Friday, March 14, 2008

Ah, the comments sections well worth the fodder...

Rosanna of Juliannie's blog (which as far as I can tell is completely lifeless). Posted a comment on my copy of Jesus Loves the Little Zygotes by Frank Zindler.

Well... lets see what the crazy fairy left us!

Jesus WAS a zygote. God (Jesus) was a human embryo. He placed himself in the hands of humans whom he loved so much that even though he loved them they killed him because they would have no other king but Caesar.


A zygote is a single cell made of two gametes. Unless Jesus was a massive fertilized egg, this is funny. People would have no other king but Caesar. Caesar was an emperor and there were plenty of kings. Finally, most of the Jesus story is probably fiction.

Pontius Pilate knew Jesus was innocent and places a sign above Jesus on the cross that read "King of the Jews" but the Jews told Pilate to write "Jesus SAID 'I am the king of the Jews'" and Pilate said "I have written what I have written." Pilate knew who Jesus was, but even he valued the opinion of the people more than doing what was right.


That's not a part of the original text. And where it is, that part of the gospel makes no sense at all. Everybody is acting out of character for no apparent reason. If you were a trouble-maker you get nailed to a stick for everybody to see what happens to trouble makers. You stay on that stick until you're good and rotted. You don't get a trial, you don't get some vote to let a prisoner go, you don't get any of that. - You get nailed to a stick, and if anybody else is around they get nailed to a stick too! If nailing you to a stick could get people to see that you don't fuck with the Romans, you got nailed to a stick.

So Jesus (God) died. God knows all about death and suffering. And he established his church that we can now collect as a family and do something and work together. But as you can see we still have the free choice to say no and do bad things, further making the world a worse place than we made it with the original sin. Sin has cosmic effects, primarily death. Diseases are death at small scale: cells die first, then the whole body. But sin first kills the spirit.


Why? Why couldn't all powerful God have come to a different conclusion as to what to do given the situation? Some creation of God acted in a way God didn't approve of, even though God should of known exactly how they would have acted, and thus their children (I know not how this is fair) are cursed for their wrongdoings. God find that this is unfair and in order to fix the problem God sacrifices himself to himself in order to create a loophole in his set of rules?

As far as diseases are concerned, I wonder why humans are the only creatures who cook their food.


This is remarkably a good question in a sea of stupid. If you were to name one quality of modern life that is nearly impossible to do without: cooking! As far as adaptations go cooking food is exceedingly important. Not only is it the best way to tenderize food it also pretty much opens up every other niche on the planet to human colonization. Cooking food is the best adaptations humans have. Some speculate that cooking is primarily responsible for humans position in the animal kingdom, and I tend to agree. If you watch Survivor, the first thing you do in camp is get a fire.

And the domestic animals who we feed cooked food to die also of the diseases that we have: arthritis, cancer, immune disorders.


Those diseases are common in animals well beyond their prime. Previously humans died far sooner than we do today. If you keep an animal alive in a domesticated fashion such as dogs or humans they will start to suffer these ailments having been spared from other things. If starving is off the table, there's few other things to get you.

Why do humans have long intestines with pockets in them, our stomachs produce light acid, while carnivores like dogs have intense acid that can separate flesh from bone and they have short intestines that are smooth so the meat they eat doesn't putrefy before it's eliminated.


Because humans cook their food. Some species of carnivores (carnivoria) can eat putrid meat, as in rotten meat which would easily kill a human. This is because they are evolutionarily adapted in a way to allow them to eat the food they do eat.

As a whole, we humans don't actually go along with natural law very well.


We have been domesticated for so long that it has had a major impact on our diet and our ability to consume food. Rather than forcing our jaws to eat raw meat (don't let a chimp bite your finger), or our stomachs to extract nutrients from hard things, we typically just cook all of our food making it fairly mushy and often tasty (though 'tasty' might be evolutionary preference for cooked food). The fact is, cooking and society are evolutionary products, they are not exceptions to nature.

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