Pro-Life Atheism: You Don't Have To Be Religious To Be Against Abortion

I'm atheist. On Dawkin's religiosity scale of 1 to 7 (1 being extremely religious and 7 completely atheist) I'm 6.9 (just like Mr. Dawkins himself). God plays no role in my life and I find the idea of an intelligent creator of the universe who sits up in the heaven and concerns himself with what hand I wash my ass with or when (and with what gender) I have sex with quite laughable. At most, I might consider being an agnostic deist. That is, I believe there might some sort of intelligence that created (masterminded) the Universe, but one that does not care for the existence of the humans. However, I'm different from most atheists in one aspect, I do not think that abortion is right (although I'm fully opposed to it either). Unfortunately, this is not the position one wants to find themselves in, as most of pro-lifers also happen to be Christians and believe in pro-life because they think the bearded man sitting on the cloud told them to.

My story is a little bit different. Surrounded by liberals all around, I never gave that much thought to the abortion debate, as I thought it was a given that a woman has a right to choose as it is her body. That is what most liberals argue, and luckily enough for them they aren't met with much opposition as Christians and religious people as such usually fail to adhere to reason which in most cases automatically makes their arguments to a very large extent invalid.

My point of view on the other hand is more "philosophical" (for a lack of a better word). Most people argue that their life will be ruined if they have a child as they won't have time to do whatever it is they were planing to, so they resort to killing a fetus. You might agree with that, but what if the baby was born? Let's assume that the baby is a day old, how is it different from killing that child as opposed to killing it inside the mother? Some will say that this reasoning is unfair and wrong, but it's not. Let's look at the facts. Both the baby inside and the baby outside of the mother are still unconscious of their existence. Both will grow up to be conscious and aware of their existence, learn to love, feel etc. Sure, one can say that some babies are aborted before they are even 'alive', but that is the line of reasoning that is wrong. Whether or not the baby is alive at the time of its abortion is very irrelevant, what is relevant is that both are still unaware of their existence. How is it fair to claim that one baby should have the right to live while the other doesn't just because the first one was lucky enough to be given enough time to have it's nervous system grown (something it has no control over)?

When I was first realized  this, I was shocked. Why is it that so many liberals believe that abortion is right? In fact, assuming the absence of religion and following the line of reasoning I wrote above, it seems that the liberals would have been pro-life, and conservatives ( who are more individualistic)

pro-choice.

So the question then remains, assuming there was no religion, why would one be pro-choice? And in my opinion, this is the most interesting part. That is because deep down inside we are individualistic, egoistic and cruel animals. But there are two reasons why we don't act in such a way, first one of which is the so-called social contract. "Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the ruler or magistrate (or to the decision of a majority), in exchange for protection of their remaining rights". Killing newborn babies would most certainly be a violation of such contract.

The second reason is evolutionary psychology. That is, the involuntary decisions that we make. As I had previously mentioned in one of my earlier posts, one has all sorts of involuntary reactions when they look, smell, touch or even see a baby (and what's even more amazing is that the baby can be of a different species). Dopamine is released in the brain and one is overcome with a sudden urge to protect the baby, while some of us can't stop involuntarily smiling at them. That is because our brain has a special face-recognition "program" that can tell apart a baby, who has comically over-sized eyes and a disproportionate face just to aid the brain in recognition.

So when we hear of a baby being hurt, most of us will be angered and sad. When a parent kills their 2-month old baby we are outraged (think how much it disgusts you just reading that), but we don't give it a second a thought when a fetus is aborted. And that is because it is "only" a fetus. We haven't seen so we didn't bond emotionally with them yet. And if the fetus is in the earlier stages of development, then what's worse is that it hasn't yet had a chance to grow those characteristics on its face that we label as cute.

And that is pretty much my principal argument. Of course, there are instances when the situation becomes more confusing (what if the woman was raped?). These are the issues I will not discuss as it is not the point of this post. I'm merely adhering to the fact that the pro-lifers are fighting for the wrong reasons.

