Post by Elfie on May 1, 2006 14:34:30 GMT -5
God could have made the whole thing much simpler for us. A lot of people don’t realize that. He had a whole planet that he had just created, could put anything anywhere, but no, he had to put the Tree of Knowledge right there in the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve could see. He could have just as easily stuck it in Antarctica and we would not have had to be concerned in the slightest, but there it was and here we are. Curse temptation, eh? If only there was some way to avoid it. I mean, if we could just get rid of the things that tempt people, we would never have to be concerned with whether or not they were going to give into that temptation.
God could have done that. Instead he gave us the Tree of Knowledge, and sure enough, we mucked things up. It’s important to realize that we don’t blame the tree though. Sure it was there. Yeah, it was ruined everything. Let’s be realistic though. It’s just a tree. It’s not good or evil or some shade of grey. We may choose to be good or evil, but trees don’t exactly have that luxury. We don’t blame God either. We could. We could ask why He let us have a tree when He knew we were just going to disappoint him with our decisions. It may have been rather rude of him to get angry when He was the one who stuck the tree there in the first place, but we certainly don’t blame Him for placing the tree there.
Why is that? Why don’t we blame the tree or God? Why do we blame ourselves, or at least Adam and Eve? Well the truth is that we are accountable for our own decisions. It was our mistake to eat the fruit and we recognize that. Sure, we can say that we were destined to eat the fruit no matter what. In a scientific sense, there certainly is a case for a predetermination that can be ascertained only with total omniscience. The theory goes that if you knew the distribution, velocity and acceleration of every atom at the moment of the Big Bang, you could extrapolate with exact precision every event that would ever occur. That’s not the point though. The point is that even if our actions are predetermined we are still held accountable for them. If you just throw your hands up and say that everything is fated, people start to see justification for a lot of unjustifiable things.
The point of being individually accountable, however, is that it helps us to establish cause and effect. After all, as what seems like at least half of all first year university courses remind you, correlation does not imply causation. Basically, things can happen in relation to each other, but that does not mean that one causes each the other. The link could be the other way around, or it could be that some third party event causes both of them. In many cases, it is simply impossible to figure out where the causation for an event is. Look at it this way. Increased shoe size is positively correlated with weight. Does that mean that having big feet causes you to get fat or that being fat causes your feet to swell? Well actually, it’s neither. Taller people tend to be heavier and to have larger feet. In reality, growing causes both of them. The problem that we as a people run across is attributing false causes to events.
There’s a famous story about a Tsar of Russia whose kingdom had the plague in medieval times. He was trying desperately to figure out what was causing the disease. Had he done something to upset the divine? Better yet, was he innocent and his peasants had done something to upset the divine? He couldn’t figure it out. Eventually, he did stumble upon one interesting bit of information. In the areas with the most plague, there were also the most doctors. Now stepping aside from the story for just a moment, of course plagued regions are going to have the most doctors. It’s the job of a doctor to help sick people, and sickness is more common in regions with plague. Back to the story: “Ah-hah!” exclaimed the Tsar, or something in Russian that is the equivalent of ah-hah. The Tsar ordered all of the doctors in the land put to death on the grounds that they were causing the plague. Why else, he reasoned, would there number of doctors be correlated with the presence of plague?
Of course, we dismiss this as blatant stupidity. We would never make such a careless mistake, and on a grand level, we’re right, but we do make smaller mistakes like this all the time. The problem with establishing these kinds of correlations is that there are correlations everywhere, and more importantly people listen to them as if they were causations. You can take correlated data from wherever you want and use it to support your own prejudices and political views by implying causation. In fact, we see it all the time on both sides of the political spectrum. Politicians have no problem feeding the public correlated information and misinterpreting it to promote their own agenda.
Let’s look at a sticking point for many right-leaning members of society: drugs. Currently, there are sites in Vancouver that provide free needles for heroine addicts so they don’t have to use dirty needles and risk getting possibly fatal diseases. A lot of people object to this. After all, there is a correlation between drug use and the demand for free needles. You don’t get a lot of people who are not addicted to drugs just going by and picking up needles to rip off the system. But is it causal? Not to the extent people think. Sure, it may make starting up your fledging heroine habit a little easier, but if you’ve chosen to start doing heroine, I don’t think it’s the sanitization of the needle that has you concerned.
So now let’s look at a sticking point for many left-leaning members of society: guns. The Conservatives have stated that they want to end some restrictions on guns that make it tougher for people to kill each other. A lot of people object to this. After all, there is a correlation between owning a gun and being likely to shoot someone. You don’t see a lot of people using arrows to shoot each other. But is it causal? Again, not to the extent that people think. Sure, having a gun makes the process of shooting someone easier, but if you’re planning on committing a crime, I don’t think you’re going to balk at the idea of committing another one to get a gun.
