This one, I must share.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

From Pharyngula, comes this beautifully written essay:

Why I am an atheist – Fiona Wallace

I am an atheist because I've seen hundreds of people die.

Around the time of my brother's birth, my father decided that we should all start attending the CoE chapel on the local naval base (he was a retired naval officer) and within the year, my brother and my ten-year-old self were baptised. Some four years later I was confirmed, after being forced unwilling to confirmation classes. This class demanded a weekly essay on some biblical topic; deeply unfair, I felt, when I was the only one in the class who went to a highly academic school, and already had 4-5 hours of homework each night. I bought into the mythology, because adults were always right, or so my obedient self had been taught, but the essay was usually scribbled sitting in the back of the car on the way to class.

I think the chaplain knew.

On leaving school for university I fell in with a very catholic contingent, and here the first cracks really showed. They used condoms instead of the pill 'because it's easier for god to make a condom fail if he wants you to be pregnant'.

Hmm.

I found out that engaged couples had to attend a class where celibate, single men told them how to be married, because god says.

Hmm.

And confession magically erased any bad stuff you'd done, but didn't really explain why you still needed a day of judgement.

And I began to see people die.

The first was an old man gasping his last with acute pulmonary oedema.

The next was a young cyclist.

A nine-year-old boy, of asthma.

A girl with cystic fibrosis.

A fifty year old woman with teenage children.

The list lengthened, and now I can no longer remember all their deaths, though some of them do stick in my memory.

What they had in common was...nothing other than death. Old people, young people. Children and babies. Sick and healthy. Deliberately or accidentally. Fighting all the way, welcoming it or simply giving in to the inevitable. Distressed or peaceful. Merchant bankers and newborn babies, elderly paraplegics and young athletes. Road accidents, cancer, lifelong disability, infections, heart disease, respiratory failure...I learned all the ways a human being can die.

Now at this point a religious person would be nodding sagely and deciding that I had got angry, and turned away from god. That I raged against him and his cruelties.

Wrong.

Have you ever seen someone die? One moment they're there, a person, the sum of all the experiences they've ever had, a fantastic bundle of memories, desires and hope. And then it's gone.

The match sputters out, the clockwork toy winds down, the tree falls to earth, and it's over.

And it's only in the last sixty years that we've really made a difference. Before that, we died like flies.

Were the people back then less deserving? Were they more evil? Were they less religious? I don't think so. In fact, I know they weren't. So why were they not deserving of all the things we have today? Why did two of my father's siblings, twins, die before they were five years old of preventable childhood diseases and end up buried in Egypt in the 1930s? Why is every advance that humanity has made been paid for in blood, again and again and again?

No apologetics can explain the way the world simply is. No amount of hand-waving can hide the fact that the majority of humanity still suffers, much of it beyond our coddled imagining. I cannot compartmentalise this, for to do so would be to deny that suffering was real, to wave it away, salving my conscience with the lie that it was all for some hidden purpose. I am not willing to lie to myself and even less am I willing to lie to those around me.

I don't have parables of how I do good in the world, or trite recitations of lifesaving heroics. I've saved lives, but that, to put it bluntly, is my job. There is no god to be pleaded with, bargained with; it is us, homo sapiens, who save each other's lives, who offer comfort to the dying, who create and invent and build a better future for ourselves.

Send that mythological monster away. Your child died because there was nothing further human beings could do to save him, your sibling lived because human beings successfully pulled her back from the brink. And that effort belongs to all of us.

And, as far as I'm concerned, it's enough.

Fiona Wallace
UK/Tasmania

[Opsa]

At first this seemed to me to come off as a bit bitter, but I think it is really trying to say that people need to take responsibility for themselves instead of hoping or demanding that god take care of them. I can agree with that.

[Griffin NoName]

Yes, she says something about not being angry, but I did think it had a background hint of anger. Of course, it is written material so as we know all to well one can't judge tone without emoticons.

[pieces o nine]

At least a little anger would be appropriate, I think...
It doesn't lessen the impact of her essay.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

I liked that she emphasized we humans have literally bootstrapped ourselves out of the mud-- and that longer lives are the collective effort of countless giving human beings, doing what they love or are driven to do, to make life better.

And life is better today, than it was even 50 years ago:  more people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before in the history of our planet.

All thanks to people helping people.

It's about time we put the credit onto ourselves-- where it belongs.

My $0.02...

[Griffin NoName]

And life is better today, than it was even 50 years ago:  more people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before in the history of our planet.

Agreed re pat on back for some of us. People living in, say, Somalia, would not agree! Arguably, (I don't have figures) more people are dying from starvation and other "natural" disasters than ever before (because there are more people).

?

[Opsa]

Ooohoohooo... good point.

That's the yin and yang of it.

[Griffin NoName]

Just watched Lord of the Flies (not for the first time, and the book is better).. It should be compulsory viewing once a week for all western people.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

And life is better today, than it was even 50 years ago:  more people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before in the history of our planet.

Agreed re pat on back for some of us. People living in, say, Somalia, would not agree! Arguably, (I don't have figures) more people are dying from starvation and other "natural" disasters than ever before (because there are more people).

?

Yes-- people are starving there, no doubt about it.

But-- with the slow influx of modern medicine/sanitation ideas?  Even these people are living a bit longer than their ancestors did.

We are all benefiting in some way-- small for some, rather larger for others-- from modern discoveries.

There is hope for us all, that one day if we can break the cheap energy question, everyone can benefit in a large way.

