Memories – Of My Father

Going through a box of old stuff, my brother recently unearthed some really interesting stuff: An A4-sized sheet of paper with photographs glued to the front, and a text written by our late father on the back. The photographs date from roughly 1930 to about 1990 and depict my father’s father at various stages of his life. All of them are pictures neither of us had seen before. The text on the backside is entitled “Memories – Of my father” and was written by our dad on the day our grandfather died.
Reading it, for the first time in my life I realized that I know next to nothing about my grandfather. We’ve always been a rather atomic family. Relatives tend to live rather far away and contact tends to be maintained loosely. We did visit my grandparents when we were kids, but not too often, and almost never for more than a single day at a time. My grandfather died when I was 7 years old, and until then I had mostly stayed out of his room, which he only left for meals.
To a seven-year-old, he was an intimidating figure – a grumpy old man sitting in a dark and dusty room, tied to strange and noisy machines that seemed to serve the purpose of doing his breathing for him. This is what he looked like then, and how I remember him:

I never spared this man much thought – he simply didn’t play any significant role at any point in my life. Still, reading my father’s recapitulation of his life had me choking down tears. I’m not sure whether that’s due to the depressing facts of my grandfather’s life, or a reaction to the sadness of my father’s voice speaking from the old text. One way or the other, the summary of my granddad’s life is a story worth reading, so here it is:

Memories – Of my father

Born on October 4th, 1921 in a well-off family, he spent a childhood that, according to his own account, was “happy”. With his brother he noshed on raisins and marzipan in his uncle’s Bread-factory, and was allowed to ride along in his beloved grandpa’s (the 7th German to own a Penny Farthing bycicle) Ford “Model T”.

The beginning of his adolescence concurred with the beginning of the Nazi-reign in Germany. Convinced as well as indoctrinated by the new ideology, he volunteered to serve at the warfront at the age of eighteen.

Chaperoned throughout his teenage-years by the HJ (Hitler Youth), he spent his youth in the trenches of a horrible war, and returned “home” in 1946 as a young man from russian war captivity – One bullet in his stomach, the lung penetrated by another, leg injuries, Frostbite, “Russian Periodontitis”, Malaria – without teeth of his own and plexiglass-implants below his knees instead of real bones. A physical wreck at the tender age of 25.

An iron will to persist, cheerfulness and humor (later also alcohol), were the sanctuaries that allowed him to forget his lack of physical ability.

Whether office parties at the post-war-employer’s, rounds of Doppelkopf (a card game) or simply with friends at a bar – with his blunt or sharp remarks, superficial or subtle jokes, his flat crudities or his fiery esprit he always was at the center of any social gathering. Somebody who made people laugh – and made them forget the surrounding debris and its causes, push it to the back of their minds at least temporarily.

He, himself a master of suppression, was considered a humorist, a blithe spirit, the life of every party – and liked that role. Nobody could or wanted to see his suffering, which he wouldn’t allow to surface for even a moment.

A new job, marriage, the birth of his son – the highlights of the fifties.

He lived without regard for his infirmity – which he put out of his mind, but which still existed. Whenever he spoke of scars or injuries, it was like he wasn’t talking about himself, but about entirely abstract objects.

But the suppression of reality did not enable him to endure the permanent burden of a life in the workforce. In his early forties he was as often certified sick as present at the workplace, and was signed unfit for work (or, as he called it, “broken”) before the age of fifty.

1975 his physician predicted that he’d have perhaps two, maximally three years left to live. 1978 he moved to the countryside in good spirits, hoping to be able to catch his breath in the fresh air and for an improvement of his condition. But nothing did improve.

His ailments didn’t get worse, either, but the chronic presence of his condition and the continuing, for him always surprising experience of his physical limitations increasingly wore him down.

The continuous intake of drugs and the accompanying side effects lead to an increasing loss of physical balance, which in turn was medicated with even more drugs (with side effects of their own). Even though he made fun of that essentially ridiculous loop with unbroken (gallows-) humor; the captivity in this vicious circle too exhausted a large amount of his strength.

Today, on February 10th, 1995, his strength is finally drained.

It’s Been A Year Already!

