I usually don't get this way about bugs in my home. But this is ridiculous. I'm seriously going to move to the Yukon.

“How can you possibly think that?” I asked him. “What, do you think there’s some chemical reaction that occurs when a sperm hits an egg that creates a soul out of nothing? Do sperms have souls? Or does your god actually reach his noodly appendage down each time an egg is fertilized and personally place a soul in it?” Needless to say, he was stymied by my logic.

But then I thought about it some more. Doesn’t life begin at conception? It’s a given that life begins at some point, and it’s pretty ridiculous to say life begins at birth, as a former psychology professor of mine once did. But there really isn’t any other definitive point at which it becomes clear that the foetus is alive or not alive. Life used to be said to have begun when “quickening” occurred, but more advanced observational techniques showed signs of life prior to that. I’m sure that science is capable even of breaking the so-called “moment” of conception into innumerable distinct stages, each as morally insignificant as conception and birth.

So, the existence of life in a foetus—or a zygote, or an embryo—is debatable, but only inasmuch as the definition of “life” is debatable. I think it is probably fair to say that life begins at conception, if such a time can be accurately pinpointed, if only because we have no way of measuring something as subjective as “life.” It’s better to err on the side of caution on this one, and concede the point, than to try to make baseless, arbitrary arguments about when life begins.

Just admitting that life seems to begin at conception, however, does not end the debate on abortion; it merely reframes it. Consider for a moment the concept of brain death. Brain death is, by definition, irreversible. There have been rare cases, of course, in which a brain dead person has been revived, but saying that brain death is “almost irreversible” or “really hard to reverse” just clouds the issue.

Basically brain death means that your brain has stopped working, but the rest of your organs work fine. Of course, none of the organs will do anything without a say-so from the brain, but modern medicine has allowed doctors to keep brain dead people alive by artificially stimulating their organs. Except that this is a logical impossibility, because brain dead people are legally considered dead in the Unites States, and thus can not be kept alive at all (as far as we know, death and life are mutually exclusive conditions). The main reason for classifying brain dead people as dead seems to be that it is then justified to remove life support, freeing up both resources and the deceased’s organs, which may then be transplanted into actual living people.

But brain death simply isn’t the same as death and I think people know that intuitively. Doctors understand that there is a distinction, but since it’s obviously immoral to discontinue life support in a living person, we have redefined death and made it okay to kill brain dead people.

We all know that brain dead people are really alive, and so are people in persistent vegetative states, and people in comas, and people who are asleep. They’re all alive, but by saying that one type can be killed without remorse we are not changing the definition of death, we are merely evaluating the quality of life and determining that it is not sufficient to provide this person with the same rights as everyone else.

Or do people lose their souls when their brain dies?

Where does the humans’ immortal soul factor into this issue? Obviously, this has nothing to do with a soul, and neither does abortion; both are matters of the value of specific lives, and the fact that some have more value than others. Of course, as I said, this does not close the debate. It is possible to argue about the value of a particular life; defense attorneys do it all the time. Sometimes murderers receive the death penalty; sometimes they don’t. But the question of whether those people are alive or whether they have an immortal soul is rarely, if ever, part of the debate.

Opinions will probably always diverge on the value of different lives, on different types of life, but as long as those opinions are grounded in reason and logic, rather than scripture and skewed biblical “morality,” the debate is one worth having.

What kind of democracy would we be if every person had the exact same rights to free speech on the Internet? In a capitalist democracy, you have to earn the right to have your voice heard. You have to pay for the privilege of decent communication. If high-speed Internet is provided to all websites equally, what incentive is there for those websites to provide worthwhile content?

The old Ma Bell telephone system operated on a single network, run by a single company, providing clear, reliable service for everyone with a telephone. Obviously, this system was flawed, which is why the U.S. Department of Justice broke up the monopoly in 1982. Back then the country understood that competition is the only way to better service.

Look at the facts: less than a year after the 1982 decision ordering AT&T to break up its monopoly, the United States’ National Science Foundation created the network that became the modern Internet. How? Competition. And it is because of that same competitive drive that former Bell subsidiary SBC was able to grow large enough to buy former Bell parent AT&T.

