Finding Truth

This is an open letter to exchristians as a whole and specifically, Nate who has recently deconverted from Christianity. For best results click here and let it play while reading the post.

I find your position credible, respectable and highly unenviable. I too have left churches in the past and even though these people are supposed to show the love of Jesus, they’re all too quick to show you their back. That is genuinely hurtful and is a blight on the church in general that this is how people are often treated. I was driving around today thinking about you and the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” came to mind. Particularly the last verse:

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for thy courts above.

If you’d like the strictly relevant audio it’s here . This is performed by Mumford and Sons who I really like.

The lines “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, Prone to leave the God I love” really stuck out for me. You used to love this God which you now say doesn’t exist. This post for me was particularly impactful as it appears at a time when you have made your decision and you are experiencing the fallout. That is a major adjustment for your psyche so it must be difficult to get your bearings after that. I cover this type of thing in another post, I refer to it as Foundational Unprovables, as these are the things that form the basis by which all other things are judged and you had a crisis of faith where you felt the need to alter or discard these foundational concepts that you were living your life by. I was thinking about what that would be like for me and I know it would be exceedingly difficult process to go through, so to have most of your friends ditch you in that process must have been additionally traumatic, so for that I am sorry for you.

I am also reminded of the parable of the lost sheep. Jesus left the 99 to go look for the one. That means he is looking for you right now. Please keep an eye out for the shepherd… even though you don’t believe in him.

To the Deconverted: What About All the People God Doesn’t Help?

This post is a response to a comment on a previous post, so in a sense a continuation of that post. You might want to read that first and come back.

This comment is from Nate:

Hi Patrick,

Just a quick question. In those times when God helped you personally, were those things that simply could not have happened naturally? In other words, how do you know that God actually helped you, especially in light of all the times he doesn’t seem to help people, as you mentioned above?

Thanks

This seems to be the critical issue, especially for the former Christians. They felt at one time that they had a genuine relationship and faith and have since let their doubts and their “rational” mind convince them that it was all a series of coincidences, that the “spiritual” experiences were just emotional manipulation or group think or whatever.

For me, the ways that God has worked in the series of events could be explained away as happy coincidences, mostly what you would think of as circumstantial evidence. Right place, right time sort of thing or I got out of predicaments that were entirely my own doing by good fortune, many lucky scrapes by outside observance. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of being kicked in the balls and heartache like anyone else but I think I lead a charmed life through no spectacular effort on my part. There was also a fair amount of restraint due to no money to do otherwise and in the end, it worked out way better that way cause I would have messed it up if I had the resources to.

This blog is meant to be semi-anonymous so I’m not going to go into my personal details much. If you were with me I would chat with you about it no problem over a beer or a coffee but here is the 30,000 feet view. Married very young (stupid decision) -> Had kids really young (stupid decision) -> Had to work out of town a lot because that was the only thing we thought could pay the bills (stupid decision) -> Ensuing relationship problems -> Recovered via forgiveness and by the grace of God -> Had to leave town due to <can’t say> problems -> Had a really bad accident: multiple injuries like crushed knee, etc. (my fault) -> Couldn’t work for four months and I was currently running a business with employees, the business disintegrated -> Survived the four months despite no real income -> Job after my accident paid far better than the business I was running before -> Had to leave as <can’t say> problems followed us -> Left the country with suitcases, kids and little else and barely enough money to get us there -> Got job in new country that came with company vehicle, otherwise I would have been screwed -> Laid off from job -> New country currently putting me through college. If you don’t find other people’s encounters with God credible it is unlikely that you will find my account any more so but there it is. I realize that many people would dismiss it as circumstantial.

For me it is the occasional transcendent prayer that will in no way allow me to deny that there is a person on the other end of the line. Maybe this makes me a weak person (I hope so) but I literally have tears streaming down my face thinking about that fact, which makes no sense but that’s the effect it has on me. I wish I had prayers like that every day but I don’t. After that, everything else is just icing on the cake.

When it comes to people that are in need of help, there are plenty of people that are in a desperate state living next door to every one of us but we don’t recognize it as so because they’re behind the wheel of a Beemer. There are many ways that we can be in a desperate state, not limited to poverty or oppression. I don’t know that God isn’t helping them but I do believe that God is waiting for people to respond to his voice. There is also the intervention of human free will in that the people that are creating these oppressive circumstances are choosing to do that and God doesn’t seem to be in the habit of striking people dead or forcing them to make the situation better. There is also the free will of the person in the oppressive circumstance; whether they will accept God’s offer of friendship.

