The Late Dan Head

Dan Head

I only recently realized that I hadn't seen any posts from an old friend, Dan Head, in a while on Facebook, so I went to his profile to see what was up.  There I found out that he'd passed away on August 14th in Eugene, Oregon.

Here's a post I put on his page for any of his online friends to see...

Oh, I'm so sorry to hear of Dan's passing.  I only just saw this now, when I went to look at why I didn't recall seeing any of Dan's posts for a few months.

Dan and I were friends since elementary school in Waldport, when, though he was a year older than me, we played on the same little league baseball team.

In Junior High we had art class together.  One of those classes without the usual lectures and tests and school work, giving us students lots of time to visit and chit chat and goof off together. We were in the same in-class social group there.  The teacher usually let students pick music to play while the class worked and I remember Dan usually picked Ted Nugent's "Intensities in Ten Cities," though I wasn't into that sort of music yet.

I still remember a particular painting he did in class, three silver globes clustered together, floating over some kind of landscape.  

In high school we fell into the same social group again, a bunch of us hanging out every morning before class in either the counselor's office, with its round table and office-style swivel chairs, or if he had a meeting, in the home-ec room.  Talking about inane teenage stuff, but as a group of book loving teens, often working in a lot of puns and wordplay into our discussions.  For a couple of years we had a game where one person would pound the table and say a general subject and we'd spend all day trying to make our puns fit the subject (e.g. "birds" would be an emu-sing day...)

While most of our group likes fantasy, swords & sorcery books, Dan and I were the only ones who enjoyed John Norman's "Gor" series beyond the first book.  Both of us read all twenty plus books available then, and everyone else considered us a bit sick for that.

Being a year apart, we didn't have many classes together, just a few electives, but they were fun for socializing.  Classes like TV Production were like junior high art, not very structured and much of the work was done outside class hours, so in class every day was social hour to visit, discuss books, discuss music and all that...

We were both in the small school Games Club that met a couple of times a month to play war games, either in school or at our teacher's house to play games like Diplomacy, Russian Campaign, Squad Leader and so forth.  Lots of fun, lots of socializing.  Mostly it was the same group of us that met in the mornings, but with a few younger guys as well.

Some of our discussions, especially about a particular H.P. Lovecraft story we both liked have had life-long effects on me.  Talking to Dan back then, at 14 years old convinced me to basically reject religious belief altogether.  Though I'm not sure any of us actually knew much of atheism them, except as something portrayed as evil and communist, which we weren't.  But that's relieved quite a burden off me for decades.

I think the last time I can remember seeing Dan must've been around 1988, when a large group of our social circle were back in Waldport for holidays or summer or something, and we got together with a former teacher to play games.  We stayed up late into the night, playing a board game, chowing down Diane's Nacho Cheese tortilla chips, guzzling soda, talking, visiting and laughing.  

Life was already taking us all in different directions.  But it's a good memory.

Just for reference, here's the profile picture he set on Facebook at some point in the last couple of years...  It's not my photo, of course, so no credit to me.

How Do You Explain a Mosquito if Their is No God?

How Do You Explain a Mosquito if Their is No God?

(note: I borrowed the wrong homonym in my title to keep with the meme...)

For some reason the not-particularly-new meme from some dumb-ass theists asking questions to "prove" that god exists came to mind.  One in particular, with a woman holding a hand written note "how do you explain a sunset if their is no God?" (sic).

In my sleep I thought of three different ways to interpret the question itself (ignoring the incorrect homonym).  There may be more interpretations, I just thought of these three, and I already know I'm not particularly bright in general.

1. How do you explain why the sun sets at all, as opposed to remaining the sky?
2. How do you explain why the setting sun looks the way it does?
3. How do you explain why we almost universally feel sunsets are beautiful?

The first two are easily explained by physics, of course, and most of the memes that "answer" this question revolve around those two, the sun sets because the Earth rotates on its axis, and the Rayleigh scattering explains why it looks like it does in Earth's atmosphere.

The third interpretation, though, is a lot more philosophical.  If sunsets weren't almost universally considered beautiful the woman in the meme, and many others, likely wouldn't associated them with god.  And for people who believe in crap like a supreme being want to associate good or beautiful things with their supreme being.

And because the third interpretation appeals to people, they likely won't find arguments against the meme to be at all convincing.  Sunsets are still relatively beautiful, even if you understand why they happen and why they look the way they do.  

Otherwise, the question could be "how do you explain a mosquito if there is no god?"

Then again, many religious people see the explanation of negative, bad, or ugly things as still proof there is a god, punishing the wrong-doers, or punishing the righteous for not fighting the wrong-doers enough or something.

I guess there's no getting anywhere with this shit.

Atheism

A while ago in a public forum someone posted something about atheism, and being an atheist.  That led to a big discussion in the comments section, which of course made me think a little more about when my cousin asked me what I believed.

One of the religious people in the discussion said something like "I pity you atheists because of the huge emptiness in your lives," (maybe not the exact wording).  But I was thinking of life like a box of stuff shipped to you.  To me, G-d is like the packing material, to fill in the spaces between the real stuff.  So, by not being a believer, I'd want less of the packing material and more of the real stuff…

The packing material analogy came from my thinking about history, knowledge and science.  In the far distant past we, humans, had far less knowledge, so G-d or gods made good answers to what we didn't know.  Why does the sun move across the sky?  Ra pulls it in a chariot.  Why does it rain?  The gods send it.  Why do people get sick and die eating pork?  G-d forbids it!

But over the millennia people have worked out answers to lots of things and thrown out the "filler" (now we know how to clean butchered pigs so the meat is safe).  Of course, that's accelerated at exponential rates since the Renaissance.  And while I know we don't have all the answers to the things we don't know, one thing I see from all the knowledge we've gained is that we're capable, over time, of using science to find all the answers.  Sure, not at one time, not a big bang of "wow, I know everything" but continued advancement.

The more we learn and the more we find out, the less we need to use gods as an explanation for what we don't know.  And the less sense it makes to use gods as an overriding explanation for things we do know…

To me, saying things happen the way they do, or have been set in motion the way they have by a single, omniscient being simply doesn't make sense.


----

Online I see a lot of people who post atheist topics frequently post things, sayings, humorous cartoons, etc. that point to the burden of proof of God's existence should be on those who are religious, rather than the burden of proof of God's lack of existence on atheists.

On the one hand, that makes sense.  As someone who doesn't believe in god at all, the whole idea of an all-powerful or all-knowing, and especially benevolent, creator or whatever simply doesn't make sense to me.

However, given that humankind has worshipped and had near complete faith in the existence of gods since time immemorial, countless generations, that it's only a small minority that don't believe that, it is kind of hard for a minority of people to demand that everyone else is responsible for proving it.