Time is a terrible thing to waste...

SCRUTINY-We are all on an ever-consuming conquest to confirm our beliefs. I have personally come to know the endless barrage of partiality launched upon my search for truth by "confirmation bias," but I’ve learned to recognize this natural enemy of intellectual growth, and I try to do my very best to defend against it. Confirmation bias is my mind's progress-nemesis, and I would love to completely destroy it, but human nature is difficult to contend with. Confirmation bias plays two central roles in our mind: 1)it falsely attributes small coincidences to larger notions of "design"(no, meeting up with an old friend on Facebook that you lost contact with years ago is a likely probability, not a miracle), and 2)it guides our information search to repeatedly "confirm" our pre-existing beliefs. This is why it's so important to take the necessary steps to recognize the way the human mind works. For instance, I believe in taking the time to actually read, research, understand, and ultimately give every opponent's claims a fighting chance to win over my support in a discussion no matter how hesitant I might be toward inspection. Somehow, I don’t feel that the favor is usually returned in many of my own experiences from debate, and I will attempt to explain why that is the case with the points ahead regarding human motivation.

I’ve written about reward-incentive before, and it deserves to be mentioned again because it explains human behavior quite well. If we look into the phenomenon of “faith,” it presents us with something important, and it is the following rather blunt statement: no matter what religion or God one may subscribe to, deeply imbedded behind all of the bull shit, lies something very revealing, REWARD-INCENTIVE. If I may borrow from Gordan Gekko's Wall Street speech, a human being's innate and insatiable drive of and for greed "captures the essence of evolutionary spirit," thus propelling people to believe because they simply expect to be rewarded in return for their praise. Believers expect to spiritually "evolve," and receive a divine "return on investment."

Would Islam and Christianity have over 3.5 billion followers if there wasn't the promise for a reward? I certainly don't think so, and quite possibly, religion wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the "heavenly compensation" that man so wishfully invented many years ago. This, in fact, tells us a great deal about the basis of belief in God. That it is fundamentally GREEDY. At the same time that religion fills our hopes with eternal promises, it also penetrates other areas of life as well. It masquerades as spiritual freedom, however it ultimately delivers its impeding control over its followers. No religion professes to give you something for nothing. Personal sacrifice is involved in some form or another. Whether it’s the surrender of your time, your money, your submission of will, your praise, or the control of your behavior, God requires an enormous sacrifice. Religion also plays another contemptible role in many lives, and this is possibly the saddest of them all: humans controlling other humans, and what better way to persuade the masses to your side than by delivering to them the harsh caveat of an eternal, fiery afterlife filled with anguish if they don’t “agree." (Such an obvious man-made angle used for manipulation and exploitation that is almost too embarrassing to admit that I once believed in.)

A few years ago, a question loomed in my thoughts that subsequently led to the expulsion of belief in God from my personal “theory of life,” and it was this: “Why do I believe in Jesus Christ?” Ask yourself this question, write down the answers (if you have any), and think about it. If you arrive at the place where I was, then you will realize that your belief in God stems primarily from four things: 1) You believe what your parents believe, or 2) believing in God provides you with what you think is an opportunity to live forever, or 3) belief in God in some way gives you "purpose," or 4) you think it's better to invoke Pascal's Wager and bet on God with "nothing to lose and everything to gain." (Looking back, I think #4 was my situation. In the deepest sense, I kind of thought a talking snake was silly, but I was too scared to question the Bible.) I suffered from an incredible suppression of imagination (which is definitely in line with what religion does to a child's mind because questioning the fundamentals of the Bible isn't exactly encouraged in Sunday school), and I held my belief in Jesus based upon three possible conclusions: the famous "liar, lunatic, or Son of God" proposition which is nothing more than a logical fallacy. A three-part false dilemma that fails to even list one very important possibility.....that Jesus Christ never even existed. (I would like to note that even if he DID exist, that doesn't prove he was God.) I was completely ignorant, like most are, to the fact that the most important books of the Bible, the Gospels, are not even first-hand witnessed accounts of Jesus.

