Response to God’s Image – The Difference Maker in Answers In Genesis by David Casas and Dr. Russell Fuller

“We’re such good stewards,” claims a fundamentalist, proudly displaying how she turned a milk carton into a pot for plants. 

I read a Christian article this morning, “God’s Image – The Difference Maker,” about how humans are special, have dominion over animals, how animals can’t reason, how humans are commanded to reproduce, how animals are not spiritual, how humans are told to be “good stewards of the earth,” and how humans are the only spiritual beings because humans talk to each other about God.  It is another “feel good about humans, feed the human ego” article.

I think the fundamentalists really have a point on this one – animals probably do not chat about the Christian god – or Jesus.  Of course, this was another one of those epic length Christian articles, but my paragraph above encompasses all of it, except for the huge emphasis on how we humans are all spiritual. 

The funny thing is, the word spiritual is never defined.  Sometimes, when I see an animal standing still, breathing in the air, or when I see an animal playing, I think it is spiritual.  It is experiencing life or joy.  If spirituality is being thankful, revering life, enjoying life, being present, feeling life and trying to do good, then animals pass the test as often as humans do.  

I consider myself a very spiritual person.  I am truly thankful to be alive, even though there is no one to thank.  I am so grateful for all the beauty in life, and try to notice the good as much as possible.  I pay attention to the feeling of the breeze on my arms, and always look up and enjoy the stars when I walk my dog outside at night.  If I am not considered spiritual by Christians, it is because they have too narrow a view of what is spiritual.  Spiritual is not exclusively their word. 

Do Christians actually think we were put here to have dominion over animals?  Why, then, did so many animals die before humans even came on the scene?  We have the fossils, you know.  I realize the fundamentalists will not accept the fossils, but even thinking about the present, there are so many animals alive right now that humans have never seen.  How do we have dominion over them?  It is absurd that such a command would be given, instead of a command to respect other animals.  The only reason we have to take care of some of them is because we have destroyed their habitats! 

How in this day of information can Christians still believe that animals cannot reason?  We have YouTube!  Have you not seen all the videos and read all the articles that show animals reasoning?  They figure out how to get themselves and friends out of locks; they put themselves in danger in order to save other animals; they figure out mazes; they communicate in groups; they use tools to get what they want; many have a sense of self; they share, they talk, and they love.  I am not sure what “reasoning” higher animals lack!   We know of a dog who understands over 300 words.  Not all dogs can do this - animals have varied personalities and I.Q.s, just as do people.  Some animals grieve when they lose a member of their group or a loved one.  A few wild animals look sad after they have had to kill an animal for food.  They have feelings too!  There is a bonobo who recognizes 3,000 words and can put short sentences together on a computer.  He can gather sticks, light a fire with a match and then roast marshmallows!  How more human-like is that!

It used to be that the difference between an animal and a human was that humans made tools.  But we now have proof that many animals make and use tools.  So they have to move the goal posts and find something else to stall the fact that we are much like our cousin primates!

Animals learn by watching.  Dolphins imitate humans’ poses!  Animals have so many skills that are superior to humans, such as bats coordinating hearing with navigation while flying, dolphins using echolocation, birds and fish using group synchronization, sharks using electric signals from their noses to locate food under the sea floor, and dogs with their superior sense of smell – even a talking bird saying, “Talk clearly” when it was frustrated!  How can anyone try to claim they are reasonless?  Their world is different from ours so why are we judging them by their ability to talk to God?  The reason humans are “chosen” is because they have the ability talk to an imaginary friend?  Pretty funny something unintelligent and unreasonable is what divides us from the animal world, according to Creationists! 

