Same Love - But Not Same Parenthood

Today I am going to write about a topic I have been hesitant to express my views about openly for a while. As an Australian, I will stick to the social frameworks of Australia in this post to simplify my points. Marriage equality had been a hot topic during the bygone 2013 elections, with the two men vying for prime minister-ship here (Tony Abbot and Kevin Rudd) having expressed differing views on the issue. And I have problems with arguments on both sides of the marriage equality debate.

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Same Sex Marriage

First and foremost, I would like to make clear that I have no issues with people being homosexual. I believe that no one should ever feel frightened to be who they are so long as it does not interfere with or damage another person's life. I am also all for marriage equality. I do not buy into the argument that allowing homosexual people to get married undermines the significance of marriage as an institute. I am not a religious person, and so I do not believe marriage is a sacred sacrament. I see marriage as a symbolic (and legal) gesture by two individuals through which they accept responsibility and respect for the relationship they share. It is an expression of commitment, loyalty and (often) love - and thus is a formality that can exist between any two consenting, adult parties who are not already bound by close familial ties. And most importantly, it is a personal affair - so why would one person's marriage undermine another's? That's a silly connection to make. Furthermore, if homosexuals can openly share a household and opt for a civil union, what is wrong with marriage? Seems like neither one is a very Christian choice to begin with.

On that note, I should also add that I do not understand the logic behind gay people wanting a Christian wedding. If God is truly loving and merciful, He/She/It will bless a marriage no matter how it is done - one does not require approval from pretentious clerics for the marriage to be legitimate. The concept of God is built around omnipresence, so a marriage does not need to take place in a Church for God to oversee it. Being an agnostic, I see clerical hierarchy or authority as undermining the universality of God, and as being detrimental to one's personal connection with the transcendent - if there such a thing really exists at all.

Same Sex Couples and Children

From personal experience and some reading, I understand that adopting children or giving birth to children by sperm donation or surrogacy does not face much legal restriction in Australia. I personally know two lesbian households who have children without being married, so I understand that bringing up the question of children has no real implications on the marriage debate. Despite this, I will still raise some points that LGBTI activists will not like. 

I understand that research will be against me on this issue, with most results showing that gay parenting is just as great as conventional parenting. Homosexual people make extremely attentive and committed parents as they tend to have children by choice, and work hard to establish their families. Research has also shown that children from gay families are just as competent in all aspects of life (social, physical and mental) as their counterparts in straight households, and often have a more mature approach to global issues.

I have no doubt that these conclusions are correct. I am also sure that many of these children love their parents, gay or not, and feel lucky to have them. But if a person could choose, in retrospect, what kind of family to be born into, would they say "one with homosexual parents"? 

It is true that every couple deserves to have children, whether they can or cannot through conventional means. And whether or not they have this child "naturally" is not really important. The greater question is whether it is "normal". According to Wikipedia (not the best source I know, but they have a reference), only about 1.6% of men in Australia are gay and 0.9% bisexual. These numbers are 1.4% and 0.8% respectively for women. Between 8 and 15% of men and women reported having sexual experiences or feelings of attraction towards a member of the same sex, but identify themselves as heterosexuals despite this fact. So there is no doubt in saying that an overwhelming majority of people are of a heterosexual orientation in Australia.

But LGBT activists often compare homosexuals with children to infertile heterosexual couples who find alternative ways to have children but do not face the same societal prejudices. This is not a fair comparison for obvious reasons. Children of homosexual couples will always be deprived of one biological parent and will undoubtedly be outnumbered by children with heterosexual parents - a fact that they must come to terms with at some stage in their lives. How an individual copes with these facts may vary, for some it's easy, for some it might not be.

I recently read an article by a man raised by lesbian parents who voiced his true feelings regarding the matter. He wrote about others he knew who held similar attitudes about gay parenting but were reluctant to speak up:

"Those who contacted me all professed gratitude and love for the people who raised them, which is why it is so difficult for them to express their reservations about same-sex parenting publicly. 

Still, they described emotional hardships that came from lacking a mom or a dad. To give a few examples: they feel disconnected from the gender cues of people around them, feel intermittent anger at their “parents” for having deprived them of one biological parent (or, in some cases, both biological parents), wish they had had a role model of the opposite sex, and feel shame or guilt for resenting their loving parents for forcing them into a lifelong situation lacking a parent of one sex. 

The richest and most successful same-sex couple still cannot provide a child something that the poorest and most struggling spouses can provide: a mom and a dad. Having spent forty years immersed in the gay community, I have seen how that reality triggers anger and vicious recrimination from same-sex couples, who are often tempted to bad-mouth so-called “dysfunctional” or “trashy” straight couples in order to say, “We deserve to have kids more than they do!” 

