a reoccurring theme

i read on the dish by andrew sullivan, that "...a study published in the April 2006 American Sociological Review found that 48 percent of Americans would disapprove if their children married an atheist, the highest disapproval rating of any named group." this disturbed me! i guess i forgot i could be discriminated against. i am a little saddened by this statistic because i put in real effort to be a good person, make good decisions and do right to human-kind. i posted this quote on my fb page and got some interesting responses. what i got from a theist (and quite liberal) friend is that some theists believe there must be a check in place (like an vengeful spiteful god) to give them the consequence necessary to do right.

i guess i am wired, from the start, slightly differently than a theist. i have always recognized how splendid and amazing it is to exist as a present self without a myth! it is neat enough that my egg dropped that month and my mom and biological father hooked up. i don't need a story that doesn't make any sense to think existing is awesome. the recent discovery of the higgs-boson (~125GeV, holy shit CERN! CONGRATS!) is mind blowing and super duper neato, i don't need "And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light." i need to understand how a photon acts as both a particle and a wave length!

i wrote previously about this outstanding, albeit necessarily vague, short paper on the probability of a personal existence. there are a couple factors that i think could enhance this paper. firstly, using anthropology, there can be more precise statistics regarding surviving youth to reproduce! we understand a great deal about each era, the climate, the diseases, the missions and invasions... how neat is it that in the 16th and 17th centuries, the rate of survival in the first year was 12%? that means, if you're reading this your ancestors survived when 88% of their peers and siblings did not, only in the first year. then, they survived past childhood, the black plague, smallpox, and the spanish flu. they survived and found a mate to make another generation of survivors to beat the odds and so on and so on until your mother and father hooked up and here you are today. i would like to see the data that Mr. Binazir published revisited and his variables reweighed to reflect more (or less) value to each century,time period- diseases rampant, rainfall or drought... with less ceteris paribus. i hypothesize that the outcome would be the probability of any single existence would be even more slight.

that slight probability is fascinating and real and worth taking every wondrous moment i have and basking in it. does that make me unmarriable? i guess so. the exclusion and disrimination is necessary from the theists and i will have to accept that. also, the rejection of my kind reinforces my understanding that it is nearly impossible to be truly open minded when the basis of your belief's parameters are unmoving and inflexible.