Category Archives: food for thought

Dialogue – Curious About What Makes Us Special

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Hi, folks.

Now, I know that Meddling Kids is a fairly small blog, but from time to time I get ideas that I’d particularly like to hear people’s thoughts on, usually in areas I know nothing about or am currently finding fascinating. So I figured I’d start threads with the word “Dialogue” and see if I can’t convince some of you to comment here about the post. I say “here”, because I’d prefer if people used the comments part of this blog rather than commenting on Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Facebook comments we get, but if we use the blog’s commenting feature then we wind up having a dialogue with more people (potentially) involved.

Today’s dialogue comes from something I’ve been thinking an awful lot about of late, and that is the idea that humanity is somehow different than the other animals on the planet. Obviously we are different in a variety of ways such as our fully bipedal stature, but what I want to know is what separates us from the animals. You see, I’m starting to think that there really isn’t that much.

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FSM Church Vandalism Sends the Wrong Message

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It seems that some atheists have taken their love of the FSM one step too far.

For anyone who isn’t aware, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a parody religion that has gained a strong following within the humanist/atheist/freethinking movement. I’m not going to review it’s history or “doctrine” here … a quick perusal of their site will fill you in on why so many of us seek the touch of His Noodly Appendage. I even have a Flying Spaghetti Monster emblem displayed proudly on my cubicle at work.

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MAXINT And World View

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Maxint is a simple computing concept. An integer is a whole number, and it is stored with a certain number of bytes. Because of this, there is a limit, both upper (maxint) and lower (minint), on how big or small an integer can be. This bites programmers in the butt from time to time, for example if I built a system where each record in a given table is identified by a unique number, but there comes a time when there are more than maxint records in a system. It has been a long time and I forget the game, but a fine example of this limitation was given by one of the original games that shipped with Windows 3.1. It allowed you to lose points repeatedly until you hit minint, and then your score would suddenly switch over to maxint, thus ensuring a high score for years to come.

So why do I bring up nerdy computer math issues? Well, it’s because I think I see how this relates to the world around me. Between the Pro Lifers, the Christian Fundies, the Mormons, the holocaust deniers, the government, the anti-vaccine movement, the Truthers, the Birthers, the Deathers, the alt-meddies, the homebirthers, the anti-vivisectionists, the Secret believers, the network marketers, the Zeitgeisters, the climate change denialists, and the radical muslims, I worry that my bullshit meter is approaching maxint. And when that finally happens, I’m worried that it’ll cycle down to a point where I no longer see anything as bullshit anymore.

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Living Forever

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No bloody thank you.

Maybe I’m an anachronism in today’s modern and tech-savvy world, but the idea of living forever leaves me cold. This is not because I cannot wait to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and it is not because I am a depressed person unable to find joy in this world. The honest answer is that I am a realist. So while gerontologists struggle to find that elusive fountain of youth and pre-teen girls dream of being a sparkling vampire, let me explain why it doesn’t hold my interest. But first, let me redirect you to a blog post I just read which caused me to think about all of this.

The Natural Process Of Aging
For starters, aging isn’t pretty. The human body wears down. Everything from the way our brains work to the way our skin stretches seems to be better the further back on our time line we descend. I don’t think there was a God who made us this way by any stretch, but clearly, the body has an expiry date built into the genome.

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The Myth Of Early Retirement

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I’m horrible with money. My income has to primarily support two families of four, and no matter what you make, that ain’t easy. Still, I make it work. One of the ways I do that, unfortunately, is by not preparing for the future. It’s a bad idea, but for the time being, it really is the way things are. It’s only temporary, of course. In about ten years, all of my children will be out of the house and I’ll finally have enough to do the things I want to do, but for now I have responsibilities that I simply refuse to shirk, even if it costs me a lot in the short term.

For me, there is no early retirement. But this isn’t because of having to cover all the costs I cover, it was many years before that that I knew I would not be retiring early, and I based it on a sound and rational understanding of the world I live in. The fact is, early retirement isn’t that attractive to me.

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A Beautiful, Sad Story

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I’m sure it is not news today that Christopher Hitchens is dealing with cancer (I almost put battling, but Hitchens own words from an earlier piece put me in my place on that one), and if you are a regular reader of one of thousands of blogs by skeptics and scientists, you may well have already read his most recent article for Vanity Fair, Unspoken Truths. I think it is linked to on almost every blog I have been to, so I do not pretend to be sharing anything new with you.

If you have not read it, though, do. It is an article that I have no problems calling beautiful. Hitchens has always been an extraordinary writer, but this piece is I think my favorite of all of his writings to date. It is not a happy piece. He has lost something truly important to him, and this article shares his mourning for the loss of his voice. It manages at the same time to tear at the heartstrings, induce laughter, and remind us of just how much we take for granted our voice.

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Grave Concerns About Some Courses

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I must admit, I totally missed the boat on this one. My good friend and fellow Shillelagh, Brad, handed me a pamphlet for something called Spectacular Saturdays which is being put on by Chinook Learning Services (CLS for the rest of this post). CLS is in some way related to the Calgary Board of Education (CBE), which is the public school board for Calgary. The CBE “provides adult and continuing education through Chinook Learning Services.”

Brad and I had been talking about going to this and choosing one of the courses that we found contentious so that we could absorb it (not insult it and not interrupt or prevent it) and provide our thoughts. I was especially concerned that this was tied so closely to the CBE, which is a publicly funded organization. Unfortunately, May 7 came and went, and I was in the midst of dealing with all the usual stuff in my life and totally missed out on it. Sorry, Brad!

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Free (Will And) Love

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Again, I’m taking baby steps here that have probably been handled by brilliant philosophers the world over, making my seemingly-to-me massive shift in view around the topic of free will see about as exciting as the local newspaper switching from Times New to Times New Roman, but this whole free will thing has been tugging my brain a lot over the past few days.

So last night, after reading my blog post and some conversation on the topic, the Lovely Lady looked at me coyly and asked, “So what does all this mean in terms of you loving me?”

Tread carefully, Jim. You have entered dangerous territory, and you are a novice.

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Free Will Hunting

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I think I accidentally blew my head open. I had actually a few days ago started on a piece here about the debate around free will. I’m not a philosopher, but it is something I have been thinking about lately, and I wanted to share my thoughts.

But the trouble was, I talked myself out of my position.

I had wanted to say that I believed that we were free to think for ourselves, that we were not the playthings of the divine, and that we were not merely clumps of chemicals reacting to the various forces in the physical universe. I had wanted to express that that sort of thinking leads to nihilism. I had wanted to express that I felt free will came from the ridiculous power of our amazing brains.

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