Read More

Economic Performances of the US Presidents

On average the US presidents tend to do a worse job in terms of the economy during their second term. This is a graph from the economist, comparing the economic performances of the presidents. How do you think Obama will do?

Read More

alterFACT: IBM's 1964 Supercomputer Was Much Bigger And Much Weaker Than Your Smartphone

IBM's 1964 360/91 model computer had an internal memory of 8Mb and was humongous. It was housed by NASA and was at the time the most powerful computer in the world. Your smartphone is thousands of times more powerful than this device

Read More

The Strange Future of the World and Nanotechnology

Someone born in 1930 would never have believed that billions of people would fly around the world in metal tubes called airplanes, that a man would walk on the moon and that you will be reading this on a metal box called the computer connected to the rest of the world through the Internet. 

Now it's time to embrace the new world of the future. Where scientists will move single atoms to create new nano-structures to achieve the most remarkable achievements. The new world of opportunities. The new world of Nano.

Read More

On This Day: End Of the Vietnam War

Exactly 40 years ago on this day President Richard Nixon proudly announced the whole world that the peace deal with Northern Vietnam has been signed. At that point American troops have been involved in Vietnam for over a decade, with over 500,000 deployed at the height in 1967. The peace treaty didn't last long as there were frequent violations of it until 1975, when a full-fledged war between the North and the South started. Unsurprisingly, it was the North that came on top with Ho Chi Minh proclaiming himself the ruler of the finally united and independent Vietnam.

Bad news Dick, the latest polls suggest that you are in fact a crook

Ironically, the war could have finished way before. In 1968, United States were going through a presidential election. Hubert Humphrey, the vice-President of Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat) was running against Richard Nixon (Republican). Nixon was winning pre-election polls by large, but Humphrey made-up fast by rapidly progressing the Paris Peace talks to stop the Vietnam War. A few days before the election, Humphrey actually brokered a temporary ceasefire, and it seemed that the war was about to end and Humphrey was about to be elected the new president. However, things changed rapidly one day before the elections, when the South Vietnamese (American Allies) suddenly withdrew from the talks. It seems highly suspicious that the American allies withdrew from the talks one day before the elections, and as it later turned out, it was Johnson aides who convinced the South Vietnamese that they were being tricked and would be sold out right after the elections.

The result of this whole thing was that Nixon became the newly elected president, and the war dragged on for another 5 years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Read the original 1973 article about the Nixon announcement here

Lyndon Johnson explains what happened in a tapped phone conversation

Read More

alterFACT: You Are More Likely To Die On Your Birthday

The study carried out by "serious" (as BBC calls them) Swiss scientists shows that you are 14% more likely to die on your birthday than any other day. The study analysed 2.5 million death in Switzerland between 1969 and 2008.

Some claim that the dogs playing dead were mistakenly accounted for as well

There are number of hypothesis to explain this phenomena. Some say that people "hang on" to their birthday, while  others attribute this statistic to the fact that one is more likely to take greater risk on their birthday, such as drunk driving. There is also a possibility that some documents had wrong dates.

Read More

alterIMAGE: When Lava Meets Water

So nature has done it again! This stunning photo is what happens when lava and seawater meet.  The water will get into the cracks of the lava flow’s surface, causing it to rapidly expand. The intense heat will convert the water to steam. At the same time, the cooling effect of the water causes the lava to solidify. All together this creates some pretty violent explosions from the combination of rocks, water, steam, and sparks of lava. If a wave splashes over the flow, the action is quite impressive as well (in terms of photography, but it’s actually pretty dangerous if you’re too close). What happens is that the water almost instantly will vaporize, which sends large rocks flying…so keep your distance. The steam is also very dangerous. Besides from being extremely hot, it contains volcanic glass particles, hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid. Seems like another legit reason to swim away if you see lava heading towards the ocean. But from an artistic standpoint, it’s truly spectacular.

Read More