Also included in the article is the statement that humans are commanded to reproduce.  Where does it say that?  In the Abrahamic holy books, written by men.  If this were a command, you would think all women would be able to have children and all men’s sperm would be a’swimmin.  In case these fundamentalists didn’t notice, animals reproduce and don’t need a book to command them to do so!  If a human does not want to reproduce or cannot reproduce, no one should force them to go through something so unnecessary when we certainly are not dying out as a species.  Why can’t fundamentalists look at the big picture – our dying planet – and see that reproducing exponentially is not “intelligent design?”  Thousands of people dying from starvation each year, and they think they must reproduce, and think it is a woman’s duty.  These examples show why holy books can be so dangerous.  They cannot get past the intelligence of 2,000 years ago.

Fundamentalists always make excuses for their “dominion over the animals” command.  They say it means to be a “good stewards of the earth.”  This is how Christians take all the guilt away from themselves--by making proclamations, “I am a good steward of the earth!”  Really?  And you eat meat and dairy which produce methane, excess CO2, destroy rain forests, all our land and you populate which takes away animal habitat?  “I am a good steward” is such an egotistical statement for someone to make.  Even though I recycle, am vegan and don’t travel much, and buy from thrift shops if I purchase at all, I would never call myself a good steward of the earth.  There is much more I could do, like ride my bike or take the bus to work which I do not do.  If you eat meat and dairy, you are not a good steward, you are part of the problem.  That is not a mean statement – it is a fact.  I’m tired of apologizing for something all should recognize at this point.  The arrogance, selfishness and narrow mindedness of fundamentalists continues to amaze me. 

How will Christians respond?  “She’s angry.”  We need to show her how loving Christianity is.  Do you think other humans cannot love?  We have all the emotions a Christian has – we just use reason instead of being fooled by our emotions.  We are all human animals, and realizing our connection is very spiritual!

Fructose Malabsorption - Extreme Pain after Drinking Apple Juice or Eating Dried Fruit

I discovered a name for a malady I have, and it is not too rare to have some problems with the foods that cause it, but most people do not have this malady to the extent where it causes the pain that it causes me. 

The name for this illness is “fructose malabsorption” (not hereditary fructose intolerance – a SERIOUS disease), but just the inability of the small intestine to absorb much fructose.  It causes a quick buildup of fructose in the entire intestine.  No wonder the cramping felt like something deep inside me that radiated all over my middle! 

(I don’t need the next quote marks, because it will be obvious I am quoting WIKI.)  “The physiological consequences of fructose malabsorption include increased osmotic load, rapid bacterial fermentation, altered gastrointestinal motility, the formation of mucosal biofilm and altered profile of bacteria.”  So I am not making it up!  

For years I noticed I could not eat more than a few cherries without debilitating cramping coming from somewhere deep inside me.  I would occasionally have the same problem when drinking apple juice – ¼ of a glass could bring on weird symptoms where I hurt inside from my clavicle to my back to my stomach.  A couple of times I thought perhaps I should go to the hospital.  Other fruits would slightly bother me, but about three weeks ago at work, just a few pieces of dried pineapple sent my whole “trunk” area into spasms of pain, and I wanted to crawl to the bathroom – just as an animal will go hide when they are in pain, that is what I wanted to do.  I managed to walk to the bathroom and wait for the pain to go away.  I thought this was serious - maybe my kidneys were shutting down!  But the pain subsided, and realized it was time to Google my symptoms.

It was difficult to describe what this pain felt like, but I Googled something like “pain stomach drinking apple juice” and found a few other people describing this strange, very painful cramping that happens to them, and asking, “What is this?!!”  Most of the responders did not know what it was and offered “cleanses and pseudoscience,” but finally I found enough people agreeing that it was fructose malabsorption.  Sprinkled on the pages were people claiming they had fructose malabsorption, when all they had was gas, which really muddies the page and makes it more difficult to find other people with the same symptoms!  If you have fructose malabsorption, you definitely know there is a huge difference between it and “just gas!”  Also muddying the information are the pages with varied foods to avoid. 