As for the starving, abused and neglected children and otherwise vulnerable, helpless people in the world, I don’t really know. I do know that God is constantly telling people in the Bible that they should be looking after the poor and not taking advantage of them.

I know that what I would choose for myself and what God has chosen/is choosing for me are very different. The way that I would choose to help those people is different than the way God would/does help them. From our/my mindset we/I think it should be solved by delivering loads of aid, education and democracy along with the rest of our western values. From God’s perspective, that may look much different as he is interested in our hearts, not necessarily in our physical comfort. He wants to save those people from their sins, not necessarily from their desperate circumstances.

Pain and discomfort are temporary, what comes after this life on earth is permanent and eternal.

Faith and Reality

For some reason I keep getting sucked back into this whole theism/atheism discussion. I tried to keep it short. That didn’t work but it is all relevant so please humor me and try to follow my train of thought.

One of the things about atheists (or Atheists if you prefer) that is admirable is that they want to live in reality. Even if at the center is the cold dark fundamental belief that after this time on Earth you have nothing to look forward to except a dinner date with the worms. I think this is a respectable position and probably the main drawing card of atheism.

The counter to that from a Christian perspective would be the nature of the wager. If I’m wrong, I become worm bait anyway. If I’m right I get to go to heaven to be with God forever and not go to hell. In the meantime I can participate in my “delusion” and live a blissful existence abiding by centuries old teachings and have a genuinely happy and fulfilling life. At the end I’ll die and all my loved ones will believe I’m better off dead than alive. Doesn’t sound too terrible to me. For those types of Christians they don’t want to hear the alternative because it is not a wager they are willing to take given the above terms.

At the other extreme of the spectrum are people that would say, “That’s great if it works for you but I believe that…. “. Well, actually that’s not great if it “works” for you as it needs to be based in reality otherwise you are just participating in self delusion like our poor chap above. Despite our desire for our beliefs to represent reality, reality does not follow our beliefs; our beliefs should follow reality.

If belief should follow reality, what is Reality? That is the question that people have been trying to answer for millenia. Well, for one thing, it isn’t what we see. Science tells us that our eyes are just light detectors that give us a 3d view of the world. For some reason we are locked in this physical dimension that doesn’t totally make sense yet. Our atoms are essentially nothing with a few tiny particles whizzing around each other. Inside those tiny particles are even tinier particles once again surrounded by lots of space. What is the most primary reality? Is is strings or a brane? The Bible agrees with this aspect of science in that we believe in what we do not see:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see.

We have gotten to the point in science where we realize we may not ever be able to look into the next layer of abstraction. No one has successfully devised an experiment to prove or disprove strings or branes, they are just mathematical constructs. Even with the universe, we can’t prove or disprove whether the universe is infinite or not through measurement as we can’t see beyond a certain distance because of background radiation, it’s kind of like looking through a light fog where at some stage, you just can’t see past it. Of course, if we could see forever, we may only be able to prove that the universe is finite, infinite is probably a different thing altogether.

A problem with modern “rational” thought is that it has become heavily reliant on science to the point that if science doesn’t explain it, it isn’t worth knowing. It’s like we have said that the ancients couldn’t have known anything worth knowing because they didn’t have science. I think there are many examples of ancient knowledge that equals or betters modern knowledge such as herbal medicine, acupuncture, Tai Chi, etc. If you read through the book of Proverbs in the Bible you will likely realize that it is full of good advice, much of it strictly practical.

So what if Real Reality is actually spiritual and the physical world is just a thin veneer on top that we are stuck on? The spiritual world has proved to be almost impenetrable by science, thus many people’s insistence on excluding spirituality from the conversation altogether. If you consider ancient wisdom on this you would be hard pressed to find a single ancient spiritual thinker talking about atheism, although I suppose Buddhism comes close by my understanding of it. When the ancients had the realization of our inherently spiritual nature, why are we so quick to discard that? I suppose we would like to shed the “ignorance” of our past.