[Opsa]

Just watched Lord of the Flies (not for the first time, and the book is better).. It should be compulsory viewing once a week for all western people.

Which one? The old one or the new one? I love the old version.

There is hope for us all, that one day if we can break the cheap energy question, everyone can benefit in a large way.

Is that our quantum leap?

[Roland Deschain]

A very poignant piece she wrote. It annoys me when you see people giving praise to a god for something that humans spent hundreds or thousands of hours doing by their own ingenuity. It's as if they're saying that we do nothing, but this is a grave insult. If i'd spent my life devoted to increasing human knowledge, or decreasing human suffering, i'd be ok with getting no recognition, but extremely annoyed at that recognition being given to something that didn't exist.

[Griffin NoName]

Just watched Lord of the Flies (not for the first time, and the book is better).. It should be compulsory viewing once a week for all western people.

Which one? The old one or the new one? I love the old version.

The Peter Brook black and white version.

A very poignant piece she wrote. It annoys me when you see people giving praise to a god for something that humans spent hundreds or thousands of hours doing by their own ingenuity. It's as if they're saying that we do nothing, but this is a grave insult. If i'd spent my life devoted to increasing human knowledge, or decreasing human suffering, i'd be ok with getting no recognition, but extremely annoyed at that recognition being given to something that didn't exist.

Oh, that reminds me of two things I find irritating. The first is people praising me for things my sons do/achieve. It really annoys me, because it's my sons doing the doing not me. Praise them, not me. The second is that I always operated according to the view that my sons as they were growing up were responsible for who they were, they were their own people, not "mine" - I hate the way (most/many?) parents think their children belong to them, anyway what I hate is the fact my sons give me no credit for this!!  Yes, I am aware of double standards here.    Woops nothing to do with G-d really, unless I am one.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

There is hope for us all, that one day if we can break the cheap energy question, everyone can benefit in a large way.

Is that our quantum leap?

It probably will be-- I keep hoping for a breakthrough of some sort.

But alas, it's all been tiny, incremental things.

Take batteries, for example:

In the beginning, there was carbon-zinc cells-- and these were so poor, that when policemen were given these new "electric torches" (as they were first called) there was only an intermittent on switch-- you would "flash" it on, to see down a darkened alleyway (for example).  You had, at best 10 minutes or so of energy in these clumsy things, so you used it sparingly.

That was the beginning.

Fast-forward to today?  We have LiIon, rechargeable batteries than can give days of light at 10 times the output of those early flashlights (yes--that's how they got their name) -- but these were the results of years and years of trial-and-error to achieve, with many-many-MANY intermittent steps in-between.

We (or engineers did) took tiny, baby-steps over the years, to achieve what we did-- no real breakthroughs here, just slow, steady progress, tiny incremental improvements of what has gone before.

No breakthroughs here.

What I am dreaming of, is an energy source that is reliable, fairly cheap to make, even cheaper to recharge (if it be that sort), and not damaging to ... anything really.

Fusion seems to be the unattainable goal, here-- as it easily (theoretically) meets several of my criteria above-- abundant energy that is not damaging, and should be cheap to recharge/refuel too.

What we really need, is an organic catalyst-- something that could be grown by modified bacteria or plants, to replace the hideously expensive metal catalysts needed for fuel cells.

If we could do that?  Fuel cells could easily be the cheap energy source I'm speaking of-- feed them hydrogen and oxygen, and they give you carbon dioxide, water and ... electrons.  We know exactly how useful electrons are already...

... they don't pollute (much-- CO2 could become a problem if there were enough of these things about-- but there are ways of addressing that, too), they would be cheap (with organic catalysts), they are proven reliable (the now defunct Space Shuttle depended on them, as did Apollo-- reliable?  You betcha).

I always kind of thought that re-engineering plants would be the trick:  they already split water using sunlight and an organic catalyst:  chlorophyll-- it's cheap, too-- no exotic metals needed.   If only we could do a similar thing with fuel cells.

Imagine it:  an organic "living" fuel cell, in which you feed it H2 (via hydrocarbon molecules if you must) and O2, and it gives you H2O, CO2 and electrons in return... 

Imagine fueling your cell phone with a little organic alcohol?   About twice a year, say?

Or a solar-assisted cell array, that was literally grown on top of your house?   A literal green roof, that not only sheds the rain, but makes electricity for you and your neighbors.   Centralized power-plants become a thing of the past-- except for energy storage and accumulation, for use on rainy days and at night.   

Mall parking-lots would have lovely green covers over the parking lots-- to soak up the sunlight, to power the mall and sell the excess back into the local grid.   

Tall buildings would sport the latest green siding, to absorb sunlight and make power for the city.

We would be living in a literal Oz-- an Emerald City that makes it's own power from sunlight and easily available H2.

*sigh*

I can dream, can I not?

[Opsa]

Dreams awaken possibilities. Those are good dreams!

I especially like the green parking lot.

[Roland Deschain]

I like that dream, too. Plants could potentially make a lot of power, especially if genetically-engineered for their purpose. Whole cities of individual organic power plants, all busily generating what we need. Considering the power of genetics, there may be almost no limit to what could be done.

I remember a while ago reading about a possible future where houses were made out of trees. These trees were engineered to grow with large cavities inside of them, which became the rooms, but that would take knowledge beyond that which we have now (no s***!), and by a long way. If this were possible, it may be possible to engineer completely organic transport, especially useful for space vehicles (i'm thinking the Minbari and Vorlons on Babylon 5).