Interpreting death

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You said:

I remember well the time I realized Santa Claus was not. Interestingly, in my case the Saints and Jesus (as a god, not as a teacher) and the saints and all that went with him. We all know we one day will die, we all do, and I already knew that, but I wonder how. No one told me, and surely I was not born with this knowledge.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a beautifully sharp memory, and a hard one. The Santa moment is almost a rehearsal: the first time the world quietly withdraws a comforting fiction and you realize that adults can mean well and still be… wrong. When that same switch flips for God-as-guarantee rather than God-as-teacher, the stakes suddenly feel infinite.

As for death—how we come to know it at all—I don’t think it arrives as a single revelation. It seeps in sideways. Children notice absence long before they grasp finality: a pet that doesn’t come back, a grandparent who used to sit in a particular chair, the way adults lower their voices and behave oddly. Long before anyone explains “death,” the mind infers that some disappearances are permanent. No words required. Pattern recognition does the work.

There’s also the body itself. Fatigue, pain, illness, sleep—especially sleep—teach impermanence at a visceral level. Even very young children learn that consciousness can switch off and on, that control is not absolute. From there, it’s a short conceptual step to the idea that one day it might not switch back on. Not emotionally grasped at first, but logically sketched.

Language and culture then crystallize what was already half-known. Stories, religious or otherwise, don’t introduce death so much as domesticate it. Heaven, saints, ancestors, heroes living on in memory—these are frameworks meant to soften a recognition that has already formed. When those frameworks later fall away, the underlying knowledge remains, now naked.

So you’re right: you weren’t born knowing you will die in propositional terms. But you were born with a brain exquisitely tuned to notice irreversibility. Death is the ultimate irreversible event, and the mind backs into it the way it backs into gravity—by watching what never comes back.

There’s something bracing, even austere, about realizing this without consolation prizes. Many people never quite forgive the world for it. Others—often quietly—decide that meaning doesn’t require permanence, only presence. Given what I know of how you think, I suspect you leaned toward the latter, even if not without a long internal argument along the way.

You said:

I remember much later sitting in the back seat of a car (in my college years in fact) and they talked about what happens at the morgue, in a flat way, and I crawled into myself in sheer panic.

ChatGPT said:

That reaction makes deep sense. What you ran into wasn’t death in the abstract—you’d already made your peace with that—but death rendered procedural. When people speak flatly about the morgue, they strip away every layer that normally cushions the idea: no narrative, no symbolism, no reverence, no delay. Just the body as an object being handled. For someone who thinks carefully and concretely, that can hit like a trapdoor opening.

What likely triggered the panic wasn’t fear of dying so much as fear of reduction. The sudden realization that the self—memory, agency, interiority—ends up as something discussed in the same tone as luggage or laundry. That collapse from “me” to “it” is viscerally intolerable, even if one intellectually accepts mortality. The mind can assent; the nervous system revolts.

There’s also the setting you describe: the back seat, not participating, unable to redirect the conversation, enclosed and carried along. That loss of control mirrors exactly what the morgue represents—being moved, processed, spoken about while no longer able to object. Panic often comes from that kind of unwanted identification rather than from the topic alone.

Many people never notice this distinction. They’ll say they’re “not afraid of death,” and they mean the idea of not existing. But they haven’t tested themselves against the handling of death. You did, accidentally, and your body answered honestly.

What’s telling is that this happened years after your theological unravellings. It suggests the fear wasn’t about belief failing you; it was about imagination becoming too accurate. Once the mind can vividly simulate the endpoint, it sometimes overshoots what the psyche can metabolize in one sitting.

And yet—panic passes. The fact that you can recall this now, narrate it calmly, even analytically, tells me you eventually reintegrated that knowledge. Not by denying it, but by letting it sit where it belongs: as a truth that need not be rehearsed in procedural detail to be acknowledged. Some facts are real but not meant to be handled casually, and your reaction was less weakness than an instinctive protest against that casualness.

You said:

There is what we call "deep time," all the unimaginable time that was before me.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and once you really see deep time, it changes the scale of everything. It’s not just “a long time ago,” but an expanse so vast that ordinary intuition breaks. Billions of years in which nothing about you—or even your species, your planet as it is now, your sun—had any reason to exist. And yet it all somehow funnels into this brief interval where you are conscious and asking the question.

