Thursday, December 18, 2008

Reconciling Christmas Stories

So after looking over the list of ideas for posts that I have come up with over the past month, I have realized that most of my posts, at least initially, will be about my views on the world and how they have changed, or not, since I became an atheist. That being the case, I will be making several posts in the next few weeks explaining my views on atheism and what led me to stop believing in God. However, there is a certain holiday fast approaching, and I would be remiss if I didn't at least comment on my personal thoughts and feelings about Christmas.


I love Christmas. It has always been my favorite holiday. When I was younger, I used to spend months deciding on the perfect gifts to give everyone in my family, and now my husband and I spend the week before Christmas making homemade cookies and candy to give to everyone we know. I love getting out the Christmas decorations and putting the ornaments on the tree (even though the one I have right now is only a foot tall) and I love listening and singing along to all my favorite Christmas carols. Christmas is a chance to spend time with family, and an opportunity to show the people I love just how much they mean to me. But for the last couple of years, I've felt really uneasy about Christmas, and I think it has something to do with the fact that my favorite Christmas song is "Do You Hear What I Hear."

It is not that I have any problem with the religious overtones of Christmas, because it has evolved into a holiday that everyone can enjoy, no matter what their religious beliefs. I have not met anyone, religious, non-religious, or atheist who does not love to celebrate *something* during the holiday season. As the image above indicates, there are many parallels that can be drawn between the religious figure of Jesus, whose birth is celebrated at Christmas, and the secular figure of Santa. And therein lies the difficulty that I have been struggling with for the last several years, ever since I became an atheist. You see, I was raised to believe that one of those Christmas figures was just a nice myth that inspired people to be good and kind to one another, and that the other Christmas figure was a real person whose story was absolutely 100% true. And I bet you can guess which one was which.

It comes as no surprise to me that I am having a hard time demoting the story of Jesus from fact to myth. After all, it took me many years of suspecting that Santa Claus was actually my parents before I finally had to admit that he wasn't real, and it has taken me many years of study and personal reflection to come to the conclusion that God isn't real either. But every year at Christmas, when I hear my favorite Christmas song, I remember how much it meant to me to believe that there was a supernatural being who would "bring us goodness and light." Santa never brought anything but toys, which really paled in comparison to peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. It hasn't been easy to demote something that wonderful from reality to fantasy.

Of course, every year it gets a little easier to see the story of Jesus as just another myth, and Christmas as just a wonderful holiday that inspires people to give of themselves to one another, so I'm not about to dismiss the Jesus part of the holiday altogether. Trying to ignore the Christian element of Christmas would cut out so many of the things that I love about it, and so many of the icons that make Christmas what it is. But it is also a constant reminder that letting go of long-held beliefs is not an easy thing to do. So now, when I listen to my favorite Christmas song, I remember that there is nothing wrong with the ideas that the story of Jesus inspires - that we should be kind to one another, give to the less fortunate, and do our best to make the world a better place. But there is one word that I substitute in the last verse of the song, because I would rather *work* for peace.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and have a Joyous New Year!

Lyrics to "Do You Hear What I Hear"

Said the night wind to the little lamb
Do you see what I see
Way up in the sky little lamb
Do you see what I see
A star, a star
Dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite
With a tail as big as a kite

Said the little lamb to the shepherd boy
Do you hear what I hear
Ringing through the sky shepherd boy
Do you hear what I hear
A song, a song
High above the tree
With a voice as big as the sea
With a voice as big as the sea

Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king
Do you know what I know
In your palace wall mighty king
Do you know what I know
A child, a child
Shivers in the cold
Let us bring him silver and gold
Let us bring him silver and gold

Said the king to the people everywhere
Listen to what I say
Pray for peace people everywhere
Listen to what I say
The child, the child
Sleeping in the night
He will bring us goodness and light
He will bring us goodness and light

Friday, December 5, 2008

So About This Blogging Thing...

