America's intolerence towards gays.

I tend to follow American politics closely, its a nation which affects us all because of the policies they make, especially when it comes to its powerful financial system.

What has worried me and most of the rest of the 1st world is America's religiosity gaining in power in the American political world. The republican party has been taken over by the right wing evangelical Christian movement and the repurcussions are vast considering for example the vast majority of Republicans deny global warming which will have great consequences for the US cleaning up its act; considering the amount of polution coming from our friends in America.

Today I'd like to point you to a recent article on CNN regarding advice on how to anwer your children when they ask about same sex couples. Its a thoughtful and insightful article that is attempting to help parents deal with something many Americans are uncomfortable dealing with.

What is always so fascinating to me is not the articles themselves, but the comments below; considering CNN is well known to be a liberal leaning website, it attracts a large number of conservatives who love to make their voices heard on social issues like gay marriage, abortion, welfare for the poor, global warming, etc..

Here's a sample of the comments on this article:

"Amistavia, I believe they have proven scientifically that fecal matter in a man's urethra is very unhealthy to say the least. In addition science has proven that a placenta cannot reside in a rectum. GOD's design and plan works best! Stick with it! Teach your kids the truth! GOD BLESS AMERICA - from an African American man who loves the LORD! HE has done so much for me. Love, grace and mercy are mine everyday. Thank you LORD Jesus!"

"Homophobes are disgusting and revolting. Just the mere thought of them carrying that much bigotry makes me wanna puke. It's completely unnatural and perverted for them to obsess on sexual acts all the time. I will teach my kids to scorn them for their mental illness and I will never accept them as normal. And they will burn in hell forever too."

"Teabagger? That's funny that you talk for gays while you use that term. Typical ignorant liberal! Of course it's ok for 2 men or 2 women, or a man and a dog, a woman and a horse, 2 horses, 2 women 2 sheep and an ox, 2 men and 2 goats......... "

"What has always been known as a sin and a psychological disorder is now being portrayed as normal. If it were so normal this amount of confusion would not exist from the media to the government to the Church. We were all born with a sinful nature. We have a choice whether we will live in sin or repent and turn from it. Those who promote sin as normal will be held accountable because it causes others to stumble. As a nation we continue to ignore and disobey GOD as if there are no consequences. Remember you always have a choice to do what is right and what is wrong. YOU HAVE A CHOICE!
Father forgive us as a nation in the name of Jesus, LORD, King and Savior. Amen"

http://us.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/08/23/kids.explain.samesex.parents/index.html?hpt=hp_c2&is_LR=1

A Christian serial killer in heaven. Justice?

A serial killer raped a Jewish girl, he killed her and later was caught for his horrific crime.

A jury condemned the horrible man for his crimes to death, 10 years later after all his appeals were exhausted he was put to death by lethal injection. In those 10 years, he found god, he spent those remaining years as a born again Christian who repented all of his sins and promised his love to Jesus his savior.

When he was finally put to death, he appeared at the gates to heaven, after entering he asked Jesus "I would like to speak to the girl who'm I murdered, I need to tell her just how sorry I am for my evil deed." Jesus replied, sorry but she's in hell, you cannot speak to her.

Come to God as a Child? (video)

Girl spanked to death in the name of god

Through these Godless Eyes (video)

Major breakthrough in Cancer research

The last few days have been very exciting in the biomedical research world, I’ll start by talking of the big one announced today which could have massive implications for cancer treatment and possibly finally a way to cure cancer.

“In what is being hailed as a potential cancer breakthrough, three men suffering late-stage leukemia have been cured using their own, genetically reprogrammed immune systems.

The technique transforms blood-borne T-cells into “serial killers” that hunt down and obliterate cancer cells, leaving healthy tissue unharmed, according to a pair of studies published simultaneously in two prominent journals.”

The big benefit of this treatment if successful is that you will teach the body to defend itself from cancer, if the cancer would return the t-cells would simply do their thing again and aggressively wipe it out as has been seen in these very early 3 patient trials.

It's way too early to be too excited, but what great hope this methodology has for us in the future. We can use our own body's defenses with a little help from science too reprogram them to be even better at their jobs. With the story yesterday about a new drug that could potentially kill most viruses, including the common cold; we are truly looking at a very exciting era of medical breakthroughs up ahead, and maybe much sooner than we could have dreamt was possible.