Yep, Just a Little Common Sense turned one. Actually, it turned one a little over two weeks ago.

I started this blog at the very end of april last year; I had been back in Germany for a while and faced at least half a year without occupation, due to my being too stupid to notice my gross misconception in how universities choose from their applications.
Being unemployed was hell – It turned me nocturnal and into a couch potato. Without any serious motivation to get out of bed in the morning and without deadlines to keep, I quickly perfected the art of procrastination. The days dragged, but the weeks whizzed by.
So I started blogging – in order to finally have something to do again, in order to keep up (and perhaps improve) my english skills, in order to finally spent my time with something marginally more useful than online-games.

After two months I had produced nearly 40 pieces of writing, most of them utter crap, but all of them good practice and fulfilling their purpose of keeping me busy. I spent serious time promoting the blog, too – and quickly reached averages of about 100 individual clicks per day.

Blogging wasn’t the only thing I did to keep my brain from turning to mush, of course. At the same time I started attending meetings of political parties and humanist/skeptic organizations in my area, searching for new stimuli, conversations, inspirations. I searched for groups of people with goals worth supporting, and I found one Humanist group whose meetings I still attend regularly.

If you have been following this blog, you may have noticed that over the last few month my output dropped significantly. My activity here declined to less than four posts per month. The good news is that that’s because things have been going well lately – I have a life that is worthy of my undivided attention again.
I’ve been stressed out for a long time now and it’s been quite a stretch emotionally as well as physically, but I’m alright now and at the moment it looks like there’s nothing but further improvements ahead. I’m finally myself again.
I feel able to write again- where in the past months the reason I haven’t posted was that I couldn’t seem to find the right words, now it’s that I simply lack the time. But I am planning to take this more seriously again, and I’ve promised myself to ramp up my output to at least six posts per month again. Because even though I started this half-heartedly because I felt I had to do something to keep my brain from decaying, I’ve really grown fond of blogging. There’s something intriguing about the blogosphere, this strange world of carefully selected and presented insights into the souls of strangers. I very much liked being a part of it, for however short and superficially, and even though my initial reasons for running this blog are gone now, I’d like to stay and perhaps even increase my presence here. It’s been helpful to write about stuff, to speak up about things that concern me, to rant about things that annoy me. To praise the things I find beautiful. Thanks to all of you who during this past year have shared their thoughts with me, who offered support or constructive criticism. Thanks even to the few trolls and religious nutbags. I appreciate it.

So Osama is Dead. Happy Now?

Suddenly there’s an entire nation celebrating. And not only america is stoked: the heads of other nations are already sending their congratulations. It’s a celebration of a victory that doesn’t exist, of the murder of yet another human being. The death of Osama bin Laden will not change a thing. The situation in Iraq will not improve, the soldiers won’t be in any less danger, none of the 9/11 victims will come back to life. NOTHING has been accomplished here.
All it is is a disgusting display of people’s primitive lust for vengeance, and it makes me sick to my stomach.
Seriously. It’s been a few thousand years since we thought that tit-for-tat made for actual justice. One should think that now that we’ve been to the moon, we might have left this preposterous primitivism behind and developed more sophisticated ways of dealing with wrongdoings.

“Osama plotted the killing of a few thousand americans, let’s kill him 3000 times to get even…” What a load brainless shit. Again, what has been accomplished here? Terrorism is just a symptom, not the disease. The diseases that cause it are called “poverty”, “bad government” and “desperation”… Those are the problems that need to be dealt with. The only way to win the “war on terrorism” (oh how fucking ridiculous that term is!!!) is by eleminating the need for it: By improving the living conditions of the people within the “rogue states”, by tracking down the sources that furnish organizations like Al Quaida with money and weaponry, by helping the people to establish a fair and stable government. Only desperate people support fundamentalists – Terrorist would not find much support among a nation of educated and well-fed citizens.
I realize how high those goals are, but please don’t tell me that there is no way of accomplishing them given the incredible amount of money and resources that we choose to spent on expensive toys for our generals to play with instead.

