I think by this simple shift, we would quickly see the poorest communities rise out of poverty. Education would become an important issue, as these same politicians would be sending their own children to the same schools as the poor.

The point is that there is a huge gulf between our politicians and the regular people in our country. They live at the top percentage of wealth. Their children go the most expensive schools and hospitals. They dine at restaurants that an average person would only dream of eating at.

How can these same people know what laws should exist for the American people, when they are so far removed from regular life in the United States. Instead, the interests of huge corporations are taken into consideration above those of people.

Until the everyday life of politicians is at least somewhere near what the everyday life is for the majority of our population, this gross imbalance will only become greater and wealth will become the final law.

C.S Lewis, when writing about this topic, noted that “..You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like , ‘I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 am on January 15th and saw so and so’  or ‘I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such and such a temperature and it did so and so.’ Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a person is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science-and a very useful and necessary job it is too. “

What this amounts to is that the claims of Evolutionsts and Creationists both tend to rely on a lot of theories, however scientific they try to make them sound. We simply do not have the means to time travel and observe what really happened during the formation of the world. Nor can we replicate something that (theoretically) occures over thousands or millions of years, nor do we have the power to create life. There can only be speculation on these topics.

I am not sure how evolution turned into something that people felt necessary to teach at schools. Would a person studying science not be a good scientist if they had never heard about evolution? How can holding to a theory about how the earth and life formed cause someone to have good scientific practices?  Why is it so incredibly important that evolution be in all school books, while creationism is removed? The very argument that the theory of Creationism not be in school books would, by logical sequence, also dictate that evolution not be included either. It also seems to me that teaching evolution as a fact (which appears to be the goal) would promote bad scientific methods.

I know that many people will rail at this and say that evolution is widely accepted by all “vaild scientific organizations.”  The problem with this line of argument is what these people mean by “valid” is people who believe that evolution is fact, or at least the best theory, so basically what they are saying is that “all scientific organizations who accept evolution are the ones who believe evolution is the best scientific theory.” , or, more simply put “we agree with the people who agree with us.”

As far as Creationism goes, I am not sure it matters one way or another to spiritual well-being. A person can accept either theory without offending anything spiritual.  It may be at the end of times one finds out that God used a little evolution in the creation process. If a person believes in God, then any sort of evolution will have only happened with Gods full knowledge and interaction, or not have happend. God will still be the same God. A persons spiritual beliefs would be very weak beliefs if they hinged on  a particular guess at how things looked while life was forming.

At the end of the day, the real question about this would be: Is this really something that needs to be anything more than a friendly discussion? If not, then why is so much time and energy being put into promoting guesses and speculations that simply cannot be validated by any means available to us?

My particular request for people who comment on this is please do not make statements that are presenting theories as some kind of irrefutable fact. In this case I think the Evolutionists are worse than the Creationists. I am constantly getting statements like this:   “Love, loyalty, and altruism within one’s community evolved as adaptive behaviours.”  …ummm so because this person believes in evolution they can now make statements about how love came to being.  I even hate worse these same people who begin their sentences with “1 million years ago…”  as if this person knew what was happening 1 million years ago.

My attitude would be much different if this debate were about something that we might actually be able to validate. Like “Is there life on Mars.”  We will probably be able to find this out sooner than not, of we dont destroy ourselves first,  but unless Time Travel becomes a reality, we will not in this life be able to know what things looked like 1 million years ago…or 10,000 years ago for that matter. It is, and will remain, a mystery.

One side believes that life begins either at the moment of conception, or sometime shortly after that, (there are various opinions, but this particular side of the line all agree that life begins while a baby is inside the womb). Those who hold to this, believe that inside a mother is a human being who has full rights as a human. If you killed this human, it should be the exact same thing as if you had walked up to someone and fired a gun on them.

Some people have been convicted of manslaughter for harming a pregnent woman and killing her unborn child, so this viewpoint is not something that is entirely ridiculous. If, for a moment, you could imagine that some people were killing babies who had just been born, you might be able to imagine the same sort of horrified reaction that the people have who believe that unborn children are fully human.

