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human life is consciousness.

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  Through Life on the music train. - GGE Probably the most convincing argument against abortion is that a foetus [1] is life, and life is sacred. Let me qualify that: it’s human life that’s considered sacred; we’re much more cavalier about the worth of animal and plant life. We can argue the definition of life as including all that can grow, independently of another’s control. Or we can apply the definition we use when through disease or accident, consciousness is irretrievably lost and we withdraw our support for continued biological life. We unplug the machinery even though cells continue to replicate themselves, the body continues to digest food and maintain a viable temperature. “In practice, human life is consciousness. ” But to assert it as a dictum misses an important point when applied to abortion: a foetus generally has potential to become conscious, while we only “pull the plug” when the potential for consciousness no longer exists. If it needed to be complic...
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Koalas are fussy eaters...

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  On a mountain top in Turkey, a rock formation being explored by archeologists has a boat-like shape. Hopes are being expressed on social media that this could be the petrified Noah’s Ark. Traces of what might have been organic material have been excavated. It would be a fascinating find for fundamentalist Christians if proven, and if its interior could be discerned in the specimen. I imagine, for instance, 3,500 tiny jars, each one holding a pair of each variety of mosquito. Of course there’d be protestations that mosquitoes would survive the flood because they hatch in water, but then, where would female mosquitoes get the blood they need to reproduce? And the number and size of storage containers for the different fodder-needs would be mind-boggling. Koalas are fussy eaters, and won’t touch bovine, equine hay supplies, just eucalyptus leaves, thank you very much.  And the manure!   There’d have to be millions of bird cages. Perching, non-swimmers couldn’t survi...
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Post Modern Piracy

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  Image Copilot generated I got an email message yesterday informing me that my “investment” had already increased to $861.53 and was about to double, then directed me to some email or phone action to take advantage of this doubling. I may be an octogenarian, but that doesn’t make me a babbling moron. I immediately identified it as a pirate ship coming alongside my rusting and slow schooner to rob me of some of my meager cargo. It used to be that economies would cough up surplus manpower through land shortage for farming, seasonal unemployment, or whatever factory owners’ whims dictated. No job meant no food. The temptation to remedy that led many men to join privateer ships , which were licenced to support navies in a mercenary capacity. Almost inevitably, these crews’ skills equipped them to enrich themselves, a temptation too powerful to pass up. Moral scruples abandoned, they attacked and plundered cargo ships in the knowledge that valuable goods, not peanut shells, merit ...
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If a bird should sh*t on your Wedding Attire

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  iStock image A bridegroom is standing outside the church minutes before his entry into the sanctuary. He’s shaded by a giant elm tree and just as he and his best man are about to enter, a robin shits onto the shoulder of his wedding tuxedo. He takes it as a sign, cancels the wedding and leaves his blushing bride “at the altar.” It’s not uncommon to hear cliches like “everything happens for a reason,” or to declare that everything that happens is part of God’s plan for us. At the same time, we focus on blame when bad things happen, which is hard to assign in the case of a bird whose only connection to the bridegroom is proximity. So it must have been God sending a message, our young man concludes. It must be a warning that he’s making a wrong choice. He certainly can’t go ahead with guano on his shoulder so the message is clear, especially since our bridegroom’s been led to believe that everyone finds a partner meant just for them; how could he have thought this lovely one was ...
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Who wants to be a millionaire

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  “Here’s how to become a millionaire on a low salary,” the internet ad says below a smiling face of a happy, happy blue-collar man. By now, we should all know what that’s about: you send in X dollars and a computerized algorithm running 24/7 will buy or sell investment pieces with your X dollars. You may buy a tiny interest in Greyhound, say, at 2:30 am for $11.25 and sell it at 2:35 for 11:30 for a profit of $.05. And if the computer makes, say, 1,000 similar transactions while you’re asleep or at work, your portfolio will have grown by $50.00 in a day, let's say, and $1,500 in a month. That seems like a deal of which everyone should take advantage, except if everyone did and Rosthern, became home to 500 millionaire families, prices for houses, food, services would rise enormously on the principle of  whatever the market will bear . Unearned money, dollars achieved through speculation on the currency itself or on the price of land, goods or services, is in the end, blood m...
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Noel, Noel

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  I'll be home for Christmas It’s time for Christians to take a deep breath and think about the season they’re in in relation to their faith and their neighbours. Yesterday, a non-believer took exception to Christian references made by the US Vice-President (he used the name of “Jesus” three times) in his Christmas address. Social media lit up immediately with the “keep ‘Christ’ in Christmas” reaction and applauded the VP for doing just that. Winter solstice celebrations went on long before Jesus was born; Christians decided to hold their celebration of Christ’s birth during the same time. (See below) Christians today enjoy the right to unhindered celebration of the birth of the founder of their faith largely because the separation of religion and state guarantees it.  By the same token, the state catering for one religion (as in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, for instance) leads to repression of all other faiths. For a state authority like the American VP to make out that th...
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The Devil's Workshop?

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  CONSIDER THE LILIES   Have you ever wondered what could be going on in the mind of a cow lying placidly in a pasture, chewing the cud balls she stored up in her morning feed. Or that lone horse in a pasture you drive by on your way to and from work who—standing on three legs as resting horses do—could be a lonely, living statue ... day after day after day. Surely absolute, unmitigated boredom is the lot of the domesticated animal species we imprison for our pleasure and nourishment.             I’m intrigued by the creation myth in the first chapters of Genesis, primarily because it’s an  attempt to visualize what could make us so different from all other living things. Consciousness—or the knowledge of good and evil as Genesis calls it—is imagined to have been a choice fraught with such danger that the creator predicts that “if you eat of it, you shall surely die.”        ...
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