I’m sick of assholes. I’d be less colorful in my language, but I also don’t think being censored necessarily leads to a better life. Maybe I should add that to my list.
I’ve penned a few quick tips for how to stop being an idiot who makes life unpleasant for yourself and those around you. Most of this is specifically directed at the atheist/theist community. If it applies to you, you probably won’t think it does, but someone out there might be picturing your face or username right about now, so it pays to give a few of these a whirl just to say you tried. Heck, it might just help us become a better society, and wouldn’t that be just peachy?
01
Don’t be an asshole. Just in case specifics are too much for you, try this one as a catch-all.
02
Want someone to listen to your opinions? Start by listening to theirs.
03
Biting one-liners & zingers won’t change anyone’s views on gods or the supernatural. You need to get deeper.
04
When you’re being a dick on the net, the only people who are hearing you are those who already agree with you. Do better.
05
Don’t evercensor your ‘enemy.’ When we all have equal rights, the best argument should win.
06
If you can make arguments about religion without resorting to cliches, quotes, or insults, you’re one step in the right direction.
07
Yes, some beliefs are silly, but the people who believe them do so for serious reasons. Find out what those are, and you might discover the keys to reaching that person. You might also gain a friend.
08
He/she may be rude, ignorant, or just an enormous bag of dicks, but you don’t need to be one in return no matter how tempting it may be.
09
When you make a mistake, are caught in a fallacy, or otherwise fuck up, apologize and start over. It will go a long way to help communication and gain you some respect.
10
Assume the persons with whom you debate have something to teach you. Be open to it, and they may become open to learning something from you in return.
11
No small group or single person is representative of the whole. Making sweeping statements about others only degrades your position.
12
You never know who is watching or listening. A seemingly insignificant point, fact, or insight you offer might help someone else in a great way.
13
Stick to the facts. Scientific truths and reason are some of the most convincing tools for planting seeds of doubt in outsiders.
14
Be kind and gentle. You won’t regret it, and you’ll gain much.
I’d like to thank many of you who are my friends, confidants, and allies in this world. Without you, I’d be living a much douchier life. I might come off as a bit of a wanker sometimes, but just like many of you, I’m trying to be better. Thanks for helping!
I read in the HuffPo that one Douglas Knight, who holds the rather impressive title of Emperor with no clothes Drucilla Moore Buffington Professor of Hebrew Bible and Professor of Jewish Studies, has written a book titled “The Meaning of the Bible: What the Jewish Scriptures and Christian Old Testament Can Teach Us”, in which he addresses what he calls the “creation vs evolution debate”.
What debate, where ? Apart from some religious fundamentalists in the USA and Islamic countries, hardly anybody is having a debate. Evolution is a fact. Creation is a myth. That’s it.
For more than a century the creation vs. evolution debate has raged in numerous countries, nowhere more strongly than in the United States and the United Kingdom. Its sensationalist forms are fodder for the media: the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925, the Arkansas trial of 1981, the “Intelligent Design” notion, the “Young Earthers” and the continuing controversy over what to teach in schools. Science friction.
Not quite. Science as a way of knowing has increasingly replaced religion since the Middle Ages, although god knows religion is fighting teeth and claws to keep some kind of a hold on any kind of relevance in explaining natural phenomena. But the reality is that religion has no role whatsoever anymore in helping us explain the natural world, and “creation” is a useless, simplistic, and wrong assertion from millenia ago, that is so much less interesting and fascinating than the real answer of how life came to exist is going to turn out to be. But that answer will come from science, not scripture.
While science and religion operate with different methods, criteria, aims and subject matter, neither has to dominate the other.
No. Science and religion are not at all equivalent in that they both operate with “methods” or “criteria”. Science has these things, but what religion does is to make a dogmatic claim, and then work its way backwards to an explanation through creative interpretation of Stone Age poetry. Science has no aim, it makes observations, and then derives hypotheses to explain the observations. Religion aims to do the work of a god, and it works on faith, not objective reality. How many sails of ships did early Christians see disappear on the horizon without thinking about whether this was consistent with a flat earth ? No, religion is not a way of knowing, it’s a way of relinquishing thinking to dogma.
Theologians work with the material they are given, religion’s holy books. And they have over millenia done their best to make sense of the garbled, contradictory and outdated verses left behind by the desert nomads who wrote them, and the scribes who transposed and translated them in later centuries. But it all comes down to one thing. Theologians operate under a false premise, namely that there are gods, or that supernatural beings had any hand in the putting together of these verses.