If the nature of Reality is actually spiritual, we should be looking for people that have mastered the spiritual while living in the physical world. Most world religions would have someone that they would say has done this whether it be the Buddha, Mohammed, the Dalai Lama, etc. The one that I look to in this category is Jesus. Perhaps this is the reason why he was able to perform miracles, etc. is that he had an inherent understanding of reality. Some people say the reason he was able to perform miracles was because he was God incarnate but he said that his followers would be able to perform greater signs than he did, so he clearly thought that whatever he was doing any other human could do with God’s assistance. The opportunity to interact on the spiritual plane is just as much a reality now as it was then, you just have to accept the offer.

In all my traversals of philosophy and thought experiments, I keep coming back to the person of Jesus.

Are you engaged in the real reality?

Gluten Free Pancakes and Crepes

The basic crepe recipe I use for non-gluten free is:

1 ¹/₂ cups flour
2 ¹/₄ cups of milk
¹/₂ cup vegetable oil
2 eggs

This recipe for oat flour pancakes is online somewhere (I don’t really know otherwise I would put the link):

1 cup oat flour
1 egg
1-2 tablespoons of oil
1-2 teaspoons of baking powder
dash of salt

Oat flour is easily made with rolled oats, so all I do is put them all together in the blender and let it mix and grind the oats at the same time. Use 1 ¹/4 cups rolled oats as they are a little less dense than the oat flour.

By combining aspects of the first two recipes, you can get an oat based crepe:

1 cup rolled oats
1 cup of water or milk
¹/₂ cup of oil
2 eggs

Other alternatives that I have toyed with would be rice and potato blends to substitute for flour with varying success. This is probably the most difficult to get right so I don’t recommend it for someone that has never made crepes before. In this recipe the rice is basically filler and the potato is a binder. In this one, everything is a bit relative because the rice or potato could have higher or lower water content. Adjust to the proper consistency for crepes. If you don’t know what that is, refer to recipe one, make a batch of those first.

1 cup cooked rice
¹/₂ cup boiled/steamed/mashed/cooked potato
1 ¹/₄ cup of water
¹/₂ cup oil
2 eggs

All of the gluten free versions will be more fragile by nature. Gluten is the glue that holds stuff together and there is no straight substitute for it, just approximations. If you have access to Xanthan Gum, you could add a teaspoon of it to make it a bit more stable and more gluten like.

For all the versions, I recommend using a ladle or measuring cup or something that will deliver the same amount of batter to the pan each time. You need a pan that has even heat or one part will burn before the rest is ready to flip. I recommend cast iron but you could probably put it off with a nonstick pan as well. It will be more difficult with a stainless steel or aluminum pan. Preheat the pan to medium heat. Once you become practiced at it, you could probably get away with high heat. Also, the type of flipper you use should be large, like something you would see in a commercial kitchen. The front should be flat, not round so that you can use it peel the crepe off the pan. If you are using a small flipper for the gluten free crepes, the crepe will probably break before you can get it flipped. The flipper I use is something like this and the pan I use is this one.

When you are ready to start making them, brush a little bit of oil on the pan. If you don’t have a brush for this, you can use a paper towel. Ideally, you don’t want any excess oil on the pan. Spoon the crepe batter into the center of the pan, then lift the pan up and swivel it in all directions at around 30 degrees or so. You just want to spread the batter out. It should be about ¹/₈ inch or 2mm thick and about the size of a large plate or tortilla or vinyl record depending on your frame of reference.

When the top looks dry it could be ready to flip. You will probably have to burn a few to get to learn when to flip them. The other side will take a little less time.

What to top your crepes or pancakes with? The classic is maple syrup; fake or real depending on taste or preference. Fruit or fruit sauce is nice. Whipped cream is always welcome. Cream cheese is nice alternative. Yoghurt is also an interesting addition. You could keep it simple with sprinkling brown sugar or powdered (icing) sugar. Some people enjoy sugar and lemon juice. The world is your oyster with crepes because they are so versatile.

My personal favorite is peanut butter sauce. You could make it with equal parts peanut butter and maple syrup, heat it up a bit and stir it together and pour or spread it on the crepe, roll it up and eat it. If you don’t have maple syrup you could make it like this:

¹/₂ cup peanut butter
¹/₄ cup boiling water
2 heaping teaspoons brown sugar

Let me know how it works for you.

To the BitterSweetEnd: I’m Stealing All Your Content

… well not all of obviously because this guy has a lot to say. Here is my response to this intriguing post:
The Christian (Theist) Challenge
I answered these before looking at the other replies so I wouldn’t be influenced by them.

