Thoughts on the ACLU and the 2nd Amendment

The American Civil Liberties Union.

ACLU POSITION

Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right. For seven decades, the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view.

The Supreme Court has now ruled otherwise. In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.

The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.

There are a couple of points they're missing, namely that the right is recognized (not granted) by the Constitution, because "the people" were all considered potential militia members in the event of invasion or tyranny. It did not only apply to active members of militias because the Justification Clause was just one example of why the right to armed self-defense is a necessity of Natural Law. The right itself is not dependent on the Justification Clause, because the right was not established by the Constitution, but merely recognized.

More broadly, according to the Ninth Amendment, you cannot use any part of the Constitution to invalidate any right recognized by the Constitution, which is what happens when they claim that the Justification Clause prevents it from being an individual right. To do so is inherently contradictory, and sets a dangerous precedent for negating any individual right.

I get that they may not like guns or the idea of an armed populace, but that is irrelevant to the ultimate purpose of defending individual rights. To me, that sends a message that the ACLU is only interested in defending rights it deems valid, thereby attempting to supersede the Constitution.

Why I am opposed to the 9/11 Cross at the WTC.

9/11 wasn't a Christian tragedy, nor was it just an American tragedy. 3500 people, Muslims, Christians, Jews and Atheists from all over the world, died when a small group of extremists gave up and turned to violence, in an effort to traumatize an entire nation.

It is utterly ridiculous to me to think that amidst all of this violence, destruction and death, amidst the dozens of people who committed suicide by jumping to their deaths, that the god of Christianity saw fit to make his presence known by welding together two pieces of steel. Not by stopping the planes, the collapse of the towers or waiting until everyone had been safely evacuated.
Instead, and with a complete lack of sensitivity to all of the non-Christians who were killed, he made a metal sculpture.

All of the insensitivity and absurdity aside, this is incredibly divisive because it only encourages the narrow minded ideas that A) Christianity is a necessary part of the American identity, and B) Islam and Christianity are entirely incompatible because apparently individual human beings are inseparable from the wide range of beliefs attached to a particular label that they may claim.

It is entirely unsurprising that the same people who think Al-Qaeda is representative of all Muslims would also have the sort of childish pareidolia looking at two pieces of metal melted together at a right angle, while dismissing any notion that the WBC and KKK are equally representative of all Christians.

If it had been a Christian church, or a solely-Christian gathering, I would feel differently, but it wasn't. To me, that self-entitled ignorance which fuels the dehumanization and discrimination of every minority group, that fearfully and angrily searches for differences instead of similarities, is what that cross really represents.

Why does a Locus of control matter to a rationalist?

Think of it as splitting events into 2 categories:

1. Events that can be controlled.
2. Events that cannot.

For events that cannot be controlled, they are further divided by asking, not what, but "who" is in control? I use that word specifically because it characterizes an inherent tendency in people to anthropomorphize the universe. That perception of control, in most people, is often described with words like "The Universe," "God," "The World," or even "Society."

Internal Locus: I observed a property of the universe.
External Locus: The universe revealed something to me.
Undefined: I happened to be in a position to observe something the universe did.

Internal Locus: I misplaced my car keys.
External Locus: I couldn't find my car keys.
Undefined: I couldn't remember where I put my car keys.

This is important because how we perceive phenomena and events influences how we understand and explain things.

For instance, "How does water know which direction to flow?"

Water doesn't "know" anything. It has no intelligence. It has no mechanism for even having an intellect. Water flows downhill because of gravity. More specifically, because gravity acts upon all things which have mass, and liquids generally flow more easily than solids in conditions commonly found on Earth.

This subject may seem trivial or extraneous, but this type of mindset noticeably affects how people perceive and understand Logic, Causality, Knowledge, Truth, Morality etc.

One last example:
External Locus: Allah revealed the writings of the Koran to Muhammed.
Internal Locus: Muhammed made it up, and attributed it to being inspired by God.

To say that the universe reveals things is to imply a motive, and also to imply that a certain occurrence was out of the ordinary, regardless of how we've observed the universe to normally behave. If your Locus of control is external, then when Logic is demonstrated to be applicable to the universe, you may be perceiving that as the Universe revealing Logic to you, which would necessitate an existence of Logic that is external, instead of simply perceiving Logic as a method of thinking that works because it is based on observed principles. This perception will affect how you reconcile the idea of Logic existing in the universe, regardless of the fact that it doesn't have any tangible existence. It won't make sense, because you've already perceived the idea of Logic as being something external to your conscious mind.

The Teleological argument, or, is DNA a code?

Code: Noun- A system of words, letters, figures, or other symbols used to represent others, esp. for the purposes of secrecy.

“Information, transcription, translation, code, redundancy, synonymous, messenger, editing, and proofreading are all appropriate terms in biology. They take their meaning from information theory (Shannon, 1948) and are not synonyms, metaphors, or analogies.” (Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life, Cambridge University Press, 2005)

• Skeptic statement: "In human language, symbols are arbitrary. ..."
• Rebuttal excerpts: The information in DNA is independent of the communication medium insofar as every strand of DNA in your body represents a complete plan for your body; even though the DNA strand itself is only a sequence of symbols made up of chemicals (A, G, C, T). We could store a CAD drawing of a hard drive on the same model of hard drive, but the medium and the message are two distinctly different things. Such symbolic relationships only exist within the realm of living things; they do not occur naturally. If you disagree, all you need is one example."