My point in both of these matters is that it’s the individual choice that we have to be worried about. We have to be focused on reducing the demands for drug use and murder rather than the supply of needles and guns. One reason is that supply banning is ineffective. It creates black markets and causes countless dollars to be expended only scratching the surface of problems. The American War on Drugs, despite it’s billions of dollars in investment has been a spectacular failure because it has not bothered to convince Americans not to do drugs in the first place. The Canadian gun registry has met a similar fate. The original plan of two million dollars has since ballooned to one billion dollars, five hundred times higher than the original bill, and it still is not working to full capacity. In today’s consumerist society, supply always meets demand, legally or not, so the trick is to alter demand.
In a lot of cases we’ve recognized this. We don’t like many of the things that people do when under the influence of alcohol, but we’ve given up trying to ban alcohol. After all, it’s not the decision to have a glass of wine that will lead to you getting pulled over for drunk driving: it’s the decision to get wasted out of your mind. We have favoured individual responsibility and a government system that while caring, does not engage in the hard paternalism that was so common in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, our response to the crime of rape is to punish rapists, not to ban mini-skirts. If you really wanted to, I’d imagine you could find a correlation between mini-skirts and rape, but even then, nobody is going to listen to you if you say mini-skirts cause rape.
So why does that work in other areas? Why are we content to say that guns cause murder and that free needles cause addiction? Why are we content to say that capitalism begets corruption? We repeatedly demonize objects and ideas rather than accepting responsibility for our own actions. People cause murder. People cause addiction. People cause corruption. Sure, these things can make it easier to get away with some of these actions, just like how alcohol makes it easier to drive drunk, but that alone is not justification for banning them. It punishes those who own a gun but don’t make it habit of shooting people, who are addicted to drugs but didn’t start because we offered them a free needle or who own a business but don’t go around employing slave labour and paying off governments of developing countries to keep quiet about it. What’s more, it does not deter the murderers, addicts to be and corrupted who will likely find a way to murder, get addicted or cheat anyway.
God didn’t put the Tree of Knowledge in Antarctica where it wouldn’t bother anyone. He put it in the Garden of Eden, and His point was that you can’t ban all the temptations around you, nor should you try. The one thing that you can do is recognize those temptations. You can get out the word that drugs are bad and stop people from wanting to do them. You can get out the word that murder is bad and stop people from wanting to commit it. In fact, you can probably find ways to discourage crime through charity and to discourage drug use through programs that stimulate people in other ways. The point is that these days you can’t just cut people off from things and say it’s for their own good. Not only is it arrogant and paternalistic, it’s ineffective. Instead, we need to focus on communicating with people on equal footing and convince them to make the right choices of their own accord, not through our strong-arm tactics.
God could have done that. Instead he gave us the Tree of Knowledge, and sure enough, we mucked things up. It’s important to realize that we don’t blame the tree though. Sure it was there. Yeah, it was ruined everything. Let’s be realistic though. It’s just a tree. It’s not good or evil or some shade of grey. We may choose to be good or evil, but trees don’t exactly have that luxury. We don’t blame God either. We could. We could ask why He let us have a tree when He knew we were just going to disappoint him with our decisions. It may have been rather rude of him to get angry when He was the one who stuck the tree there in the first place, but we certainly don’t blame Him for placing the tree there.
Why is that? Why don’t we blame the tree or God? Why do we blame ourselves, or at least Adam and Eve? Well the truth is that we are accountable for our own decisions. It was our mistake to eat the fruit and we recognize that. Sure, we can say that we were destined to eat the fruit no matter what. In a scientific sense, there certainly is a case for a predetermination that can be ascertained only with total omniscience. The theory goes that if you knew the distribution, velocity and acceleration of every atom at the moment of the Big Bang, you could extrapolate with exact precision every event that would ever occur. That’s not the point though. The point is that even if our actions are predetermined we are still held accountable for them. If you just throw your hands up and say that everything is fated, people start to see justification for a lot of unjustifiable things.
The point of being individually accountable, however, is that it helps us to establish cause and effect. After all, as what seems like at least half of all first year university courses remind you, correlation does not imply causation. Basically, things can happen in relation to each other, but that does not mean that one causes each the other. The link could be the other way around, or it could be that some third party event causes both of them. In many cases, it is simply impossible to figure out where the causation for an event is. Look at it this way. Increased shoe size is positively correlated with weight. Does that mean that having big feet causes you to get fat or that being fat causes your feet to swell? Well actually, it’s neither. Taller people tend to be heavier and to have larger feet. In reality, growing causes both of them. The problem that we as a people run across is attributing false causes to events.
