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The Voice of Sanity THE NEWSLETTER OF THE UPSTATE S.C. SECULAR HUMANISTS Visit our web-site for current and back-issues at: www.uscsh.org e-mail: secularhmnst@aol.com

CALENDAR

The next brunch will be 10:30AM on Saturday, April 10th; at Denny’s restaurant; 2521 Wade Hampton Blvd, Taylors.

The next dinner/meeting will be Sunday, 1:30PM (note time change) April 25^th; at Joyce Bates; 231 Rainey Road, Greenville. For directions call (864)-423-0802.

Secular Humorist

by

R. Georges Delamontagne

It cannot possibly be a matter of pure coincidence that April Fool’s Day and Easter Sunday are never more than one to two weeks apart, since they both provide perfectly legitimate and widely-accepted opportunities for tricksters to fool many of the people some of the time. On April Fool’s Day, you can point up into the sky and exclaim to your friend that “Look up there; there’s a flying saucer, and there are mean-looking little green men inside looking down on us!” On Easter Sunday you can attend a church service celebrating a white man’s rising from the dead and ascending into the sky (heaven) to sit at the right hand of his father, who happens to be invisible -- which reminds me of a section of George Carlin’s book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? 2004 (Hyperion: New York). George’s contribution is entitled “They Came From Out Of The Sky,” and it reads as follows:

I find it discouraging – and a bit depressing – when I notice the unequal treatment afforded by the media to UFO believers on the one hand, and on the other, to those who believe in an invisible supreme being who inhabits the sky. Especially as the latter belief applies to the whole Jesus-Messiah-Son-of God fable.

You may have noticed that, in the media, UFO believers are usually referred to as buffs, a term used to diminish and marginalize them by relegating them to the ranks of hobbyists and mere enthusiasts. They are made to seem like kooks and quaint dingbats who have the nerve to believe that, in an observable universe of trillions upon trillions of stars, and most likely many hundreds of billions of potentially inhabitable planets, some of those planets may have produced life-forms capable of doing things we can’t do.

On the other hand those who believe in an eternal, all-powerful being, a being who demands to be loved and adored unconditionally and who punishes and rewards according to his whims are thought to be worthy, upright, credible people. This, in spite of the large numbers of believers who are clearly closed-minded fanatics.

To my way of thinking, there is every bit as much evidence for the existence of UFOs as there is for the existence of God. Probably far more. At least in the case of UFOs there have been countless taped and filmed – and, by the way, unexplained – sightings from all over the world, along with documented radar evidence seen by experienced military and civilian radar operators.

This does not even begin to include the widespread testimony of not only highly trained, experienced military and civilian pilots who are selected for their jobs, in part, for their above-average eyesight and mental stability, but also of equally well-trained, experienced law-enforcement officers. Such pilots and law-enforcement people are known to be serious, sober individuals who would have quite a bit to lose were they to be associated with anything resembling kooky, outlandish beliefs. Nonetheless, they have taken the risk of revealing their experience because they are convinced they have seen something objectively real that they consider important.

All of these accounts are ignored by the media.

Granted, the world of UFO-belief has its share of kooks, nuts and fringe people, but have you ever listened to some of these religious true-believers? Have you ever heard of any extreme, bizarre and outlandish claims associated with religious zealots? Could any of them be considered kooks, nuts or dingbats? A fair person would have to say yes.

But the marginal people in these two groups don’t matter in these arguments. What matters is the prejudice and superstition built into the media coverage of the two sets of beliefs. One is treated reverently and accepted as received truth, the other is treated laughingly and dismissed out of hand.

As evidence of the above premise, I offer the version of a typical television news story heard each year on the final Friday of Lent:

“Today is Good Friday, observed by Christians worldwide as a day that commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whose death redeemed the sins of mankind.”

Here’s the way it should be written:

“Today is Good Friday, observed worldwide by Jesus buffs as the day on which the popular, bearded cultural figure, sometimes referred to as The Messiah, was allegedly crucified and – according to legend – died for mankind’s so-called sins. Today kicks off a ‘holy’ weekend that culminates on Easter Sunday, when, it is widely believed, this dead ‘savior’ – who also, by the way, claimed to be the son of a sky-dwelling, invisible being known as God – mysteriously ‘rose from the dead.’”