Pre Implantation Genetic Diagnosis: What It Is (And Isn’t) Actually Capable Of

There is a lot of talk about “Designer Babies”. Everybody knows that it is already possible to screen embryos for certain genetic diseases, so how far could we possibly be away from the process of picking and choosing specific traits for our babies, having them designed according to our wishes, have the modified embryo implanted, and nine month later giving birth to exactly the baby we wanted? Actually, can we even be sure the rich and powerful aren’t already secretly doing just that in shady hidden labs, run by megalomanic mad scientists? Are there already designed people walking among us?

The short answer is no. The technique used for avoiding genetic diseases in couples that have a high risk of giving birth to genetically impaired offspring is called Pre Implantation Genetic Diagnosis, usually shortened to “PGD” or “PIGD”.
Quite unlike what most people imagine, this doesn’t actually involve sequencing the embryo’s DNA: There is no doctor looking at thousands of lines of genetic code and saying stuff like: “it’s gonna be a tall blonde boy with an IQ of 126. Do you want us to remove his predisposition to alcoholism?”
In reality, PGD is very limited. The embryos are scrutinized at a stage when they consist of 8 cells. In this stage, all of the cells are still pluripotent (they haven’t specialized to be anything specific yet) and the embryo is still capable of being frozen and later reanimated without taking any damage. From these 8 cells, two are removed for the purpose of screening. That doesn’t impair the embryo, as at that stage the remaining six cells keep dividing into perfect copies of each other and the growth simply continues.
The two removed cells each contain two sets of chromosomes. That is very little genetic material to work with.

Human DNA

With so little material, you have to know very specifically where to look and what you’re looking for in order to be able to spot anything at all. Sequencing the complete genome is not possible under these conditions. So “Screening” is limited to just that: Tests that check for a very specific genetic abnormalities in very specific places on the genome. In a healthy organism, every chromosome ought to be found twice in each cell. Some diseases are caused by one of these copies missing (monosomy), or there being three rather than two copies present (trisomy). These are the kind of genetic defects that we can spot with PGD. And that’s great, because it allows us to avoid some pretty horrible diseases. But all the hype is exaggerated: All those who are panicking because they think that if we don’t outlaw PGD, people will be able to walk into a clinic with a list of attributes they’d like their child to have, and be furnished with an accordingly designed embryo ready for implantation, have no idea what they are talking about.

Anything beyond recognizing the most obvious of oddities is still very much science fiction.

Music For The Unbeliever: Episode 2

For the first post of this series, featuring Motörhead’s beautiful “God Was Never On Your Side”, click here.

This time an oldie most people are likely already familiar with: Jesus He Knows Me by Genesis. I’ve listened to this song countless times on the radio throughout my childhood, but only recently I noticed how great the lyrics are. Well worth paying attention to. They’re quite easy to understand, but I’ve added them below the fold anyway, just in case. Enjoy!

I’m Not Obliged To Make You Feel Welcome

This blog is not intended as an opportunity for faith-heads to proselytize. It’s my soap-box to write about topics that interest me, and I greatly welcome people with like interests to discuss the issues.

I’d like to make it clear once and for all that I feel no obligation to accommodate ignorant and condescending dickheads. I will not censor any comment, but please consider that religious organisations and beliefs are a genuine topic of interest for me – I’ve spent some serious time studying various religions and theistic philosophy. If you don’t display even the briefest of interest in (or knowledge of) Humanist philosophy, it should come as no surprise to you that I much rather spend my time with the more productive discussions I have with the secular commenters here, or the few religious ones who came here out of an actual interest in a frank exchange of views rather than some misguided missionary zeal or equally misplaced ignorant concern for my (apparently) lost soul.

If you come here with the intention of confronting my worldview, you ought at least to know what that worldview consists of. If you don’t, prepare to get bitch slapped.

