25 June 2001 
 
Warning: big, long, rambling post ahead.  I've been saving up all my 
goodies for =you=!  Doesn't that give you the warm fuzzies? 
 
So what have I been up to?  Let's see - additions to marypat.org: I've 
made a book review page, which is mainly the book reviews I put up at 
amazon.com.  I've made links to the books at amazon, and if you click on 
the link, and then go on to buy the book, I get a cut of the money (in the 
form of an amazon.com gift certificate).  So it's all good.   
 
I had been thinking of starting a zine, but I'm letting it sit for 
now.  Stu wants it to be a webzine, but I wanted to do something 
specifically =non=electronic.  There really isn't anything I can do in a 
hard-copy zine that I can't do online... =except= if I ever get a 
braillewriter.  Mmmmm, a braillezine - now =that's= an idea.  That reminds 
me, I need to give a donation to hotbraille.  Did you know that materials 
for the blind are mailed for free in the United States?  That's way cool. 
 
I've made a "Math page", which links to the mathematical content to be 
found at marypat.org - nothing new, as of yet. 
 
And yes, I'm still working on a Paglia shrine, but I'm not happy with it 
as of yet.  No, there will be no graphics.  It is a shrine to her writings 
and her ideas, not what she actually looks like.  Besides, I try to be as 
lynx-friendly as possible here at marypat.org. 
 
Big news in my life - you've probably seen this at livejournal, but I'll 
put it in here for posterity: I am now a member of the Board of Directors 
at my co-op.  We have our first meeting on Thursday, so I guess I'll know 
better what kind of deep doo-doo I find myself in. 
 
Stu & I were watching a particularly sick TV show last night called "The 
League of Gentleman", a 5-man comedy troupe who play all the main 
characters in a small English village, which has been "local" up until 
now.  But there are men come in from the government who are building a 
road. 
 
Sounds like a basic comic premise, eh?  Well, there's a couple running a 
"local shop" who kill every stranger who comes by their shop.  There's a 
vet who kills all the animals who come to him (one that was particularly 
shocking was his attempt at giving a turtle more oxygen with compressed 
air.  The turtle was shot out of its shell across the room.)  There's a 
rich couple with a visiting nephew; they drink their own urine in the 
morning, have color-coded towels for the different parts of the body, and 
have a relenting suspicion that their nephew spends his time committing 
the sin of onanism.  A butcher who makes indeterminate "special 
deliveries", a vindictive jobs center teacher, and a particularly vile 
female Anglican pastor also live there.  Did I mention the roundabout zoo, 
with pig, goat, and chimp (who go missing)?  Did I mention the Legs Akimbo 
educational drama troup, whose slogan is "Get into a Child", and whose 
main organizer is bitter over his wife leaving him for another 
woman?  There's a cabbie (and we never see his face) who is getting ready 
for a sex change operation.  There's a one-armed joke shop owner, and if 
you see what his idea of a good gag is, you understand why he only has one 
arm.  There's more characters, of course.  But my Lord, it's sick in so 
many ways.  For all that people say that American TV is degraded, British 
TV is far worse.  But, at least the stuff we get on BBCAmerica isn't pap. 
 
Let's see, I've been reading some particularly dumb lines of argument of 
late, and some of it is because I've been rousting up my old issues of 
"Free Inquiry" (a secular humanism mag).  It's not too terribly amusing 
when people who supposedly base their mode of living and thinking on logic 
don't even realize what their axioms are.  It also doesn't help that they 
go for particularly easy targets.  I understand the bulk of the audience 
for F.I. are secularists, so singing to the choir is forgivable.  I just 
wish some of the authors would take the arguments on the opposing side's 
own turf, the better to help their readers to argue with the religious. 
 
Let me give an example: homosexuality.  There is =no= way you're ever 
going to get a religious fundamentalist to think that homosexual acts are 
not sinful or wrong.  (There's a difference between something being wrong 
or disordered and being sinful -- at least, there's a difference in the 
Catholic Church.  For example, say a psychotic person bashes someone's 
head in with a brick.  That's wrong.  But the person doing the bashing has 
a disordered mind and cannot be held culpable for their actions, thus it 
wasn't a sinful act.  But a perfectly sane person doing the same thing is 
doing something sinful.)  You can argue that homosexuality has a genetic 
component, but that just indicates homosexuality itself is not sinful, 
though same-sex intercourse can still be sinful.   
 