Where does the time go, anyway? It's been two months since I promised myself that I would blog more often, and suddenly I look up and it's been over a month since my last post! I could blame my job and the holidays and the annoying muse of fiction deciding to camp out in my brain, but the truth is that I have always been a horrible procrastinator. No one believes this about me, but it's true. Yet somehow, I always manage to accomplish what I want to accomplish, and I am trying really hard to do something with this blog.

I have some post ideas, which I will start working through next week, but a little motivation is always helpful. So, if you happen to be reading this blog, tell me! That's what comments are for, and knowing that even one person out there is reading what I write will be a great motivator. Also, if you have any ideas for topics or things that you would like my opinion on, I'd be glad to address them in future posts. I'm still trying to find out where I am going with this blog, so I am happy to write about anything and everything.

On that note, I would like to leave you with an amazing piece of reporting on the Mumbai terrorist attacks from, surprise surprise, The Daily Show. If more news organizations could cut through the bullshit and explain events with this much clarity, maybe I would watch them too. Enjoy!

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Cautiously Optimistic


With just a few days to go before the election, I am proud to say that I voted today. I filled out my absentee ballot and turned it in. I am also proud to say that I am, for the first time in a long time, feeling cautiously optimistic about the outcome of this particular election.

I turned 18 just a few weeks before the 2000 presidential election, and I was so excited to cast my ballot and take part in the political process. I followed the election closely, and made an informed decision, then sat back and watched the democratic process crumble before my eyes. For four years I seethed under the governance of a president that I did not vote for and that was not elected by the people, only to see him get elected by the people the second time around, thanks to a lackluster opposing candidate who did not stand up for himself and did not know how to inspire people. At the start of this election cycle, I found that I had grown cynical. My voice had not been heard before, and the party in which I placed my trust seemed weak and ineffective, unable to stand up to a bullying opponent who had been able to convince so many people to go against their own best interests for as long as I had been paying attention to politics.

But somehow, this election ended up being different. The Democrats finally managed to field a young, inspiring candidate who was not willing to back down in the face of mudslinging and personal attacks. I watched as the Democratic convention came to my home town, as the state that I lived in became a major swing state after voting Republican for so long, and as friends and family members finally were willing to discuss politics in a positive light. Obama's messages of hope and change do not only apply to what he promises to bring to the Presidency, they apply to his campaign, and to what he has done for the Democratic party and the way that people view and talk about the political process.

I am still only cautiously optimistic in regards to the outcome on Election Day, however, because I have experienced nothing but disappointment so far. I am sure that many other young people my age feel the same way. The pride I felt participating in my first presidential election was shattered when the decision was made not by the people but by the Supreme Court, and my faith in Americans to make good choices was dashed in my second presidential election in 2004. To make matters worse, the Colorado ballot is proposing an Amendment this year, the first in the nation, that would legally define a human being as a "person" from the moment of conception, which, due to the highly generalized wording of the amendment, would make abortions and most forms of birth control illegal in my home state. This concerns me greatly because our state very easily passed an amendment banning gay marriage several years ago, and with the lack of avertisement for the current amendment, I am very much afraid that it will pass without much resistance and really screw up people's lives. Additionally, as an atheist, I often feel disenfranchised by a political system that loves to use us as boogeymen and paint us as evil, immoral, and unAmerican. I don't know if any of that will change any time soon, but I am doing my best, in my own small way, to stand up and make my voice heard.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

A Sad, Sad Day for the Atheist Blogosphere

After not having posted on this blog for a very long time, it is with a heavy heart that I return to posting with news that saddens me greatly. One of my favorite blogs, Possummomma, has gone dark after some very serious harassment of her and her family following what I can only summarize as a malicious case of mistaken identity. Since I am not privy to specific details, being only a reader of her blog, I will not endeavor to explain much more, but details about the incident can be found at The Calladus Blog, and at Berlzebub's Inferno.