The DOJ recognized the illegality of Ma Bell’s monopoly. The current state of the Internet is no different, except that this time the consumers are the ones with the monopoly. Think about it in terms of money. No one who uses the Internet spent any money to build it, with the possible exception of Al Gore. So why should any of us freeloaders be able to decide how it runs?

The telecom companies paid for the wires and the infrastructure that brings the Internet into our houses. Inasmuch as they are entitled to a return on their investment, they also ought to be entitled to regulating their own invention. After all, no one expects the government to just blindly pour money into, say, the education system unless they are allowed to determine how it is spent. That’s just bad business.

The Internet is this century’s telephone and post office. And just as the telephone companies have the freedom to drop your calls or give you a bad connection, just as the postal service has the freedom to lose your packages or make you stand in line for your entire lunch break, so too should the Internet providers have the freedom to prevent you from watching the Numa Numa Dance on youtube or getting your daily dose of the Daily Kos if they would rather show you the latest Verizon ad in your AOL inbox.

To prevent this upgrade of the internet into a more democratic, free trade entity is to prevent progress itself. And to impede the progress of our democracy is to undermine the very principles on which the Internet is based. As the great conservative thinker Howard Zinn put it, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

It’s 2:30 am and I’m heading home from a lame party that was actually cool, where I met cool people who I couldn’t help thinking would be deemed “losers” or “hipsters” by the people I usually hang out with. That’s a different entry, though.

I’m on my way back to Park Slope from Williamsburg, which, because of the ridiculous G train and its habit of not running on the weekends, requires a quick trip into Manhattan on the L. Fortunately, the F is waiting for me when I get to 14th St. In my haste to get on in time, I don’t notice the confused looks of everyone else on the train.

Just as I’m sitting down I hear what has everyone else perplexed: Opera Man. If I hadn’t come across this guy before, I would have been as confused as everyone else, which is precisely the brilliance of this guy. Everyone on the car, save those with headphones on and those who, like me, are familiar with the shtick, takes at least one look around the car to try to find where the opera singing is coming from.

It drifts into your ears in waves, so you hear just a snippet of a vowel, just enough that it catches your attention, but not enough to convince you it wasn’t your imagination. Stick around long enough, though, and you realize there actually is someone singing opera, or at least opera-like, on the F train.

As I said, I’ve been on the train with this guy before. I had been waiting for the train a couple months ago and he was just one of the many people milling about on the platform. Totally normal-looking guy. I didn’t think twice about him. Then I got on the train and almost immediately there was the faint sound of opera. I didn’t quite believe it, and the whole ride I craned my neck to see where it could possibly have been coming from. Of course, I was looking for a woman, because that’s what he sounds like, but I couldn’t see anyone singing, or anyone staring at someone who was singing. I only discovered who it was because he kept up his act on the platform when he got off, walking past the car of people staring, flabbergasted.

Tonight I decide I was going to see Opera Man up close and in action, so when we get to West 4th, I take advantage of the influx of people to move my seat closer to what I perceive as the source of the singing. Only as I am again sitting down do I discover how fortuitous my choice of seats has been: Opera Man is right in front of me, and he is singing. Loudly. But his mouth is barely moving.

The people sitting directly around him all know exactly what is going on, but anyone more than a couple of seats away is unlikely to catch him actually singing. He sings a couple of lines of “You Are Everything” by The Stylistics in a creepy falsetto voice (listening to the song now, I realize that he actually sounded like the lead singer) through tight lips, then quickly scans the car, presumably to see if anyone noticed.

I do my best to ignore him, like a proper New Yorker, like everyone else is doing. After each mini-performance, he takes another look around, and the dutiful New Yorkers act like nothing unusual is going on. I direct my attention everywhere but at him, because I know once we make eye contact, he’ll zero in on me and won’t let up.