The Bible does not claim a unified, monolithic portrait of creation. Its descriptions vary from text to text, as do its literary styles. It expresses how the material and human world came into existence, but its real message is not those external details but its insights into the nature of divinity, humanity, and the world.
The Bible does no such thing, and it holds no relevant insights for us today, apart from those of a historical and anthropological nature. What it expresses is the feelings, fears and superstitions of Stone Age nomads from 3000 years ago, and while I applaude Mr Knight for yet another creative effort to get some coherent sense out of a religious text, to be used in a current-day affair such as that of the validity of the theory of evolution, ultimately this whole effort is bound to fail and look somewhat pathetic. Wrong department.
Gotta love this story from Reddit, about an atheist who walked into a Christian store…
They had a t-shirt printer that was used to put verses. I asked if a printing of a Timothy 2:12 shirt was reasonable. Being Christians, they had never looked that far into the Bible, so they looked it up with their handy dandy on site Bible. When they recited the verse (A woman happened to be the reader of the Bible) they informed me of how disrespectful of their religion I was being. I was unsure of how I was being disrespectful by asking for a verse from their Holy Book.
So I really want to know: Why is that disrespectful? It’s not really out of context — not anymore than any other quotation would be. It’s in the Bible. So what if most Christians don’t happen to agree with it?
In the lastseveralposts I’ve written about ethics, I have been talking in part about the various ways in which we are ethically responsible for our emotions and for reasoning through them.
One thing worth to make explicit, which I simply assumed people would understand, is that I have been talking in those posts about neurotypical people who have reasonable potential to reason through their emotions and to alter them accordingly if they were to become conscientious about doing so.
In this the talk below, JT gives a really powerful and personal talk about what it’s like to have neurological deficiencies that make it simply impossible to feel rationally:
Watching this video I feel like simply repeating what I’ve said before about what I think about when JT discusses his mental illness:
One of the most important mental disciplines is to assess yourself honestly. We are so naturally susceptible to judging ourselves according to both the flattery of our admirers and of our own ego, on the one hand, and the disdain of our detractors and our own irrational fears, on the other. It takes a lot of work to look squarely at what we actually do and what it is actually worth. Our brains are structured in such a way that emotionally our fastest judgment is a simplistic positive or negative towards whatever we encounter, including ourselves. And because of this we can think only positively about ourselves one moment and only negatively the next.
So, I concentrate a lot on looking at myself as truthfully as I can manage and it is a daily uphill climb. And tuning out the misperceptions of others is a vital part of this process. I work very hard to not judge myself by widespread misconceptions of what value does or does not consist in.
And so I cannot express enough my agreement with, and admiration for, JT Eberhard’sfrankness about his struggles with mental illness. He is able to insist on seeing the rational truth for what it is. It is not his fault that he has a sickness. It is not anything he should be ashamed of. And it is not anything he should hide from his enemies who would want to exploit it in order to undermine his credibility by trading on resilient myths about either the weakness or the culpability of the clinically depressed.
He will publish his experiences of temporarily losing his mind, even sometimes, intimately, right after they happened. He will publicly let others suffering like him know he is with them. He will model his successes in beating back the monsters and model resiliency after losses against them. He will vividly describe for the rest of us what it is like to live in a brain like his own. He will expose and articulately denounce the attempts to exploit his illness by religious people who misguidedly prey on those they perceive as vulnerable. He will refuse to confuse his sickness with weakness. He will actively counter such misconceptions step by step, putting himself and his own experience unashamedly on the line and daring those who want to assess him by false standards to expose their ignorance.
That is what living according to the truth is like and that is what fighting for the truth is like.
Not many people these days know much about Horatio Alger, but most of us know about his legacy. I find that most people who do know about him are either very old, or well read. I'm neither; I heard about him through the book and movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
Not being one to horde what little knowledge I do possess, I can tell you that Alger was a 19th century author known for writing children's stories. Alger helped popularize rags-to-riches tales, and in part, helped lay the foundations for what became known as the "American Dream." Alger's stories tended to focus on young men who come from humble beginnings and, through hard work and good moral character, rise to the top.
There is something simultaneously virtuous and naive in his work. On one hand, it's undeniable that perseverance and ethics are important traits to imbue upon the young. On the other hand, the idea that your success or failure in life entirely rests on your actions alone is a concept that is as ridiculous today as it was when he first wrote it.
