Why do we die?

I finally got around to finishing Greta Christina’s Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God. It’s good! This book is the sort of thing atheism needs more of: an acknowledgment that the phenomena most important to human beings can be addressed effectively without imagining fantastic supernatural creatures. Atheists have this reputation of being nerds all wrapped up in abstract concepts and making arguments against the superstitious props that people claim to find useful in day-to-day life, and it’s good that some of us make the effort to show that no, we do deal with real-world concerns, and no, your myth is actually a terribly ineffective way of handling that problem.

So I guess it’s not surprising that my strategy for coping with death isn’t in Greta’s book. I take a developmental and evolutionary view of death.

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You’re putting who in charge of science?

Further evidence that the American political system is broken: Ted Cruz has been made chair of the committee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness (one of the things in that list of three does not belong…and why is “Space”, a small subset of science’s compass, given such a prominent spot?). Marco Rubio is chair of the subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard (another hodge-podge!). This is as insane as putting James Inhofe in charge of environmental policy.

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Dismaying statistic of the day

It’s shocking what college men will confess to.

The University of North Dakota researchers asked 73 men if they would force a woman to have sex with them if there was no chance of being punished, and 31.7 percent said they would. When the researchers asked if the man being questioned would "rape" a woman if there were no consequences, however, 13.6 percent said they would.

Hmm. UND has about 15,000 students; if half are men, that means there are about a thousand amoral assholes wandering about who’d like to rape someone, and about 2400 who are willing to rape as long as it isn’t called rape. Anyone want to claim there is no such thing as a rape culture here?

The lesson is that you should send your daughters to the University of Minnesota, because I’m sure our students are not at all like those Dakotans. There’s a border and everything.