Evolution

So maybe this isn't so weird, but I just found out the other day that my two desk mates don't believe in evolution.

Now, one of them is Catholic (I bugged her with so many questions when I was thinking about converting - she claims she gets 'convert points' for helping bring me in!) and the other is not, but she is a Christian.

And I just...assumed that everyone who wasn't some sort of 'weird' fundamentalist believed in evolution, but I was wrong and I am shocked.

Of course, the Church permits belief in evolution and belief in not-evolution, so it's fine, but I just...

It was a surprise.

And I've realized that I have assumed that evolution is true because I was told that evolution was true and that there was science that proved it but I don't know what that science is. Like, I'm not saying that I don't believe in evolution, just that I know that I don't even know enough about how it has been proven to make an attempt at arguing for it.

Knitting Myself a Mid-Life Crisis

Does it count as a mid-life crisis if you're 36? 

I mean, I don't know. 

LOL

So, I got a tattoo today. It's my first tattoo, ever, and I like it a lot. It's a shark with some blue watercolor like background, on my shoulder. We'll see how it goes, but the actual tattoo didn't hurt at all, and the place that I got it done is nice and clean and has an excellent reputation. But I'm already thinking about getting another one. An octopus, wrapping around my arm. In case you were wondering. 

I took the day off of work because the appointment for the tattoo was in the middle of the day, and I have vacation days, so why not? Anyway, I got my hair trimmed - that's one problem with having short hair, is that if you want to keep it up, you have to get it trimmed more often. Long hair is more forgiving of growth. But the woman who cut my hair suggested that I get 'plum violet' highlights - I was at a little walk in place, so they don't do it there, she wasn't trying to like, sell me on spending more money, but I'm thinking about it. 

Like I said. Mid-life crisis. 

Also, I'm starting on knitting a new baby blanket. 

It's....for a surprise. :D

Not ME, so get that right out of your head, but a surprise none the less. So if we're FB friends, mums the word. Because mum doesn't know yet. The announcement is planned for Halloween, because my sister is absolutely related to me. :D

We don't know what sex Surprise will be, so I picked out some nice yellow yarn to make this one. After all, it's tradition at this point. 

The knitting, not the color. But I learned from the last time. Baby weight yarn, but not the super thin kind. Wheee!!!

would you time travel to meet Jesus?

So, I don't remember how, but my dad and I were talking about time travel the other day. And again, I don't remember how we got on this, but we were talking about it and he says that he wouldn't ever want to go back in time to meet Jesus.

And I'm not going to say that's not a good idea, because time travel seems problematic for so many, many reasons, but I found *his* vehemence on this point sort of puzzling.

Like, I won't be time traveling to meet anyone, ever. I wouldn't ever specifically point out Jesus as someone I wouldn't want to go see. So I asked why, and his vaguely worded answer was that he was worried he'd be disappointed.

I mean, fair, we're used to certain standards of living that were not possible in the ancient world.

Like A/C and cars and modern hygiene and medicines. To name some that I am personally concerned about.

But disappointed?

I mean...

Okay.

You basically have two choices.

One, you go back and Jesus is a revolutionary, but not how you imagine Him in your head. There's no way to 'prove' divinity even if you go meet Him. After all, we can rationalize anything and faith is believing in things even when you can't see them.

Two, you go back and Jesus is how you imagine Him. But you're still going on faith that He is God, since, see above.

So why single out Jesus, unless you're concerned that seeing Him as a physical, human person will somehow hurt your faith.

ghosts be gone

I've long been into the paranormal - ghosts and cryptids and the like, but I just had this realization.

So, especially in big famous hauntings, there are stories that everyone tells and they get evidence that supports these stories.

For example, the Myrtles Plantation has a legend about a slave named Chloe and how she tried to win her way back into the favor of her master by 'lightly' poisoning his wife and children so she could nurse them back to health. But of course that goes poorly and they die and she is killed by the other slaves to try and avoid the master's wrath.

