Holy Crap I've Been Busy

Sorry for the disappearance all, I've been crazy busy at work, I've been planning a wedding (which may get scrapped for purely financial reasons), and most of my internet time has been sucked up into the World of Warcrack.

All in all though, things are getting better, and calming down a bit, so I may actually post more often. Shock! Awe!

All in all though, its been fairly quiet on the religion front for my part. I've not seen much politically that has shocked me, and other people like Personal Failure and Ziztur seem to get to the good stories significantly faster than I find them. I'll find something. Might even get that book review done.

Back From the East Coast

So I got back into town last night. Overall it was a good trip, although I'm always made slightly uncomfortable around my family on the east coast. The whole lot of them are pretty devout in their religious beliefs, and this has always been a bit of a sticking point for me. A good number of them are Nazarene, a few are Mormon and all of them are Christian. Needless to say I was obligated to attend a church service in honor of my Great Grandmother which preceded her birthday celebration.

This wasn't too bad, it was a fairly traditional congregationalist church, meaning they weren't hardcore evangelicals. Just more regular protestants. The amount of Hymns always make me uncomfortable when im with my family because I simply do not sing them because I will not sing praises for something I do not believe. Even so, it doesn't stop some of them from wondering about me because I'm the only one in church not singing, and the only one who doesn't take communion, etc.

Only my immediate family knows about my faith or lack thereof, but its always on the odd side not being part of the group at a family function.

But, all that aside, at my great grandmother's birthday celebration at the tables they had little churches made out of the material from those stress squeeze-ball things. I'm putting up a picture as soon as I have one. Also, we picked up one extra that if someone wants it, I may give away at some point.

It's good to be back. I'm looking forward to more great discussions.

Stalking Pharyngula

I was over reading on PZ Myers' blog and saw this lengthy bit on whether a fertilized egg is a member of the species it could one day represent. I'm curious what others' thoughts on this might be.

I agree with the assessment of life being continuous. It spawns anew, and while death for an organism is inevitable, the act of recombinant procreation is clearly a continuation of 2 seperate organisms' partial genetic code. At no point did it become not alive, even when the individual gamete contains only half of the necessary chromosomes for reproduction.

So, here's what I don't get. By the definition of life, most "pro-life" advocates want to say that human life begins at conception. But this isn't really true since the life (as far as biology is concerned) never "started" but was, as PZ says, continuous. I think, if we're arguing about this, its an important distinction between life and cognizance. Otherwise we might as well argue that ovulation is murder and male masturbation mass murder.

I'm really not an expert on this. Thoughts?