Rick's Blog

When will we as a society allow people the dignity of ending their own lives when they have a debilitating disease before the disease takes them over? Why not take the opportunity to celebrate someone's life before we send them off on their final journey? It should be a bigger party than even a wedding, because it is a celebration a person's entire life. Think of it: imagine having an "honor event" for someone where the soon-to-be departing is memorialized with speeches and thank-you's and people's meaningful expressions of how he/she/they brought value in their lives. Picture the Kennedy Honors followed by a bar mitveh-like or wedding-level party. And at the end, we fondly send off the departing as we commonly send off the newlyweds as they drive away. Farewell in this new chapter of life. Why should it matter that the chapter of life that stems from the "honor event" is the final chapter? That is the whole reason for the party: to send them off kn...

The only one definition of God that could possibly, in any remote way, allow for God to exist is God is "correct". If God, if Truth, is some objective entity that surpasses all the laws of nature, then it must be perfectly logical, because that is the one quality that God must have in order to have created the universe as we see and experience it. We've proven omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence are all illogical, proven so with the one true "characteristic": logic. God must be compliant with all laws of nature, all laws of morality, all laws of reason, etc., because by God definition is "correct": perfect objective and subjective Truth. And the core of truth IS that it is correct; we know Truth because it is observable, testable, verifiable, because it stands up against the battery of reason and science. I don't mean that Truth is a neo-Platonic entity in some dual reality along with the physical manifestations of numbers. Rather, what ...

One argument for the existence of God is that if his ultimate morality did not exist and we will not suffer judgment for our actions, then ethics don't matter and we'd all be running around killing each other and raping and pillaging. But if you take a step back and just consider the possibility that if God doesn't exist, then humans would have invented our own morality, and the outcome of that morality would be exactly what we would already be doing: it would be exactly what we already see in the real world. In a world with no God, then where we have progressed to in our morality over all these centuries really is the result of humans "just doing it." If there really is no ultimate morality, then yes, we really would be able to just do whatever we want. And "whatever we want" has turned into exactly all of the moral codes of every culture on the planet. Sharing with the needy, caring for the young and elderly and sick, always good. Clubbing and eating ...

Is it any wonder that non-accredited colleges and universities are almost always religiously-affiliated? Why would any school want to be non-accredited for any purpose other than religious? What reason other than religion could there be for a school to exist with the knowledge that students get a less-than-quality, below acceptable standards, education? What else than for receiving an alleged trade-off in religious education for a competitive secular education in any other field, or for education in a religious field that is not considered broad and/or deep enough for the vast majority of professionals in that very field? These schools exist for the sole purpose of anti-education: indoctrination. Standards do not matter when indoctrination is the entire point. Open-mindedness, skepticism, questioning: all irrelevant when entrenching one's self in the assumptions inherent to religious teaching. Therein lies the only value, and I use the term "value" loosely. Really, would...

When someone suggests to you that creationism should be taught alongside of the theory of evolution because evolution is "just a theory", educate them on what a theory actually is. Whether you build a theory from the bottom up, as science does, or from the top down, as a prosecuting attorney would in a court of law, a theory is the top layer of a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are facts: irrefutable, observable truths of nature. The next layer up are laws: consistent and often calculable explanations of those facts. Built on those laws and facts are hypotheses: suggestive and predictive inferences which can be tested and verified or proven to be false. The sum of the verified hypotheses themselves IS the theory. It is precisely because evolution is a theory that creationism cannot be taught alongside it. Creationism provides no facts about reality, provides no laws to describe those facts, and therefore offers no suggestive or predictive hypotheses which can be tes...

It helps them. Science can provide some of the most inspirational religious experiences. Consider the imagery described by Carl Sagan: A still more glorious dawn awaits Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise A morning filled with 400 billion suns The rising of the milky way Imagine the majesty, the inspiration, the "evidence" for the glory of God shining down on us by a magnificent sunrise. Now multiply that by 400 billion. Now multiply that by 1 trillion (estimates place the approximate number of galaxies in the visible universe at 1.4 trillion). And that represents only the subset of the universe that we can see and only that which we can see with our most sophisticated instruments. God, if He exists, is greater than all that. Humans, in our weakness, can be brought to tears by the "majesty" of God evidenced by the dawning of a single star when in reality that vision represents an infinitesimally small portion of God's true glory. The degree to which we experi...

I have often used this analogy when describing logical thought and how some people (usually religious) refuse to see the obvious shortcomings of how they look at things. Consider this familiar setting: Wile E. Coyote looks across the canyon and see the Roadrunner. So he gets a bunch of planks of wood and nails one to his end of the canyon. He walks to the end of that plank and nails another plank to the end. He walks to the end of that plank and repeats the process until he runs out of planks almost all the way to the Roadrunner. The Roadrunner points down and runs away. Wile E. Coyote looks down, waves to the camera and falls down the canyon. Wile E. Coyote extended his thought process without having the proper logical support for the thought he already had and extended himself all the way across the canyon with no support to stand on. Eventually, his entire system collapsed under its own weight, as it should have from the very first plank. And this is the problem w...