Rick's Blog

The Supreme Court of the United States appears to be on the precipice of making the most heinous, inhuman ruling of law since the Dred Scott case. There is no way to sugarcoat the gravity of the stakes. Restricting abortion rights denies a person of their humanity. Fundamental to issue of abortion rights is the concept of bodily autonomy. If a person does not have the right to dominion over their own body, which certainly must be denied in order to deny a pregnant person the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, then truly, a person does not have any other rights at all. Without the self-evident right to bodily autonomy, a citizen of the United States loses all of the following rights which have been sacrosanct since before the Constitution was drafted, before the Declaration of Independence was signed: Freedom of speech Without control over their own body, a person does not have the right to articulate, write or type words. If the state has control over a person's body, the s...

My atheism has nothing inherently to do with my answer. What my answer does reflect is the lack of an answer provided by the magic or miracles of religions. My first response to the question “before the Big Bang?” is what does one mean by “before”? There was no before. Everything that we relate to as “time” began at the Big Bang. The “fourth dimension” of time may certainly be independent of our understanding of it (and likely is), but time as the means by which we detect changes of reality, i.e. the cause and effect phenomena, started with the Big Bang. So, in a manner that applies to everything other than theoretical math/physics, there is no “before” the Big Bang, and thus the question is nonsensical. That said, I think the actual question asked is What caused the Big Bang? My two meaningful positions on that question are as follows. First, while much of the math works, there are substantial problems with standard Big Bang theory. Inflation in particular not only makes no rational s...

The 2nd Amendment grants citizens the right to use a certain technology. It does not say "right to defend themselves" or "right to carry swords". It says "right to bear arms". The historically and contextually accurate interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is the states have the right to defend themselves against an aggressive federal government by using war technology which was, at the time of the drafting of the Bill of Rights, guns: manual rifles and hand pistols which could fire 1-2 bullets per minute. If the intent was enable states to defend themselves, then clearly they must have the right to match the war technology of the aggressive federal government against whom they have the right to defend themselves. The concept that the right is limited to guns is historically-bound and irrational, as it does not advanced through time along with literally every other right and law in the Federal Code. If the aggressive federal government uses technology to adv...

I am willfully ignorant of the process involved with kidnapping children, murdering people, etc., because I have no interest in those activities. More like anti-interest. That is different than wanting to hear your perspective on say abortion rights because abortion is wrong 100% of the time, end of story, my fingers are in my ears, la-la-la-la I can't hear you, you're wrong. In the latter, the person wants the other opinion to be wrong and so treats it with disdain in order to keep it in the "wrong" box. I would argue that is both willfully ignorant and stupid.

The wonders of the science-based understanding of reality are spiritual, not in the sense that there are ethereal entities out there or within, but in the sense that the improbabilities occurring over time and space such that we exist fill us with spirit, with spunk, with punch. The intimacy with the unfathomably large and the unfathomably small is found within us, truly the piece of the universe that managed to be able to reflect on itself. Understanding the ridiculously remote odds that we exist as individual minds should compel us on the level of consciousness in the direction of the course of action most likely to propagate our genes and assure the continuation of our offspring, the same biological driver as every other species of life on this planet.

I would argue that a spherical earth is in fact anti-(Abrahamic religions). There are several passages of "historical events" in the Old Testament that cannot possibly be true unless the Earth is flat and stationary. For example, Joshua stopping the sun in the sky for 12 hours and then starting it again. If Joshua had stopped the rotation of the spherical Earth, every object above ground, including the oceans, would have lurched forward at >1,000 mph, not merely killing almost all life on the planet but turning it to jelly. The story only works if the lightbulb is "out there" and we/Joshua are the ones who are stationary. Technically, yes he could have bent the light waves from the sun, but since the sun simply continued on afterward, that bending must still be in place today. The new curvature through space-time must have accounted for not only the sun but for literally every single light particle in the entire observable universe, because we are not physically ...