So why is this so important to me, you may ask? Well, to put it simply, I was not always an atheist. I was raised religious, and only came to atheism in my 20s while at college. Now, I have a wonderful husband who is also an atheist, and I know that some day we will want to have children and raise a family. But when I look back at my personal experiences of childhood, and when I look to the adult role-models in my life that I would reach out for advice about raising children when the time comes, I find myself surrounded by religion. It is a hard thing to escape. Being an atheist, how do I explain death to my children when I was raised to believe in Heaven? How do I raise them to be moral and kind and caring and generous without relying on the Ten Commandments or the stories of Jesus? The thought of trying to raise children without ever reverting back to the moral instruction I received by way of religion used to terrify me.

Possummomma's blog changed all that. Her frequent posts about raising a non-religious family, despite her religious upbringing and recent deconversion, were truly inspiring. Her stories and photos showed a family that was happy, stable, kind, and loving, children who were smart and independent and thought for themselves, and parents who, despite many personal hardships, were able to put the really important things first and get through both the good times and the bad without religion. I admired her for her courage in putting so much of her personal life online, despite the fact that she attracted the worst sort of trolls because of it. Hers was the first blog that I ever chose to comment on, and it was her blog that inspired me to start one of my own.

And now, her blog has gone silent. And it makes me angry. Angry that people can be so pessimistic and suspicious that they would take any act of kindness and charity by people towards someone they had only met online and assume that the person receiving the charity has to be duping those who would wish to support them. Angry that a person who is brave enough to show the world that you can raise an amazing family without the crutch of religion would draw the ire of so many people who think the worst about atheists without even getting to know one. And it makes me angry to see the very worst aspects of human nature lash out and cause so much pain to people who are only trying to embody the best aspects of human nature (I am speaking about both PMomma and her supporters here).

But mostly, the silencing of PMomma has just made me sad. I find the Internet to be such an amazing place because it makes it possible to connect with people that you would never get a chance to know otherwise. PMomma is an amazing person, and she has become one of my role-models. I have so much to thank her for, and I am sorry that I never really got a chance to tell her so myself. Though this blog post has been a chance for me to vent my feelings on an occurrence that has greatly affected me, I am also using it as a call for personal action. I started this blog because of Possummomma, because I was so inspired by her frank, unapolagetic sharing of a family life without religion. She is one of the few that I have found that are willing to put their life up for scrutiny and say "I'm really just like you. I may be part of a despised minority, but I am your next door neighbor, your friend, your family member." If more people, more atheists were willing to put their lives as ordinary people on display, then maybe the people who doubt the existence of happy, ordinary, moral atheists would not be able to attack so easily.

So, this is my call to action. I am going to stand up here and now and say this: I am an average, ordinary person. I am happy with my life, I have a wonderful marriage, and I have the same plans and concerns about the future as any other ordinary person. I am also an atheist. I am the girl next door. I am your sister, I am your daughter, I am your friend. And I am an atheist. Doubt me if you must, but that does not change the fact that I know who I am, and that, from now on, I am going to own it, be proud of it, and tell everyone that I know about it too.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

Humanist Symposium #16



The latest Humanist Symposium is up at Glittering Muse! I encourage you to check it out. I found the introductory essay especially moving and insightful. My favorite article in this Symposium is the article on abortion. Jeffrey Stingerstein of Disillusioned Words has an amazing and provocative piece on the grey areas surrounding the pro-choice, pro-life debate, putting into words my exact thoughts on the issue that the debate on abortion is not as simple as the politicians and the activists on both sides make it seem.

I also really enjoyed the two articles on free will, specifically because I have been thinking a lot about human intelligence and what it means for us as compared to other animals now that I no longer believe in the concept of a "soul" that makes human beings unique. I hope to post my own thoughts on this idea soon.

The next Symposium will be up at Mind on Fire on March 30th. Hope to see you there!