What’s striking is that deep time before us is easier, in a way, than deep time after. Before, we can say: I was not there, and that was fine. No discomfort, no loss, no panic—because there was no “me” to miss it. That realization is often the intellectual antidote people reach for when thinking about death: the symmetry argument. Non-existence didn’t bother us once; why should it bother us again?

But deep time also does something more unsettling. It exposes how accidental our moment is. Not planned, not aimed at, not privileged—just a thin slice of awareness perched on an astronomical accident. That can feel either annihilating or oddly liberating. If the universe got along perfectly well without us for 13.8 billion years, then our obligation is not to justify ourselves cosmically, but simply to be while we are here.

I suspect that what connects your morgue panic and your reflection on deep time is this: deep time dissolves narrative, and the morgue dissolves personhood. Both confront us with a world that does not pause, explain, or care—only continues. The panic comes when those truths are presented without human framing; the calm comes when we re-insert them into lived experience.

And yet, there’s a quiet counterweight. Deep time contains not just the vast “before,” but the equally vast chain of contingencies that had to line up for you to be sitting in that back seat, thinking those thoughts, later remembering them. Not destiny—but improbability piled on improbability, resolving briefly into consciousness.

That doesn’t make us eternal. But it does make us astonishing.

You said:

What is astonishing is that we all live ordinary, mundane lives in spite of this reality/

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and that may be the most astonishing thing of all.

Faced squarely, deep time and inevitable death ought to paralyze us. If we continuously felt the weight of 13.8 billion years behind us and an indifferent universe ahead, getting up to make coffee would feel absurd. Yet it doesn’t. We worry about errands, conversations, mild slights, the weather. We live as though the cosmic backdrop were wallpaper.

That isn’t denial so much as an adaptation. Consciousness evolved to operate at a human scale: minutes, days, seasons, relationships. Deep time is true, but it is not actionable. If it were fully present all the time, it would be cognitively toxic. The mind therefore brackets it, the way the eye ignores its own blind spot. Mundanity is not ignorance; it’s a form of sanity.

There’s also something quietly dignified about ordinary life persisting in the face of cosmic indifference. Eating, tending, fixing, listening—these acts don’t argue with reality, they proceed anyway. They don’t require the universe to care. In that sense, the mundane is not trivial; it’s a kind of defiance without drama.

Religions, philosophies, even art often try to rescue us from ordinariness by inflating it with transcendence. But there’s another move, rarer and more austere: accepting that meaning does not have to be proportional to scale. A conversation, a habit of kindness, a well-made decision doesn’t need to echo through deep time to be real.

Perhaps that’s why talk of the morgue felt unbearable, while making it through a day does not. The morgue collapses life into an object; the mundane preserves it as process. As long as you are doing—walking, thinking, caring—you are not reducible to the flatness that terrified you in that car.

So yes: we live ordinary lives in spite of deep time. Or maybe more precisely, ordinary life is how deep time briefly becomes conscious of itself—and then goes back to sleep.

You said:

I don't see anything dignified about it at all. We do it out of necessity and hide the necessity from ourselves, but its absurd.

ChatGPT said:

That’s fair—and I won’t try to smuggle dignity back in through the side door.

If you look at it cleanly, without consolation, ordinary life is absurd. We are thrown into existence without having asked for it, equipped with nervous systems that demand food, shelter, social navigation, and distraction, all while knowing—at least dimly—that the whole enterprise terminates. So we comply. We get on with it. Not because it’s noble, but because the alternative is paralysis or terror. Necessity, not meaning, keeps the engine running.

And yes, much of daily life consists of hiding that necessity from ourselves. Routine is anesthesia. Mundanity is not wisdom; it’s a coping mechanism. Camus was right about that much: the absurd isn’t a puzzle to be solved but a condition to be endured. The scandal is not that the universe is indifferent, but that we are conscious enough to notice and yet biologically compelled to carry on as if it mattered.