But I am here to say no, having a mom and a dad is a precious value in its own right and not something that can be overridden, even if a gay couple has lots of money, can send a kid to the best schools, and raises the kid to be an Eagle Scout.

It’s disturbingly classist and elitist for gay men to think they can love their children unreservedly after treating their surrogate mother like an incubator, or for lesbians to think they can love their children unconditionally after treating their sperm-donor father like a tube of toothpaste."

If I were homosexual, I would be terrified of bringing a child into this world knowing that they might silently resent the situation I've forced onto them to fulfill my own desires and for choosing a lifestyle for them that applies only to a tiny percentage of the population. 

Having said that, I am more accepting of gay parents who ensure that the child's biological parents are well and truly involved in their lives. That way, a child has a clear picture of their beginning, or their origin, and would not feel detached from or deprived of a parent. The surrogate or sperm-donor should not be absent and shrouded in mystery, and should be a person the child knows and interacts with. I am also encouraging of adoption, where the children are often in need of a family to raise them. 

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I think it's important that we make people who are different feel comfortable with living the life they choose for themselves without facing discrimination. But we must be careful when our own choices begin to dictate the course of another individual's life as well. 

Did God Create the Universe?

I watched this episode of Curiosity hosted by Stephen Hawking, recently, on the topic of "Did God Create the Universe?". I made some notes on the episode and will summarise them here. I will also end with some counter responses to this episode that have been made by the website creation.com - the reason why I'm including both for and against arguments on this topic is to highlight the point that debating this age-old question is futile and very subjective to individual belief.

Full episode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLkf78_rcu4

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Summary - Did God Create the Universe? Season 1 Episode 1 of Curiosity:

The episode begins by presenting a selection of belief systems throughout history that have been made redundant by scientific progress. Hawking starts by describing how the Vikings of Norse Mythology assigned a different deity for phenomenons of nature they could not explain. For example, Thor was the god of lightning, Aegir the god of sea, and Skoll - was a wolf god who allegedly ate the Sun to cause what is now known as the solar eclipse. The Vikings would try to scare Skoll away with their waving swords and when the sky returned to normal, they believed their actions had worked.

It was Aristarchus of Samos, Greece, in 300BC who began to study the sky and draw geometrical diagrams to assist his observations. He suggested that the eclipse is not a divine occurrence, and was merely due to the Earth casting a shadow over the moon. He rationalised that the stars were not cracks in the floor of heaven as his peers believed, but were of the same nature as our Sun. Aristarchus also supported the heliocentric model.

Hawking then proceeds to Galileo Galilei's story from 1609. Galileo constructed a telescope and observed that the moons of Jupiter were orbiting the planet - hence proving that not all entities in space revolves the Earth. Galileo was under house arrest for 9 years for his groundbreaking discovery and was made to renounce his heresy by the Church.

Aristarchus' calculations from 3rd century
Source: Wikipedia.org

Those who studied the nature of the Universe were often dubbed as heretics and the Church was threatened by their ideas and rationality. Ultimately a solution to this threat was proposed by the religious-minded: the laws of nature are governed/owned by God, and He may break them if he so wished. However, Hawking stresses that there is a distinct difference between arbitrary made-made laws that continuously adjust and readjust to accommodate progress in society, and the absoluteness of nature's laws. From the above stories it is apparent that over time scientific knowledge has gradually eliminated the need for religion, and ultimately God.

So, how did the Universe originate?

Hawkings explains that there are three fundamental ingredients required for the formation of our universe.

1. Matter/Mass - i.e. dust, ice, rocks, gas, liquids, etc
2. Energy - this drives the processes and masses within the universe
3. Space

In the 1900s, Albert Einstein theorised that mass is equivalent to energy by his famous equation E=mc2. This reduced the above ingredients list to only two items: mass/energy and space. Now, when the big bang occurred, it produced enormous amounts of positive energy. But this positive energy is countered by an unseen negative energy which is stored in space. To illustrate, Hawking asks his audience to imagine a man who decides to build a hill from soil. He digs up the ground and produces a mound of dirt, but in the process, also creates a depression in the ground where he has dug. This is the nature of positive and negative energy. These energies cancel one another out, implying that there was nothing at the start of our universe. However, even if on a macroscopic level it may seem like the universe was created from nothing, at a quantum level, traditional physics breaks down completely, and particles appear (and disappear) from nothing all the time. I'm not quite sure how this works - but Briane Greene's documentary The Elegant Universe may give you some idea.