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Why We Need Each Other

So, today I added a list of my favorite atheist blogs to the sidebar of this blog. When I first started writing here, I was planning on keeping the atheist angle low-key, but an experience I had this weekend changed my mind. I have decided that, more than ever, it is important that I express my views on atheism and add my voice to the atheist blogosphere, because we atheists need all the publicity we can get.

The incident in question occurred when I brought up this article in the company of a group of friends on Sunday night. A brief explanation is in order: I am very close with this particular group of friends. We have known each other for many years and I have always found them to be a very open and understanding group of people. However, one of the few things that I do not know about any of them are their specific thoughts or feelings on religion. I know that some of them are nominally religious, most of them seem to be fairly indifferent to religion, and I am pretty sure that non of them are extraordinarily fundamentalist or anything, but I'm not really sure. Religion just never comes up in any of our discussions. I brought up the article that I linked to above because they all had lived in Boulder at one time or another, and I wanted their opinions on whether they thought it was the "smartest city in America." I also found it funny that the author of the article called Boulder the "most delusional" city, a statement that I tend to agree with, so I mentioned that part of the article as well, which then required me to explain to them why the author would have said that about Boulder.

To summarize, the article describes a situation in which an organization known as the Boulder Atheists set up a booth at a local community festival, and in order to get noticed by the milling crowds of people, they gave out free bottles of water. While they were noticed and thanked by some people for providing such a wonderful service on a hot day, there were some people who refused to take the water because the people who were giving it out were atheists. I thought it was pretty silly that people living in a city like Boulder, which is full of a healthy mix of rich conservatives and free-spirited new-age hippies and seems to be fairly accepting of everyone, would have such a negative reaction towards a group of atheists. But, unfortunately, I didn't have to wait long to experience my first direct run-in with the way that people who don't specifically view themselves as atheists think about those who do.

I didn't even get the chance to finish summarizing the article before my friends started making fun of atheists. "There are organizations for atheists? What do they do, get together and talk about what they don't believe in? *snicker*" "It takes just as much faith to say you don't believe in God as it does to say you do." "Atheists are all just agnostics with a chip on their shoulder." I was stunned and deeply hurt. I was expecting my friends to agree with me that it was dumb to not take free water from a group of people just because they were atheists, and here they were displaying the exact same prejudices as the people in the park. I kept my cool and tried to refute their arguments, telling them that most atheists don't believe in god because of a lack of evidence, they don't generally say "There is NO god." I explained to them that the word agnostic was a description of the strength of someone's atheism or theism, not a valid position on the existence or non-existence of a deity in and of itself. And I explained that groups of atheists generally exist in response to the rising voice of religious conservatism in this country, so they are there for support against religious encroachment on their rights, not to "talk about what they don't believe in." But the one thing that I couldn't bring myself to say (to my deep shame) was that I was an atheist and very happy to be one.

I have been reading blogs about atheism for a long time trying to prepare myself for a confrontation like this, but I expected it to come from members of my extended family, who are all very religious and whose opinion about me and my life choices matters to me not one bit. I never expected it to come from my friends, who were people that I thought understood me and whose opinion of me matters to me quite a lot. It hurt me even more because I'm pretty sure that they didn't know that their ridicule hurt me as badly as it did, but I couldn't bring myself to tell them. But there was a silver lining to this depressing incident. I found myself being supremely grateful to the atheist blogosphere, even more grateful than I was before this happened, because I realized that they serve a far greater purpose in my life than I could have imagined.