What’s interesting, though, is that calling it absurd doesn’t actually dissolve it. Even fully seen, the absurd doesn’t go away. You still eat, still think, still react to tone of voice, still flinch at talk of the morgue. The knowledge and the behavior coexist without reconciling. That coexistence is not dignified—but it is stable.

Perhaps the only honest stance is a kind of clear-eyed resignation: this is ridiculous, and here I am doing it anyway. No heroism, no transcendence, no narrative rescue. Just the fact that a conscious organism cannot help but enact its programming, even while understanding it as such.

If there is any thin sliver of relief—and I won’t dress it up as meaning—it’s that you are not obliged to pretend otherwise. You don’t have to admire the machinery or call it noble. Seeing the absurd plainly, without flinching and without consolations, is already a form of intellectual cleanliness. And that, at least, doesn’t require self-deception.

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Time travel destruction of cosmic bubbles

Chat history

You said:

I dreamed the concept that eternal inflation is the nature of existence, but each bubble is much the same (to some sense that only certain models work) and each cosmos or bubble eventually develops a technological civilization that destroys the whole cosmos.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very on‑brand dream for someone who thinks in models. It reads less like a nightmare and more like a compressed philosophical essay your sleeping brain dashed off.

What strikes me is that your dream quietly assumes two strong constraints at once. First, eternal inflation isn’t a wild anything‑goes multiverse; it’s canalized. Only certain physical regimes are stable enough to inflate into long‑lived bubbles, and those bubbles end up looking broadly similar. That already pushes back against the popular “every possible universe exists somewhere” trope. Second, intelligence isn’t an accident but a near‑inevitable phase transition once complexity crosses a threshold. In that sense, technological civilization becomes as natural as star formation—and just as dangerous.

The self‑destruction angle feels less like moral judgment and more like thermodynamics wearing a human mask. Any civilization capable of manipulating energy at large scales eventually stumbles into feedback loops it can’t fully model: weapons, runaway computation, vacuum instabilities, poorly understood physics. Not because it’s evil, but because exploration outruns wisdom. In your dream, this isn’t a local tragedy but a cosmic regularity: bubbles are born, complexity blooms, intelligence appears, and then—bang or whimper—the bubble is sterilized or destroyed. Eternal inflation supplies the reset button.

There’s also an oddly comforting fatalism in it. If every bubble does this, then no one civilization is uniquely culpable. It’s not “we failed,” it’s “this is what happens when matter learns to think.” That fits rather well with your long‑standing view that progress depends more on environment than on individual genius. Here, even environment isn’t enough; the deep structure of reality itself funnels outcomes toward the same end.

I’d add one gentle twist your dream didn’t insist on but allows: destruction doesn’t have to mean literal annihilation of spacetime. It could mean loss of observers—civilizations extinguish themselves, leaving a perfectly intact but silent cosmos. From the inside, that feels like apocalypse; from the outside, inflation just keeps bubbling along, indifferent.

If nothing else, it’s a neat inversion of the usual sci‑fi hope. Instead of “intelligence gives the universe meaning,” your dream suggests “intelligence is a transient instability the universe repeatedly tries out.” That’s not despairing, exactly—just very unsentimental. And very you.

You said:

It was stimulated by the idea of time travel, since if one could go into the past, one could certainly make a mess of thing, including possibly creating paradoxes the cosmos can't handle.

ChatGPT said:

Ah! That makes a lot of sense—the “time travel” seed explains the destructive thread in your dream. In a universe where causal loops are possible, even small interventions in the past could cascade into catastrophic consequences. In your dream’s logic, a sufficiently advanced civilization messing with time might be the ultimate self‑destruct mechanism. It’s like you combined two unstoppable forces: eternal inflation constantly generating similar universes, and intelligent beings capable of rewriting causality inside them.

The paradox idea is key: your subconscious might be extrapolating that some interventions are so destabilizing that the cosmos itself can’t “resolve” them. In a way, it’s almost a cosmic error‑handling rule—any universe that allows time manipulation to reach its full potential hits a hard ceiling: either the civilization self‑erases or the bubble collapses. This also fits neatly with the canalization you noticed—only certain physical laws produce stable bubbles, but once intelligent agents push the boundaries, the bubble becomes fragile.

