Facebook simply because my side of the family shares their news and pictures there, but I see so much junk there too. One thing that did happen all over Facebook during this election was the sharing of misinformation, partly because so many of my friends insisted that they could not trust "The Media" to tell the truth. In the meantime a large number of sites popped up to fill the void. I caught one sloppy site in the act of creating itself, writing a bogus article about one of the candidates. I identified the site as a bogus one almost instantly, but then it began to populate its pages with news stories copied from other sites to make it look older and more legitimate than it really was. People like me who hunt urban myths for fun couldn't keep up with the deluge of purely false news pages that clone real-sounding pages simply to harvest clicks, and even legitimate news sources followed the clicks and reposts on social media and began sharing the bogus sites themselves. 
You probably expect me to now rant about how you need to stop clicking those wasteful sites to protect the sensibilities of people like me, but no. THAT is not my point. If it entertains you to give money to stupid click-bait sites then do it, and go ahead and repost the links so your friends can get sucked in. What really bothered me was that no one took responsibility for all the junk being spread. Hello fellow American! You can't blame the media for anything anymore! If I can prove a website false by doing a Google search in ten seconds you can check your own stuff too. Back when the media was our only source of information we could blame the media for not letting us know the truth, but now we can fact-check just about everything that pops up with archives that stretch back decades. 
What I learned from this election cycle is that our media companies are not in the information business, but advertising, and those who are the most outlandish get the most free advertising. So what was your job, friend? It was the same as mine, to research and share the truth. What often happened instead? my social media feed was filled with people reposting things that agreed with their ideology though the facts were wrong or twisted. Out of hundreds of friends I had only eight upon whom I could depend to post thoughtful links that were factually correct. The rest only posted stuff that seemed right, but was never checked to be factual. 
It is time for the American public to take responsibility. You are now "The Media". In fact it is pretty obvious to the objective viewer that no one watches your clicks and reposts more than the very "media" you vilify. If it trends on Facebook or Twitter, by golly, it will be on the news tonight. Who is responsible for all the misinformation on Trump and Clinton? You are. Why didn't we have better candidates for which to vote? A big part was because you guys wouldn't stop talking about the idiots on your social media feed. 
Its time to treat everything you are given on your social media feed like the pioneers did the peddlers of old. Use their information and stories to feed your curiosity, but don't let them suck you into their false narratives and lies. If you pass it on, check it out first. Right now, I simply can't trust you. I can't trust "The Media", remember? And you are the media.

Is Race Really A Side Issue?

I must admit that, as a Yankee, I am somewhat of an outsider in my adopted home just south of Birmingham, Alabama. I was told by my father of a time when he was an outsider in the South when I was a small child. He was repeatedly told that "He didn't understand." when he tried to bring dark-skinned brothers and sister in Christ into the Church where he ministered in North Carolina. Now I am being told that I don't understand.

I have been told by people with light-colored skin that racism is a thing of the past in our country, and that Black people are the problem because they keep bringing up the issue of race. In other words, my dear "white" friends here in Alabama truly believe that black people use race as a means to avoid the bigger problems of all the poor choices of the members of the black community. When a dark-skinned individual is attacked by police, and killed, my "white" friends tell me how the injured or dead deserved what they got for not complying with some order even though the facts don't always support that conclusion. Its interesting really. My friends often have the belief that the facts will prove that the "black guy really did something wrong" and they post false or dubious articles to their Facebook page to support their assertions.  

We can play with numbers, how more "white" people are killed by police than "black" people, though, admittedly, it makes statistical sense that it should be the case that the population with the highest numbers have the most run-ins with the police. It is interesting though, that my friends and family that have darker skin and dark curly hair have more negative encounters with the police for "routine checks" than do my lighter-skinned family and friends. It has been brought home recently when my aunt, who is a Native American from Western NY described to me how she is treated as a dirty Muslim or Mexican, and my friends who have adopted darker-skinned children or married someone with darker skin see their kids treated very differently than the light-colored kids they tend to be around.

 As illustration of this point I don't call these friends and children "black" because some of these friends are dark-skinned, but not necessarily from an African heritage. Our culture is so racist that they assume dark-skin is some form of an African heritage and worthy of mistreatment. The stories these friends and family recount are heartbreaking, and not all in the South. Children are called dirty, and told to stop playing with a group of children because they appear to have African heritage until that child's "white" mother steps in to correct those adults' behavior.

 I have been told that I don't understand true racism because I'm not from the South. I may understand better than you know. My grandmother, a Yankee by birth, used, to my father's horror, the n-word to describe dark-skinned individuals. She once told me how she wasn't racist because she didn't mind talking to "them". She really was more accepting of "colored people" than many of the people from which she learned culture growing up. My grandmother defined her racism based on how she compared to "true racists" that she knew, but generally felt that people who were darker-skinned were less trustworthy and not quite as industrious. In other words, though she didn't desire harm on others, she was racist and she didn't recognize it.