Up until this point, I have always felt a little silly reading so many atheist blogs. My husband is also an atheist, but he doesn't read any overtly atheist blogs because religion was never as big a part of his life as it used to be in mine. I had always thought that feeling the need to read so much about atheism when I wasn't surrounded by extreme religiosity was a sign of weakness in my decision to stop believing in god, and I kept hoping that a time would come when I was strong enough in my convictions and arguments for being an atheist that I wouldn't need the support of people I had never met before any more. Now, though, I hope that time never comes. I have seen that even the minds of the moderately to agnostically religious have been poisoned against the word "atheist." I see that the greatest challenge I will face as an atheist is not standing up in the face of people whose minds I don't expect to change, but standing up to people whose opinion of me actually matters to me. I have seen that even though I know all the arguments, the hardest part is saying "I think," instead of "Atheists think."

So, Ebonmuse, Possummomma, Hemant Mehta, Dale McGowan, Chanson, Greta Christina, Ed Brayton, PZ Myers, and all the other atheist bloggers out there whom I have yet to discover, I want to thank you. You guys are my support group, my daily reminder that friends can have many faces and that I am not alone in my need to surround myself with like-minded people, even if it's only in a virtual space. I am a quiet person, but some day I may leave a comment on your blog, or listen to you speak at a conference, and your influence on the world and mine will grow a little larger. It is true that the only thing that brings atheists together is something we all lack, but when religion has the ability to have such a great impact on our lives, and on the lives of people we care about, we owe it to everyone to organize and make ourselves heard, no matter how isolated we as individuals may feel.

Monday, February 18, 2008

The Humanist Symposium

I love reading blog carnivals. For those of you who don't know, a blog carnival is a serial post on a certain topic that showcases articles from multiple bloggers. There are blog carnivals on every topic you could possibly imagine, but the one that I have followed every three weeks since its inception is The Humanist Symposium. I post this now because the #15th Humanist Symposium is the first one to occur since I started this blog, but I will be posting the location of each one every three weeks when they are published. So, to reiterate, the 15th Humanist Symposium is now up at Cafe Philos.


So, why post this at all, aside from wanting to share the work of some amazing and talented writers? Well, the primary purpose of this blog is to air my thoughts on things that are important to my world view, and standing at the forefront of that world view at this moment is my position on religion and where it stands in the "quest for the meaning of life." Though this may not be well-known to anyone currently reading this blog, I decided several years ago that I was an atheist - which means that I weighed all my observations about the world with everything I had been taught about the idea of God as the creator of it all, and decided that there was no longer any reason for me to believe in something when I have no proof that it exists. That is the simple explanation, which I will expound upon at a later date.

However, after doing a lot of reading and self-evaluation of my thoughts and feelings with regards to being an atheist, I decided that it was not the label that I wanted to apply to myself when someone asked me what I believed in. To be an atheist is to not believe in something, and I am an atheist in the same way that I am a a-Santa-ist, an a-fairy-ist, and an a-Easter Bunny-ist. Not believing in something is not the best foundation for one's outlook on life, nor is it a good way to describe one's self when asked what one does believe in.

So I eventually came to the conclusion that I was a secular humanist - I believe that this life I have on Earth is all I've got, and that the same is true for everyone else, so I want to work every day to make the lives of everyone I meet (and those that I don't) a little better with my actions and my presence. As a humanist, I hold the care of my fellow humans above all else, but it is a secular humanism because I do not feel this way as a result of any religion or a belief in any deity. I wish I could explain it better, but I am still having difficulty expressing my thoughts and feelings about this significant change in my life.

That's where the Symposium comes in. It was started by my favorite atheist blogger, Ebonmuse, over at his blog, Daylight Atheism, and has been going strong since April of last year. The wonderful bloggers who contribute to the Symposium every three weeks express their thoughts and feelings about what it means to be an atheist and a secular humanist better than I ever could, so I will continue to follow and advertise this excellent Symposium now that I have a blog of my own.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Baby Pictures! (sort of)

OK, so, as a shameless excuse to finally let people know that I have a blog, I give you... more new rat photos! (I promise this blog is about more than rats, really)


Aren't they adorable!



Myst the eternally curious



I still can't believe how tiny Pepper is!