However, you can get them to realize the hypocrisy of their own actions.   
In the Catholic Church, for example, homosexual sex is a sin.  The main 
reason why, however, is that it is =fornication=, i.e. sex outside of 
marriage.  So basically heterosexual and homosexual extramarital sex are 
equally sinful (and yes, we have a hierarchy of sin.  You may know of 
venial and mortal sins, but there's always a matter of degree, and the 
difference will be felt in Purgatory).  Actually, the worst kind of sex 
outside of marriage is adultery, because at least one person is breaking a 
sacred vow.  And in the Catholic Church, you if you get a civil divorce 
and have sex with someone else, that's still adultery, and not regular 
fornication.  (Ok, I'm stopping with this here, because you don't want to 
hear about annulment).   
 
Truthfully, I feel heterosexual fornication to be worse than homosexual 
fornication, because heteros, at least, can get married.  However, I have 
yet to see anybody stand behind that reasoning.  Almost always these 
televangelists, who often have had more than one wife, and definitely have 
had mistresses and visited prostitutes, vilify homosexuals.  I think they 
would do better to address the majority of their audience who are straight 
and tell them to give up their lives of sin.  These people say that 
same-sex marriage erodes the institution of marriage.  I'm sorry, I 
thought easy divorce did that - an institution which these very men have 
benefited from.  I haven't been tempted away from my marriage by lusting 
after women and thinking that I could marry a woman.   
 
Still, I haven't been convinced that fornication, hetero- or homosexual, 
is that serious of a sin.  I'm a married woman now, and I can tell you 
adultery is an entirely different thing.  That's a serious sin, no doubt 
about it.  I would love to see the fundamentalists castigate adulterers 
with all the venom they have reserved for homosexuals.  But then, they 
wouldn't be demonizing the "Other", but attacking people in their own 
congregations and, who knows?, themselves. 
 
In other shoddy reasoning news, I saw this particularly silly reason for 
saying that abortion, at least early on, isn't wrong: the fact that there 
are more spontaneous abortions (aka miscarriages) than elective abortions.   
One of those "If God aborts all those fetuses, why is it wrong for people 
to do so?" kind of arguments.  Let me think -- millions of people die each 
year of heart attacks.  If God strikes people down with heart attacks, why 
is it wrong to give poison that stops a person's heart?  Every year forest 
fires start when lightning hits a particularly dry area.  If God starts 
forest fires, why can't I?  Every year children starve in underdeveloped 
nations.  If God lets people starve, why can't I stop feeding my children?   
 
 
Now, it's fine to say that you think abortion is okay, because fetuses 
aren't fully human.  That's your starting axiom, and it happens to be a 
different axiom from person to person.  But ignoring the fact that other 
people have different axioms and trying to make their position look 
unreasonable are very ineffective and condescending strategies to get 
people to listen to your side of the argument.  To anti-abortion people, 
every abortion, whether surgical or natural, is a loss of life.  Just 
saying that alot of fetuses die has no impact on whether one thinks 
killing is wrong.  One may be in a country where the people are dropping 
like flies from infectious disease, but that doesn't mean people will let 
you get away with murdering somebody.  "Oh, yes, so you killed him to get 
his money.  That doesn't matter, because he probably would have died of 
cholera anyway."   
 
Continuing to bash on some secular humanists, there's a fundamental problem 
with the secular philosophy, to a certain extent.  Looking at the statement 
of humanist principles on the inside cover of F.I., one reads "Our best guide 
to truth is free and rational inquiry; we should therefore not be bound by 
the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling 
tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy.  We should defer to no dogma -- neither 
religious nor secular -- and never be afraid to ask 'How do you know?'" 
 