 I've come to see that my friends down here who are racist don't recognize their racism because they are comparing themselves to some pretty awful people. The fact is that we are all a bit racist, and most people who refuse to admit that they prejudge people based on their skin color are much more racist than they realize. This point really hit home when I heard one of my friends listening to the video Kalyn Chapman James posted on the internet where she admitted tearfully that she identified a bad attitude about police in her heart, and how she is trying to deal with the fact that the sniper who killed five police officers seemed like a martyr to her. In other words, she was using herself as an example of how one needs to recognize that they have to face the darkness in her heart and grow past it. The video was not politically correct. It was quite shocking, and I admired the girl's courage to admit something that will get her death threats. She insisted repeatedly that she would not accept this dark thing about herself, and was working on changing her heart, but my white friends could only see that she admired the murderer of five police officers. They totally missed the point. And they missed it because it came from a black woman.

 I don't have time to recount the number of times a white guy or lady admitted a wrong, very damaging, attitude of heart, and were forgiven by my friends for seeing their wrong attitude and trying to fix it, but my friends could not even hear this black woman's confession of sin that was coupled with a stated desire and plan for repentance. Donald Trump was more quickly forgiven for suggesting that black people should be beaten senseless at his rallies for being annoying, and he never expressed a desire to repent of his attitude. No, Donald Trump is lauded for refusing to be politically correct and saying what he really feels without worry about repercussions. The same apparently does not hold true if you're a tearful black woman wanting to change.

So don't tell me that racism is dead in 2016. Don't tell me that you don't see color. You may be better than your ancestors, but we are not out of the woods yet. It is not the imagination of dark-skinned individuals that police and the average citizen is frightened or wary of them simply because of their skin color. It is time to admit, like Kalyn did, that we have the wrong attitudes in our hearts, and there is room to grow. Refusing to face the darkness in our own hearts will only perpetuate one aspect of the darkness that creates such fear in the lives of so many law-abiding minorities in our country as they are held at arms length simply because they have more melanin in their skin than our favorite people do.

Evolution and Reality

I learned a song as a child that embodies the ideas and opinions of the adults around me about biologic evolution- "I'm no kin to the monkey. The monkey's no kin to me! I don't know much about your ancestors but mine didn't swing from a tree." It really is a silly song, but it reveals some very strong opinions about the state of mind among the adults that made up my childhood world regarding descent with modification. As a child it was made very clear to me that nothing evolved. In fact some of my friends worried about me because I was taught by my parents, and believed them, that dinosaurs were real. I was raised in an area where almost every rock in the creek bed contained marine fossils, and I was taught that they were present as a result of Noah's worldwide flood. I was drilled with the dogma about origins so that if I saw a fossil I instantly thought of "The Flood", and if I heard anyone speak about millions of years I would automatically translate it to thousands of years in my mind.

I mention all this to explain why this is important for me to state. I am different than that wide-eyed kid in so many ways, and one of those ways is the fact that I can conceive of a universe that is billions of years old, and that gave rise to life in a series of processes that are known generally as "biologic evolution." I now acknowledge biologic evolution as fact, and realize that were I to go back far enough I would find that one of my ancient ancestors probably did look quite bit like an ape, though I really have never really made any effort to determine if the ancestor really did swing from a tree.

So what is this biologic evolution? Evolution as a concept just means change over time, but I choose to describe it with the word "biologic" because this change over time is within systems that involve life. It is important to make this distinction because I was taught as a child that "evolution" entails the "big bang" and origin myths that are described within science labs in hushed, reverent tones. The concept of biologic evolution dovetails nicely with ideas about the origins of the universe since a primordial soup, of sorts, present at the infancy of our planet could have given rise to life if a series of coincidences worked just right. While this is true, biologic evolution does not require a big bang or primordial soup. All it requires is descent with modification, or the passing on of changes from parent to child. Where the original organisms come from, their origin, is not essential to the hypotheses that are now accepted parts of the working models that help humans understand where our species came from and where we might go.

Biologic evolution is not controversial really once we get past the arguments over the origin of life. It is not controversial, that is, unless you include a group of people who insist on interpreting the Christian Bible as a literal historical and scientifically accurate set of documents that present a very specific sequence of events to explain the origin of species. I think I will put this topic off for a bit.

Back to biologic evolution. Charles Darwin is known as the father of modern ideas of biologic evolution, though he certainly wasn't the only one who put forth such ideas. I highly recommend that every literate human spend time reading through his book On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection to understand what scientific research entailed in the days before Google. Darwin went around the world collecting specimens of plants and animals along with their fossils, if available, and writing letters all over the world to be transported by ship to receive more specimens and data from other researchers, It isn't like Darwin had this idea and wrote a book to advance his idea while hoping evidence would support his idea, but the guy did serious research.

