The Binary Circumstance

The video footage of hurricane Katrina’s destruction they were showing on TV this morning was really astounding. Most of New Orleans is underwater with more water flowing in. Cities along the Mississippi coast were completely demolished. It is expected that the death toll will reach into the hundreds. The damage is far beyond what anybody had expected.

But the questions is, why didn’t they expect it?

New Orleans is built below sea level and relies on a system of levies and pumps to stay dry. It’s also built in a hurricane zone.

Katrina comes along and says, “Oh no you don’t.” She reminds us that nature, in order to be commanded, must be obeyed.

The financial losses from Katrina are expected to be at least $25 billion.

Every hurricane season brings much destruction to the American Southeast. This year, before many structures were rebuilt from last year’s hurricanes, they were wiped out again by this seasons storms.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco has called for a day of prayer. Once again the line between church and state have been blurred.

She did this in response to the overwhelming disaster from Katrina and on the same day that hundreds of Muslims where stampeded in Iraq at a religious ceremony.

While they’re talking to God they might want to ask Him why he created so much destruction and sadness in their lives. And if he created it, why would he want to help fix it for them?

It never ceases to amaze me that those who claim such devotion to God have no respect for the physical laws that govern the universe. If you believe that God created the earth, don’t you also by default believe that he created the physical laws that govern the earth?

I guess not.

The atmospheric laws that govern weather and create powerful storms like Katrina and the law of gravity that dictates that water flows to the lowest level are not going away. We keep thinking that our technology is going to protect us from those forces, and it does, up to a certain point and at tremendous cost.

Our technology protects us only to the degree that it obeys the laws of reality.

Too bad we haven’t found a way to harness the tremendous power of hurricanes. If we could capture their power and use it to generate electricity or put it to some other use we would be using nature to our advantage rather than trying to defeat it, which is a losing battle, not to mention a very expensive one.

Pharyngula goes off on doctors and the field of medicine. Senator/Doctor Bill Frist was his inspiration.

While contemplating that phrase, “graduated from Harvard Medical School” [Frist graduated from Harvard Medical School], I had an epiphany. This is the death of expertise. Who cares what a bunch of biologists say about biology…so who cares what a Harvard Med grad says about medicine? I am liberated and empowered by these statements. I may have no training at all in medicine, but so what? The more closely I looked at the medical establishment, the more clear it became that there is a conspiracy to keep the failings of Hippocratism hidden.

There are many problems with the practice of medicine these days. Underlying most of them is the fact that doctors and their friends in the government believe they have a “right” to control what people do with their bodies. Objectively, there is no scientific evidence that such a right exists.

One horror that results from this belief is that doctors and scientists in union with drug companies and government can use patients has guinea pigs. They can test out their theories and new medicines on patients who do not have the same level of freedom to test out possible therapies to treat their illnesses.

Of course patients in most cases much consent to any type of treatment or experimentation, but without the option to choose therapies not approved by the government, they are really not consenting at all. Without choice, there can be no genuine consent.

If you are forced to use a particular medical system, to seek treatment only from certain individuals, there is no consent. If your choice is to use the approved system or die, that is not consent. There might be a better, cheaper alternative which can only be found if the patients who is facing death has the freedom to search for it and experiment on his own body.

Think about it.

Others have the right to use your body to advance their own ends which usually involve making huge profits, but you don’t have the right to treat your own illness, which could ultimately be very profitable to you. You don’t have the right to try and save your own life if you are terminally ill without working with or getting permission from doctors and/or the government.

That process guarantees that if a patient stumbles upon a therapy that works better than any existing government approved therapies, the doctors or researchers that he is forced to work with will end up benefitting from the patient’s efforts and intellectual property.

The fact is that many patients have a stronger background in science that their doctors do. Many have higher IQs than their doctors. ALL patients have a greater incentive to cure themselves than the doctors do, yet they are required to use government approved doctors and drugs to treat themselves.

Of course they should have the option to use a system like the one we currently have, but it should never be a requirement.

If thousands of people have a particular disease, say AIDS for example, then all of those people are potential researchers in the hunt for a cure. They will take many different approaches to solving the problem and I guarantee you that one of them, probably working in conjunction with scientists, will find a cure or a cheaper more effective therapy much faster than our current government regulated system, which is not based on science, and is as much about concentrating power and wealth into the hands of a few as it is about finding cures for diseases.

Consider the system that evolution has created for the survival of the human species. It is built upon genetic variation, not uniformity. When faced with a disease, every individual has a unique set of genes. If we all had the same genes then a disease that killed one human would likely kill us all and the species would die out.

Governments like uniformity, nature does not.

The reason that there is so much genetic variation in the gene pool is because giving every human being a unique genetic makeup greatly increases the chances that some individuals will be resistant to any given selective force like a disease. Likewise, if every patient with a disease could try a unique approach to solving his/her health problems, the chances are greatly increased that somebody will find a solution.

A medical system based on science would take advantage of this inbred biological diversity and allow for all possible pathways to treatments and cures to be explored.

Here’s a funny cartoon satire about people who drive huge SUVs and how they see the world from where they sit. [viewable in multiple formats]

Jay McCarthy has been reading C. S. Lewis.

Many of my friends in late high school and college were reading C. S. Lewis and J. R. Tolkein.

C. S. Lewis’ discussion of the natural and the supernatural seems nothing short of bizarre to me at this point. I didn’t really get it back then and I certainly don’t get it now.

If the supernatural exists, it is part of existence, hence, part of nature.

The basis of religion is that there is a dualism between nature and some supernature that is divorced from nature and while at the same time married to it.

Lewis, from Miracles:

The difference between Naturalism and Supernaturalism is not exactly the same as the difference between belief in a God and disbelief. Naturalism, without ceasing to be itself, could admit a certain kind of God. The great interlocking event called Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling ‘God’ arising from the whole process as human mind arises (according to the Naturalists) from human organisms. A Naturalist would not object to that sort of God. […] What Naturalism cannot accept is the idea of a God who stands outside Nature and made it. [p. 19]

When you make something, you are intimately connected with it. It is the product of your being. You cannot stand completely outside of it because it has its origin in you and therefore is forever tied to you its creator.

Believing in this type of dualism is just a license to make stuff up. It works great for fiction writers, like Lewis, when they’re writing fiction. It becomes lunacy and an exercise in playing God when the fiction writer can convince himself that his creation is something completely outside of himself, something they stand “outside of.”

Objective reality is what stands outside of us. We, however, do not have the freedom to stand outside of it.

When we die the universe lives on. If the universe dies, we all die with it.

Without objective evidence to support Lewis’ view of things, I can only believe it is fiction. Blaming it on some super connection to a supernatural being, who he claims at the same time stands “outside of” nature, is just pure craziness.

How can he be connected to and communicating with something that is completely “outside of” nature?

It’s just total nonsense.