Food

I saw video tonight of a Japanese whaling ship slaughtering a whale, and think it is time for that kind of killing to stop. I’m not a big ‘animal rights’ sort, I had chicken for dinner and think that pea-brained critter was better off soaked in molé sauce, than ever it was in life. But I do hope it was dispatched without cruelty, for not even dumb animals deserve torture.

First, the whale was tortured — harpooning is not a swift or painless death. Second, whales, like a few other animals, are demonstrably intelligent, and should receive a higher level of respect. In the Americas we don’t eat horses, not because horse meat is bad, but because close association with these animals has convinced most of us that they are intelligent beings, who deserve respect. Somehow, we have come to the same conclusion about dogs, thought sometimes I wonder why, but again, I’m just as glad we don’t eat them. Dolphins, whales and chimpanzees should be in the same category.

Now parrots and crows are pretty smart birds, and I can hear people saying we shouldn’t eat birds either. Well, I don’t eat parrots or crows, but just like mammals, I like to draw the line at specific species, based on their demonstrated intelligence, or lack there-of. Cows, sheep and pigs are food, people, chimps and whales are not. That is just where I like to draw the line.

Yes, pigs can be relatively intelligent. Smarter than dogs, no doubt. I hope those that dispatch them take that into consideration and make it as swift and painless as possible. But still, they are raised as food, and would be nowhere so numerous as they are if they weren’t so good to eat.

I have to admit, I have tasted whale and walrus meat and blubber, when I lived in Alaska, and I make no apologies (unless I could apologize to the specific animals involved) — curiosity overcame my qualms in the matter, and nothing I might do would bring back those already deceased animals. Still, I wish they had not been available to me, and I would not eat such food today (and not just because the blubber was so unpalatable) — because my curiosity is satisfied. They are no better than cow, and I’m firmly convinced that is a dumb animal.

Life is a long series of decisions, and many of those decisions require us to draw fine distinctions. We each have to make the decisions that we can live with — I wish the Japanese would decide to stop killing whales, but I respect the fact that it need be their decision, not one forced on them from any outside agency.

Reality vs Feeling

OK, so science is fallible, which should come as no great surprise since scientists are people. Bust still, it is a better way of understanding reality than the alternative, which is religion, isn’t it?

Religion is also espoused by people, so it is equally fallible. But it makes us feel better. Isn’t it nice to think we are better than 98% of the rest of the world, because we are True Believers? And isn’t it nice to think we will never really die — our bodies yes, but soul lives on forever.  Isn’t it nice to think that justice will prevail, if not now (as we can plainly see) then at least in the afterlife?

Anyone who looks at it rationally can see religion only exists to make us feel better. But is that bad? Certainly, 95% of people will never contribute anything worthwhile to human existence, shouldn’t they at least feel good about their worthless lives? Faith-based belief is delusional, but perhaps it is better than the hopelessness the unimaginative feel on the loss of faith.

I think perhaps it is time we merged science with the ‘feel good’ principals, and enlighten those who realize religion is bogus. Science is not so hopeless or unimaginative as they think. Take time, for example.

Science tells us time is just another dimension, like up and down, left and right, forward and backward. We even use those last two to describe time, though in a somewhat different sense than when referring to spatial dimensions. And now, new theories suggest there may even be more than one dimension to time, a hard concept to grasp.

So, for those religious doubters who still want to feel good, consider this: we are eternal. Time is just another dimension, so we exist forever, though perhaps only within a small time frame. Considering the size of the universe, we exist in a very small spatial frame as well, so this should not be disconcerting. We will always exist — at those time and spatial parameters that encompass us.

Maybe another time I’ll go in to morality, which is another bogus argument for the superiority of  religious belief over science. Meanwhile, watch the news, and see who is committing the atrocities — religious believers, or atheists?

Time Enough

Ever wonder about time? Why is it that the clock ticks steadily on, but our perception of time ebbs and flows, even seeming to stop at times? And there are two times, now and past, that are perceived differently, even when they refer to the same moment.

Take new experiences for example. Go on vacation to someplace you have never been, and while you are there time seems to creep slowly, you experience so much that is new and stimulating. But when you get home, and remember that trip, it seems like it was just a fleeting moment.

There is also a different perception of time’s flow as we grow older, but I’ve got that one figured out. The older we get, the faster time seems to pass. Remember when you were seven, how long it was between birthdays? Or that huge time span between Thanksgiving and Christmas? With each passing year, those time spans seem to get shorter and shorter, compressed into blurring motion.

That is because they are all the past, and all past time has only one perceived length. When we are seven, one year is one-seventh of the past. The year gone by encompasses 14% of all our experiences, and much more than that of remembered experiences. By age 25 that percentage has dropped all the way to 4% — so the past year seems to have gone faster, because it includes less of our total experience of the past.

And the future? Well the future never comes, we have only now and back then. We can try to imagine the future, but we never really get it exactly right, as the past writings of any futurist will show. I’m still waiting for the flying-car I knew would be the normal mode of transportation when I imagined the year 2000 when I was a child.

Of course some future predictions come true, but the details are never correct. Jules Verne may have imagined flying to the moon, but he forgot his space-suit.