“According to the legend, by volunteering to be killed and actually going through with it, Jesus saved every person who has ever lived – and every person who will live – from an eternity of suffering in a fiery region popularly known as hell, providing – so the story goes – that the person to be ‘saved’ firmly believes this rather fanciful tale.”

This would be an example of unbiased news reporting. Don’t wait around for it to happen. The aliens will land first.

Darwin Revisited

Over 150 years have passed since Darwin published the “Origin of Species” and today many still choose to believe the world is only about 6000 years old and all living things were created instantly, or, at least in a matter of days. There is so much emphasis on criticizing Darwin’s original thesis that one might think that nothing new has happened since. Here’s a look at the history since then:

Back in the 19^th century Darwin had the advantage of friendship with Charles Lyell who was not only interested in the fossil shells Darwin had seen on his voyage, but in how long it would take erosion to compress and form layers of rock containing those shells. This length of time would not be in thousands of years, as put forth by the Bishop of Usher, but at least hundreds of thousands of years. This gave Darwin the advantage of time to explain the change in life forms. Now we know geologic time is measured in millions and billions of years and it is not a stretch to say that this concept put a huge crack in religious belief not only in Darwin’s time but serves in the present equally well. No one can deny that, to an observer, the process of erosion is about as fast as that of drying paint. It is no accident that geologic time is ignored when discussing creationism.

Since Darwin, there has been a huge amount of scientific research. Darwin had been confined to working with the whole organism. The experiments on dominant inheritance that his contemporary Gregor Mendel did were with the whole organism, as well, and only hinted at Darwin’s ideas of natural selection. Thomas Morgan skeptical of both Darwin and Mendel set out to prove them both wrong, but he changed his mind in 1910. He discovered a fruit fly with a white-eye mutation that did indeed produce future generations exactly in step with Mendel’s ratios of inheritance. Later, research revealed more inherited mutations confirming not only Darwin’s ideas, but confirming Mendel’s experiments and reaffirming Morgan’s research, as well. This hard work made theory a reality and set the stage for the hunt to find the origins of life itself.

The hunt is still on. Hans Krebs untangled the mystery of metabolic reactions within the cell in the 1930’s. Cell metabolism is a chemical reaction using oxygen to burn simple sugars and produce the energy that defines life. The Miller-Urey experiment during the 1950’s cooked up “primordial soup”. This was a combination of ammonia, methane, and hydrogen through which electric sparks were passed. Amino acids, the building blocks of protein were created in this experiment. Awhile later, telescopes in Green Bank, WVA, detected amino acids in the dust and particles of space. Watson and Crick teased out the structure of DNA, the blueprint for formation of living things in the 1950’s. Researchers have been busy translating it ever since.

The latest research has arisen, not in the laboratory but during ocean exploration. Ocean vents called “Black Smokers”, discovered near the Galapagos Islands in the 1970s, produce complex living communities without sun or atmospheric oxygen. They are acidic in nature and have caused scientists to look at chemical reactions unlike those in the Miller-Urey experiments. Life could have ascended from such unlikely substances as carbon monoxide, iron pyrites (fool’s gold), and hydrogen sulfide. Even more promising are the “White Smokers” which are alkaline, and also have swarms of bacteria with associated animal communities. Concentrations of carbon dioxide and free hydrogen created by the mixing of hot ocean water with rock have been detected in these areas. Free hydrogen is difficult to produce, as we are finding out in our experiments to use it as a substitute for gasoline. However, living cells produce it routinely to metabolize sugars.

The search for the origins of life is an exciting adventure. It has taken time and effort by thousands of scientists working their whole lives to slowly nail down theories with facts and create new areas for scientific exploration. You have to admit that it’s just as good a story as Genesis but with facts to back it up. And it isn’t finished yet. J.Bates

Ref: “Life Ascending” Nick Lane (2009) W.W.Norton

“Blueprints” Edey and Johanson (1990) Penguin

“The Machinery of Life” David Goosell (1993) Springer Verlag