On the other hand, there are those who believe that an unborn child is not quite a human yet, but rather something similar to cellular tissue (there are also varying opinions  on this side of the argument as well). These people see the issue as enforcing laws on a woman that could affect her entire life, just because some other group believes that cellular tissue is human.  If the government created a law that said anyone who has cancer cannot remove it, because the cancer is a living thing,  then that would be the same sort of law to these people.

The line is clearly drawn where people believe that life starts and someone becomes human. Is it at the moment of conception? (which is the view that the Catholic Church holds). If so, this would mean that certain types of birth control are committing murder anytime a woman uses it.  Others hold that a child becomes human after a certain stage of development in the womb, such as when it starts sucking its thumb or moving around. Still other people believe that a baby is not a human until it is born and takes its first breath. Anything before this is non-human, and can be destroyed with no moral bounds being broken.

There is no clear scientific data on this topic. The accounts range wildly. Viewpoints are debated constantly and with much yelling and spitting on both sides. Few topics can bring up so much emotional energy in people. Personally, I have no answers, as I have never studied up on the topic of the unborn. My point in writing about it is to define exactly what the debate is about, which many people seem to miss out on, and that is simply when life begins. The entire debate fascinates me because both sides have such powerful arguments, but all the while the simple point seems to be overlooked.  I am not sure why this is.

If it were the future, and we had the correct technology, I think that people should be sterile unless they go through some kind of process, such as getting a simple injection or taking a pill…almost like reverse birth control. This way, having a child would require a certain amount of thought. Anyone who wanted could still  have children, but no one could accidentally become pregnant; however, this is currently not the case, and figuring out whether abortion is killing a human (and thus committing murder) or rather a case of violating a persons rights  is an important topic of our time.

Maybe a certain amount of cells should be required to be qualified as a human, or perhaps the first heartbeat. If this point could be agreed upon, we might be able to arrive at a happy medium for both sides.

Having said that, I still believe that marijuana should be legalized. I have travelled profusley around the United States, mostly by hitchiking. On average, in my travels, I would say that one in every ten people I meet smoke pot. This is not a certain group of people I hang out with (in case you were picturing a bunch of hippies on a bus), but rather a wide scope of United States citizens that I have met: a wealthy white man in a sports car who talked about money for hours on end, a couple of mexican men on their way to work, a woman with children…the list is long, wide and varied.

To believe that these people are all criminals is quite a judgement. The people who support the silly laws against marijuana seem to always quote reasons read straight off of an anti-drug pamphlet: “Pot is a gateway Drug”  “It is highly addictive”  Smoking Pot causes car accidents”  and many more such lines that I cannot remember but all are founded on ignorance of what effects pot really has on a person.

It is frustrating to talk to these people, since they are usually adamant about their opinions, while they clearly don’t know what they are talking about. Do people really believe that weed is more harmful than alcohol or tobacco? It is a difficult stretch of the imagination to grasp this. Alcohol is legal, yet thousands of people are killed by drunk drivers, or alcohol poisoning. My uncle died from liver failure caused by excessive drinking. We all probably know someone who is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, struggling with their addiction to drink. Yet, alcohol is not only sanctioned by the government and our culture,  but a huge profit is made every year in taxes on beverages.

Cigarettes are the apex of this same sort of hippocrytic thinking that criminalizes responsible adults who smoke weed in their leisure time, while supporting and profiting from giant tobacco industries that clearly profit from the addiction and subsequent deaths of thousands of people in our country.

In short, I am against laws that  criminalize a large portion or our population based on reasoning that crumbles to dust on close observation. Smoking marijuana only affects the individual who chooses to smoke it. Some people benefit from the effects of weed. The laws that put our citizens into prison, or lay heavy fines on the poor, are far more harmful and costly than the very thing they are against.

-endle