Yes, the remedies are all dietary.  At the most extreme, they say to follow the FODMAP diet.  If you have ever looked that up, you will wonder how the followers on a FODMAP diet survive!  There are very few foods allowed.  I decided I would pass on that, and just avoid apples (which mostly give me headaches and jaw and neck pains – and which never stopped me from eating several of them in one day), apple juice and cider, drink smaller amounts of orange juice (safer fruit), have no dried fruits except a small amount of blueberries or raisins, no cherries and watch my consumption of artichokes, asparagus, and all of the “itol” chemicals such as sorbitol, manitol, and xylitol, which somehow make the fructose malabsorption worse.

It’s a “cruel joke” that a vegan who absolutely loves apple juice and apple cider and fruits has to eliminate some of them and just have small amounts of others.  I even am watching my “high fructose corn syrup” amounts.  Something I never worried about. Glucose is just fine, but a high fructose to glucose ratio is something I need to avoid.  

Further, what cruel irony that I used to tease all the people claiming they needed a gluten-free diet because they wanted some special malady - and then I come down with a special malady!

And lastly, what a cruel shame that my brother has an apple orchard and makes the best apple cider ever, and apple cider is something that may bring on the cramping for me.  I guarantee, I will still drink small amounts of that deliciousness, and risk the attack! 

I’m not going to make a big deal about this and I really think I just need to eliminate a few foods.  I will learn by trial and error!  My experiences with fructose malabsorption are written here so that someone else searching for a fellow sufferer will learn the name of what he/she is experiencing! 

Ideas to End All this Bombing

It is upsetting that we seem to need to use more violence to try to end the violence of ISIS.  I don’t feel good about it, but perhaps it will work.  

What could also work, without using violence is to rid us of the Abrahamic religions.  We could have a Qur’an Buy-Back program.  I like it.
 
Can you imagine a few generations without the Qur’an or the Bible?  What a beautiful world we could create!  I wish we had a really good humanist book that is easy to read and is about feeling happy, loving life, being kind, thinking beyond our species, and helping the earth.  I can’t think of one, but I’d love to swap out the holy books with such a humanist book!  

In reality, no one would dream of taking away those “wonderful” holy books where the most we got out of them are: “The Golden Rule,” “Love thy neighbor,” and “A camel can’t go through the eye of a needle” (or something like that).  People sit in churches all their lives and those are about all they can remember!  All these ideologies of love, respect, don’t be greedy and treat people well are present in most societies and are not original to Christianity anyway.  

Since I know the holy books will not disappear, the next idea is to have a panel of neutral people with scissors to go through the Qur’an and the Bible and cut out anything objectionable.  What will be left after excision could be their new holy books; and these books would be short enough, everyone could read them cover to cover!  Perhaps we could add a few important lessons we have learned, such as slavery and rape are bad.  Update these shortened, more positive versions of the holy books from time to time by people with no vested interest.

Well, those are my ideas instead of blowing people and cities and countrysides apart in order to bring peace.  Simple, effective, yet none of these ideas will come to fruition.

The Rapture and the Second Coming - It's a Mystery to Me!

Did you ever stop and picture yourself being raptured up to be with Jesus?  How did it go – did you just fly up and meet him in the sky in your neighborhood and then go on up to your Heavenly home?

Yes, Jesus is planning on meeting you in the sky, but at what location?  How will you see him when you can’t even see past the trees at the end of your block?  Jesus seems to be interested in a renewal of Jerusalem, and I kind of doubt he will be waiting for you over Bad Axe, Michigan.

Anyway, you will have to be zoomed over to Jerusalem to meet Jesus in the sky, as far as I can tell, and then you will journey on to Heaven, along with all the dead people who were good Christians who will come out of their graves to fly up to Heaven too.  They may be half-eaten by worms or just skeletons - it could be gross; unless they are given a spirit body on the spot.  I am not sure what air you will breathe, since it is hard enough breathing at Arapaho Basin in Colorado.  How are asthmatic, overweight Christians going to make the journey to Heaven, being whisked up “in a moment?” 