And there are all sorts of pictures of her ghost and 'evidence' of her haunting.

Of course the problem is that none of it is true.

You can find historical evidence of when the wife and children of this particular man's wife and/or children died and there's just no proof that Chloe existed let alone that her tragic story is true.

So then what's giving all these people their evidence of her?

There are some people who think it's like a tulpa, which is a concept I cannot totally explain, but basically they mean that the peoples' belief in Chloe's story has created Chloe.

Which seems....questionable. Because where did the story come from? A psychic? Okay, I don't believe in psychics anyway, but I have a hard time with the whole idea that collective thought creates a real thing.

But then I thought, today, I was listening to a ghost podcast, and I thought about what would be running around tricking people like that to believe in these stories and to keep digging deeper and deeper and just....

Demons.

Hear me out.

We are not supposed to talk to ghosts.

We're not supposed to raise the dead.

And people who ghost hunt tend to have iffy, wobbly ideas about religion and what happens after death. Which they then help to spread.

Who gains?

Demons.

Not the most complex theory, but um.

I'm not messing with that.

Not today, satan.

*flaps hands wildly*

I have to get rid of all my ghost stuff now.

New Blog

I miss blogging, ya'll, but I don't think that this blog is really who I am anymore.

I've settled into my faith, I've maybe grown up just a little.

And really what I want to talk about is books - fiction, non fiction, good, bad and ugly.

So I'm starting a new blog where I ramble about books at a predetermined pace.

It's like a book club where I do what I want.

lol

https://mostlymurders.blogspot.com

I've been listening to way too many fan podcasts, where they go through a tv show episode by episode and analyze and enjoy and nerd out and I want to do that but not a podcast because I don't have podcasting equipment I just want to ramble about nerd stuff and I will I think I just have to pick a show but I want to do ALL THE THINGS

Emotion or Vulcan Logic?

Can you ever make a decision completely devoid of emotion? An important one, I mean, one where you've been asked to set aside your instincts and emotions and base it solely on facts and evidence?

I've mentioned before that I listen to a lot of podcasts, and a great number of them are true crime, unsolved mysteries and the like. There's one called Breakdown, from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It's pretty well done, all in all, not sensationalist even though the second season has been covering what you might consider a pretty sensational crime.

Or accident.

One of those.

This season has been following the trial of Justin Ross Harris who was accused (and convicted) of deliberately leaving his nearly two year old son Cooper locked in his car all day in 2014. Cooper, tragically, died and his father was very obviously the responsible party.

That's not really in question.

Harris had his son and instead of taking Cooper to his daycare, he drove to his work and left his son to die in the car. Harris and his attorneys claim that it was an accident, that because he did things out of order that day, because he was distracted, he had a lapse of memory and forgot that he hadn't yet taken Cooper to the daycare.

That he forgot his son.

He was responsible for Cooper's death, and no two ways about it.

And this is a thing that happens. The number of infant car deaths is terrifying, to be honest, and I don't have kids! I occasionally have my god kids, and it's unusual enough for me to be driving them around that I am constantly aware of them and checking to make sure they're okay in their carseats. But I don't have them every day, I don't have those car seats in my back seat every day. I can kind of see how, especially with the rear facing seats, you get used to seeing them there, the seats themselves can become a part of your scenery.

I can see how you could accidentally forget a child in one of those seats, and I can't imagine how painful that would be for a parent, and I'm glad that there are people working to raise awareness and to make items that will help keep these sorts of tragedies from happening.

People forget things on a near constant basis! We forget things that are incredibly important because we're distracted or it's something so routine that the memory of us having done it is almost burned into our brains, making it occasionally hard to remember whether or not we really did the thing that day, or we're just remembering having done it a million times before.

Usually, this isn't a matter of life and death. But our brains can be slippery bastards even when the consequences are unthinkable.

However, this turned into a case that wasn't as horrifically simple as an accident. Harris was tried and convicted for the deliberate death of his son. According to the prosecution, Harris did not have a memory lapse but rather intentionally locked Cooper in the car to die because he wanted to be free to pursue a life that he felt his son was holding him back from.