The era in which his work was most popular came to be known historically as the "Gilded Age," a term coined by Mark Twain for the era following the Civil War. Again, most people may not know what gilding is, but I am happy to share with you that to "gild" something is to cover it with a thin layer of gold. Twain so named this time the "Gilded Age" as a take on "golden age;" it appeared golden, but only on the surface.
Alger's work became popular at a time when America was growing at a rapid pace. Hundreds of miles of rail were being laid down, factories were springing up across the Northeast, and a new class of super-wealthy private businessmen began to emerge, with individuals like JD Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and JP Morgan earning millions at a time when a penny still bought you a magazine with an Horatio Alger story inside.
The "American Dream" trope had always been there (though not explicitly by that name), especially from the European perspective. America had been, and still was at that time, the land of opportunity for many people in Europe, or even just a place for people to get a second chance. By Alger's time, however, he saw a sharp decline in the work ethic and morality of those around him (especially those born in America, as opposed to immigrants seeking opportunity), and he chose to focus on promoting the idea of self-determinism and honesty.
And thererin lies the rub: it is patently absurd to both promote the idea of self-determinism and that of honesty, because self-determinism is a fallacy. It's true that if you are born with nothing, you will almost undoubtedly have to work for everything you get, but if you happened to be a child in the Vanderbilt family, you very well may live a life of opulence without so much as working a day in your life.
That part, I can live with.
What is disheartening, however, is that most poor people work their hands to the bone, both in that time and in this one, and yet they will often see very little pay-off for their effort. Generational poverty is a reality, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. There are families where both parents have tirelessly worked multiple jobs going back a century or more, and they have little to show for it. Their children cannot hope for much more than to labor in futility until they, too, die, having not reached their full potential. "Working-class" is what we call it when we are trying to flatter them, but really, they are the perpetually lower-class.
The myth that you determine your own fate persists, however, because of people like my father. He was the first person in his family to graduate from college, and he has had job titles including words like "Executive" and "Vice President," and currently has a title that includes both. I'm proud of him, and I know he worked hard, but I also know he didn't work any harder than millions of other people. If all it took was hard work, more people would have achieved what he achieved, but his station in life is the result of what would be called "opportunity" by capitalists, and "luck" by cynics.
The truth is, there is so much outside of our control. I sense that I have perhaps not worked as hard as he has, though I'm no slouch; I still manage to accomplish quite a bit in a day, even though I could just sit on my ass while unemployed and do absolutely nothing, thanks to his hard work and "opportunity." But the truth is, I just have not been given opportunities like he has, and this is largely not because I have not gone looking for it, but because there simply isn't a lot of opportunity out there right now at this moment
Personally, I'm an optimist. I know that my father, like all people who experience upward economic mobility, was not catapulted to their current status overnight. I am not out applying for jobs as an executive and getting frustrated at my inability to instantly be on top. My father also graduated during economically hard times, granted they were not as bad as they are now, and like him, I am confident that all things change. But I have to wonder... would my father be so "lucky" if he had to cope with the financial strains of today while he was in the situation he was in when he started?
What I mean is... I can afford to be confident. I can afford to be patient. I can afford wait out the storm. I can afford these luxuries of opportunity because I come from a moderately wealthy family. Scratch that... after discussing my father's current finances, I can safely say I am the beneficiary of a 1%er's good graces. He didn't come from the bottom; he came from the middle. But now he's at the top, and by familial association, I am coming from the top, as well. The world is a different place now, and I question whether someone like my father (who I have immense respect for) could succeed in this day and age.
My father worked a few hours a week and put himself through college, and he graduated with no debt. I worked during college, and I graduated with student loan debt of over $100,000. If my father, coming from his family, was in my position, he would have six-figure debt and would perhaps still be looking for a job, as I am. However, because I am who I am, my father cut a check and paid off my student loans this year in one fell swoop, something his own father never could have afforded to do for him. My father doesn't love me more than his father loved him, he just has the means to do more for me than his father ever could have done.
I get angry when I see people criticizing the poor, especially older individuals who grew up and made their place in life during a very different time, or who come from families that were not truly poor. I don't think most people ever remove themselves from their privileged lives, where they feel entitled to all the advantages they received by virtue of which vagina they were laboriously pushed from at birth. Most poor people aren't poor by any fault of their own, they are poor by virtue of birth, and many of those who do make it have to work harder for the same results than those born into better situations.
What is most depressing, however, is that so much hard work goes unrewarded among the working class. I wish hard work was rewarded. I wish everyone truly could make something of themselves. I wish self-determinism was a part of our reality. I wish it were so, but it is not.