There are no symbols in DNA. We assign symbols to represent the different molecules (G, A, T, C) and in that sense, DNA can be represented by code.Simply being a pattern is not enough to be a code.

Here's the difference: Computers are machines based around channeling electrical impulses from the hard drive through various electronic switches to generate a specific pattern of impulses as output. The electrical impulses themselves are put into the system using specific interface devices that translate an arbitrarily created code designed to interact with the specific hardware.
However, the code itself doesn't particularly matter, because the code could be written in ANY made-up language. All that matters is that the input follows the pattern that corresponds to the desired output. The input and output languages don't even have to be the same. The only thing that matters is that every output is a specific pattern of impulses that necessitates a specific pattern of input impulses.
The difference? You can't do that with DNA. DNA is ACTUALLY analogous to the circuitry and impulses themselves (the difference being that the operation of DNA is inherent in the properties of the chemical bonds, whereas electricity simply flows through the circuitry), and although DNA can be represented by a code, you cannot substitute Adenine for Amphetamine as you could substitute the letter A with a Batman symbol.
That's the difference between a code and a mechanism.

"The information in DNA is independent of the communication medium insofar as every strand of DNA in your body represents a complete plan for your body"

If DNA contained a complete plan for our bodies, there would be no mutations, genetic defects or inherited diseases. Our DNA only contains a 99% complete recipe for our bodies and its functions, but it also contains some of the patterns left over from our fishy ancestors, and subsequent mammals. much of our DNA was implanted by viruses millions of years ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/science/12paleo.html?pagewanted=all

While we're on the subject, viruses are little more than relatively short RNA or DNA strands, sometimes protected by a protein shell. But all they do is replicate. Their function (message) is inseparable from their structure (medium), because the function directly results from their structure. 

Bananas are relatively simple organisms, but they have 24 chromosome pairs, while we only have 23. Are Bananas more complex? If DNA is a code written by a divine artificer, then why do we have junk DNA? Did someone get lazy during the debugging process?

One thing is for sure: Our DNA was NOT arranged specifically to make humans as they appear on Earth right now, that's just what comes out of the prevailing combination. You can't even go back 200 generations without finding "humans" that look quite a bit different than you and I.
DNA is a remarkable, self-replicating molecule that can be represented by a 4-bit code because of its exclusive, patterned makeup, but it is not a code, no matter how intransigently anyone says otherwise.

Hypocrisy

The crucifixion of Christ was not a gift, it was another appalling example of the barbaric nature of the Bible's authors: 

Torturing someone to death is immoral.
Punishing someone, especially killing them, for the crimes of another person is unjust.
Doing it for crimes that have not yet been committed, is psychotic.
Arbitrarily deciding that something is a crime, not because it's harmful to the person or to others, or because it infringes anyone's rights, but simply because it's your whim, is tyrannical.

God first punished mankind by banishing them from paradise, then later killed everyone with a Flood. When those still didn't work, instead of admitting his mistake and either changing the rules or once again using his great power to remake the world, God conceived himself (or His Son, depending on your theology), so that he could sacrifice himself, to himself, in order to appease himself, because his "perfect creation" broke his rules.
That is appalling behavior for a being that is the supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving Creator of the universe and arbiter of morality. Instead of just admitting that he had made a mistake and either starting over or changing the rules, after punishing and then trying to kill all of humanity, he settled on human sacrifice as the final solution to his problems.

For that matter, at some point in the Bible, God is depicted as exhibiting every one of the 7 Deadly Sins:



Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride/Vanity

The first 2 Commandments alone cover over half of them:

1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. (Pride) You shall have no other gods before me. (Greed)

2. You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. (Vanity) For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, (Envy) visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, (Wrath) but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

The Bible is a poor guide for morality. Yes, there are some positive attributes to the teachings found within its pages, but you must wade through centuries of ignorance, prejudice, racism, homophobia and misogyny to find them, and if you so happen to decide to ignore all of those other verses, regardless of your reason, then you are using your own moral intuition to decide what is right and wrong. That alone is proof that the Bible is unnecessary.

Human beings forgive each other all the time without torturing our children to death, because intelligent people are capable of understanding and appreciating the merit of simply being good people without the promise of eternal bliss and the threat of eternal torture.

Burden of Proof

As atheists we hear it all the time: "You can't prove God doesn't exist." And while that's true, it doesn't shift the burden of proof. Here's an easy way to explain why:

Let's assume Existence is a crime, God is the one accused, and in the courtroom is a skeptic pitted against a believer.
The skeptic's position is that of the Defense: God is presumed innocent of existing until proven otherwise.
The Believer's position is of the Prosecution: God is guilty of existing, and must be proven so.

Because of the difficulty of proving a Negative, God CANNOT be proven innocent of Existence, meaning the skeptic can't prove that God doesn't exist.
Fortunately, however, the skeptic doesn't have to, because the court is impartial, but more importantly because the skeptic is not making that claim, merely challenging The Believer to convince the court that God is indeed guilty of existing.

A skeptic's job is to make sure, as the Believer attempts to convince others that God is guilty of existing, that the evidence is credible, the logic is valid and the methodology is sound.

As a skeptic who values intellectual integrity, meaning I want my beliefs to be true and consistent, I will critically examine every claim made, because it is a moral imperative to ensure that only the guilty are convicted. That is, to ensure that factual claims are actually true.  Thus, the burden of proof lies with those making the claim and in the case of a god(s), that would be the believer.