Hawking states that the Universe was once a minuscule black hole smaller than a proton, which warped space-time to such a degree that time was at a standstill, and therefore did not exist at all. I'm not a physicist/astronomer so I will try to explain to the best of my knowledge how a black hole works. A black hole is basically a very big (usually dead) star which has collapsed under it's own gravitation to form a kind of funnel, or a deformed region of space-time from which even light cannot escape. If light enters a blackhole, it is slowed down, and hence, time itself from an outside observer appears to slow down. This effect is known as gravitational time dilation. 

So if time did not exist prior to the big bang, then a God/Creator was unlikely to be present before the bang to have caused it. On this premise, and along with the history of science-religion conflict in which science consistently won out, Hawking justifies the non-existence of God.

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Creation.com posited that the above argument made by Hawking can be negated by two simple counter-points in relation to the positive-negative energy analogy provided by Hawking. They say:

1. The formation of the hill needed a cause - i.e. the man with the shovel
2. This 'cause', i.e. the man, existed before he built the hill

They also argue that:

• The universe could not have created itself because until it existed, it was not in a position to create itself
• According to critics of the big bang - scientists Alex Williams and John Hartnett (both Australian) - believe that the universe could not have materialised by a quantum fluctuations alone as the laws of quantum physics were not established prior to the bang. 
• They also state that the life-time of quantum events are inversely proportional to their mass, and therefore the lifetime of our universe should be less that 10^-103 seconds (i.e., incomprehensibly short). 
• Furthermore, particles today appear within space. Before the big bang, there was no space/vacuum for particles to appear in.
• Some of the competing theories presented in a Curiosity episode on Parallel Universes also debunk Hawking's stance as one claims that when a blackhole swallows a star, it ejects it out the other end - and this is how our Universe could have been born. This implies that time before the big bang did exist.

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What's my opinion on all of this? I think that the question of God's existence is beyond us. The problem with religion is NOT spirituality, or the belief in some great and mysterious omnipresent power/force. The problems with religion lie within the superstitions, traditions and separatist mindsets that cause divide within communities and breed intolerance and dislike towards people of another faith/caste/gender/race/sexual orientation/social status/etc.

I remember watching a debate between Hassanain Rajabali (a Shia Muslim) and Dan Barker (an atheist) in which Rajabali argues that to dismiss the existence of God through science is irrational as God cannot be compartmentalised by time/space or any other relative dimension. I doubt one's belief in God can be swayed by insisting that time did not precede the big bang, as most would say God is not restricted by time or the laws of our present universe, but sits outside it all. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c5-vVwJ2eQ)

If believing in God gives purpose to one's life, then so be it. As long as it is not imposed on others, I am happy to simply not comment on their personal belief.

Save Bangladesh!

"Radical Islamists yesterday kept marching towards Dhaka from different parts of the country, defying blockades and hartal amid a tense situation. 

Infuriated by what they say is obstructions by the government, Hefajat-e Islam, organiser of today’s long march, is set to announce the next course of action to realise its 13-point demand"

The thirteen demands are:

1. Reinstate the phrase “Absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah” in the constitution as one of the fundamental principles of state policy 

2. Pass a law providing for capital punishment for maligning Allah, Islam and Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and smearing campaigns against Muslims 

3. Stop all propaganda and “derogatory comments” about Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) by the “atheist leaders” of the Shahbagh movement, bloggers and other anti-Islamists; arrest them and ensure stern punishment to them 

4. Stop attacking, shooting, killing and persecuting the Prophet-loving Islamic scholars, madrasa students and people united by belief in Allah 

5. Release all the arrested Islamic scholars and madrasa students 

6. Lift restrictions on mosques and remove obstacles to holding religious programmes 

7. Declare “Qadianis” (Ahmadiyyas) non-Muslim and stop their publicity and conspiracies 

8. Stop foreign cultural intrusions including free-mixing of men and women and candlelit vigils, and put an end to adultery, injustice, shamelessness, etc in the name of freedom of expression and individuality.