Some of what Darwin argued against seems crazy in today's world, but he dealt with the idea that all animals existed in the areas that they were placed at the time of creation. Darwin explored the idea that some species migrated due to geologic, climate, predator, or dietary pressures and changed to fit the new pressures they faced in the new locations. A famous example is found in the beaks of the birds in the Galapagos islands who all obviously shared a common ancestor, but developed variations in beak size and shape based on the food available on whatever island the particular branch of the bird family made home. Darwin didn't know how such changes were passed on from parent to child, but he guessed some sort of particle was tweaked and the particle change was preserved in reproduction. Now we know that Darwin wasn't too far off, and that his vague particles are genetic code that is passed on from parent to child.

The way it works is fairly well established, but nothing in the field of science is written in stone. Let me try to explain this- Suppose we are talking about our friend the T-Rex. Imagine something happened in his exposure to UV radiation that tweaked his genetic code so that one of his genes involved in skin generation caused his baby to be born with a little wisp of a feather present in a certain region of skin. Some genetic mutations, "tweaked genetic code" cause organism death, but others simply result in insignificant changes that may only influence appearance. Over generations this genetic mutation being passed from parent to child could result in an obvious difference between the families of the wispy feathered dinos and the feather free variety. In fact, it is possible to imagine that certain size and colors of feathers made the feathered dinos so much more attractive to potential mates that they reproduced more often, and the differences between the variations of feathered dinos became even more obvious between families where the potential mates tended to like particular variations. Such preferences are seen among animals today.

As climate and food pressures changed smaller animals survived more often to reproduction age so that eventually the great, great, great, and so on, grandchildren of these dinosaurs look alot like emus and chickens. This is the part of my silly blog post that made some of my friends shake their heads vigorously. I had you until the animal species changed. If we rewind far enough such changes could mean that we could imagine prions coming out of the primordial soup. That's a bit much for some of my dear friends. Note that I didn't say who would be responsible for these modifications, and many Christians point to God's hand at work in biologic evolution.

Now for the Christians who just said, "God did not twiddle with some primordial soup". There you are dear one! I came back to you. Your version of the story is very simple. God said- "Let there be light, and it was so. And it was good." What does the long explanation above do with the history lesson related in Genesis 1-3? That is a problem that I will not solve, but Google can help you, or Bing, if you so choose. I've never been a fan of Bing, for the record. Let me tell you that making this your proof of a good Christian pushes more godly youth away from the Church than should happen. Try this for size- "Evidence points to species changes with biologic evolution, but God tells a different story in the book of Genesis. God's point is that He is the Creator and has the right to dictate to His creation. I don't know why reality and the story of Genesis does not mesh, but I will trust God in this and ask Him when I get to Heaven." Oops, I did present a possible solution. It is a very effective method for dealing with some touchy subjects. Try this- "I don't know why God commanded genocide in the Promised Land, but He obviously had a reason. We don't do that anymore, but we can ask God why in Heaven." Or how about this? "I don't know why God commanded his people to kill unborn children in the Old Testament, but I know God doesn't want us to kill them today. We can ask for an explanation in Heaven. I still trust that He is good." See how that works?

This doesn't work so well- "Yes, bacteria change species, and evolve constantly, and we have documented similar genetic changes that are recorded in species that are unrelated, and there is a pretty clear fossil record of biologic evolution, but we must believe that the Bible is true, and all these evidences of evolution that keep building in quantity are false. The truth will out someday." It will happen too many times that the student will decide that either God creates lies to deceive scientists, or the biblical literalists reject reality and deserve to be rejected. I won't even deal with redshift in stars and the Capulin Cinder cone evidence against Noah's Flood.

Now here is the meat of the matter. Some of you want to argue evidence and conspiracies back and forth. I'm not going to do it. Some want to talk about how kinds or species are immutable, but I see a bunch of evidence to the contrary. Remember that what differentiates between "kinds" could be tweaked with a bit of a genetic mutation that's exaggerated over generations. "Kinds" or species are often differentiated by visual morphology that is dependent on hidden genetic code. Change the code and the baby and great grandbabies look a whole lot different than great granddaddy many generations before. One little change and a species changes. It's not really all that far-fetched, and happens in bacteria and viruses all the time. These are the only organisms that reproduce fast enough that one can directly observe evolution in one lifetime.

