Memories are Strange Things

It's funny how you can go months without thinking about someone. Then you find something they gave you and it hits you again that their gone.

When I was in college I was fairly briefly involved with a guy. Despite that it was pretty intense, Dave is the only guy I've been with who was as into BDSM as I am.  One of the first times we met it was because there were plans for a play party around halloween. Not going to go into detail about the party or our relationship, those are memories I'm not ready to share and definitely not on a blog anyone can read. It was complicated in many ways and didn't last very long. We did remain friends afterwards though there were some uncomfortable moments.

Skip ahead a year and a half later, I had left college and drifted apart from my friends there a bit. Then I get an email saying he'd died. I'd never lost a friend before, never anyone my own age to have it be someone I had feelings for made it really hard. It's been 6 years but the pain can still feel fresh.

I came across the collar he gave me, just a play collar it was never meant to be significant, but it's the only thing I have that he gave me. It just brought it all back. Time doesn't heal everything, it makes the memories retreat back in your mind so they don't come out as often but when they do nothing has changed.

Fun with Twitter

Last night Twitter had one of it's little hashtag memes going and I joined in. It was a lot of fun so here were my contributions to the #worldsthinnestbooks:

• "Correct Predictions" by Sylvia Brown 
  
• "The Art of Blending in" by Lady Gaga  
• "How to detect a fake autobiography" by Oprah  
• "Understanding Evolution" by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron  
• 'How to run an investment firm" by Bernie Madoff  
• "Introduction to Aristotelian Philosophy" by Jessica Simpson  
• "Preventing Infectious Diseases" by Jenny McCarthy  
• "Problems that can't be solved with explosives" by Adam Savage and Jaime Hyneman  
• "How to have a successful marriage" by Elizabeth Taylor  
• "Understanding Germ Theory" by Bill Maher  
• "Successful Public Relations" by Fred Phelps  
• "How to Invade Russia" by Napoleon Bonaparte  
• "Answer to the Question of Life the Universe and Everything"  
• "Successful Faith Healing"by Peter Poppoff and Benny Hinn  
• "People God Loves" by Fred Phelps  
• "Guide to Modern Psychiatry" by L Ron Hubbard, forward by Tom Cruise  
• "How Homeopathy Works"  
• "Altruism" by Ayn Rand  
• "Landing a Probe on Mars" by the Russian Space Agency  
• "Recording a Clean Podcast" by @GeorgeHrab  
• "How Old is the Earth" by Ken Hamm  
• "Winners of the JREF Million Dollar Challenge"  
• "Contraceptives" by Michelle Duggar  
• "Ethical Business Practices" by Kevin Trudeau  
• Okay last one, dedicated to the SGU: "What I love about birds" by Perry D'Angelis  

Most of these of course are of a skeptical nature and pretty sarcastic. However I do have to say I love Mythbusters, George Hrab, the JREF, and the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Perry is greatly missed as a co-host on the SGU.

Stopping Fear and Misogyny

Recently a story was published in Wired magazine by journalist Amy Wallace titled "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All". I've been vocal on Twitter for quite some time about my support for vaccination and I totally agree with Ms. Wallace and the vast majority of doctors and medical researchers that vaccines are safe, effective, and have probably saved more lives than any other medical advance. Vaccines wiped out the most horrific infectious disease of all time, smallpox, and has nearly wiped out polio.

This debate has recently become very personal to me and here is the reason why:

That adorable newborn is my nephew Joshua, as I'm writing this post he is a mere two weeks old. I shouldn't have to be scared that he'll contract whooping cough before he's old enough to be vaccinated. Unfortunately because of anti-vaccination fear mongering, based on faulty and anecdotal "evidence", mean that herd immunity is crumbling and he's in danger now.

It's also personal in another way. As I found out this week from Orac's blog (and reminded again by Dr. Isis) Amy Wallace has been the target of some really vile misogynistic attacks such as these:

I've been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a "fking lib." I've been called the author of "heinous tripe."

 J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay title" "Paul Offit Rapes (intellectually) Amy Wallace and Wired Magazine." In it, he implied that Offit had slipped me a date rape drug. "The roofie cocktails at Paul Offit's house must be damn good," he wrote. Later, he sent a revised version that omitted rape and replaced it with the image of me drinking Offit's Kool-aid. That one was later posted at the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism.

I've been the subject of this sort of attack myself and it generally rolls right off my back because it reflects more on the person writing them than it does on me. However it is a symptom of a disgusting aspect of our culture where insulting a woman's sexuality is often used to silence them. I don't want my nephew to grow up and see it as acceptable to do so. I know that his parents, grandparents, and I will teach him otherwise but we'd be blind to think there will not be other influences on him such as the media.

NECSS

So I attended my very first skeptical event over the weekend, the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in New York City. It was a lot of fun, I got to meet so many great new people. The conference itself had some wonderful speakers and panels.

Definitely the highlight of the day for me was the live Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast and George Hrab's performance during lunch. After the conference was dinner and hanging out at a bar with a bunch of other skeptics.

The lowpoint of the trip was the subway. Saturday night it took about 2 hours longer to get back to the hotel than it should have due to rerouting and delays. My feet were killing me so I was really cranky.

Huge thanks to Mark who set everything up so I could go and for putting up with me when I was feeling so crappy Saturday night.

Atheist Spirituality

I know that title is a bit of a contradiction but bear with me on this. Today on PZ Myer's blog he posted a very snarky response to this article that argues that humans are hard wired for religious belief. I strongly disagree with that article as well but I'm not going to be so snarky.

There are many reasons why humans invented religions but this is about that feeling of spirituality that so many people feel, from evangelical Christians to devout Muslims to Buddhist monks. This brings me back to the contradiction in the titles of this post, we don't really have a good word to stand in for this feeling when it's not religious in nature. Awe and wonder come close but I don't think they quite say it so for lack of a better term I'm going to use spiritual an mean it in a totally non-superstitious sense.

I think that argument of humans beign hardwired for religion confuses that sense of awe before nature and spiritual emotion that humans have. Those feelings I think are hardwired into us, back from the time when nature was an almost total unknown, the source of life and destruction (as it still is but we understand much of it now and what we don't understand we have the tools to learn).

That feeling led our ancestors who hadn't yet developed science to create mythologies that explained and channeled that spiritual emotion. However just because we have this emotional response built into our brains doesn't mean it has to or should be channeled into worship of some higher being. It just as easily can be channeled into a wonder and love of the universe and it's immenseness and beauty. You don't need a god to feel that, there's no emptiness to being an atheist we've just found that we don't need religion to feed that emotional need.

The universe is more than enough for that. I look up and see the stars and realize that the atoms which make up my body were once inside stars like those. As Carl Sagan said "We are all made of star stuff" and that knowledge invokes in me this amazing feeling that is probably the same as the feeling many religious people feel in church.

Trying to Get This Blog Rolling Again

Yeah, I know I haven't posted here in about a year. In the last year things have changed a lot for me so I thought I'd start this blog up again to have a place to write a lot of stuff that just doesn't fit in my other blogs.

Don't expect a lot of posts here, this is more an outlet for the stuff I don't have space enough to say on Twitter. Do expect me to talk more about my skepticism and atheism because I've become a lot more involved and vocal about those topics.