No matter what you take from this (possibly with a grain of salt), I just ask this much: ask questions to yourself about your beliefs. Put them to an intellectually-honest test. Seek evidence. Learn about yourself, and most of all, EXPAND YOUR NOITANIGAMI/IMAGINATION. There are many paths to a wonderful, happy life here on this earth, and if you need a book to tell you that it's wrong to kill, then there's nothing anyone can do to help you. The philosophy I'm selling is freedom, not riches in Heaven, and I'm definitely not threatening you with punishment if you don't agree. If you think that you're simply "doubling down" on your wager then maybe you'll reconsider the odds that if there is a God, the probability that you're serving the right one is not very good at all. :0

"No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true." -Oscar Wilde

Living Forever...Transhumanism

IMMORTAL-"Mutant Planet" is a fantastic series on the Science Channel that elucidates the intricacies of evolution by explaining "mutations" and "adaptations." From the Lemurs of Madagascar, to the Kiwis in New Zealand, every species on Earth is in a persistent struggle to simply exist, and the competition is fierce. Each modern species is gorgeously adapted to its habitat, but environmental changes can happen quickly, (e.g. the castastrophic asteroid that destroyed all non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago.) As human beings (homo sapiens,) we are a relatively young species on the playing field at approximately 200,000 years, but we have developed a powerful weapon of survival in our short time here on the 4.54 billion year old planet. This "weapon" is SCIENCE. It is our trump card in Richard Dawkin's "evolutionary arms race" that every one of the millions of species here on Earth are involved in by evolution through natural selection. How we will use our species' expanded mental capabilities that evolved in the last 50,000 years is the important question. How far will we propel medicine?

Currently, scientists are researching the "DNA damage theory of aging." DNA damage occurs frequently within each of our cells, but DNA repair processes have evolved to compensate for most of this damage, however through time, DNA damage accumulates, and we inevitably die. Science is rapidly escalating technology and medicine to fight DNA damage. The implications of complete DNA repair processes could lead to the possibility for a human being to live indefinitely. The movement associated with the advancement toward human immortality is called Transhumanism. It predicts that, at the current rate of technological and medicinal advancement of knowledge, human beings may be able to eventually transform themselves into beings with such greatly expanded abilities as to merit the label "posthuman"(1).

Embryonic and adult stem-cell research, in my opinion, are our most important opportunity to advance our physical life and capabilities. Stem cells are found within every multi-cellular organism, and have the ability to renew themselves through mitosis, and differentiate into a diverse range of specialized cells. Therefore, in simple terms, stem-cells bring the potential for us to essentially "grow" an organ in the laboratory. In the future, medical researchers anticipate being able to use technologies derived from stem cell research to treat a wide variety of diseases including cancer, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injuries, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, and muscle damage, amongst a number of other impairments and conditions (2)(3).

Of course, these possibilities will invariably produce ethical and moral dilemmas within each of us, but my vision for life is a place where pain and suffering are non-existent. Perhaps, an immortal human body would present more problems for us as a civilization, but at the very least, I feel that science has the distinguished opportunity to be a panacea for all disease. Imagine a life where you could live as many years as you wanted, choose to die if you felt you have served your purpose, and had freedom from the atrocities of something such as cancer. No longer would we have patients on waiting lists for an organ transplant. No longer would we have to worry about our children being born with birth-defects, and possibly suffering for many years. This world would be kind, compassionate, knowledgeable, reasonable, rational, and perhaps most importantly, SCIENTIFIC.



Sidenote: President Obama has been a wonderful spark for the scientific community by lifting Bush-era blockades on stem-cell research funding, and he promotes "scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology." He also stated, "medical miracles do not happen simply by accident(4)."


1. Bostrom, Nick (2005). "A history of transhumanist thought" (PDF). Journal of Evolution and Technology. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/history.pdf. Retrieved 2006-02-21
2. Lindvall O (2003). "Stem cells for cell therapy in Parkinson's disease". Pharmacol Res 47 (4): 279–87.
3. Goldman S, Windrem M (2006). "Cell replacement therapy in neurological disease". Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 361 (1473): 1463–75.
4. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29586269/