The prosecution presented a lot of evidence toward the fact that Harris was, in fact, a pretty awful husband and generally less than stellar person. He'd been cheating on his wife for years, hooking up with women online - some of whom turned out to be under age at the time of the interactions. He was, in fact, sexting with an under age girl the day that he left Cooper in the car.

They brought out comments and threads that Harris had made or checked into about the 'child free' lifestyle and how he 'loved his son and all but we both need escapes'. Now, plenty of people want to live the 'child free' life and they are in no way thinking about or advocating murdering children. They just don't want to have them, and so they don't.

Of course the defense pointed out the thin connection between needing a break from your child and murdering that child, but all of these things about Harris' lifestyle and actions were presented in court. The podcast played pieces of testimony, people talking about how wrong Harris' affect seemed when he discovered Cooper's body in the back seat. They talked about how, essentially, deviant he is to be cheating on his wife and having these multiple affairs while pretending to be this great family man.

There was also evidence, of course, and not just the comments that he made online. There was the fact that Harris is seen on the parking lot security seeming to watch someone as he passes them - after he had just parked the car that morning with Cooper strapped in - to see if they were going close to his car. There's the video of him going to the car at lunch and throwing a pack of lightbulbs into the car - with the argument that he had to have been able to see Cooper at that point, that even if it was an accident, he 'discovered' the mistake hours before he admitted to it and there is one witness who claims that Cooper could have still been alive at that point.

But, at least from what was relayed through the podcast, a lot of the evidence was character driven.

He was a bad person, and bad people do bad things.

He cheated on his wife and he wanted to be free of the responsibilities of being a father. So he murdered his son.

They played parts of one of his interviews with the police on the podcast and the first time he sees his wife after Cooper's death.

I admit, up until the audio of the police interview, I was torn as to whether or not I personally thought he was guilty. There are, at least for me, degrees of badness? Of evil? Just because you're willing to cheat on your wife doesn't necessarily mean that you're willing to murder, let alone murder your own helpless child.

However, the audio of his interview with the police convinced me that he did it. His reaction to being told that they're going to charge him with...I believe they said it was neglect at that point, but I could be wrong about the specific word they used there. Basically, they said that because Cooper had been in his care and due to his negligence Cooper had died, they had to charge him with this. And I'm listening, thinking, okay, okay, that's reasonable. Harris was the adult, he was responsible for Cooper's safety and well being and it might have been an accident but he failed his responsibilities and Cooper died. He didn't just get hurt, he *died*.

And then Harris proceeds to calmly *argue* with them that he shouldn't be charged with anything, that it wasn't intentional. Let me say, there is something, in listening to him speak, so *off* about his tone and his concern and his reaction that makes me think he did it. It was that fast, I decided that he was guilty and I've been listening to the rest of the podcast with that mindset.

When I heard that he was convicted I thought, 'Good. He murdered that poor baby.'

Now, after this whole thing has had time to marinate in the back of my mind, though, I'm wondering.

I'm wondering if Justin Ross Harris wasn't a philanderer, a cheat, and a generally morally reprehensible person, if I would have taken his reaction as proof positive that he did it. Certainly he didn't react the way that I imagine I would in such a situation, but I've (thankfully) never been in that situation and you never really know what you'll do when faced with something like that. But is that enough to say that he is guilty of a deliberate crime? Or could it still have been a grossly horrific accident?

And I'm just getting the bits and pieces shared over the podcast. The jurors are seeing much, much worse than what I'm hearing.

Which brings me to my question.

Can you ever really totally objectively look at something like this?

Could you, as a juror, ignore your emotional reaction to seeing a dead child? To knowing that his father is the one who caused his death? To knowing that the man has been cheating on his wife, has been doing things that are illegal and/or morally corrupt?

Could you look dispassionately at what the facts are and decide innocence or guilt based only on that and not on the emotions that you feel?