I've been miraculously cured by large doses of tylenol and much required rest.
There's nothing to say about yesterday's and today's agenda.
I prepared .5M iron III chloride and .5M potassium thiocyanate for chemistry guy for a concentration reaction experiment. You put 5mL of ferric chloride in a tube, then add drop by drop the thiocynate (love playing with the poisons). Turns a colour. Then add dry ammonium chloride, turns another colour. Neat eh?
Otherwise, i've cleaned up a lot. I've organized microscope slides. I've been bored to death.
In my free time i've taken a lot of time to research into the whole creationism vs evolution debate currently baking in the US.
Here's one thing everybody should know. I don't believe. Not in god, saints, virgins or churches. It's all a big pile of bullshit to me.
Don't get me wrong on what's to come, i respect people's beliefs, people are free to believe whatever they like. However, I truly believe that faith is the surrender of reason, when you surrender reason you start thinking irrationally.
In my eyes, people who believe blindly in god, saints, virgins and churches do so because they don't want to question anything, as in, don't want to learn about, let's say, the origins of life, speciation, evolution, etc. These things, as you can probably assume, are very dear to me because these are concepts that took me years of studying to understand fully.
Why do i choose to believe that life couldn't have been started by a "superior being"? Simply because there's no evidence of this. Now, biology has some attractive theories on how life might have begun and how species evolve that actually have some evidence backing them. As for "intelligent design", random chance has as good a shot at explaining these things happening.
Most religious people that have challenged me to provide evidence and reasoning for this have gotten plowed by my very-well-informed-on-the-topic brain as they can't refute science they can't understand. Of cource, most eventually resort to ask me to provide proof that god doesn't exist. I'm not going to waste time proving something exists or doesn't exist, especially since it can't be proven. But that's aside the point
I do realize however that they can be as wrong about religion as I can be about science. I don't think science has all the answers... yet, but i do believe that research and investigation is way better than assumption.
On to my point.
In the US there has been heated debate in some states about what is appropriate teaching material and what is not. There's also been debate about sex ed, gay rights and contraception.
I was shocked when it was announced in kansas that creationism would be taught as an alternative to evolution. I'm not too familiar with american politics, but I thought that their government was a secular one, as in, without religious influence. This ruling put religious influence right into federally funded school classrooms, and it clearly violates their precious constitution which I believe says that no religion is superior than any other and as such, should be excluded from government decisions.
So here's the worst part. I placed myself in the shoes of a parent that doesn't believe and had kids in this particular kind of school where creationism would be taught. I've always agreed that people should make their own choices and I'll present both sides of the issue to my kids and have them make their own choice. But i'll make sure that is anybody forces their beliefs onto my kids, i'll force a baseball bat into their skulls. So I thought i'd organize everybody that was against this and star my own movement.
And then I ran into the church of the flying spaghetti monster.
The FSM is a very good parody on religion and it raises a really good point on what the "american taliban", as some like to call the religious nuts who pushed for this, is trying to do to the education and personal freedoms in their state (still, what do i care, i have bigger problems right here in pooradise, but let's explore this further).
It seems to me that these religious right wingers feel so
threatened by science that they've decided to become as
fundamentalist about their shit as the taliban and other hard core
religious sects.
This was started with a letter to the kansas school board where Mr Henderson, the author, stated that his newfound belief (that the flying spaghetti monster created everything, controls everything and wants everybody to wear pirate suits) should also be taught in the classroom along with intelligent design and evolution. With this he essentially told the Kansas school board that their infringing into everybody's personal freedom of religion. Why's that? Because they'd be teaching something that is not representative of everyone's belief system in that particular area. Now, evolution may not be part of their belief system either, but i'll sure like to see their kids going into college without the slightest notion of what evolution is.
The whole thing about the FSM is just hilarious, and as long as it angers fundamentalist religious readers who, in order to remain in control, keep their subjects ignorant to alternatives.
In my defence, before anybody gets itchy fingers and starts typing an offensive comment, you can't say I shouldn't speak about religion because i don't know anything about it. I beg to differ, i know plenty about it, more than most religious folks know about science. Not saying that all religious folks are less knowledgeable, by all means, there's plenty of people with better understanding of science and other things than I am that still keep their belief.
I am attacking oppression. I live in a country with an oppressive "love me or prepare for puniment" government. I say teach the children biology in biology and religion in religion classes. Let the kids make their choice to believe or not to believe and you're going to save yourself a generation of rebels without a cause.
Not sure if i made any sense but those are my 2 cents.
Cheers.