9. Stop turning Dhaka, the city of mosques, into a city of idols, and stop setting up sculptures at intersections, colleges and universities 

10. Scrap anti-Islam women policy and education policy and make Islamic education mandatory from primary to higher secondary levels 

11. Stop threatening and intimidating teachers and students of Qawmi madrasas, Islamic scholars, imams and khatibs 

12. Stop creating hatred among young generations against the Muslims by misrepresentation of Islamic culture in the media 

13. Stop anti-Islam activities by NGOs, evil attempts by Qadianis and conversion by Christian missionaries at Chittagong Hill Tracts and elsewhere in the country

Source: http://www.thedailystar.net/beta2/news/hefajats-demands/

This all sounds like a joke to me. Bangladesh is a country of 158 million people, of which 10.3% consist of minority groups of Hindus, Buddhists and Christians. The percentage may sound insignificant, but this represents a whopping 1.6 MILLION people in Bangladesh. Religious fundamentalists vandalised nine idols in three different Hindu temples yesterday. But violence will only beget violence, and tolerance begets tolerance. How dare they want to impose Islamic education and jurisprudence in our country where generations of people from different religions and different ideologies have lived side by side in tolerance and cultural diversity. And Khaleda Zia should know that an Islamic government would never let her run for prime minister-ship for being a woman. The hypocrisy is blatantly obvious. 

"Activists of the 23 organisations who have been enforcing the 24-hour hartal since last evening kept their presence at 20 points in the city." 

"Ruling Awami League men were also instructed to remain vigilant at different parts to assist the law enforcers to thwart any attempt of subversive activitiesMany activists of BNP-Jamaat-led 18-party alliance that has already extended support to the long march to cash in on people’s religious sentiments may join Hefajat’s rally."

And cashing in they are. The hartal has blocked transport networks, and yet the Islamists have been able to hire vehicles to reach their destination. Clearly the opposition BNP and Jamaat are paying these youngsters off. Imran H Sarkar, the convener of Gonojagoron Mancha, has requested for a peaceful meeting to settle differences between the groups but the Islamists have said they will not negotiate with an atheist. This, in my opinion, has reached the pinnacle of bigotry, and I blame the government for stirring emotions and not handling the situation responsibly!

Full Article: http://www.thedailystar.net/beta2/news/dhaka-tense-over-long-march/

Bunnies Lay Eggs?

Another round of Easter celebrations are among us. For an agnostic like myself, the mention of Easter merely conjures up visions of a four day weekend and two consecutive four-day weeks of work (Yippee!!) And, having attended a Catholic School for 6 years of my life, Easter Thursday was also the day we all went to Mass for a feet washing event commemorating Jesus's last supper. 

Easter is in fact "a Christian festival and holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day after his crucifixion at Calvary as described in the New Testament." (Wikipedia) But as I stared down at the easter eggs given to me during work today, I wondered where this tradition of Easter Bunnies and Easter Eggs came from? Firstly, rabbits are mammals so they don't lay eggs. Secondly, what does it all have to do with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ?

The answer is simple: Absolutely nothing.

"Bunnies, eggs, Easter gifts and fluffy, yellow chicks in gardening hats all stem from pagan roots. These tropes were incorporated into the celebration of Easter separately from the Christian tradition..." (Discovery News)

Eostre
Source: Wikipedia

The concept of an Easter Bunny originates from  "13th-century, pre-Christian Germany, when people worshiped several gods and goddesses. " (Discovery News) Their goddess of Spring and fertility, Eostre or Ostara, was symbolised by the rabbit due to its high proliferation/reproductive rate. Feasts were held in Eostre's honour at the March equinox.

Eggs have also been a long-standing symbol for fertility. Furthermore, legends stemming from the Persians, Indians and Egyptians who told of the earth being born from a cosmic egg also contributed to it becoming a symbol for birth and life, which was later incorporated into the concept of Jesus' resurrection by 15th century Roman Catholics in Germany. 

"By 1680, the first story about a rabbit laying eggs and hiding them in a garden was published. These legends were brought to the United States in the 1700s, when German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania Dutch country, according to the Center for Children's Literature and Culture." (Discovery News)

The abundance of eggs during Easter may also be attributed to the fact that during Lent egg was not eaten by Catholics, and therefore it was made available after the fasting period.

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More fascinating to me than the history of it, is the fact that people have somehow managed to grip onto meaningless, pagan traditions that have no basis in Christianity (which is more or less a monotheistic religion) whatsoever. But nobody seems to question it, or wonder why these misplaced and incoherent symbols have been commercialised and used to such an extent by the media? It shows that once people become comfortable with a tradition it's difficult for them to discard it.

I understand that these symbols are probably harmless in the present context of the world and only serve as stories used to engage children. But I still believe it is important to know why we give importance to certain practices, and where they came from. Again, being aware and being knowledgeable will benefit us as a race in the long run!


Stay safe, Happy holidays and a Happy Easter to all of you!

Full Article: http://news.discovery.com/history/what-does-easter-bunny-come-have-to-do-easter-120406.htm