1. Do you feel like Religion, God and The Bible conflict?
If you were to ask Jesus this question, he would say Religion and God definitely because Religion is man’s attempt to quantify or control God. It is man’s imposed structure and it generally goes awry. God and the Bible I don’t think conflict. The Bible says that all scripture is God breathed or inspired by God so I don’t see that as a conflict.

2. If God told you kill someone, (And you are 100% it’s God). Would you kill that person? Why or Why Not?
When is the only time you can get away with speeding legitimately? If you have an emergency and you have to get to the hospital immediately. If you get stopped by the cops, you quickly explain the situation and they happily drive ahead of you to the hospital. It is justifiable in this situation to break the law.
If God told you to kill Hitler, would you do it? I don’t think many of us would counter that the greater good is served by the death of Hitler. Yes, I would kill someone. I would also kill someone in self defense or if they were raping my daughter or threatening someone I love.
You may consider that God is the giver of life and thus he has the authority to take it away. One of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament was told to sacrifice his son which he was in the process of carrying out when God told him to stop.

3. Who created God; if he came from nothing or has no creator doesn’t that violate The First Law of Thermodynamics?
I think you have to have a broader imagination here. If he created the First Law of Thermodynamics he doesn’t have to submit to it. If God predates the universe, he also predates time so we have to think about beginnings differently then. I can’t claim to understand it because it is so far outside my experience but if he says he has always existed I just have to say okay on that one.

4. If you believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God; do you believe it to be inerrant or infallible? And, If the Bible is found errant, does God still exist and is the Bible still a trustworthy source?
I believe that it is inspired but I don’t believe it is necessarily factually inerrant or infallible. This is bordering on making the Bible itself God or a demigod of sorts. Many people treat the Bible as an idol and they venerate it nearly to the point of worship which I don’t think God intended. It points to God but is not God. People need to clarify passages that talk about “the word of God”. Sometimes this is God’s literal words, sometimes it is Jesus (“In the beginning was the Word”) and sometimes maybe it is the Bible but I think in most cases it is the first one.
The Bible is definitely trustworthy. It is thousands of years of distilled wisdom and divinely inspired writing.

5. In the Bible their are stories of God telling the Israelites to kill innocent women & children and children being punished for the sins of their father. Is this morally right or morally justifiable?
I am not in a position to judge God. Otherwise see question 2.

6. If God is perfect, how can something imperfect come out of something that is PERFECT? Did God make a mistake?
Can an excellent carpenter build a crappy birdhouse? I guess so if he wanted to.
I don’t think God made a mistake. He made us like he wanted to make us. You could say that we are flawed or we are fallen. It doesn’t make much difference. It is quite clear we were capable of being flawed from the outset. This gives us the opportunity to choose him (embedded in love is a choice). If we were perfect we wouldn’t be able to not choose him (maybe). Love is meaningless without choice.

7. If a Christian goes into a forest and gets lost. And he prays to God to be saved and not die. Does a God still here him? How do know? And, how can you be sure?
I suppose the way you can be sure that your prayers are heard is based on experience. I prayed about such and such a thing and something came out if it. For me, it is not that my prayers are always answered the way I wanted them to be, it is more like I can see that the best possible result came about that improved my character or made my life better in some way. Like if my son constantly asks for sugar cereal but instead I feed him porridge, he might not like it at the time, but later on he won’t have rotten teeth and malnutrition. We shouldn’t always get what we want. That might be why God hasn’t made me win the lottery. (…yet! Please, God, Please!)

8. If you were to die, and when you go before God; it’s some other God you have never seen or heard of nor worshiped? What would you do? Would you plead for him not to judge you harshly and what would you say?
Nice to meet you… Sir. What is the basis on which I am judged? Feel free to judge me on the basis of the life I lived. I am in awe of the universe you created.

9. What is something that would convince you that Christianity is wrong and that there is no God? (If your answer is NOTHING, than please explain WHY?)
When I die and nothing happens, I will be fully convinced.

