I don’t recommend that anyone actually read this. I personally don’t even recommend reading this to me. I was having trouble sleeping tonight. Madeline woke up and was in need of comforting and would only take solace from Sarah. Then Zach awoke and also wanted Sarah’s help. I was reading Dreaming in Code. My mind was drifting about and I figured I might as well write a long overdue posting of nonsense to my blog. In this case I will try to track some of the odd things that were keeping me up at night thinking.
I tend to be interested in things like software, science, and literature. I like systems of rationale thought. I don’t mind religion as an area of study but as an atheist I take more of an archaeologist or genetics slant on things. I like to understand the system. Will our invasion of Iraq be successful in the mission to provide greater security to us in the United States? At the time of the invasion I thought this would be true. Now I don’t really understand fundamentalist Islamic philosophy but it appears that there are some significant differences in the Islamic countries in the middle east and the united states. Those differences are ideological. People with the same ideologies won’t run around killing the other since they are aligned. In general a crazy democrat would be more likely to kill a republican. Those sorts of things do happen. So the thought process I had imagined for our invasion was that by spreading democracy to Iraq and eventually to the middle east we would be all set for the major ideological difference. Apparently either this transformation takes a lot longer than five years or maybe we need to keep working on the other ideological differences.
I know someone who goes to the middle east to help with cancer awareness. He says among the major problems is simple education and women’s rights. So if a woman has cancer there are two barriers to her getting effective treatment. The first is that people think that cancer is contagious. This is wrong but a reasonable assumption if you don’t understand the science of the disease and actually true in a sense for things like HPV and cervical cancer. But the male dominated culture also allows that if a man needs to discard a wife then he can beat her and divorce her leaving her in a precarious position of having been discarded by her husband. So the chain of events of investigating if you have cancer leads to a destitute state for a woman which may be worse than suffering through cancer without treatment. But the point is that there is a system of religion, disinformation, and law that supports this apparent immoral situation where a person can’t even seek treatment for a treatable disease that they have. It is this system that needs to be reformed and not just democracy in order to reach a point where we will be secure.
Religious systems have the property that all good systems that evolve have of being able to repair themselves in order to maintain integrity and longer term propagation. So if we try to attack the religion itself we find rules and beliefs that protect it from such attacks. The rules in a fundamentalist religion include the capacity to place people into a construct that allows the religion to maintain its power of them. So one thing that can bring about change would be to allow women to have greater rights and education. One key to fostering this is the right to have contraception. If a woman can choose to educate herself or to work rather than bearing children then she can also become more powerful in her role outside of the family. But most fundamentalist religions have a strong prohibition against contraception. Contraception can destroy the religion itself so it has long protected itself against such a threat. But to achieve our goal of security we need to break down these sorts of things over time. Unfortunately the other thing that the fundamentalist religions have are concepts to destroy the people who work to destroy their religion. So if one was to distribute contraceptives to women in some undetectable form or to spread educational materials about how culture works in the west to suggest that women should have rights then these foreigners or converts to western beliefs would be considered infidels and apostates and predictably would be punishable by religious laws to both horrible fates and forces the religious minded to mobilize to defend their religion. So irking the fundamentalists into a new state causes them to want to attack.
Now all of this is somewhat irrelevant banter running through my head in the middle of the night. I don’t really have any answers and don’t have the time to put any real analysis into these systems. What I’d like to see are ways to change the systems. Ways to introduce a catalyst, a drug, an enzyme, into the systems that change them fundamentally. That is what is so great about technology and engineered things that we build. Satellite HDTV, Guitar Hero, and cell phones could be as effective at transforming fundamentalist cultures into a modern merged baseline culture to eliminate wars as the wars themselves. I don’t know if it really works but I’d be more supportive of shipping lots of entertainment and productivity products to places that we consider to be dangerous than building bombs and missiles to protect ourselves from them. It is fun to protect ourselves and we can create some great technologies in the process but if we wanted to make some progress on a complex system we have a really interesting one with plenty of room to grow in our knowledge.
We barely have started to understand molecular biology. We have a bunch of the pieces and we have a lot of cool techniques like sequencing, PCR, microarrays, data repositories, and analysis tools in place. But we have no clue how pervasive problems like asthma, diabetes, obesity, autism, aging, and cancer really work. There are too many pieces to track with too many possible permutations of the genetics, the cell types and stages of development, and the environment. We spend over half the US budget on social security which is basically taking care of old people. But why can’t we get to the point where old people are still as productive as I am today? I’d like to be among the folks who are healthy and productive at 150. It could be impossible but I am almost certain at the pace our technology is going today that I will live less than 90 years. So isn’t the real war we need to move on to if we can ever shift away from the ideological war to be a war between us walking results of genetic programs and the limitations in the genetic programs themselves that have us fall apart after 70 years. Unfortunately these systems of my own biology that are closer to home for me also seem to defy treatments, drugs, and catalysts to fix them. There is no cure for the degeneration of time. It seems that the human form was designed through evolution by our genes to be a temporary output lasting from one generation to the next for the purpose of generating a next and better generation of the genes.
Well Zach and Madeline are asleep. I wondered why they cry and get so upset in the middle of the night. Maybe they need something mentally to pacify them. Eventually they will be like Sarah and me and not cry out in the middle of the night until someone comes to comfort them. The curse of human intellect is the need for something to occupy it. Whether it is religion, software development, or science something needs to fill our minds to allow us to sleep peacefully. It seems that the comfort that religion brings to people is what makes religion so powerful and necessary in their lives. All people need some form of religion. For some folks like me that religion is in science, engineering, and my own construct of ethics based on the parts of Judaism that don’t bring a God into the picture. Religion is whatever connects with people’s need to generate a view of their universe to let them operate each day without thinking about why they are here, why what they are doing is the right thing, and what choices they should make based on their beliefs. Without religion life would be discontinuous, nonsensical, and we would be unable to make life decisions. But with it comes the hardened beliefs, ideological differences, the fundamentalists, and the wars.