Well, we will assume everyone made the trip alive.  Or you died and are all spirits.  After you are up in Heaven for awhile, according to a very knowledgeable Christian site about Heaven that I visited on the Internet, you will come back to earth with Jesus and his horse and sword, where he will destroy everyone who is left behind.  That would be all the people of the other religions and a good share of my friends and me.  So you will get to see us wait for Jesus to swing his mighty sword at us and kill us all, including the Antichrist (Who or what the heck is he?  Last I knew, it was President Obama.)  After all the murdering, you will watch Jesus establish a Millennial Kingdom.  For whom?  For youm, I guess!  Somehow, I feel the Jews have been swindled, because Jesus was a Jew and when he was supposedly alive, he supposedly said he would come back and restore everything to his fellow Jews, and during their lifetimes at that! 

I guess you all will live in Jerusalem for awhile – not sure how long.  Not sure if you are alive or dead at this point, since you have already been to Heaven.  Not sure if you are returning to Heaven, but I would assume you are – and that makes me wonder why it was so important to restore the Millennial Kingdom.

Eternal Life! (No Matter What!)

Humans really seem to have a tendency to be hopeful.  I think that is why they developed an afterlife – because they really want to live on. 

Even after I knew there was no afterlife, I found I still had those hopeful tendencies.  I thought I might exist, somehow.  Many secularists do think there might be some life “in another realm” or “a force for goodness” or “my atoms will incorporate with other atoms and I will live again”; but the evidence is not as rosy.

According to Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist, "The mind is the brain.  The brain is made of atoms.  We know how atoms work.  The laws of physics relevant to the atoms in your body are known and there is no room for new laws of physics that would affect how the atoms in your brain actually work.  When you die, your brain decomposes, and atoms eventually decompose, with all that information that was “you” stuck in those atoms, and there is no way for the information to leave your body, or to persist after your death."   Oh, thanks, Sean.

Then Sean goes on and destroys all hope, by telling us the fate of the universe.  Even though there may be multiverses, our universe will burn out one day, billions of years from now and even the black holes will disappear.  Our universe will then exist as nothing – no time or space or anything – just nothing.  Just stab me, why don’t you, Sean!

Yet, I still feel I might escape!  (That is the human condition at work!)  I imagine that one atom of mine (that somehow has all of my personality and my looks contained in that one atom) escapes out a porthole into the universe next door, and I live on! 

Isn’t that funny how we just do not want to die and we cannot allow ourselves to fully accept that we will not live on.  We keep hold of the slightest hope that we will live eternally – and without arthritis!  Just like in the movie, Cocoon, “You’ll never get old, and you’ll never die!”

 

I Predict a Blood Moon on September 28th!

This is not a sign of the Apocalypse:  blood moons happen when the earth is between the sun and the moon (eclipse), and light will scatter off the earth’s atmosphere, casting a red glow on the moon.

If God were sending you a signal, 1,  He would do something supernatural – not a normal, scientifically sound eclipse;  2. We would not be able to predict it – scientists have told you the date and time that the eclipse will happen.  3.  He would tell the “good people” directly to prepare – not send a vague signal of a blood moon that could mean anything (he has “personal relationships” with most people these days, you know).  3.  He would make sure it was not cloudy anywhere.  We may not be able to see it here because it will be partly cloudy here in Illinois. 
Enjoy the blood moon if you can see it!  It will be a “super moon” (at a closest point to earth in their natural orbits), a “harvest moon” (closest full moon to the start of autumn) and a “blood moon” (lunar eclipse). 

And stop the silly superstitions!  I have seen so much violence in my life due to superstition:  killing children because “they are possessed”; sacrifices to a god in order to save themselves; denying civil rights in the name of a god, and god telling climate change deniers to run for president.  Just enjoy nature at its finest and bask in the wonder of it all!

Three Excellent Atheistic Videos!

This is a wonderful video about what life is, and the fate of the universe. For a physicist, he is very easy to understand and enjoyable!

Such a logical thinker!  Sam does an excellent job of describing just how horrific the Bible really is, in his soft, calm voice.

David Fitzgerald shows how unreliable any historical sources are for the Bible.  Wonderful video!