10. This is a quote by the atheist Richard Dawkins…”We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go ONE god further.“-Richard Dawkins. Why does the Christian reject all other gods, but not their own? Why are you Christian? Why do you believe in only the Judo-Christian God?
This is kind of like saying to a married man, “You’ve rejected all other women except for one, so why not just go the whole hog and become celibate.” There is a large chasm there.
Any religion that does not claim exclusivity is essentially pointless because if it is acceptable to be in some other religion while being in the non-exclusive one, you might as well go to the exclusive one and increase your odds of getting it right.
I became a Christian because I was raised that way. I choose to remain a Christian because I am fully convinced, although I prefer to be called a follower of Christ as I think the term “Christian” has a lot of baggage. Please note that not everything I was raised with I still believe now. My beliefs are not static and I prefer to be an independent thinker, not tied to any particular dogma apart from Christ and what he taught. That being said I find the Bible reliable and compelling but I wouldn’t claim it is necessarily inerrant.
The major difference between Christianity and all other world religions is in others it is what you do for God and in Christianity it is what God does for you. All you have to do is believe that Jesus died so your sins can be forgiven and you can be acceptable before God and God takes care of the rest. That being said, salvation is free but it will cost you your life and you will never be so happy to give it away (I say this with sincerity). This is very compelling to me. Love and forgiveness are central concepts in Christ’s teachings which are very attractive to me.

Once I experienced Jesus and glimpsed eternity, I could never go back.

To the BitterSweet End

This post is in response to this post on The BitterSweet End. Go read it first and come back when you’re done.

I see this as multiple arguments that stack up in favor or against. I don’t know all of them for atheism because I’m not collecting them (maybe an atheist could fill in some for atheism), but here are a few that I believe for myself:

The universe was caused-> God may have caused it.
The universe appears to have been designed -> God may be the designer.
The universe appears to be fine tuned to support life -> God may have created it for life.
Humans seek meaning or “higher calling” -> God qualifies as a higher calling.
Humans desire, give and receive love (many would say above all else) -> maybe a God who loves built us.
…. this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, I think you see where I am going with this.

Then, in my own case, I have my personal experiences that confirm my philosophical suspicions that there is in fact a God because he has taken care of me and bailed me out of so many jams I have lost count…

… future reply:”Well isn’t that great for you but what about all the children being raped and starving to death that cry out to (your) god on a daily basis. Why doesn’t he do for them that he chooses to do for you, you western pompous twat.”

To that I say: I am really humbled and a bit ashamed that God chooses to help me with my ridiculous petty life as important as it is to me it doesn’t hold a candle to those children that are suffering. All I know is that he is God and I am not. I am not in a position to judge what he does. I would like to think he is doing something to alleviate their suffering but he isn’t accountable to me so I don’t have a very satisfactory answer except to say that in my life, such as it is God is a good friend and he has shown that he loves me.

As usual, your comments are appreciated.

Stir the Marbles in Your Head with Neil deGrasse Tyson

To my shame I had never heard of this guy before but I stumbled onto this video on Youtube and thought it was pretty brilliant.

I like how he frames the argument and just how little here cares. Come to think of it I think the English Premiership is pretty pointless but I don’t spend much time railing against it.

Once on that page you can click on this video:

This is very entertaining but it got me thinking about “life”. It doesn’t cut down on the fine tuning argument just because life only exists in one small part of the universe (that we know of). It doesn’t matter that 99% of species that have ever existed are now extinct, although I think a different figure might be interesting like how many species generally exist at any given time. Ok, I’m pretty sure that’s unanswerable so let’s just call it rhetorical. The amount of real estate we occupy in the universe is just a matter of scale. If the whole earth fit on the head of a pin would that even matter? (In reference to scale or amount of territory we occupy. I understand our physics would be totally different.)

Life is irrepressible. It keeps coming back from the dead. Some scientists are looking at the bottom of a lake in Antarctica just to see if there is a place on Earth where life can’t exist just to know that this thing actually has a floor to it.

I do a bit of software design. If I was able to create a self replicating program that gave the best of its source code to the next generation and systematically weeded out the garbage all the while slightly altering the source code to improve the chance for betterment for millions of generations and continued to do that until it became sentient, that would be amazing beyond my wildest dreams. Then, if that sentient computer being looked back and said, “It all looks like a big accident to me… “. Well, that might sting a bit.

Autism and Accidental Creativity

I recently read the book Autism and Creativity by Michael Fitzgerald. The premise of the book is that men with autism, more specifically High Functioning Autism or Asperger’s Syndrome are inclined to be creative in a way that breaks the mould because they are incapable of fitting into the world in a conventional way.

