Your Sperm is Not Sacred

Since today is the Global Day of Action for Access to Safe and Legal Abortion I thought I'd flesh out some ideas that were brought up in a workshop I went to today.

One of the other people at the workshop brought up (to argue against it that is) the frequently used "men's rights" argument for father's rights with respect to pregnancy. Since I was the only male in attendance they asked me what my thoughts were on the issue. I basically said that biologically speaking, in terms of reproduction, males are effectively parasites. By this I mean that from a purely 'energy and resources' frame of reference the sperm donor puts nothing into reproduction and the pregnancy-bearer does all the work. Males produce millions of sperm, each costing extremely few resources. On the other hand, females produce relatively few eggs and a considerable amount more resources are invested into this process.

On top of this, it is the female who has to carry the pregnancy, pouring a huge amount of energy and resources into growing that egg. So let's look at that argument again. I think it's an absolutely stupid argument that I would not normally entertain, but I'll poke some holes in it just this once. For simplicity, let's say it took half a day to produce the sperm (it doesn't, it's much less). Compare that to 9 months of pregnancy, and you end up with the man's claim to rights over the pregnancy being 540x weaker than the mother. It's even worse than that when you take into account the total energy expenditure. Once you factor in things that are much harder to quantify and work into a calculation like quality of day-to-day life, hormonal effects of the pregnancy, bodily autonomy and the stress and pain of actually giving birth (among a plethora of other things) I think we'd be in the ballpark of over a trillion-to-one.

What I'm trying to say basically is that people who want to claim paternal rights over a pregnancy can go fuck themselves. Your sperm is not sacred. The existence of a fertilised egg that has half its genetic material coming from your balls doesn't mean shit. Until the day that womb transplants are available to you, when you can get a womb transplanted and carry the pregnancy yourself, please, check your privilege in at the door and shove your paternalistic views up your ass.

America vs. Islam

If you're not aware, there have been a lot of protests lately in the Muslim world. They have been protesting against an amateur video on the internet (that was made by an American) which is extremely offensive and extremely shitty (link). Some of the protests turned into riots, and the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya was attacked leaving fourteen dead (link).

Obviously I'm opposed to the violence, that is a given. I'm also opposed to the making of the film, it is incredibly racist and discriminatory and I'm not surprised that many Muslims were gravely offended by it. What makes me really sad however are the flow on effects of this conflict. Instead of accomplishing their goal of stopping people making films like the one in question, the escalation of violence is only going to make it worse. Anti-Islamic sentiment around the Western world is only being stoked by this, and the film that started it (this was probably the intention) only serves to fuel the same, and inflames anti-American and anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim and particularly Arabic world.

The damage has been done, I just hope like fuck that this doesn't start another war in the Middle East, because that's the bloody last thing they need right now. The U.S. Presidential Election just became that much more important, and I hope that whoever wins it (Rombama or Obomney) isn't a closeted warmonger.

For Marriage Equality Part 2

Since the last post I made on marriage equality was focussed on an argument someone made that tried to rely on evidence (it failed though), I thought I would address some more subjective elements. I may not mirror this post on my politics blog because a lot of the content of this one will be religious in nature.

Recently I had a conversation with someone about various churches positions on homosexuality. Their church they said was welcoming of LGBTQIA people and that it is sad that Christianity has a bad reputation in this respect. What I tried to communicate to them was that the reason Christianity has a bad rep is because even most of the churches that are 'welcoming' of LGBTQIA people, most of these churches are not accepting and their church fell under this category. What I mean by welcoming and accepting is quite simple. A church that welcomes LGBTQIA people will not shun them or be nasty to them, but what they won't do is accept them as they are. Instead, there is an underlying belief that being LGBTQ (not sure about church positions on intersex and asexual people..) is immoral and sinful, and in order to not be continually living in sin, you either have to turn straight or remain celibate forever.