Which leads me back to Horatio Alger. Alger came from an affluent minister family and attended Harvard, so he didn't live the stories he told. And for all his talk of morality and personal responsibility, Alger lost his job in 1866 as the pastor of a Massachusetts church for molesting young boys. But I will give him this: he promoted honesty, and he never denied the accusations. He simply moved to New York City, continued publishing stories for young boys, and never faced justice for his crimes. How's that for personal responsibility?
The difference between men like Horatio Alger and myself is not so much our outlook on life (which is still quite at odds), it's that I don't need to write fictional stories to illustrate how I think the world works; the truth is enough.
The truth is this: I've found a strange trend. Those who truly come from poor backgrounds and make it don't preach so much about hard work and morality, they talk of giving opportunities to the poor, while those who have everything handed to them are generally the ones who never shut the hell up about how the only way to get ahead in life is hard work.
Personally, I would find it easy to say I have what I have because of my hard work. I did work hard, both in my education and while employed. It's not a lie, it's the truth, but I also know that my hard work is nothing special. I know that when opportunity comes (and it so often does for affluent white males such as myself), I will grab hold of it. But someday, when I look back on my life, I refuse to pretend I did everything myself. I will know I had help, from my family, from friends, from my wonderful wife, from society, and from whoever gives me the opportunity to succeed. I won't hog the credit, I will be grateful, and I will do my best to extend opportunities to others, because giving someone the chance to succeed is not only the greatest gift you can give someone, it's the only way anyone's hard work can really pay off.
In his latest essay, Atheist, Heal Thyself: The Myths of Atheism (this guy is too stupid even for PuffHo), Moshe Averick really outdoes himself in the egregious stupidity department.
Scientists are stymied in their attempts to explain even such a common and basic human ability like verbal communication, in material terms. I will briefly elaborate. Imagine two men; one is an American who only speaks English, one is Chinese and only speaks Chinese. Both are thirsty and desire liquid refreshment. In other words, both are thinking essentially the same thought; namely, that they want to imbibe liquid into their bodies. Each turns to the other and in their respective language, asks for a drink of water. Of course, neither has any idea what the other is talking about. Why? It is because the thought, “I want a drink of water,” is completely separate and different than the words, “I want a drink of water.” The words themselves mean nothing at all. They are arbitrary sounds that represent thoughts, ideas, concepts, emotions, i.e., information. When I am thirsty and want to ask someone for a drink, I proceed to form a series of arbitrary and intrinsically senseless sounds with my mouth. These sounds travel through the air where they are heard by another person, who then decodes these sounds and brings me a glass of water. We take it for granted because we do it all the time, but what is transpiring is nothing short of miraculous. I am taking ideas in my head and sending them through the air to others. I am attaching ideas to sound waves. The words (i.e. the sounds), that I spoke were arbitrary and meaningless, but the information was very specific and very meaningful. Words and sounds do not equal information, words and sounds represent information. The information itself cannot be defined in material terms. [overused emphasis (the good rabbi loves him some italics) omitted]
Seriously, this is what passes for "sophisticated" thought among the religious.
As is often the case, the article is chock full of stupid, a lot more than I quote here.
Synagogue Church of All Nations offers a 100% guaranteed cure for AIDS via prayer and the the use of special ‘anointing water’. All you have to do is have faith. You can demonstrate your faith by stopping the use of your AIDS treatment medication. Sounds like a deal, right? Well… not so much really. Bodies are hitting the floor.
Rachel Holmes, one of the pastors, told a reporter that if symptoms persist it is simply HIV leaving the body.
'We have many people that contract HIV. All are healed,' she told Sky News.
'We've had people come back before saying, "Oh I'm not healed. The diarrhoea I had when I had HIV, I've got it again".
'I have to stop them and say, "No, please, you are free".'
FOX News and religious conservatives are pissed off at President Obama because they didn’t like his Thanksgiving address. Here are some excerpts — see if you can figure out why they’re angry:
As Americans, each of us has our own list of things and people to be thankful for. But there are some blessings we all share.
…
We’re also grateful for the Americans who are taking time out of their holiday to serve in soup kitchens and shelters, making sure their neighbors have a hot meal and a place to stay. This sense of mutual responsibility – the idea that I am my brother’s keeper; that I am my sister’s keeper – has always been a part of what makes our country special. And it’s one of the reasons the Thanksgiving tradition has endured.