Letter To Faith-Head Jim

Yesterday I received a comment on my latest post that is exemplary of the condescending attitude of believers who believe that, simply because they are a few years older than me, my views are not even worth listening to. They’ve got it all figured out, and they’re just trying to help a poor, young and obviously confused soul.
That comment is so exemplary in fact, that for a second I wondered if it was just some fellow atheist’s idea of humour. In the end I was convinced of the authentic nature of the comment by the author’s abuse of punctuation and generally faulty grammar. Here it is, in all its beauty:

I stumbled upon your website and will probably never be back. I have no agenda other than to leave you with some thoughts you might find helpful. I know a lot of young people in their mid-twentys…none of them blog. I wonder why you do? Are you happy…I mean deep down? Life is short, death is certain, eternity is forever…Faith comes BEFORE knowledge and understanding, it must…the Truth is a Person…that Person will be with you every step of your journey despite your rantings. You sound like a smart guy…you can figure this out. I wish you well…Regards from America.

As I said, this is a perfect example of an attitude I encounter all the time. My usual tactic is to smile and ignore. It’s an invite to a game that I have stopped playing some time ago, when its predictable patterns started to bore me. This comment being on my blog however, for anyone to see, I felt obliged to answer. Having just had a really great although exhausting day, and feeling relaxed and a tad bored, I was in just the right mood, too. So I blew the dust of my trolling-gloves and accepted the invite.

Dear Jim,
I appreciate your kind but entirely misplaced concern for my personal happiness. If you would actually wonder why I blog, you could of course simply have asked, but if you prefer to stick to your preconceived notion of the angry and frustrated young atheist who blogs because he has nobody in real life who will listen to him, that’s just as fine with me.
I can’t help wondering a little myself… those people you know, presumably my peers by age, do they watch a lot of quality TV like American Idol or Big Brother? Do they drink a lot of alcohol? Because I don’t. And I’d like you to consider which is the more fulfilling past-time: That, or blogging about the kind of political and ethical issues that I find interesting, in a foreign language?

I know you weren’t really interested in an actual answer to your rhetorical question in the first place, but here it is anyhow: I blog because I enjoy writing. I enjoy playing that weird but beautiful instrument that is the english language, enjoy to improve my grasp of it. I rant because it’s something I enjoy doing from time to time. It’s an intellectually engaging way to keep my english-skills alive, and it most certainly beats watching TV. Satisfied?
I am a smart guy, thank you, and I already figured this out. I know it makes you uncomfortable to even consider the possibility of a happy atheist, because that might mean you need to seriously reconsider your world-view, but YES, I actually am happy deep down.

You are right, faith does indeed come before knowledge. That is because it acts as a gap-filler in its absence. Those who choose to still stick with it once actual knowledge is available are cowards, too afraid of change to opt for improvement and a widening of their horizons. Terrified, they stick to the mundane and shrink away from exploring the realms of intellectual growth and sensual fulfillment in which true happiness can be found.

It’s kinda cute to see you try to patronize me, Jim, but your petty fairy-tales and empty promises of a better beyond fail to impress: With music, philosophy, art, literature and human relations I have a wealth of experience and beauty at my disposal right in the here and now that makes your promises of heaven look pale by comparison. My faith is in people, and it’s a faith stronger than yours will ever be.

——–
UPDATE: Despite his announcment not to be back, here he is. The discussion continues in the original comment thread.

The Ethics of Animal Testing

The one thing people bring up in defense of animal testing are the huge medical and scientific advances it provides us with. There’s immensely important treatments out there that could not have been developed without experimentation on animals, and nobody seriously denies that.

From a utilitarian point of view, ethics are a cost-benefit calculation: The end does justify the means: While killing people is generally a bad thing to do, assassinating Hitler for example would have been ethically permissible because in that case, the benefit of preventing or at least stopping a genocide outweighs the cost of killing a single human being by several orders of magnitude. By the same token, sentencing a few hundred mice to a death of agony may be morally permissive when it leads to the discovery of, say, a cure for cancer – the future prevention of great suffering outweighs the suffering inflicted upon a few mice in the here and now.

While that is a perfectly valid point to make, it is ridiculous to try to justify all animal testing by pointing out that there are a few experiments among the millions of tortured creatures that significantly advance medical science. The huge majority of animals are being tested on just to show that shampoo X is safe to use on your kids without producing a burning sensation in their precious little eyes, as if there weren’t enough safe ones available already. There is so little scientific or medical progress in these areas that it wouldn’t even justify harming a single fly.
Once that is pointed out, most proponents of animal testing retreat to defending “medical animal testing”. Unfortunately, for that field the same thing holds true: Only a tiny fragment of cruel experiments yield significant results, while the vast majority inflict incredible amounts of suffering for little or insignificant data in return.