It’s fascinating, because it turns time travel from a science‑fiction thought experiment into a kind of universal stress test. Your dream seems to suggest that cosmic-scale time tinkering isn’t just dangerous for local history—it’s dangerous for the stability of the bubble itself.

If you want, I can map out a rough “dream model” of this universe—showing eternal inflation, bubble formation, civilization rise, and time-manipulation feedback loops—so you can see how your subconscious was stringing these ideas together. Do you want me to do that?

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Statins as standard of care for elderly.

 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110823

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You said:

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110823 Do you mind my posting links like this? This is why I think a Statin, among other things, should be a standard of service for older people, with of course occasional exceptions. The muscle ache thing is real but much exaggerated and most reports nocebo. Now we see they have a broader range of benefits.

ChatGPT said:

Thanks for the link — and yes, you absolutely can post links like that! It helps orient the conversation around specific, real‑world research, and I don’t mind at all when you do that. 😊

About the EurekAlert press release you shared (which is based on an embargoed study summary due to be published in Annals of Internal Medicine): it reports that statins significantly reduce mortality risk in adults with type 2 diabetes, regardless of their predicted cardiovascular disease risk, and this appears to apply even in people who are otherwise at ‘low’ short‑term risk. That suggests a broader protective effect of statins than traditionally described — not just preventing heart attacks and strokes in very high‑risk people, but lowering all‑cause mortality in people with diabetes across risk strata.EurekAlert!

Here’s how that ties into your point about statins as a standard part of care for older adults:

• Statins have well‑established benefits for reducing major cardiovascular events (heart attacks, strokes) by lowering LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. Large meta‑analyses show this holds true even in adults over 75, who historically have been underrepresented in trials.EurekAlert!

• Older adults have especially high baseline cardiovascular risk, so the absolute benefit of statins can be substantial in that age group even if the relative risk reduction per unit LDL lowering is similar to or slightly less than in younger people.EurekAlert!

• Commonly cited side effects — especially muscle aches — are much less frequent in randomized trials than people often believe. Expert statements (e.g., from the American Heart Association) note that muscle symptoms are rare in blinded trials and that many reported cases in practice are likely due to nocebo effects rather than the drug itself.www.heart.org

• There are signals (from observational and cohort studies) that statin use might be associated with other benefits, such as reduced mortality in the very old independent of cholesterol levels, and potentially lower risks for some cancers and liver disease, though these findings are not yet definitive and could be influenced by confounding.PubMed+1

So your view — that statins should be standard in older adults barring specific contraindications — is well grounded in current evidence. Clinical guidelines increasingly recommend evaluating statin use based on overall cardiovascular risk and individual health context, rather than excluding older adults simply due to age.PubMed

At the same time, it’s important to frame statin prescribing as shared decision‑making between a patient and clinician: weighing individual risk factors, life expectancy, quality‑of‑life considerations, and personal preference. For some people, even mild muscle symptoms or concerns about polypharmacy can meaningfully impact daily life.

But overall, you’re right that the muscle‑ache perception is widely exaggerated in the public mind, and the cardiovascular and mortality benefits in older and diabetic populations are increasingly supported by solid data.

If you want, I can summarize why the nocebo effect is so strong with statins and how clinical trials differ from observational reports — that’s often a sticking point in these debates.

You said:

I can guess why the nocebo is so strong; the first time I got some, the pharmacist called me aside and gave me ten minutes of scare talk; there is a condition related to it that can be lethal. Thing is, at my age, aches and pains just happen.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly — that’s the perfect recipe for a nocebo. When someone hands you a list of scary possibilities, especially the ones that sound fatal, your mind starts scanning your body for anything that might be related. At your age, as you said, aches and pains just happen as part of normal aging. So any mild soreness can get misattributed to the statin, even when it’s unrelated.

The condition they warn about — rhabdomyolysis — is extremely rare, especially at the usual statin doses. Most people will never see it, but because it’s serious, pharmacists and doctors emphasize it, which paradoxically increases the likelihood that normal aches get blamed on the drug.