Some of my friends state that faith in science has replaced God in our culture. Science is not a thing in which to have faith. Science is simple a collection of processes to evaluate evidence and create hypotheses to test. What my friends mean is that all men must have faith in something. This is a concept interpreted from a passage in Romans 1. As annoying as this idea is, I don't mind. The idea that someone worships, or has faith in, science betrays a poor understanding of science. Nothing proposed in the process of science is immutable. Biologic evolution itself is simply a collection of hypotheses (or theories if you like) that are constantly being modified as evidence is discovered. The idea that scientists are in a conspiracy to deny God with conjured evidence is laughable since scientists who get their names recognized are the ones who challenge accepted concepts and support their challenge with unimpeachable evidence and/or data. It is true that scientists or groups of scientists have pet theories that are hard for them to let go, but eventually such pets die.

Now for the inevitable call for proof that species evolve. I have no problem doing that, but remember? I believe Google is your friend for such things. Start there and I will meet you later.

True Colors

This is it.
I officially quit.
I wanted to believe.
I thought I could fake it.
I tried to hold on to the smallest little smidgen of belief I could find.
I went back and forth a couple times to try to keep in the Church I truly love, but its not worth it.
I must admit I don't believe.

So that's me. I see a lot of the word "I" above, but it must be so. This is about me. Some guy didn't make me so mad that I wanted to leave everyone behind. My parents did not plant a seed of doubt. I did not see an inkling of hypocrisy in my father, the man that taught me to read, and gave me a love of logic and philosophy. I didn't doubt because of a college education, and I didn't walk away because I was drawn away by rock music or some stupid movie that made me desire a more exciting life away from God. It took becoming a father to realize my own faith was really a faith in my father, and not his God. When I tried to grow into my own faith I ran into my skepticism. I realized that to look past all the realities I saw that didn't mesh with the Bible I would have to have an internal sense that the truth of Scripture was greater than my doubt. I don't have that internal sense. A Christian might say that I lack the internal witness of the Holy Spirit.

Let me say it another way using the Genesis story of creation as an example. There is so much evidence in real life of an earth and universe that is so incredibly old most human minds are not able to visualize, and yet many Christians hold firmly to the belief that God created the earth and universe less than ten thousand years ago based on the chronology of events described in the Bible. So here's the rub- if, based on the evidence alone, I see that the earth is well more than a million years old, then I would have to assume that any story I heard to the contrary is false. Yet the Christian Bible states, based on its chronology, that the earth is 10,000 years old or younger. What am I to do with the contradiction? If I have no reason to believe the Bible I can simply state, accurately, that the Bible is the product of Bronze Age humans making their best guess at reality using traditions passed down to them to record their best creation myths which they tweaked over time as their culture changed. If I ascribe to the beliefs based on the Bible I look at the contradiction and go with my gut which tells me more truth is yet to be discovered and allows me to suspend disbelief in favor of what seems to be Bronze Age beliefs.

This is where I am splitting off from my former Sunday School friends. I don't have that gut feeling that tells me there must be a creator to build this complex system of physics that keeps our universe doing its thing. I don't have faith that a cosmic being who is both cruel and good has a higher purpose in mind. I don't have some whimsical sense that a better world awaits when my body loses its ability to maintain its survivability.

In short, I don't have faith.

Some would say that I have exchanged a faith in God for a faith in science, but that would be untrue. I don't have faith in science. Science is method of testing theories to come as close to truth as possible, but it is not a thing in which to have faith. Science would be the antithesis of faith in that any assertions made as a result of a scientific endeavor must be testable in order to be believed, and, as such, can be disproved at any juncture. Famous scientists are made from people who found a way to call accepted truths into question.

Some would say I have rejected God. Not really. I have rejected an artificial sense of the existence of any god. I had built up a mental image, in Christian terms an idol, of what I wanted God to be, and when I tested my theory of God I found that it was not reflected in Scripture, and, in fact, no one image of God was present in the Holy Writ I examined. All of religious tradition contains the opinions of men who seemed to have come to know different creatures they called "God".

Some would say that I have been drawn away by my own immorality to reject Biblical morality, but I counter that there is not one version of Biblical morality. This is why American Christians still argue for and against slavery, and why abortion is both acceptable and unacceptable within various factions of the Christian Church. I suggest that our cultural morality dictates how we interpret the Scriptures rather than the Scripture dictating our morality. This is partly because so many standards exist in the Holy Writ that almost anything can be justified based on how the verses are arranged.

I wanted that faith. I prayed for that faith, and studied to build the knowledge that would give support to faith, but the more I learned, the less I could believe. This is not to say that your faith is wrong, but that your faith is not based on words printed on special paper in a carefully bound book, but on some ethereal sense that your brain created to help you cope with things you couldn't explain. Or, you might say, the internal witness of the Holy Spirit.

So here I am as I really am. You can pray that God's voice will break through the darkness in my mind and bring me to your version of the light of faith. I welcome that. It is not fun feeling left out in the cold. Until then, paint me as honest. From here on, I will only admit to that which I can truly believe.