There’s a famous story about a Tsar of Russia whose kingdom had the plague in medieval times. He was trying desperately to figure out what was causing the disease. Had he done something to upset the divine? Better yet, was he innocent and his peasants had done something to upset the divine? He couldn’t figure it out. Eventually, he did stumble upon one interesting bit of information. In the areas with the most plague, there were also the most doctors. Now stepping aside from the story for just a moment, of course plagued regions are going to have the most doctors. It’s the job of a doctor to help sick people, and sickness is more common in regions with plague. Back to the story: “Ah-hah!” exclaimed the Tsar, or something in Russian that is the equivalent of ah-hah. The Tsar ordered all of the doctors in the land put to death on the grounds that they were causing the plague. Why else, he reasoned, would there number of doctors be correlated with the presence of plague?
Of course, we dismiss this as blatant stupidity. We would never make such a careless mistake, and on a grand level, we’re right, but we do make smaller mistakes like this all the time. The problem with establishing these kinds of correlations is that there are correlations everywhere, and more importantly people listen to them as if they were causations. You can take correlated data from wherever you want and use it to support your own prejudices and political views by implying causation. In fact, we see it all the time on both sides of the political spectrum. Politicians have no problem feeding the public correlated information and misinterpreting it to promote their own agenda.
Let’s look at a sticking point for many right-leaning members of society: drugs. Currently, there are sites in Vancouver that provide free needles for heroine addicts so they don’t have to use dirty needles and risk getting possibly fatal diseases. A lot of people object to this. After all, there is a correlation between drug use and the demand for free needles. You don’t get a lot of people who are not addicted to drugs just going by and picking up needles to rip off the system. But is it causal? Not to the extent people think. Sure, it may make starting up your fledging heroine habit a little easier, but if you’ve chosen to start doing heroine, I don’t think it’s the sanitization of the needle that has you concerned.
So now let’s look at a sticking point for many left-leaning members of society: guns. The Conservatives have stated that they want to end some restrictions on guns that make it tougher for people to kill each other. A lot of people object to this. After all, there is a correlation between owning a gun and being likely to shoot someone. You don’t see a lot of people using arrows to shoot each other. But is it causal? Again, not to the extent that people think. Sure, having a gun makes the process of shooting someone easier, but if you’re planning on committing a crime, I don’t think you’re going to balk at the idea of committing another one to get a gun.
My point in both of these matters is that it’s the individual choice that we have to be worried about. We have to be focused on reducing the demands for drug use and murder rather than the supply of needles and guns. One reason is that supply banning is ineffective. It creates black markets and causes countless dollars to be expended only scratching the surface of problems. The American War on Drugs, despite it’s billions of dollars in investment has been a spectacular failure because it has not bothered to convince Americans not to do drugs in the first place. The Canadian gun registry has met a similar fate. The original plan of two million dollars has since ballooned to one billion dollars, five hundred times higher than the original bill, and it still is not working to full capacity. In today’s consumerist society, supply always meets demand, legally or not, so the trick is to alter demand.
In a lot of cases we’ve recognized this. We don’t like many of the things that people do when under the influence of alcohol, but we’ve given up trying to ban alcohol. After all, it’s not the decision to have a glass of wine that will lead to you getting pulled over for drunk driving: it’s the decision to get wasted out of your mind. We have favoured individual responsibility and a government system that while caring, does not engage in the hard paternalism that was so common in the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, our response to the crime of rape is to punish rapists, not to ban mini-skirts. If you really wanted to, I’d imagine you could find a correlation between mini-skirts and rape, but even then, nobody is going to listen to you if you say mini-skirts cause rape.
So why does that work in other areas? Why are we content to say that guns cause murder and that free needles cause addiction? Why are we content to say that capitalism begets corruption? We repeatedly demonize objects and ideas rather than accepting responsibility for our own actions. People cause murder. People cause addiction. People cause corruption. Sure, these things can make it easier to get away with some of these actions, just like how alcohol makes it easier to drive drunk, but that alone is not justification for banning them. It punishes those who own a gun but don’t make it habit of shooting people, who are addicted to drugs but didn’t start because we offered them a free needle or who own a business but don’t go around employing slave labour and paying off governments of developing countries to keep quiet about it. What’s more, it does not deter the murderers, addicts to be and corrupted who will likely find a way to murder, get addicted or cheat anyway.
God didn’t put the Tree of Knowledge in Antarctica where it wouldn’t bother anyone. He put it in the Garden of Eden, and His point was that you can’t ban all the temptations around you, nor should you try. The one thing that you can do is recognize those temptations. You can get out the word that drugs are bad and stop people from wanting to do them. You can get out the word that murder is bad and stop people from wanting to commit it. In fact, you can probably find ways to discourage crime through charity and to discourage drug use through programs that stimulate people in other ways. The point is that these days you can’t just cut people off from things and say it’s for their own good. Not only is it arrogant and paternalistic, it’s ineffective. Instead, we need to focus on communicating with people on equal footing and convince them to make the right choices of their own accord, not through our strong-arm tactics.