Two MTA workers get on and briefly acknowledge Opera Man before starting a conversation amongst themselves. I wonder how often they see crazies like this, how many drunken proselytizers and mumbling nutcases they encounter every single shift. This guy is probably to them what demanding, picky customers are to me: part of the work-a-day nuisance, as innocuous as the rats they also likely encounter in droves each day.

The train is full of people on their way home from extravagant Saturday nights in the city. One of them sits next to me and almost falls on top of Opera Man in the process of sitting down, resulting in a falsetto scream that finally makes him impossible to ignore. Mission accomplished, it seems. He shuts up for a while after that, and it becomes explicit that he’s doing this to get attention. But he seems so normal otherwise; it’s hard to believe he needs to make such a spectacle of himself to be noticed.

I take another look around the car, at the people all absorbed in their own little worlds, insulating themselves as best they can from all the crazies on the subway, and I realize that you have to make a spectacle of yourself to get noticed in this city. Some people do that by wearing obviously unfashionable haircuts and too-tight jeans, and some do it by covertly singing opera on the subway. This city is filled with 8 million people, none of whom wants anything to do with any of the other 7,999,999 people. It can get lonely. Sometimes you’ll do just about anything to make a connection.

I get off the train at my stop and make haste toward the exit; I’m still a little creeped out knowing that he’s getting off at this stop, too. I can still hear his singing behind me, and I just hope to myself that when he gets home, the singing can stop and he can just be normal again. I hope he can stop before he falls off the edge.

This will serve as a record of who I am, of my thought patterns, my fantasies, my inner life. This will be the backup of my brain. There is no censorship. There are no excuses for what is written here. It is unfiltered and needs serve no greater purpose than to remind me who I am, who I was, and how the one grew from the other. This is “a living document.” Irony is encouraged. No peeking.

When I was in elementary school, one of my teachers wrote on a report card: “Alex asks complicated questions and is not satisfied with simple answers.” It’s maybe a little odd that I still remember that, but I find it so effectively explains my view of the world. Moreover, this statement was a compliment. I was glad that I was so curious. My parents were glad. My teacher was glad. As we should all be glad when people are curious, because the people who are curious are almost always the ones who make the greatest discoveries about our world. Without curiosity, without skepticism, we would never learn anything new. Or are we meant to stop asking difficult questions after grade three?

The larger issue, of course, is that a statement such as the one this person made, calling for an end to questioning of the Bible, for a final agreement upon certain facts about God and Jesus Christ, blatantly it ignores its own logic. To what dialectical questions did you subject your faith in Jesus Christ as God, I should have asked this person, that you are now convinced of its Truth?

He asked me whether I was certain of gravity, and I said yes, but I conceded that if new evidence came to light that seemed to disprove gravity or its mechanisms, I would investigate that new discovery, and approach it critically to see how it fit into the worldview I have now, which includes universal gravitation. But that wasn't the point. Newton didn't just write a book that said, "Gravity pulls things toward the earth." Gilbert didn't just decide that the earth is probably a giant magnet. Einstein didn't just have it "revealed" to him that the earth's gravity bends the light of stars. If I wanted to, I could read and (eventually) understand all of the mathematics that led to these conclusions, because they are conclusions that—while by no means final—were, at least, arrived at empirically. We can all agree on their truth; at least, that is, until some other verifiable proof comes along that contradicts them.

Where is the intellectual rigor applied to the claims of the Bible? How did you come to know that this book is the correct one? More than likely, there is no reason for belief in a particular deity other than circumstance. If you had been born on a desert island and forced to live on your wits, at what point would it become important for you to know that Christ was born of a virgin? How would this inform your intellectual and spiritual development more than, say, knowing that Medusa had snakes for hair, or knowing that Poseidon always carried a pitchfork for some reason?

All I'm saying is, you can't claim to have stopped asking questions if you never asked any serious questions to begin with. There is no process to finding religious Truth other than submission to the assertions of the Bible. Real Truth requires the exact opposite: questioning any and all assertions until we're satisfied with their veracity or falsity. Only when the apparent facts have stood up to scrutiny can we even suggest that it might be time to stop asking questions. It's questionable, however, that that time will ever come.

(originally posted on my myspace blog)