Animal Shelter Performance Tables

I have had very good reasons in my life to abandon religious faith, among them being treated very poorly by fellow students at a Lutheran college who thought that Christianity was all about rules to follow. I apparently didn’t measure up. Were they backward people? Yeah! Luther wrote about salvation by grace, through faith, apart from works in the 1500’s, but apparently they hadn’t gotten that message yet.

But even at the hour I most was rejecting my faith I couldn’t abandon the idea of a creator. The human body is full of structures and processes that are irreducibly complex, making it virtually impossible that time and chance alone could produce a human body. And even if all the parts were there, what makes it alive?

I do believe in natural selection. But you can’t use natural selection as a case for macro evolution, because in order to be selected the trait has to be there. In every case of natural selection you end up with less information not more. I read in a textbook that when we talk about antibiotic resistant bacteria, people should not think that the bacteria changes somehow to adapt. When the antibiotic kills off all the bacteria it can kill off, what’s left are ones it cannot kill, which then multiply. The “adaptation” was there all along. The antibiotics just cause those traits to be selected.

Natural selection can explain observable processes, but cannot explain what got those processes started. I think people make the leap of faith from natural selection to macro evolution because when irreducible complexity suggests a creator, that’s pretty terrifying. Without the love of Christ, God can be nothing but a terror.

But it’s arrogant for finite humans to rule out the possibility of the eternal. To have done so is not progress, but opens the door to atrocities. If life is an accident it makes no difference if a person or animal lives or dies. It comes down to personal preference, and the human race has produced people who preferred that whole groups of humans not live. It has usually been people of faith who most ardently resisted those tyrants.

Animal control in my area does exactly what you suggest and that data is available online. I didn’t know about any of it when I took Monty there. Thank goodness I went back for him. They would have killed him. They killed 636 cats that same month. But the person at the desk when I turned him in never gave me the real odds of him being killed. Those statistics should be shown to every person turning in a stray. It wouldn’t help in every case, but it would certainly save some animals. I think they make money off the dead cats, so it’s in their interest not to save too many of them. I can’t prove that, but I’m not alone in saying it. There is a petition going around online to get rid of director there, citing other cities with much lower kill rates. It’s a choice to kill so many animals, and there has to be a reason behind it. Best reason I can think of is monetary.

Funny you mention the metric system. I found a school “Weekly Reader” newspaper of mine from 1975 in my parent’s attic (they save everything) and there was an article in there about how we should get ready for the switch to metric system. The article claimed the switch was imminent. Other than in the sciences it never happened.

Our cars have come a long way since 1975 though. I have a classic car from ’76, but my daily driver is an ’07. There’s a huge difference not just in size, but in technology– safety, fuel efficiency, pollution control. My aunt said that in the early 1970’s all the trees were dying along the interstates from the pollution from the cars. Though traffic is higher than ever on our roads, the trees all look fine now. But I think since distances are so much greater in the US, you always will have slightly bigger, more comfortable cars than in the UK. Also, although I have no illusions that my Toronado’s size and weight is a guaranteed safety advantage, if the cars get too itty bitty I think you do have an issue, considering the size of tractor trailers in the US. We have semis pulling 53′ trailers. (I think they can be even larger out west.) People expect a certain amount of protection from their autos considering what they are sharing the road with, and those smart cars, to me, just seem unsafe. Bigger and heavier can be bad in collisions in that the car doesn’t give, and all that energy of the crash is transferred to your body. But crumple zones can only do so much. I just think people in the US feel safer in a slightly larger car, but we’ve definitely moved on from the 1970’s in that area.