The very first Thanksgiving was a celebration of community during a time of great hardship, and we have followed that example ever since. Even when the fate of our union was far from certain — during a Civil War, two World Wars, a Great Depression — Americans drew strength from each other. They had faith that tomorrow would be better than today.
…
With all the partisanship and gridlock here in Washington, it’s easy to wonder if such unity is really possible. But think about what’s happening at this very moment: Americans from all walks of life are coming together as one people, grateful for the blessings of family, community, and country.
Why would the religious right be upset with that? He used their buzzwords: “faith,” “brother’s keeper,” “sister’s keeper,” “blessings”…
That means he hates Christians and this is all part of a vast left-wing conspiracy!
Or he was just trying to be respectful of everybody’s beliefs…
Or he’s a secret Muslim and he hates Jesus! Yeah. That’s catchier. Let’s go with that.
“Holy cow! Is that one screwed up or what?” columnist Sherman Frederick of the Las Vegas Review-Journal wrote in a Thanksgiving-morning blog post.
“Somebody ought to remind Obama (and his speechwriter) that when Americans sit down around a meal today and give thanks, they give thanks to God.”
Over on the website of Fox News Radio, radio host Todd Starnes also took issue.
“His remarks were void of any religious references, although Thanksgiving is a holiday traditionally steeped in giving thanks and praise to God,” Starnes wrote.
Huh. My family sat together for Thanksgiving and we didn’t give thanks to a god. And my parents are religious.
Since when is Thanksgiving a Christian holiday, anyway? I don’t remember the part in the Bible where Jesus slaughtered a turkey. Christians already pretend like they own December. Now, they want November, too?
Next thing you know, we’re gonna hear about how Jesus actually blessed the first Halloween so that churches could create Hell Houses.
Gawker points out that Obama briefly mentioned “the God-given bounty of America” in his 2010 address. In 2009, he mentioned “Almighty God,” though it was part of a quotation by George Washington.
Whatever the Religious Right thinks he was trying to do, Obama certainly wasn’t trying to pass himself off an an atheist. His 2011 address sounds pretty damn Christian-y to me. He uses plenty of religious language without explicitly praising one particular god. It’s the PC thing to do, and we’ve come to expect no better from him.
video description: anthony davids video for new tune, #locationlocationlocation, shot in kenya, edited in savannah, by the kids of AWOL, and studio8. album releases Dec 6.
Just a reminder to think twice before giving your change to the Christian, anti-gay Salvation Army this holiday season.
It was written (PDF) by an anonymous reader of this site:
…
To whom it may concern,
The Salvation Army, a Christian organization, states that intimate homosexual acts are forbidden:
Scripture forbids sexual intimacy between members of the same sex. The Salvation Army believes, therefore, that Christians whose sexual orientation is primarily or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life. There is no scriptural support for same-sex unions as equal to, or as an alternative to, heterosexual marriage.
The Salvation Army believes that God’s will for the expression of sexual intimacy is revealed in the Bible, and that living fully in accordance with biblical standards calls for chastity outside of heterosexual marriage…
Such Bible-based beliefs about same-sex relationships are archaic, amoral, demeaning, errant, insufferable, repulsive, and unsubstantiated. These base views oil the slippery slope of exclusion, hatred, bigotry, suffering, bullying, gay-bashing, and, eventually, murder. It is long past time to change.
Arguments in defense of Christianity’s views, written by a Christian in response to the previous paragraph, read as follows:
Inclusion. Christians promote their inclusiveness by mentioning that all non-procreative sex is a sin, not just the sex acts performed by lesbians, gays, bisexuals, or transgendered individuals.
Superiority. Christians think that homosexuals should be allowed civil unions, but not marriage, and that heterosexuals are not superior to homosexuals.
Acceptance. Christians preach love and acceptance; they emphasize that homosexuals are accepted for who they are, as long as they refrain from sin.
Let us examine these statements, starting with acceptance.
On Acceptance. The word acceptance is defined as follows:
i. A person’s agreement to experience a situation, to follow a process or condition (often a negative or uncomfortable situation) without attempting to change it, protest, or exit.
ii. The act of accepting; a receiving of something offered, with approbation, satisfaction, or acquiescence.
By calling upon same-sex Christians to “embrace celibacy,” the Salvation Army has attempted to change the behaviour of homosexuals. Informally, accepting something means to do so without attempting to change it. The Salvation Army Christians, therefore, do not preach acceptance; they preach conditional acceptance, which is much different.