I'm ready for my close-up



Look at those big dumbo ears



The best of friends


OK, that's all for now. I'll try and think of something more interesting to post about tomorrow.

The Year of the Rat 2 - Meet the Family!

So this post is a little late in coming from my previous post, but since no one reads this blog yet anyway, I guess that's not such a big deal. Anyway... in the second post in my ongoing series about the amazing rat, I would like to introduce you to the rats that I have in my life. This post is fitting because we just added two new members to our family this past Saturday. So, without further ado, it's time to meet the family.

Maya

Maya is currently our oldest rat, and she is almost 2 and a half years old. She is a black Berkshire rat, which means that she has black coloring over her back, but has white coloring on her belly and paws, and the tip of her tail is white. She was the first rat we ever got from Camarattery, the rat breeder that we get all our rats from now, and she has been a pleasure and a joy. She is a very active rat: she runs on the wheel in her cage almost constantly when she is awake (and she is the only rat we've had so far that has run on the wheel), and she loves to try and run off into our apartment to explore whenever she is let out to play. She was the first rat to discover that she could easily jump or fall off most of the surfaces in our house (tables, chairs, desks, the couch) and not get hurt, and has used this cunning escape mechanism to get away from us at every opportunity. Fortunately, she is also very trusting and has an insatiable appatite for treats, so she is always easily lured back into her cage again.

Cas

Cas was the baby of our little family until last weekend. She is around one year old. We adopted her from our rat breeder at six months old, so she had already been given the name "Castaway," which we shorted to "Cas" (pronounced KAZ). She is an odd rat, more nearsighted than most (and all rats are so nearsighted as to be almost blind anyway), a bit aggressive and clumsy around her cage mates, and a complete homebody. She hates exploring, or even coming out of her cage. She is a Lilac Merle Variegated Down Under rat, which describes the color of her fur, that lovely light brown, and the fact that she has that color on her head and shoulders, with a white blaze on her forehead, spots of color running down her back, and spots of color on her belly. Rat coloration terms can get very technical.
Cas is a wonderfully calm rat when being handled by people. She will let you hold her without squirming, and she loves having her belly tickled. Though she has always been a little odd, we love her dearly, and her quirks are a further example of the depth and complexity of rat personality.

Myst

The first of our two new babies, Myst is an 8-week old American Blue rat. She has perfect color, and I have totally fallen for the "blue" color, that lovely silver-gray that gave me the inspiration for her name (even though I spelled it in honor of my favorite video game). Though we haven't known her for very long, and she has not yet been introduced to our older rats, I can tell that Myst is going to be as friendly and outgoing as Maya. She is as full of energy as any young rat could be, she loves to be the center of attention, and she is constantly peeking curiously out of her cage at every new sound. She is also very sweet, and already licks my hand whenever I open the cage door to say hello. I can't wait to watch her grow up.

Pepper

The true baby of the family is Pepper, our other new arrival. She is only six weeks old, and is still so tiny that she fits entirely in the palm of my hand. She is a black Berkshire Dumbo Rex rat, which means she is the same color and has markings similar to Maya, but she has "dumbo" ears that stick out straight from the sides of her head instead of pointing up, and she has curly fur and whiskers rather than smooth. She is also outgoing and rambunctious, but easily frightened and skittish as she is still so very young. She is also an attention-grabber, who will push her nose in wherever Myst is, and even tries to push or pull the larger rat out of the way when she feels she isn't getting her fair share. She and Myst are great companions already, which bodes well for their introduction to Maya and Cas in several weeks, after the mandatory quarantine period is up.

IN MEMORIUM

Maya, Cas, Myst, and Pepper are our current rat family, but they are not the first rats we have had, nor will they be the last. Though rats make wonderful pets, the sad fact is that they do not live very long, usually around 3 to 5 years, though a good diet and healthy living can extend that period. As such, we have had four other wonderful rat friends that are no longer around.

