Home Sapiens Assinus

How many man-hours are wasted every year by that worst sub-species of Homo Sapiens, the Common Two-legged Jackass?

Consider the gas station. Have you ever had to go in and leave your license or something before getting a fill-up, then go back in to pay afterwards? That extra trip to get them to turn on the pump is because the station had too many “customers” drive off without paying. Only an extra 30 seconds or a minute – but multiply that by every customer, every time, day after day.

Consider the grocery store. The idiot who brings 23 items to the 15-items-or-less line. She’s actually saving the time of the one or two customers in the regular line…but costing that same amount of time to the four or five customers behind her in the express lane. Net change, two or three people times the extra five minutes or so for her full transaction.

Consider a traffic jam on the interstate. The jerk who pulls out into the offramp or onramp to get around a dozen stopped cars, then forces his way in front of them. Not much of a cost, a few seconds – times the dozen cars he passed. Times the four or five people who seem to do this EVERY time I’m caught in traffic at the Fort Belvoir exit off of I-95. Plus all the idiots who do the same thing when I’m not there to see it. Plus all the other exits in busy areas where the same thing occurs.

Maybe those examples are too insignificant for you. Consider safety seals. Not just the extra few seconds it takes to peel off the extra plastic seals on any over-the-counter medicine bottle, but also the extra time and resources it took to PUT that plastic there. You can calculate it based on the time it took to wrap it on the bottle, to make the plastic, to crack the petroleum, to drill for the oil – or you can calculate it based on the extra cost to the consumer, in terms of his hourly wage. It’ll probably work out about the same, and it IS significant. All from one very successful jackass, the 1982 Tylenol Killer, and a few copycats.

Consider locks. If we didn’t have people who can’t be trusted to leave our possessions alone, we wouldn’t need them. Calculate the extra time we all spend locking and unlocking our houses, cars, offices, etc. Add in the extra time and resources to make the locks, alarm systems, security cameras. Add in the time and resources of police who have to investigate burglaries. The time of the courts and the lawyers. The extra prison space and resources we need to hold the crooks. Even the time of the thieves, themselves – if they weren’t committing crimes and/or sitting in prison, they could theoretically be doing something useful.

Heinlein said that time is the total capital of our lives – you can spend it, waste it, lose it, or have it taken from you, but you can never get it back. Ayn Rand suggests that every product or service is beneficial based on how much time it saves the consumer through increased efficiency. If we had some way to prevent all that sort of wasteful behavior by jackasses, big and small – how much more could we accomplish?

Ethical Atheism

I read another article on Space.com, about the new attack on evolution, Intelligent Design. In it, they quoted Sen. Santorum (R, PA) as saying "If we are the result of chance, if we're simply a mistake of nature, then that puts a different moral demand on us. In fact, it doesn't put a moral demand on us."

This, to me, is the result of sloppy thinking. People who believe in God seem to believe that without God, we would all be useless hedonistic criminals. We'd rob, rape, kill at will to satisfy whatever transient urge happened to pass through our maddened Godless brains. That turns out not to be the case. (I've been told that's a more polite way to express myself when I really want to say "Bulls**t!")

Atheism puts a GREATER moral burden on us, even from the most selfish of viewpoints. Without a promise of Heaven, we have only this life to make the best of it. Without a threat of Hell, we can only depend on our own intelligence to decide how best to do that. And a dog-eat-dog world where the strongest bully wins is not my idea of an Earthly Paradise.

Let's take a closer look. If everyone is out solely for themselves, and there is no societal framework, only the biggest or most ruthless will prosper - everyone else will serve the few rulers in basically a slave society. An intelligent Atheist can see that the odds of him being the biggest or most ruthless are slim, and it is far more likely to end up as one of the downtrodden masses. With that in mind, that's not the society I'd choose.

Even if you ARE the biggest and most ruthless...let's say you are the absolute ruler of your society. You've built more than 50 castles, you've got hot and cold running servants (not much in the way of technological comfort, but enough servants keeps that from being YOUR problem). Your picture is everywhere, thousands of people cheer your name everywhere you go. You don't have the power of life, but you do have the power of death - you can point to any individual that crosses your path, speak a few words...and that person will be dead within the hour. You have it all, and no one can challenge you! But...how do you sleep? Who can you turn your back on? If you remember, Saddam Hussein had all that. How's he doing now? Is that really a good life to strive for? And even if you avoid all the hazards...what are you leaving for your children? With no immortality, your children are REALLY the only way to live on past your death!

No, in my opinion, the best we can do to make Heaven on Earth is a rational society, with a strong legal framework and respect for individual rights. You know, kind of like the U.S.A. We're still not perfect, but we're better than 'most anywhere else. An ethical Atheist participates in his society to make it better for everyone, as the best way to benefit himself and his loved ones. That's a moral demand far beyond the "carrot and stick" method of most religions. And as for the next person who tells me I have no morals because I don't believe in his god...well, I won't do anything to him, because I support his right to believe differently - I'm even sworn to defend it with my life, if necessary. I just hope he recognizes that right for me.