On Superiority. The word equal is defined as follows:
ii. Like or alike in quantity, degree, value; of the same rank, ability, or merit.
The Salvation Army maintains that there is no scriptural support for same-sex unions as equal to heterosexual marriage. If no same-sex unions are “equal to” heterosexual marriage, then same-sex unions and heterosexual marriages are somehow unequal — they differ in value, ability, or merit. Had the Salvation Army simply stated that same-sex unions are not supported by scripture, there could be no argument. Using the word equal suggests relative values. The Salvation Army Christians imply that heterosexual marriage is more valuable than homosexual unions, which is a judgement from superiority.
Covenanting of one man and one woman, thus intrinsically heterosexual.
A voluntary union of faithfulness, mutal affection, respect, and support.
Socially indispensable environment for nurturing children.
A benefit to both partners and to society as a whole.
Respect and understanding of the sexes is passed on to succeeding generations.
Mutual comfort, where sexual intimacy may be expressed within a secure and trusting environment.
Excepting the first, the Salvation Army correctly anticipated that people will assert that these characteristics also apply to same-sex couples. In the same presentation, the Salvation Army claims it “does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in the delivery of its services.” Yet challenging the legitimacy of same-sex marriage because same-sex couples cannot procreate like heterosexuals do is, at its core, sexual discrimination. (The Salvation Army maintains there are important theological, philosophical, historical, social, legal, cultural, and anthropological reasons to keep marriage a heterosexual union. No supporting evidence is given, only conjecture.) While Christians promote their inclusiveness, the Salvation Army Christians advocate discrimination, which is exclusionary.
It is disdainfully ironic that the Salvation Army’s religious agenda regarding same-sex marriage and homosexual acts abets condemnation, superiority, and exclusivity.
Should I? I'm feeling kind of dirtied by dealing with the lunatic fringe of Christianity all the time. I know there are rational believers out there, but I've been instead dealing with the certifiable ones......let's be honest, Bob Sorensen, Joe Cienkowski, Sye Ten Bruggencate, Eric Hovind, David Smart, Dustin Segers, Joshua Whipps, Chris Bolt, and all the others coming at me in an endless flow of self-righteous delusion, are not the most sensible people to talk to.
I'm not sure what to do, on one hand it amuses me to read nonsense and respond to it, but on the other I don't know how healthy it is to be entirely known to some people for what I DON'T believe. After all, I'm also a musician, artist, writer....as well as being a husband and father, and I've been letting this whole thing take time away from a lot of the other things I love doing and being.
If I do take a break it'll probably be a week or so away from the blog, and a permanent end to interacting with moron's on Twitter (I'll still be there, but enjoying speaking to intelligent fellow free thinkers, rather than idiot creationists). Don't worry though, I'll still be doing the Fundamentally Flawed podcast.
The Bristlecone Pine is a species of pine found in the USA that lives just below the treeline in the mountains of south-western USA. It survives in some of the harshest conditions encountered by any plant species; shallow soil, whipping winds, low rainfall, low temperatures. Despite this, the Bristlecone Pine is known to have the single oldest individual, non-clonal organisms in the world. There are specimens of Brisltecone pines that are nearly 5,0o0 years old, with may reaching in excess of 3,000 years.
If a tree were aware of the world on a large scale, imagine what this tree has seen. These individual trees are older than most religion which is practiced today, older than most philosophy we know of, older than Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. These trees were saplings when the great pyramid at Cheops was constructed, when the first Trojan civilisation was formed, when Stonehenge was being constructed, and when papyrus was first being used as a medium to write on. These trees even pre-date the common use of bronze as a metal for weaponry. And yet for all they’ve seen, they sit stoically in their mountain home, never judging, and never telling.
These are mere babies when compared to the colonies of Quaking Aspen that inhabit much of the northern parts of North America, which has root systems that have lived continuously as a single entity or colony for up to 80,000 years. That is, the individual trees die off, but the roots send up new trees to replace them. These trees are actually nearly 10 times older than many Creationist accounts of the entire universe!
Compare this to the animal kingdom, where the oldest living creature is a mere 175 years old, a Galapagos Tortoise named Harriet, or the oldest living human, Jeanne Calment, who lived to see her 122nd birthday, and we really start to see how short lived we really are. Those lives are hardly a blip on the radar of the lives of these magnificent trees.
Plants are the true living fossils on this planet. Remember the Bristlecone Pine next time you think of where humans fit into our world.
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