Rosco

Rosco was our very first rat. We rescued her, unintentionally, from a pet store that sold rats for food. This meant that she had never been socialized, had never been around people, and we had no way of knowing how old or healthy she was when we got her. Despite that fact, she lived with us for over three years, finally dying this past November of old age and cancer. Rosco was not very rambunctious or social, but she loved to explore and spend time running around on the couch or our desks while my husband and I watched TV or did homework or played video games. She was a great friend, and we were very sad to see her go.

Nick

Nick (short for Nicodemus - like most new rat owners, we named our first two for the rats of Nimh) was Rosco's first cage mate, we bought them both at that pet store and brought them home together. Nick and Rosco were my very first pets (besides fish), so when she got sick and died within a week, I was understandably devastated. All rats suffer from a respiratory ailment known as mycoplasma, and when they get sick or their immune systems weaken, this ailment becomes a full-blown disease that can kill them very quickly. We took Nick to the vet and got her antibiotics, but she was just too small and sick to last very long. Though we didn't know her for long, she will always hold a special place as one of our very first rats.

Pip

Pip was our second attempt at purchasing a pet store rat, this time from a major chain pet store that actually sold rats as pets, not as food. He was also our only male rat, as we thought that breeding him and Rosco and having a cage of male rats and one of female rats would be better than buying just one rat at a time. Unfortunately, he and Rosco never even got to meet, as he got sick just like Nick and lasted only two weeks, despite visits to the vet and antibiotics as well. After more experience with rats, we believe that Pip was too young to have been taken away from his mother, and that the stress of a new environment on such a tiny rat was what killed him. After he died, we decided to look into rat breeders, which led us to the wonderful breeder that we get all our rats from today.

Callie

Callie came to us from a friend who was being deployed by the Navy and couldn't take his pet rat along. We have no idea how old she was, but she was definitely the biggest rat we have ever had. She was also a sweetheart, calm and sedate, and she would grab your hand and lick it forever if you let her. We got her around the same time as Maya, so she, Maya, and Rosco were our first rat family until she died of unknown causes (probably an age-related stroke) a year and a half later. She was a great matron to our younger rats, and will always be remembered for her caring ways and adorable face.

And that's our family, past and present. In my next installment, though I will try to write about something other than rats before then, I will write about why rats are such good pets, as well as some of the things that you should know about them before choosing a rat as a pet. Until next time... a bit of trivia:

A group of rats is called a "mischief." And believe me, it is fitting.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Happy Darwin Day!


Today is Charles Darwin's birthday, so it's only fitting that we acknowledge the man who started us on the path to realizing exactly how we got to where we are today: evolution and natural selection. The images here were submitted as e-card designs to RichardDawkins.net in honor of the day. And, so as not to forget that he shares this auspicious birthday with another great man, I leave you with this card as well.


Celebrate knowledge, freedom, and the wonder of life today!

Thursday, February 7, 2008

The Year of the Rat

In recognition of the Chinese New Year, my next few posts are going to be all about rats. The rat is the first of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, and people born in the year of the rat are supposed to possess the qualities of creativity, honesty, generosity, ambition, a quick temper and wastefulness. I was not born in the year of the rat, but I find it fascinating that the Chinese, as well as other Eastern cultures, hold the rat in such high regard when it has been thoroughly reviled in most Western cultures. Because the truth of the matter is that there is much more to the rat than their depiction as filthy, thieving, disease-carrying pests.

I could almost write a book on all the things that I find fascinating about rats, but most of that information is written about elsewhere. Instead, I will simply share what I find to be a few of the most amazing facts about rats:

1. Rats Laugh

Despite what people see in movies and TV shows, rats do not run around everywhere squeaking. The only time that rats make noises audible to the human ear is when they are angry or in pain. Normal rat communication takes place in the ultrasonic range, and they are not extremely vocal creatures. However, using special equipment, scientists discovered that rats make short, high-pitched "chirping" noises during playful social interactions with other rats or with people. They also found that rats are ticklish in the same way that people are ticklish; they have sensitive areas on their skin that generate more laughter than others. The playfulness, and the laughter that accompanies it is seen more among younger rats, and the tendency to laugh and play declines as rats age, indicating that it is a social construction meant to stimulate joy and good feelings among groups of young rats, much in the same way that children laugh when playing with one another.



