Absolutely Outrageous!

People have a tendency to organize themselves into groups. It's natural human sociology. It's most often seen today in national identities, consumer choices, and arguably most importantly, religion. But things can get out of hand. And now I am very upset at the recent event that have transpired at Springs Charter School.

You see, Springs Charter School has been called out many times by many different people because of their pulling of certain books from their shelves. They took down Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place because it quoted passages from the bible. This is the result of a larger request to pull down all books that are "Christian books, books by Christian authors, and books from Christian publishers."

This is outrageous.

But what most people don't realize is that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

As a student of Springs Charter School (oh yes, I am a student there), the first I heard about this was not from the bookstore, but from my teacher. Who was fired. For his religious beliefs. For being christian.

Let me tell you the whole thing.

My teacher, Mr. Jonston, was my science teacher, and a good one at that. He was kind, patient and tolerant. He helped everyone whenever they asked for it, and is (now was) one of the best teachers anyone could ask for. But he was a christian science teacher. He told us that he was christian. He told us that he believed that evolution had some holes in it. And it does. And knowing that there are holes in scientific theory helps us practice good science in questioning everything. And yet he was fired for it.

Myself and virtually all of his students are absolutely shocked over this. We didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to him before they ripped him from his employment. We're going to create a petition and present it to the school. Because I will not sit here and watch an innocent man loose his job over his religious beliefs!

I hope to get the word spread as far as I can about this. Something needs to be done. I hope to get the school to offer Mr. Jonston back his teaching position. And hopefully, with enough people, we'll be able to do just that.

What makes a friend?

First off, in order to define what makes a good friend, we must first look at what defines friendship. Friendship is, of course, subjective, and therefore hard to explain. What defines a friend for one person may not be true for another. It doesn't help that frienship is an abstract, human concept, built to service a broad range of human social relationships. What makes a friend even differs from culture to culture, from past to present. For example, Aristotle once wrote, " To the query; ''What is a friend?'' his reply was ''A single soul dwelling in two bodies." " Nowadays, people "friend" other people on social media, like their bosses or teaches. Not because they feel as if they are "a single soul dwelling in two bodies", but because they feel obligated. But that is a discussion for another time.

Back to the question, what makes a good friend? Many poeple try to rate freinds based on certain attributes, like loyalty, or similarity to oneself. But, as I said, friendship is subjective, and so the answer to the question must be similarly flexible. And since friendship is mutual, it needs to go both ways. What is the common denominator? What is a friend?

It's someone you trust. Friendship is built upon trust. You're not friends with someone you don't trust. And it is no coincidence that people who trust more easily have a better time at making friends. Friends are the people you trust, and who trust you back. Love and affection cannot thrive without the nuturing care of trust. And so, friendship, to me, means trust.

What do we actually fear?

It's a difficult quesition to answer at best. Fear is, after all, subjective, and therefore liable to change from person to person. Everyone seems to have different answeres. Is it suspense? Or how about danger to self? What does everyone's answers have in common? Ah, but in order to find out what we truly fear, first we must examine what it is we do not fear.

For example, imagine a rabbit. Nothing to fear there, right? Just a cuddly ball of fur. Eats vegetables, hops around, nibbles on grass. It's mundane, understood. But then, say you had this rabbit, but with blood around it's mouth. Suddenly, not so care free, are we? What happened to the rabbit? Why is it suddenly frightening? Because of the blood? No, no... think deeper. Before, we could understand it. It was predictable. Now, however, we do not fully understand it. Rabbits don't eat meat, so why is there blood on it's muzzle? How did it get there? Is there something about the rabbit that I should know about? Should I be scared?

And there you have it. You fear something which you do not fully understand, something you do not know how to react to. I gave the rabbit a cloak, a veil behind which to hide, the instant I put blood on it's muzzle. You sensed the deception, but you knew not what I'd hidden behind the drapes. You reacted, you feared, the unkown. And that's what makes us so afraid. We truly fear that which we cannot understand. That's what all our answers have in common, and that's what we will always be afraid of.

A Probablility

People have always been fascinated with the future. Who do I marry? When and how do I die? It's in our nature to speculate and hope towards a certain outcome. "I hope that I win the lottery", or, "I hope it does't rain today." And these are all legitimate sources of hope and speculation. You might win the lottery. I might not rain today. But is there a way to know for sure?

Alber Einstein famously once said; "God does not play dice with the universe." He did not like to
believe that things like weather are random. He believed that you could predict the trajectory of a particle just as you could with a space ship. And many shared his views at the time. But he was, eventually, proven wrong.

If you go down small enough, to a quantum level, you begin to encounter odd things. Quantum tunneling and the likes. Things that are an example of Non-Zero Probability. In other words, things having a Non-Zero Probability of happening become more probable, and therefore easier to observe. This Non-Zero Probability shows the fundamental, probabilistic nature of the universe and reality itself. So there is a Non-Zero Probability of anything happening. The moon falling out of the sky. Things that seem impossible, but by the laws of quantum mechanics, aren't.

This fascinates me to no end. But let's assume, just for a second, that there was no Non-Zero Probability. That Quantum mechanics wasn't probabilistic. That means that you could accurately and absolutely predict a particle's interaction with all other particles. So, if we take a leaf out of Laplace's book, he said:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
       —Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

In other words, if you were to be able to know the exact placement of every particle in the universe and it's juxtaposition to every other particle, then you could predict how all those particles would interact, and therefore know where all the other particles would be the next second. You could also deduct where the particles had been a second ago. This means that you could, in essence, predict the future. You would be able to know about all the interactions of all the particles because you know everything from an instant in the history of the universe. And with this power of predicting the future you would be able to predict people's future's as well, because, after all, we are part of the universe. And if we follow this path to the logical conclusion, then that means that you are predictable, down to an atomic scale.

And that means that free will is merely an illusion. When Einstein rejected randomness, he rejected the idea of a free human being. Luckily for you and me, he was wrong in this one thing. So we can all be grateful for the universe and it's essential randomness. It makes us fully, truly, human.