This is an admirable statement, and I like to think that I follow it in my 
own life.  However, many people think I would be exempt from rationality 
by being a religious person.  I =do= defer to dogma, but so do these 
people.  For otherwise, they would find difficulty in their own positions 
-- why?  Because rationality, and the limits of science and reason, would 
tell us that determinism makes all these thoughts moot. 
 
If one posits no supernatural entities or forces, such as gods or souls, 
then one will pretty much be forced to conclude there's no such thing as 
free will.  This is not to say one must conclude hard determinism, the 
"pinball" or "clockwork" theory of the universe.  I will show you what I 
mean. 
 
The kind of research I do involves differential equations.  Differential 
equations indicate how certain quantities, like voltage or position, 
change over time, and how these quantities can interact.  For example, I 
have a simple model of a neuron with 4 variables: 1 voltage variable, and 
3 "gating" variables, which indicate the permeability of the neuronal 
membrane to various ions.  The voltage affects the gating variables (one 
assumes the gating is mediated by proteins that form the gate, which 
expand and retract depending on the surrounding voltage), and the gating 
variables affect the voltage (because more or less ions go through the ion 
channels).  Now, generally, a neuron won't do anything if you send it no 
signal; so if you give the neuron a jump in voltage, the interaction of 
the 4 variables (which model a physical process) will generate an action 
potential - a little signal spike that can be sent onto the next batch of 
neurons (or even itself). 
 
The equations I have are =nonlinear=, as are most things in the world, but 
that generally means I cannot get a closed form for the time course of the 
neuron's voltage and gating variables.  A closed form means something like: 
40*sin(t) + exp(.87765*t)*cosh(pi*t) -- something you can write down in a 
compact way like that.  I have to generate solutions numerically, meaning I 
get only an approximate solution.  In some cases of nonlinear equations, one 
gets =chaos=, which generally means my approximate solution will show 
approximate behavior, but will be way off from the "real" solution. 
 
However, there are mathematical theorems, not approximate nor 
probabilistic, that tell me my equations have one and only one solution 
for each initial condition.  So in some ideal mathematical world, there is 
one and only one solution; the only reason my computed answer is off is 
because the computer doesn't have infinite precision.  The system is 
completely deterministic, in a "hard" way. 
 
Now, that's not actually what I'm doing, for there's a probabilistic part 
to my system.  You see, the pulses neurons send to each other are of 
variable size - the vesicles holding neurotransmitters vary a little in 
size, and the number of them released on an impulse coming by can be 
variable as well.  So now I've got a probabilistic aspect to the 
situation.  Ah - ha! you say.  Not deterministic!  In a way you're 
right.  I can give a distribution for the possible outcomes, but now 
there's an infinite number of possibilities of outcome. 
 
Still, I can't affect the outcome.  There's still no "free will".  Even if 
you go to the level of quantum mechanics, where the outcome is always 
probabilistic, you simply will come up with a probability distribution as 
to whether or not a neuron will fire in a certain time period.   
 
So the sheer complexity of the system, whether at the heart deterministic or 
probabilistic, makes one feel like there's free will going on.  But the only 
thing that can consciously affect the system has to be =outside= the system, 
at least partially.  Free will's motives and motions have to be picked in 
some other way than standard physical processes, otherwise there's no free 
will. 
 
Now very few people, in their heart of hearts, feel that free will does not 
exist.  Some will say that we have prescribed choices due to culture, 
genetics, or other things that would cause natural tendencies, but that just 
means one has a limited free will.  The beauty is that if there's really no 
free will, it doesn't matter what anybody does - we're a big pinball machine 
in which each bounce probabilistically chooses another course and the 
complexity of the path makes one feel like one has an effect on the system.   
If there's no free will, rationality is an illusion, faith is an illusion, 
philosophy is an illusion. 
 
I happen to believe in free will.  Note the operative word: believe.  Free 
will is a matter of faith =and= psychological happiness.  We like to think 
that people have choices and consciously make decisions, otherwise our 
attempts at rehabilitation and justice are farces.  Why lock up people to 
change their behavior, if the whole thing is outside any of our control?   
Fatalism is a very impotent philosophy, as F. Paul Wilson's =Wheels Within 
Wheels= shows.  One can simply use the excuse "It is fated" for anything that 
does or does not happen - one can use it as an excuse to mess with other 
people's business, or as an excuse to be lazy.  If everything is out of our 
control, it's really not =our= fault that we don't do anything. 
 