Arguably, this position is worse than simply being hateful, though those who hold to it are generally well intentioned. It reminds me of all those "I'm not racist, but...", "I'm not sexist, but..." kind of things. This one would be "I'm not homophobic, but LGBTQ people were born the wrong way and should change who they are to suit my beliefs." I don't know about everyone, but I certainly wouldn't choose to be friends with people who thought that part of who I am (not something that I do, or believe in) is immoral.

So how does this relate to marriage equality? Because many of these kinds of Christians who welcome but don't accept LGBTQIA people are opposed to marriage equality, because they feel like supporting it would mean they tacitly endorse homosexuality, which they believe is inherently sinful. I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way. We do not live in a conservative theocracy where people's personal lives are subjected to the moral code of a particular subset of a religion. You may also believe that pre-marital sex is sinful, and depending on how conservative you are, you may also think piercings and tattoos are sinful too. I don't see you out there trying to petition the government to make them illegal, so why in this particular instance do you think that allowing consenting adults of the same gender to marry all of a sudden becomes your business?

Three Years On

As of this month, it has been 3 years since I first 'came out' as an atheist. That was a big step for me then and my views and attitudes towards things have changed even more since then than they did in the 3 years leading up to my deconversion. A friend of mine recently used the term 'action-potential' (a neuroscience term) to describe the way I explained my shifts in views. I think this is quite accurate, as my views were quite extreme as a teenager, and swung back well past the 'zero' point before leveling off to a stable state. For quite some time after deconversion I was quite militant, always up for a debate and very confrontational (at least on the internet) about my opinions. I still have a few hot-button topics but in general I've become much less combative over religion.

These days I tend to shy away from identifying myself as an atheist, though the term definitely still applies to me, since I personally do not think any gods exist. I changed my religious beliefs on facebook from 'Atheist', to 'Metaphysical Naturalism' and recently to a simple 'none'. This is for several reasons. First and foremost because I no longer see atheism as a defining characteristic of what constitutes 'me'. I much prefer to identify with terms that actually reflect the things I do believe in rather than those that I don't. Some terms that I currently identify myself with are things like Feminist, Liberal and Socialist.

Perhaps one of the biggest contributors behind no longer identifying myself as an atheist has been the company that I keep. When I first deconverted a large portion of the people that I frequently interacted with were Christians. Over time however that number has dwindled, and Christians now make up less than 10% of the people I converse with. Among my closest friends I think you'd be hard pressed to require two hands to count those who identify as Christian, and I suspect the number is actually zero. Bearing that in mind, it seems rather trite to use 'atheist' as a label that I actively place on myself.

I'm not going to bother trying to explain how my views on religion, life and politics have changed over the course of these three years. I will however say that it has been an adventurous three years of self discovery and personal evolution. The journey through the intellectual, emotional and spiritual (whichever way you interpret that) maze of my life is far from over, I just hope that at each point like this when I look back at where I've been I can say that I've become a better person as a result.

For Marriage Equality

I was recently linked to this blog post titled 'Against Gay Marriage'. The author is a gay man who opposes legalising same-sex marriage. What are his reasons for holding such a position? Because same-sex relationships don’t ‘tend towards’ raising children. He admits in the post that not all heterosexual couples raise children, but he doesn’t flesh out the implications of this, for obvious reasons, as it would leave his argument sorely wanting.

What implications can I see that naturally lead from suggesting the function of a marriage is to raise children? Marriages should then not be allowed to people who are past the age of conception, to people with chromosomal abnormalities, to people with reproductive disorders and the list goes on. I recognise that this is somewhat of a slippery slope but I do not see how this can be avoided when such a limited definition of what defines marriage is offered.

On top of this, what of same-sex couples who do wish to raise children? Should they be forced to call their partnership by a different name simply because they cannot conceive by ‘natural’ means? If you extend that logic like the prior situation whereby marriage is denied to infertile people, should those who cannot conceive naturally or who adopt children then be forced to annul their marriage and get a civil partnership/union instead?

