There are two types of people. Those who believe there are two types of people and those who don't.

Physicist and writer Gregory Benford is one of the former. He divides people into those who are human-centric, who believe that humans are the context for the universe...that everything in the universe exists only insofar as it is useful to human beings...and those who believe that the universe is the context for human existence: that rain, rather than existing so that humans have fresh water to drink and so that crops will grow so that humans have food, has predated humans for millions of years and would do so regardless of whether any humans ever existed. Indeed, the universe wouldn't care one whit whether there were any humans...if, in fact, the concept of the universe caring in itself were not human-centric.

The first type of human invented religion. The second believes in a rational world that obeys the universal physical laws.

We find ourself, in this day and age, with a conundrum: how is it that freedom of religion comes into a discussion with the assumption of the primacy of exactly one creation story.

That is important at the present because so many human-centric people are refusing to find space in their creation myth for transgender people. For some reason, they believe that their god created all things...but not transgender people. God does not make mistakes, they say...indicating that they believe that somehow we are defective, and hence should be cast out.

I spent last evening reading other creation stories, scientific ones, based on chemistry: the Urey-Miller experiments of the 1950s; Gunther Wachterhauser's suggestion that life began from sulpher, iron oxide and iron sulphide, chemistry driven by undersea hydrothermal vents (black smokers) to mimic the Krebs cycle present in nearly all living things; RNA world, where RNA molecules functioned as enzymes to catalyse its own reproduction, leading to a system of evolution in the presence of fatty membranes that eventually became living cells, and the most recent suggestion, which involves viruses, which may have been agents in gene swapping between archaea and bacteria (formed in a previous RNA world), which eventually produced eukaryotes (the type of life that includes insects, worms, elephants, whales...and, of course, human beings). These are all suggestions...to be edited as we learn more about the so-called junk DNA, which heretofore we have considered of no importance to any living organism.

Anyway, that is not really why I began writing this. I was writing about creation mythology. One alternative to the one given primacy is that we really exist in order to recreate ourselves continually, seeking to improve ourselves over and over again, in order to ultimately improve the lot of all life.

Following that path is okay, until someone gets stuck somehow, with no way forward. Hopefully, our improvement journey has involved major introspection along the way in order to determine what exactly "improve" means in the context of our lives. If we get stuck, we have to examine all that introspection to find out what has gone wrong. For some small number of us it is the gender thing. We find that the only way to continue moving forward involves changing the context of our lives. This is simultaneously not a very big thing and something massive. We are still the people we were, but our context being changed demands also a change in our environment.

In the word of the poet,

And that is where the so-called freedom of religion folks balk. In the name of the primacy of their creation myth, they object to us recreating ourselves and resist any change in our common social environment. They call this "tradition."

The reality is that it is the opposite of freedom of religion. When it interferes with the lives of other people, it is fair to call it bigotry.

I shall perhaps continue this at some future point.

Perhaps it is time for a poem.

Growth Life doesn't care Life doesn't care if it's flora or fauna or something in between It exists at a more basic level cells reproducing or not growing...changing evolving Life doesn't care what genus or species it is or how success is measured in any other way than the proliferation of more life eating...excreting dying A joshua tree, a mayfly A redwood, a butterfly A panda cub, slime mold A humpback whale, Streptococcus pneumoniae A human being All passing fancy Life doesn't care as long as there's more life --Robyn Elaine Serven --January 5, 2006