2. Rats are Highly Intelligent and Social Animals

Pet rats have been kept since the 19th century, when professional rat-catchers would keep some of the rats they caught for exhibition or fights. When they started breeding the rats, they began to realize that rats were highly intelligent and trainable, so they started selling them as pets. Through years of selective breeding, people eventually bred the domesticated "fancy rat" away from the common sewer rat, but the similarities remain. Rats are social animals who require the company of other rats for health and friendship. They engage in play, mutual grooming, and a complex social hierarchy that dictates their interactions with one another.

In the wild, rats are colony animals that work together to find food, protect their homes, and defend against predators, chief of which is man. However, human beings have to fight constantly to stay one step ahead of the rat. Rats communicate with one another through complex scent trails - a single drop of scent can tell another rat everything about the one that left it, from their age and health to whether the food they were eating was good or poisoned. Rats follow known paths to and from reliable food sources on a daily basis. A trap set where rats are know to travel may catch one, or maybe two, but not before they have warned every other rat that passes that way about the danger. Rat catchers in New York have been known to come across nests that were lined with the shredded remains of rat traps.

Poison is also ineffective because rats have poison testers - one rat eats any new, unmarked food source first and the other ones stand around and watch to see if anything happens to him before deciding whether it's safe to eat or not. This is why the best current rat poisons are blood thinners, because immediate or fast-acting poisons are useless. Poisons and traps are only deterrents, not devices of extermination, and the rats are figuring them out almost as fast as we are designing them.

As human society has evolved, so has rat society. As our cities have grown taller, they have burrowed deeper. They outbreed us like crazy and are way more likely than we are to survive anything we may do to the planet.We will never be rid of rats in the wild, but why would we want to be? We are learning to mitigate much of the damage that can be done by rats, just as they have learned to avoid the harms set against them by us. Any species that intelligent should be respected.

3. And Speaking of Intelligence...

The final item on my list for today is one of the more amazing things I have ever heard. Rats display metacognition - also known as the process of thinking about thinking. In other words, rats are aware of their own thoughts and are capable of using that awareness to guide future decisions. They are the first animal outside of primates that has been found to have this ability. It was discovered through a study that began by asking the rats to define whether a tone that was played was short or long. If they gave the correct answer, they got a large reward, but if they got the wrong answer, they received no reward. However, at the beginning of the test, the rats were given the option of receiving a small reward for opting out of the test. Over the course of the study, it was found that if the rats started having difficulty getting the right answer, they would choose to opt out of the test, thus demonstrating that they recognized when they didn't know the answer to a question. This is a fascinating discovery in the field of neuroscience, and one that I will definitely expound upon in further posts.

Well, since this post is long enough to be a college essay, I'll leave you with this picture.


Tomorrow, I'll introduce you to my rats and talk about why they make such great pets.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

First Post

I might as well admit right now that I have no idea what this blog will turn out to be about. I've tried many times to keep a blog without much success, so for now I'm just playing it by ear. I have a lot of things I want to say, and not many people to share them with, so consider this a conversational blog. If I think about it, I will probably write about it.

Possible topics at the moment include:
- Observations on life in this crazy world of ours
- Books, movies, games and other entertainments of note
- Stories about my pet rats
- Politics, religion, the weather, and other controversies
- Stories from other blogs of note

... and those are just the topics I could write about right now. So, stay tuned for a series of observations on the cosmos. Love it or hate it, I hope I give you something to think about every once in a while.