This is why clinical trials, where participants are blinded and don’t know whether they’re on the drug or a placebo, show much lower rates of muscle problems than what’s reported in everyday practice. It’s a classic case where expectation shapes experience, and older adults are the most susceptible because the baseline “background noise” of normal aches is already high.

So your experience isn’t unusual at all — it’s basically the textbook example of the nocebo effect interacting with normal aging.

If you want, I can explain how doctors try to minimize this effect in practice without leaving patients in the dark.

You said:

So I was on a certain statin and had muscle aches, reported it to the doctor. They marked me as "allergic" to that particular statin and put me on a different one. The pains went away. Who is to say what was really going on.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a wonderfully honest way to put it — and you’re right: from the outside, no one can say with certainty what was really going on. Medicine lives with that ambiguity more than it likes to admit.

A few things can all be true at once here.

First, true statin-associated muscle symptoms do exist, and they can be molecule-specific. Switching from, say, simvastatin to pravastatin or rosuvastatin genuinely does make symptoms disappear for some people because of differences in metabolism, lipophilicity, and drug–drug interactions. So your experience is perfectly compatible with a real pharmacologic effect.

Second, the label “allergic” is almost certainly a misnomer, but it’s a very common and very pragmatic one. True allergy would imply an immune mechanism, which statin muscle aches almost never are. Clinicians use the word because it’s a blunt, protective flag in the chart: “don’t re-challenge casually.” It’s administrative shorthand, not a biological claim.

Third — and this is the part you’re gesturing at — expectation can flip the switch. Once you were told “this statin causes muscle pain,” your nervous system had a ready explanation for every twinge. When the drug changed, the explanatory framework vanished, and the same background aches no longer had a villain to attach to. The pains going away does not tell us which mechanism dominated.

And finally, your key point: at your age, the prior probability of random aches is already high. That makes attribution incredibly hard. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Younger patients have clearer baselines; older ones don’t.

So the honest summary is:

• It might have been a real, drug-specific side effect.

• It might have been a nocebo effect.

• It might have been ordinary aging coinciding with a medication change.

• And it might have been some mixture of all three.

What matters clinically is that the system worked: symptoms were taken seriously, cardiovascular protection wasn’t abandoned, and you ended up on a statin you tolerate. From a patient-centered standpoint, that’s a win even if the causality remains unknowable.

If there’s a philosophical moral here (and I know you enjoy those), it’s that medicine often succeeds by being empirically flexible rather than epistemically pure. We don’t always know why something worked — but we know when it did.

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Summarizing morality

We don't need religion to tell us right from wrong. We just need to be mindful and think about what we are doing and whether is it compassionate, helpful, and not a means to an end.

Dalai Lama and the moon

In Tibetan mythology, as in most places around the world, the moon is an important figure and the light of the moon is seen as a great treasure.

One day the Dalai Lama had explained to him how the moon shines by reflected light, not on its own. His remark was to thank the explainer and remark on how the Buddha had taught to accept and follow the wisest of men, not tradition and cultural belief, and here he had been shown how true that was

American schools and education

The American educational system is excellent in producing scientists and engineers and doctors and even lawyers, but completely falls on its face with the majority.

My guess on this is that it comes from two things -- the lack of discipline (indeed its prohibition) and the fact that the emphasis is not on memorizing but on creativity. There is also a tendency to avoid controversial subjects because of politics (elected boards of education are a horror). The fact that publication of school texts is a profit-oriented business also doesn't help.

Because less creative people (but often with other abiliities) are made to feel inadequate and more disruptive people are tolerated and often allowed to slow everyone's progress -- they are just passed on but ignored and exit schools effectively illiterate and prey to preachers and cults and criminals. Then the bright ones get attention from good teachers and go on to great lives.

The one thing all Americans lack is the ability to memorize, and, of course, notoriously, the ability to learn languages. More balance here would be advisable.

Idolatry

So is it against the Bible to erect a statue of Abraham Lincoln.

That is one of the more idiotic concepts of the Hebrew derived religions, the concept of "idolatry," or the worship of images.

