6/5/2013 Is having a child a leap of faith?

Next Wednesday at the Ideas Cafe, we will be discussing the decision to have children.

The decision to have children is one of the most important decisions we make.

People talk about getting married, buying a house, immigrating to another country as really pivotal moments that completely change their lives.  There is no doubt that these are important moments with big implications but they mostly concern the decision maker(s) and can be undone to some extent.

Bringing another person into this world, on the other hand, takes on the responsibility of deciding what is good for this other person who is completely dependent on you and the decision cannot be undone.

Yet it seems historically before the prevalence of birth control, there was never that much question of the decision to have or not have children.

Even after the availability of the birth control pill to liberate women from the default role of being mother and caregiver, the decision to have children continue on as mostly as "the thing to do".

For a couple who is enjoying their blissful years of newly married life, there is little logical reason to trade that for the burden of child rearing.  Even happiness studies show that couples are happiest when they first got married and drop considerably when the children arrived.  The happiness index do not come back up until the children are grown.

The pressures of a career on the rise, a newly acquired mortgage obligation for the home, older parents that are starting to age just do not seem to be the right time for young couples to also take on the binding commitment to look after young helpless children for the next 20 years or so. 

Nothing but more sacrifices and challenges awaits them.

No wonder couples are putting off having children later and later until the biological clock counts down on them.

So is the decision to have children base on example from previous generation and one's peers? A biological urge? A wish to create a dynasty of our own? to see an extension of ourselves down generations?

A leap of faith for the most important decision we ever have to make?

My personal experience though, is that having children is a wonderful challenging experience.  All the scary considerations just make it that much more challenging and satisfying.  It is not something that can be logically defended in terms of decision making and that is what makes it so intriguing. 

Looking back, it was a wonderful time even though we may not felt that way at the time.

What are some of the other decisions out there that is similar to the decision to have children, decisions that do not make logical sense but turn out to be good decisions when viewed after the experience?

It is a humbling experience to think that we do not always have all the pieces to make the right decisions. 

Maybe herd instinct to follow others of our own species is not so bad after all?

5/28/2013 Is atheism a religion?

"The power off button is not another channel on the television channel dial ! "

So said eloquently by the atheists.

Their position is that the scientific evidence based approach is the only way to guide us in our knowledge and decision making.  Faith leads to a tendency to go towards what we want to believe rather than what actually is.

The religious side can say that science can only tell us what has happened in the past.  We know that the sun comes up over the horizon every morning and gravity causes pencils to fall off the desk - up to now.  There is no scientific basis to definitively say that these properties will continue that way into the future.

Philosophy agrees.  Predicting the future is logically impossible.

The famous turkey paradox is about how an "evidence based" turkey sees the turkey farmer as the turkey's best friend.  After all, the farmer comes to clean the pan everyday and bring food and water for the turkey.  Based on that evidence, how is the turkey to expect that two weeks before thanksgiving that the farmer is coming to wring the turkey's neck?

Therefore, there is a belief involved in depending on science to continue as we experience it in the past.  The continual new findings in science, which sometimes shake up previous understanding, is evidence to this.  Did the Greeks not have every reason to think that the sun revolve around the earth based on their visual evidence?

Then there is the other aspect of the great progress being made in science.  It is no longer possible for any of us to have a full grasp of the various branches of scientific knowledge. 
When we are told that Einstein's equations dictate the presence of "dark energy",  it is evidence based because dark energy makes the equation work.  How many of us know what that equation is and understand its derivation?  When geneticists talk about chromosomes and DNA, how many of us know which ones do what?

When the new giant research facility the Large Hadron Collider at Cern said their experiment proved the existence of the Higg's boson, how do we verify the claim?

We believe.

We have "faith" in the media, the scientific community, Wikipedia, and any number of sources that agree with each other.

Conspiracy theorist would suggest that we never went to the moon and that the moon landing was all staged in a secret location.  It is all based on faith since not many of us have first hand experience of this.

Then there is group thinking and tribalism.  The bitter debate between the religious and the atheists inevitably divide the camp into two distinctive groups and the "us versus them" attitude that go with opposing groups.  While atheists may claim that they are evidence based,  it is just as tempting for them to favour speakers on their camp.

So atheism inevitably involve believing similar to the religious.  As is with the religious, the atheist values are also closely connected with these believes.

Huston Smith's book "The World's Religions" lists Confucianism in China as a religion.

"If religion is taken in its widest sense, as a way of life woven around a people's ultimate concerns, Confucianism clearly qualifies. Even if religion is taken in a narrower sense, as a concern to align humanity with the transcendental ground of its existence, Confucianism is still a religion, albeit a muted one........"

So Confucianism, without belief in any supernatural being, manage to define social values for China, Japan, and Korea for centuries and according to Smith have the essential qualities of a religion.

By this definition, atheism will also fit in the same category.

This definition, however, is not the everyday person's understanding of religion. 

For the person busy with everyday life.  Religion involve believing in a supernatural being, in miracles, in life after death, and reward/punishment in that afterlife for what we do in this life.

It is this common understanding of religion that the atheist is fighting against.

The "blind faith" based on written works thousands of years ago that defies our understanding of the present world.  The turning of water into wine, manna from heaven, and resurrection from the dead.

The story of Noah's Ark is hard to defend against current understanding of the world.  How did the lions coexist with the other animals in the Ark in the hungry days in the Ark waiting for the water to subside?  Did the North American buffalo made a special trip across the ocean to join the others in the Ark?  The Australian kangaroo?  Why did we not know about these other lands till much later on?  What about biodiversity with all the animals coming out of incest?

We need to differentiate the two complete different definition of religion. The academic and social aspect of religion as a value system, and religion involved in believing in supernatural being base on faith.

Atheism is a believe system more concerned with observed evidence while the supernatural kind is based on what we wish for.

5/22/2013 Can ugly images be good art?

This coming Wednesday,  we are discussing art at the Ideas Cafe.

Does art have to be pleasing?


We generally think of admiring a beautiful painting, listening to enjoyable music, watch an entertaining play or movie as the art experience.

I suppose it comes down to the definition of art.  Ugliness is not art if we define art as a pleasant experience for us to indulge in.  But if art is meant to stimulate our thinking, then any stimulant, including ugliness is fair game.

But then what is ugliness?  It is a subjective judgement and if art is in the eye of the beholder, then the same piece of art can be considered ugly by some and refreshing by others.

If art is letting us see what the artist see, then ugliness can be part of what the artist sees.

But would anybody have an ugly piece of art as their centerpiece in their home?

Besides, if the definition of art is so broad that everything is a piece of art, than the term art becomes meaningless.

So maybe it is our individual subjective ideas about art that prevents us from displaying ugly art ourselves while curators with public money can display provocative ugly art just to get attention, to break the monotony of "standard pleasing images"?
 
Should the ability to shock be part of or excluded from art?

I thought that we should readjust our senses after all these images from googling "ugly art".

Here is what I found from googling "beautiful art"

 

Maybe ugly art is not so bad after all!