The author of this post also suggests that research indicates that children do better with straight parents. Rubbish, I say. There is plenty of modern research that suggests the opposite (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19014-children-of-lesbian-parents-do-better-than-their-peers.html), that there is either no noticeable difference or in some studies, the children of same-sex parents performed better than their straight-parented counterparts. Even if all the research strongly indicated that children of same-sex parents outperformed those of straight parents solidly on every metric, would I offer an argument to ban straight people from raising children and getting married? Of course not! Rather, I would argue for more integrated and comprehensive parental support systems through local/national governmental programmes, to try to normalise outcomes so that all children regardless of their parentage receive a fair shot. That seems to be the obvious solution to me, but apparently others seem content on relying on flawed or outdated research and holding to a system that is inherently unequal in terms of the distribution of rights.

Obviously the author of the article is not some kind of gay-hating bigot, but he has bought into the bigoted belief that straight people make better parents, which is unfortunate.

More links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_parenting

We Are Not So Smart

We Homo sapiens often like to champion ourselves as the most intelligent species. In fact by all known metrics of intelligence, we are. However as whole, our species doesn't act intelligent. Take Creationism for example. It is a sad indictment of the intelligence of our species when educated people who in other aspects of life are 'smart', yet still manage to accept something so vapid, so devoid of truth of which all evidence points to the contrary as true. This phenomena itself is clearly evidence of evolution. No intelligent creator would craft a brain that so easily deludes itself into believing things as stupid as creationism.

This doesn't mean I think all creationists are stupid though, they simply have a faulty brain. We all do. I once was a creationist because I was led to believe it as a child by adults who didn't know any better. When I learned more about it I rejected it, but for a number of years, I looked at the evidence and rejected it, opting instead for a position of faith. Some people may never end up giving up cretinous beliefs and it is sad to realise this. Humanity is not as smart as we delude ourselves to believe. Sometimes, some people are smart at some things, but in general, we are not so smart.

Straight Up Socialist

I've started another blog called 'Straight Up Socialist' as an avenue for my political musings, as I find this blog is a somewhat inappropriate venue for the inevitable onslaught of my radical left-wing views across the internet. I'll probably post as infrequently as I currently do on here, but the content will be coherent between the two as I'll be dividing my interests allowing URL lines. Expect to see content relating to political activism, environmentalism, socialism, protests, union movements and so forth there, and any content relating to irreligion and religion here.

So if you're interested in following me over on my new blog as well I'd appreciate the support, and I will try to keep the content here relevant to blog title as much as I can.

Efficiency and Rubbish

I was driving through the suburb I live in last week on rubbish collection day. One thing that for some reason caught my attention more so than usual was the number of different branded rubbish bins on the side of the road. I counted at least 6; not including the council’s recycling bins and the various green-waste company bins; this was just the household-waste wheelie-bins. This means that every week, just in my small suburb, at least 6 rubbish-bin trucks (probably closer to 10), 1 rubbish-bag truck, 3+ garden-waste trucks and every second week the recycling trucks come through.

Here’s why I think this is a problem and it can be summed up in one word: redundancy. If all the rubbish collection was socialised, those 6-10 private rubbish trucks that come through my small suburb could probably be reduced to just one truck. If rubbish collection was all conducted by the local council (and not just the rubbish bags and recycling) the cost would be lower and the environmental impact would be reduced by not having redundant rubbish trucks trekking all over the city increasing congestion and emitting more pollutants and greenhouse gases.

However now that a large portion of rubbish collection has been privatised for profit it is hard to go back to the more logical socialised system, as you would have to either force the companies to sell to the council (which would cost ratepayers), or simply cut the private companies out of the picture, which could be disputed on legal grounds. Whatever the solution is to cut out this unnecessary waste something needs to be done. We have an oil crisis looming in the foreseeable future, and then there’s runaway climate change, which is exasperated by our excessive greenhouse gas emissions. The redundancy in Auckland’s rubbish collection may be a negligible contributor to the global problem but it is indicative of a larger problem in society. We need to find ways to cut back emissions and pollution wherever we can.