The Evolution of Me(me)

I saw it coming from a mile away. Vjack was tagged with the evolution meme, and he tagged, inter alia, The Exterminator. Since I have a good interaction with him, I knew I’d get stung by that hornet, and figured I’d be next. I even considered starting my post yesterday, so I’d be ready, but life intruded.

Unlike the last tag, which I considered to be akin to those pyramid email’s I get (send this to 10 people in your contact list, or God will strike you dead), this one looks like something a bit better. It seems that we are required to pick, from our post history, five posts that are reflective of the evolution of our blog, comment on them, then tag five other blogs to keep it going. Of course, unlike biological evolution, such a meme does share a characteristic with those pyramid emails. It relies on a conscious choice to continue the meme. There is a finite number of potential blogs, and eventually we will either run out of blogs or our dedication to perpetuating this meme, or we will start getting double tags.

This post does have the added advantage, for me, of getting my monthly post count into double digits. So, here we go.

1. I’m skipping my first post because I really don’t consider that as significant in any way. In fact, it was just a place marker to get the blog rolling. I’ve only been here since April, and actively reading blogs since the previous summer, so I don’t have much evolution to speak of, but if I was to pick the first substantive post, the post where I gave vent to those inner thoughts that drove me to explore blogging in the first place, I’d say Santa Claus and the Evidence was where I lost my blogging virginity, where I’d expounded on how, in comparison, there was more evidence for Santa Claus than there was for any god. I actually got a few comments to that one, and much like the reinforcement gamblers experience when they get a small hit, I plunged on in the hopes of more.

2. Sax and Violins was my next significant post, and one that had been percolating in my tiny brain ever since I understood the religious hypocrisy behind the self censorship codes in the movie industry. I was probably a teenager, pissed off at being able to see a movie with lots of violence and gore, but not allowed a peek at a women’s areola without having to show identification proving I was an adult. It was clear that such hypocrisy was rooted in religion, and I fumed over that for years. This post was my emotional release. It also has proven to be my most popular post, accounting for 28% of all visits to my site alone, proving that, once again, sex sells. Though it doesn’t incite comments.

3. As most of you know, if you read my About page, I’m a lawyer, so evidence is something I have a passing familiarity with. The Rules of Evidence have to be instinctive when you are in court (and after almost 30 years, I’m still working on that) so when I see Christians arguing for their god based on their incredibly deficient understanding of exactly what evidence is (they often conflate it with the concept of proof), I decided to write about it, from a lawyers perspective, with an illustration of exactly how hard it would be to prove the existence of God in a Court of Law, given all the restrictions the Rules place on the admissibility of evidence. Most people don’t realize how hard it is to prove anything in a court of law, much less the existence of something that there’s no evidence for. Many cases never see the inside of a court room, because the lawyers know it would be a waste of time. (And please don’t cite OJ to me. That case was, like many things in life, the exception to a rule.) Anyway, Burden of Proof and Hearsay was the result.

4. I see that those first three posts were in my first month of blogging. Sometimes I feel like the impetus for creating this blog is waning, as I get these thoughts out of my system and into the atheosphere. I have less and less to say, that has not already been better said elsewhere. The Battle of the Bulge, however, was one of those extended metaphors that I’ve enjoyed contemplating, since I was a student of History (my undergrad degree is in that subject), because I really think that religion is on the decline, media headlines to the contrary. It’s the human mind that has advanced civilization as far as we are now, and it is the human mind, educated in logic and critical thinking, coupled with the scientific method, that rejects religion. Since evolution is the underlying theme here, it’s evolution that will weed out religion from society. Maybe a long time from now, maybe in this century, but eventually. It’s inevitable. I’m optimistic. We can’t keep on producing humans with such serious mental shortcomings and continue to survive as a species, although if we don’t get a handle on them now, we might not make it to the next evolutionary step.

5. I’ll jump ahead a little to this month. There are a few other posts I’m proud of, but this one, God of the Gaps, fits into the evolutionary theme of this post. I had been debating a Christian minister on his blog, (and perhaps “debating” doesn’t accurately describe the give and take of comments on a blog) where he voiced incredulity at what he perceived as a large gap between the development of chimpanzees and humans. It struck me that he misperceived the gap, that in fact, such a gap didn’t exist, and furthermore, there are no gaps in evolution. If there were, evolution wouldn’t be. There would not be the clear, inexorable advance of life. Evolution is seamless. More important, I was able to advance my thoughts in a two way dialog with an intellectual opponent, which is an evolutionary advance from how this blog started, as simply a one dimensional repository of my thoughts.

OK. Those are the five posts I feel reflect the evolution of my blog. I worry that I will lose interest in doing this, but so far it’s been fun, fun, fun (as daddy has refrained from taking the T-bird away), so I hope to keep it up.

Now, for the best part of this post. I tag:

You Made Me Say It

An Exercise in Futility

evanescent

Greta Christina’s Blog

and

A Critical Mass