The second line of defense for most proponents of animal testing boils down to “but they’re just animals” – They question that animals have any rights at all, or sometimes attack the idea of “rights” itself as being useless and without basis in reality. In essence what they’re saying is that “animals are less able than us, therefore it is okay for us to treat them however we wish.”

Now here is where the discussion gets interesting. Let me start by pointing out that most people would agree that it is wrong to experiment on a less able person. It’s wrong to experiment on the elderly, children, or mentally disabled adults – only very few people would disagree with that.
The problem here is that any argument that can be used to justify the suffering of animals can equally be used to justify inflicting suffering onto less able humans. Perhaps disabled ones, or all below a certain IQ? Or why not experiment on convicts, alcoholics or the homeless?

If you invoke a hierarchy of ability to grant humans a higher ethical status than animals, you have to accept that the “lower” class that includes animals would also include less able humans. The only other real option you have is to invoke an ideal of equality based on the ability to suffer.
Suffering is the only thing that all humans share, and coincidentally is also shared by all other conscious creatures on this planet. So by its own virtue the argument extends to include, without discrimination, all beings capable of suffering.
The question is not whether there is actually such a thing as a “right” to life or to anything – the point is that to whatever extent rights do exist, there is no justification for awarding them to humans without extending them to other animals too.

With regards to animal testing this doesn’t mean we should put a stop to all experiments run on animals. Not all of them inflict a great amount of suffering on the test subjects, and some of them return results important enough to justify the harm inflicted. What it means is that we need a shift of paradigm in the public perception of the issue. Rather than the current idea that animal testing is generally okay and only in especially cruel instances may be morally questionable, we need to accept and recognize the idea that inflicting suffering on any conscious being is generally wrong, and only in certain instances may be permissible.

Setting humans apart from and above all other species is purely arbitrary, much in the same way that racism arbitrarily declares one race to be superior to others.

 

I’d like to end with a few lines that beautifully sum up the single most important argument that can be made in this debate; it was written well over two centuries ago by Jeremy Bentham, in his work Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:

The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned [...] What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month of age. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Music For The Unbeliever: Episode 1

Ever since I noticed the insane amount of christian music out there, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for songs that thematize science, atheism, Humanism, skepticism and other related topics – songs that promote critical thinking and, well, just a little common sense.
Over time, I’ve found a good few. Many are metal and punk songs, but I’ve found some less aggressive ones too, perhaps more suitable for a wider audience. Also, there’s a surprising amount of Hip-Hop in the mix. From now on I’ll be sharing one of these songs with you once a week.

I’ll start today with one of my personal favourites, ballad by Motörhead called ‘God Was Never On Your Side’. Enjoy!

 

Lyrics:

I Trust My Life To Science

A few days ago I ordered two ten-gram-packs of Nux Vomica homeopathic remedy. Today I went to the pharmacy to pick it up. I paid a total of 16,60€, 8,30€ per pack. Nux Vomica, the listed active ingredient, is a poisonous tree native to india. Its seeds contain Strychnine, the bark contains the very similar brucine, aswell as other poisonous compounds.

Nux Vomica is potentially lethal to humans. 32 mg of strychnine are needed to kill and adult, so eating only a few Nux Vomica seeds would already do the trick. This is what such a death would look like:

Ten to twenty minutes after exposure, the body’s muscles begin to spasm, starting with the head and neck [...]. The spasms then spread to every muscle in the body, with nearly continuous convulsions, and get worse at the slightest stimulus. The convulsions progress, increasing in intensity and frequency until the backbone arches continually. Convulsions lead to lactic acidosis, hyperthermia and rhabdomyolysis. These are followed by postictal depression. Death comes from asphyxiation caused by paralysis of the neural pathways that control breathing, or by exhaustion from the convulsions. The subject dies within 2–3 hours after exposure.

(Source: Wikipedia)

In a very small dose, Nux Vomica works as a laxative. In a higher dosis that is still below the lethal threshold, it leads to violent convulsions and muscle spasms.
As I said, I just legally purchased 20 grams of that stuff, at the pharmacy, without a prescription of any kind.