 

Time for Iceland to stop whaling?

 *a fin whale

With Pierce Brosnan's recent public condemnation of Iceland's whaling and the push to get the Obama administration to impose sanctions on Iceland (unlikely to happen;) I've had yet again to consider again why we even bother with whaling here in Iceland.

Lets try to break this issue down to a matter of cost/benefit for Iceland, and try to avoid the inevitable nationalistic anger about anyone telling us what to do with our resources. Hvalur, a single company is responsible for our whaling industry; while hunting endangered fin whales and the slightly more abundant minke whales. Icelander's do not include whale meat as a significant part of their diet, its a unique item that most of us will eat (its delicious) and yet we can certainly live without it.

This rather small industry on a nationwide scale is certainly very profitable for Hvalur, but what does this represent as matter of harm done to the image of Iceland globally, not just in business that we may lose or never get because of the passionate force behind those against whaling. What does this do to our tourism, how many people per year more would visit Iceland if not for this policy of whaling, and so forth.

The unknown costs to Iceland financially is very hard to quantify, yet we know there is a cost and I think too often those supporting whaling in Iceland do so more because they do not like outsiders telling us what to do and of course the fact that often people do not have their facts straight on how much we do actually hunt. 

As usual, I'm only giving you my perspective as a relative newcomer to my homeland. Do I have my facts wrong, am I missing something important as to why we should continue whaling and defying international agreements. I'd love to hear from anyone who has contrary ideas or can help me understand why we continue whaling, the only possible logical explanation I've heard is a dubious report suggesting we have to hunt whales to protect our fish stocks.

For selfish sake, lets end with a great little video on Blue Whales with everyone's favorite naturalist, Richard Attenborough.

Just how religious is Iceland?

Since moving to Iceland and trying to learn about my homeland again, the one question which often comes up for me is Iceland's religiosity. When living in Canada, a rather secular and rationalist nation, I was always under the impression Iceland was much like its brothers in Norway, Sweden and Denmark whom are all very secularist and are often cited as the most unreligious nations in the world.

Religiosity is a complicated issue, its not simple a question anymore of "do you believe in God?" Rather we need to be specific about what people say they believe in. A great example of this is Christian's whom believe in heaven, but not hell. How many Christians believe in adam and eve, noah's ark, and many of the more unbelievable stories from the bible. I know for certain that many Christian´s in Iceland don't believe in a lot of the bible, yet if you told this to American Christians's they would simply say you are not a believer.

This is the biggest problem of questionares and polls done in modern societies, a deeper look is needed to truly see what people actually believe. If we look at Capacent's most recent poll done on this issue you'll see some simplicity on the polling questions. The problem we have is the definition of 'God' can vary widely from a personal God to a term used to describe something behind all of the known universe. Its often said Einstein was a man who believed in a force that would be behind all of the laws of physics and he used the term God. 

The problem with statistics that show such high numbers of 'believers' such as in this recent Capacent poll gives political capital to the state Church and religious groups in Iceland to speak for the majority of Icelanders. Siðmennt and many groups in Iceland are currently fighting to get the church out of our public schools and move forward on making sure our new constitution includes the all important seperation of church and state.

Iceland is still pretty new to me, but there is a great deal of promise with statistics showing overwhelming support for the seperation of church and state, but then I read a story about how many believe in little people who live in the lava fields. Its a strange country, it has all the signs of being a modern secular society, but its a country that has a state religion, high belief in invisible people, and a place where big placebo (homeopathy and such nonsense) seem to be doing rather well in the absense of evidence or rational thinking.

A book I would highly recommend, is "A society without God, what the least religious nations can tell us about contentment."  Here is the author speaking about his book, including a brief discussion about Iceland.

Building blocks of DNA found in meteorites from space

 This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture of what was first thought to be a comet but is probably an asteroid collision. The inset picture shows a complex structure that suggests the object is not a comet but instead the product of a head-on collision between two asteroids traveling five times faster than a rifle bullet (about three miles per second). The collision created a meteorite that was found to contain amino acids.
CREDIT: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

The components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites, researchers announced.

A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules linked with a vital ancient biological process, adding weight to the idea that the earliest forms of life on Earth may have been made up in part from materials delivered to Earth the planet by from space.

http://www.livescience.com/15456-biological-ingredients-meteorites.html