Organ Donation Should Be Mandatory

I watched the movie Inhale which was about the epic struggle of one American family to procure an illegal organ transplant for their daughter in Mexico.  It occurred to me that organ donation should be mandatory.  After all, what good are your organs to you if you are fracking dead.  We have all seen stories of children who waited so long for an organ transplant on a waiting list that they died.  Think about it as if it was your child who needed a new set of lungs in order to live.  Sure this won't completely solve the problem of the lack of organs as there are other issues that can throw a wrench into things such as poor and diseased organs as well as the lack of a suitable match.  However, I believe it would help immensely if we had such a system in place.  Everyone should be an organ donor.

Why Liberals Should Support the Right To Keep and Bear Arms

I consider myself pretty liberal as well as a socialist. One item I have largely been ambivalent about was gun rights till recently. Democrats largely shot themselves in the foot in the 90's by insisting on gun control. Since them most of them have learned and won't go near the issue with a ten foot pole except for a few California and New York liberals. Guns can be a dangerous tool and should be used with care. There is no doubt about that. However, the right to bear arms is sometimes what enables the oppressed to throw off their oppressors. This was the case in Libya most recently. This is also something that is well understood by the Black Panthers as well. During the civil rights era, they took a stand against gun control because they knew how the right to bear arms empowered an oppressed people.

The case of Libya left me thinking recently that those of us who are liberal and support gun rights should let our views be known. Guns have often empowered workers in many places where they were being exploited such as in Chile till Allende's government had them disarm which made it that much easier for Pinochet to begin his reign of terror. Here in the US, we see an increasing infringement upon the rights of the working class by the corporate elites as well as an increasing police state where people are forced out of their homes by banks who can't even pay their bills without help from the government and where workers are intimidated by large corporations to prevent them from organizing into unions. Guns are a great equalizer though and they can enable the powerless to have some defense against this form of economic bullying by the plutocrats.

I would suggest that it is a good thing as well for working class people in the US to organize into armed militias. That shouldn't be left to just the hate mongers and the crazy right wing idiots who subscribe to every conspiracy theory known to man. For further reading, check this article out:

Gun-Control & Workers' Militias: How Socialists View the Issues:

'via Blog this'

I'm No Expert

I will begin by stating that my posts here are likely to become less frequent though I shall endeavor to post something once a week.  Today I wanted to discuss my desire to attain more knowledge of some subjects before I post my opinions on them.  It seems everyone has an opinion and there are many great articles written by many different bloggers on the web.  Having an advanced degree helps though it is not necessary.  I will give one example of what I am referring to.  It is in the area of Biblical Criticism.  While I have read several versions of the Bible as well as books on the Bible and Biblical Criticism over my lifetime, I believe that I should limit what I say in regards to that subject.  Reason being there are obviously more learned people who post online in that subject area and I believe that they contribute much more than what I usually can.  There are plenty of resources for atheists to reference online when it comes to the Bible.  The Skeptic's Annotated Bible(http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/) is one great resource as is http://jesusneverexisted.com.  The Freethought and Rationalism Discussion board(http://www.freeratio.org/forumdisplay.php?f=60) is another.

I decided this after realizing that there are those who set themselves up as experts pontificating to everyone else what they think.  I don't want to be one of those.

And Your Point Is?

Have you ever sat in an evangelical church and heard a pastor say something to the effect of Jesus was tortured and died for you so you should believe in him?  I have and it is ludicrous on its face.  For one that assumes there was a Jesus.  I don't think the evidence is conclusive that he even existed.  Secondly, there are millions of people who have died for this or that cause, so should we believe in every one of those causes?  Some of those died like the Branch Davidians.  Should we believe in David Koresh simply because he and his followers chose to die in a fire?  Should we believe in a radical suicide bomber's religion simply because he blows himself and several others up?  I don't think so.  However, this same motivation seemingly inspired the movie, The Passion of the Christ, which had Christians ejaculating praise left and right for it because it showed Jesus being tortured and killed supposedly on their behalf.

What does that say about the Christian god other than that he would evidently be a manipulative sadist?  The love of money may or may not be the root of all evil, but religion is definitely the root of a bunch of nonsense.

Atheist Blogroll

My blog has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar.  The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

Thinking of Writing a Book

I've been thinking today of writing a book about a time traveler.  I'm sorry that its been a few days since I posted.  I have some ideas for characters, but I know writing a book is an arduous task that involves a great deal of time, effort, and imagination.  Wish me luck and I will take any advice under consideration.

The Ethics of Time Travel

Time travel sounds like a grand idea at first.  Traveling backwards and forwards like the main character in Dr. Who looks like fun, but is complicated by a whole universe of ethical considerations.  Its not just as Barjavel had pointed out that someone could go back to the past and kill their grandfather, but it could be some action that seems relatively harmless which could seriously alter history unless you take the notion of parallel universes to be a serious possibility.  For instance you could go back  in time and strike up a conversation with an ancestor of Lincoln, Beethoven, or Einstein and what if your conversation kept them from meeting their future spouse and then there would be no Lincoln, Beethoven, or Einstein.  Ultimately even if time travel does turn out to be possible, the best one could hope for in such cases would be to avoid these types of ethical problems and to only go back as an invisible observer of past events.  So in reality the time machine would also have to be a cloaking device as well.

There maybe a possibility that would prevent any changes to the future by a time traveler.  This is outlined as Novikov's self consistency principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle.  If that turned out to be true then it would be impossible for someone to go back and kill their grandfather, or to prevent Lincoln's ancestor from meeting their spouse.

In reality we are likely a long way away from developing time travel if it is even  possible, but the risks should be weighed carefully when and if it is developed.