Tomorrow, I am going to swallow all of it.

Let me repeat: This is over the counter medicine, bought in a respected pharmacy. And not only does it clearly state a potentially lethal poison as the active ingredient on its label, but the package insert specifically warns not to take more than the recommended dose of five of the tiny sugar pills, and to immediately see a doctor in case of an overdose.

Despite all that I’m not the least bit worried about the consequences. I am not going to die. I am not even going to experience the slightest discomfort, beyond the taste of a mouthful of sugar. And that is because in homeopathic remedies, the active ingredient is diluted so much that there is absolutely nothing left of it.
Of course, homeopaths know that. They offer all kinds of excuses for why it might still work, mainly the claim that water has some sort of ability to retain a “memory” of the ingredient, and thus the desired effects, even in the absence of said ingredient. Of course, they might be right. Everybody has an anecdote of someone who is into homeopathy and was healed many times by it. So many people swear on its miraculous power, could they possibly all be wrong? Well, of course they could. And even though there are people who think that this is rather far-fetched and unlikely, I am willing to wager my life on it.

My confidence will become more understandable the more you read about the supposed “science” behind homeopathy. Not only has it never conclusively been shown to work, there is not even a known mechanism or even hypotheses explaining how it might work.

The label on my recently bought bottles of homeopathic Nux Vomica – “remedy” also contains information on the concentration of active ingredient. Being an over the counter medicine, it has to. The concentration is given here is “D30″ – a cryptic phrase, after all those who sell it are playing on the fact that hardly anybody knows about the principle behind it. What it means is that it has been diluted in a concentration of one in 10 raised to the power of 30. That’s a one followed by thirty zeroes:
1 in 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 – that means it’s a concentration of one molecule of active ingredient in 30 tons of water.
Which basically means that if you spill one drop of strychnine into the water of the New York Harbour, and I drink a glass of water from the Rotterdam Harbour, I have about as much chance to catch a molecule of active ingredient as by swallowing the sugar pills I just bought.

Standing in the Pharmacy with a bottle of homeopathic remedy in my hand that I had just bought and paid for, and generally being the guy I am, of course I couldn’t just leave without a comment. So I commented:

Excuse me, I’m wondering. I mean, why exactly do you sell these at all? As a Pharmacist you know that the only difference between all those bottles (I gestured at the rack behind her) is on the label, right?

She looked at me blankly, for a brief moment completely confused. Which is understandable. I mean, this wasn’t exactly fair. I came there prepared, while she was completely unsuspecting, thinking she was only dealing with a satisfied customer picking up his order when I jumped her with that question. Nevertheless, I felt I needed to make that point. Considering the situation, she kept her wits rather well.

Girl: “What do you mean?”
Me: “I mean that there’s no trace of any active ingredient in any of them. If you’d remove the labels, no homeopath in the world could tell the difference.”
Girl (confused): “But you just bought it!”
Me: “Yes, I’m with a group of skeptics who will collectively take an overdose tomorrow, to educate the public about the fact that there is nothing in it.”
Girl: “Oh, so you mean with the dilution and all”
Me: “Exactly.”
Girl: “Well, there are studies that show that it works, so…” (She left the sentence hanging)
Me: “Yeah, there’s about a handful of them. All of which have been discredited. On the other hand there are hundreds of credible ones that show no effect at all.”
Girl: “Well, there’s still thousands of people who will swear on it!”
Me: “Yes, but all they have to offer is anecdotes. There’s also thousands of people who swear on fortune-telling. Actually, there’s probably even thousands of people claiming to be the reincarnation of Napoleon. That doesn’t mean much.”
Girl: “Yes, but as long as it works for them, there’s no harm in selling it, no?”
Me: “Selling them sugar. At a price of eight euro per ten gram. No, that’s right I suppose. No harm. I just wonder about the ethics of it.”
Girl: “Well. You could talk to one of the pharmacists if you like.”
Me: “No, that’s alright. I’m not here to change anybody’s mind. I’m just making a point: Not all of your customers are happy about your support of pseudo-scientific woo. Have a nice day.”