I would extend that to say that because people with Asperger’s don’t learn in the conventional way partly because with varying degrees they lack empathy and therefore struggle with intuitive mimicry in the same way that “normal” (neurotypical) people do. Essentially they don’t really learn by example in the same way that neurotypical people do. Sometimes they can be taught a skill in conventional ways but many times they just have to forge their own way. This often leads to interesting unconventional results.

They also have obsessions which lead to interesting results. In this book one of the more drastic examples is Ramanujan who was an unconventional math genius. He died at a young age partly because he neglected his own wellbeing as he was completely obsessed with math and often would forget to eat and otherwise look after his bodily needs. Their obsessions work hand in hand with their incredible ability to completely focus on just one thing for extended periods of time.

Before I read this book I never really thought of Asperger’s as being a creative force as the people with it are being “creative” more out of ignorance of how to acclimate than out of a genuine desire for creativity. That’s why I would refer to it as accidental creativity. They are unconventional because they don’t understand how to follow convention and in general choose to defy convention partly because it doesn’t make sense to them but also because off a general lack of understanding of social rules and therefore feel less desire to conform. Also, they don’t appear to be creative in the expected way, just odd as a result of their inability to understand social interaction.

On one hand people with Asperger’s have a hard time because they end up becoming social outcasts but we should be embracing these people despite our reservations because they aren’t like us. They are inherently “outside the box” thinkers as they don’t recognize there is a box in the first place. We really need these people to propel society forward. They need us as well because as a consequence of their social dysfunction, they are generally poor communicators, so they need people that understand them that can help them liaise with the world.

It turns out we are better off together.

What is Creativity?

Is creativity about independent thought or about being different from others? If someone came up with a style like Monet without any exposure to Monet would they also be a creative genius? If someone in an undiscovered culture draws like Picasso, does that mean they are a creative genius or just have a bad sense of scale? Or if someone creates in a way not yet discovered by modern art trends does that make them a creative genius or is it just “primitive” art?

One of them has to do with creativity in a social sphere and one has to do with objective(?) creativity. In order to be creative when surrounded by alternative visions of creativity is to do something different. It seems unlikely to me the sideline idiot art critic, that Jackson Pollack would have ever happened upon his “paint spatter” style in an objectively creative manner. If anything, the spatter hand paintings found in prehistoric caves are a step above the random paint spatter as at least they represent something (the artist’s hand).

Does objective creativity really even exist? Creativity will always have to be defined within some sort of context such as language or art history or what have you. Complete object creativity would perhaps be incomprehensible as even being creative. Take for instance clouds… as I peer out the window at the blue sky with clouds moving across the sky in a never before seen display of infinite complexity while being constrained to the basic hues of blue, white and greys… but nobody talks about the creativity of clouds, except me.

We don’t think of clouds as being creative because clouds are considered a collection of inanimate particles blown about by a mindless weather cycle. Even in this, creativity is constrained to something that only a person can do. So even creativity which is meant to be the freest of all birds still lives in a box.

Lessons From the Wood Lice

I live in a place where wood lice are prevalent. I don’t have any quarrel with them. If they make it to the inside of my house, I just put them outside. I think they are kind of cute in their mindless tiny armadillo way. It’s unfortunate that I have to kill some of them every time I put my household compost into my compost bin. It has a heavy wooden lid to keep out the larger creatures, well actually it forces the rats and mice to work a little harder to get in but it does keep the birds out. When I move the lid all the woodlice are gathered around the top of the lid and some inevitably get squashed by me moving the lid. Besides me killing them with the lid, you see their little carcasses all of the place as they die for lack of food or what, I know not.

The problem with woodlice is they breed to the point of starvation and they insist on living in inherently dangerous locations. Remind you of anyone? These past couple days, Hurricane Isaac just went through the US where it gave a little dusting to Louisiana, the same place that got destroyed a few years ago by Katrina. Why would you live in a city below sea level in a hurricane prone area? I’m convinced they decided to rebuild the levies to provide proof of concept in the same way dropping a bomb on Japan was to provide real life testing of what the bomb could do to an actual population. Did you ever wonder why the two bombs they dropped had totally different designs? They wanted to see which design would be more effective. Ok, New Orleans has a unique culture, etc. That’s fine. If you are willing to put your life on the line to experience unique culture then that’s the risk you’ve signed up to. Many people would say they can’t afford to leave. This cannot be true. Refugees walk away from where they are being shot at with whatever they can carry but they get rewarded with their lives.