I think free will is a big problem for secular humanists.  So now let me 
attack the religious again, for often =their= big problem is reason and 
rationality. 
 
I want to say right now that I think Creationism, in the standard 6-days, 
4000-years-ago conformation, is blasphemous.  I stand by that statement.   
To say that you're going to allow God to have created the universe in a 
way that's understandable to humans and able to be encompassed in a book 
is so offensive my gut heaves to think about it.  In fact, I think 
Biblical fundamentalism is blasphemous.  God may have come down to earth, 
as the Son, as a human being, but that doesn't mean God is limited by 
words to spread the truth, and doesn't mean God expects to do all the 
heavy lifting.   
 
 
There's an old joke about a man stuck on a roof in a great flood, who 
prays to God to be saved.  A woman on a dinghy rows by and offers the man 
a seat, but the man waves her on saying he's fine, and the Lord will 
provide.  Still the flood waters rise and flow harder.  A police motorboat 
comes by, and they ask the man to come into their boat.  But he tells them 
to move on, for the Lord will provide.  The waters go higher and become 
torrential, and the man climbs up onto his chimney.  A helicopter flies by 
and drops a ladder -- they ask him to come up, but the man shakes his 
head.  He knows the Lord will save him.  The helicopter leaves, and the 
waters finally overflow the chimney. 
 
Of course, the man drowns.  
 
When the man gets to heaven, though happy to be there, he can't help 
asking God - "God, Why didn't you provide?  I've been a good man, and 
you've answered my prayers before -- why didn't you save me?" 
 
God answers, "What do you mean?  I sent a dinghy, a motorboat, and a 
helicopter!" 
 
Often priests use this joke (told in a better way, though I'm just doing 
it from memory) to talk about God answering prayers in ways different from 
what we expect.  I'm using this story to talk about using the gifts God 
has given us as people, and not throwing them away simply because you 
don't like the means.  Simply put, we have brains, and we have free 
will.  Though the Bible says one should not put God to the test, it never 
said anything about not putting his creation to the test. 
 
People have found out through research that our brains make us natural 
scientists.  It's mainly found in research done on children, in which some 
pretty spectacularly =wrong= conclusions are drawn from limited info, but 
which make perfect sense given that limited info.  Recently my Canadian 
friend Brenda related a story in which her 5-year old self thought the book 
her parents had called "Your Five Year Old" was specifically about her.  And 
this past weekend's "This American Life" was on kid logic, in which kids 
reason that the reason the tooth fairy builds her house with teeth and not 
bricks is because people don't have bricks for teeth. 
 
Makes sense to me. 
 
Simply put, we can look at the world around us and infer so many things.   
People on both sides of the coin - secular humanists and religious 
fundamentalists - say that science and religion are opposed, because one 
reduces the universe through materialism and the other reduces it to a 
single book of a couple thousand pages (most of which has little to say 
about things other than people).  However, I see scientific research as a 
way to learn about God and creation, a more systematic way to understand 
the mind of God, as it were.  Coming from Catholicism, I recognize that 
God's teachings aren't limited to a few written sources, but is an ongoing 
process of revelation if one simply keeps one's eyes open and =thinks=.   
Humanists think I come from a "suffocating orthodoxy", but I breathe, 
literally and mentally, just fine.  Some Protestants believe that the 
Church has corrupted the original teachings of Christ, but forget that 
even at the end of the Gospel according to John it says that Jesus did and 
said much more than could ever be contained in any number of books.  If 
you're a fundamentalist, and it says in the Bible itself that much is 
missing, why do you think you can find out everything simply through the 
Bible? 
 
So I'm going to keep thinking and keep enjoying my thoughts.  I don't 
remember if I ever told y'all that my motto, which I came up with in 7th 
grade, is "Enjoy Life".  And I do enjoy it greatly.   
 
I hope it enjoys me.