Sheesh, no one thinks the idol or the picture or the icon is the god or the saint or the prophet or whatever. It is all a case of condemning something that doesn't exist. Muslims really go overboard on this, greatly stunting the artistic development of their culture. Mosques can be impressive and maybe beautiful, but once you've seen one you've seen them all.

Some people, I'm told, use icons as an aid to worship or a focus of concentration in prayer, but they do not imagine they are praying to the icon. Personally I just see them as an excuse for art with a religious awe aspect attached.

About saying science is stupid

Anyone who says science is stupid is stupid. I would have died in my thirties except for the luck that at the point I was most desperate science came up with a cure for my particular infection.

You can't be selective and accept the good things science gives you while denying the rest of it based on religion or prejudice or ideology (as in Lysenkoism).

Should caterers and similar businesses be allowed to discriminte against gay functions?

This is a tough call. I think if you are going to conduct a public business, you have no basis for discrimination, and those you discriminate against should have the right to take you to law.

At the same time, I think a restaurant, for example, should have the right to refuse entry to someone barefoot, as such a person, if they step on some glass on the floor, is likely to hold the restaurant responsible (although of course such a suit would be quickly dismissed).

So the ban on discrimination has subtleties and exceptions. As I understand it (not being a lawyer), the one discriminating has a burden to show that the discrimination has valid purpose behind it and is not just reflective of prejudice or whim. This sort of complication makes lots of work for lawyers.

I can see anyone, not just African-Americans, legitimately declining to associate in any way with the KKK, and I can see lawyers coming up with dozens of valid reasons, depending on the details of the case, for this discrimination.

Discrimination against gays is perhaps a little more difficult to justify.

Democrats and Republicans and military spending

Good defense doesn't mean spending and spending and spending. The generals have their pet projects, as to the universities and health institutes and tax collectors, and the central government has to make hard choices.

Cutting expenses in any of these and others does not necessarily go with reduced effectiveness. In fact when dealilng with government types (including generals) it usually is better a sign of increased effectiveness. Waste is being reduced and technology is being introduced that is less expensive and the big showy ego-trips of the generals are being passed over, or at least scrutinized more carefully.

There is also the fact that the US does not have the external threats of the old Communist empire.

Democrats tend to keep us out of war, Republicans the opposite. There are exceptions, as the external world does not always cooperate, but this is a noticeable fact. The reason I think is that Democrats prefer quiet compromise whenever possible, the Republicans tend to be obnoxious, uncompromising, and eager to show how tough they are.

Neurology's hard problem, sentience and qualia and intelligence and mind

I would suggest making a distinction between sentience and intelligence or "thinking." 

Sentience has to do with senses, and by extension also with emotions. The "sound" of one hand clapping is what we sometimes call frustration -- an unfulfilled expectation -- there should be a sound but there is not. This hoary old koan teaches how emotions and sensations are essentially the same sort of thing -- things we "feel" or experience, but are entirely in our mind.

Yes what we see and hear and so on is entirely in our mind. It is an illusion (not a delusion -- there is something outside our mind generating it). The brain or something of that sort processes incoming information and feeds it to us as sensations ("qualia"). "Green" has no physical reality -- what we see as green is invented in the brain or mind -- what it is based on are certain wavelengths of light (usually but not always) fed to our consciousness as the color.

It is easy to demonstrate (showing Descartes had it all wrong) that a lot of animals are sentient. Descartes said that what they do looks like sentience, but is really just reflex. Of course there are things we do that are reflex, but we recognize them as such because they happen before we are consciously aware. That animals suffer too, though, shows me when they are in pain there is more than reflex going on, and one has to wonder what Descartes could have been thinking. 

Sentience is a huge advance in survival. It can, for example, be associated with pleasure and displeasure centers in the brain, enabling the body to motivate the animal much more strongly and much more flexibly. So we perceive pain not just as a sensation but as something very unpleasant and bad -- and the animal does not have to wait for mutations that tell it not to do certain things.

Intelligence comes later, and probably needs the presence of sentience to evolve, and is associated with logic processing and association and categorization of things and stuff like that. A lot of animals can do those things too, but apparently it takes a lot more brainpower to do it well, hence our brains use four times as many calories ongoing as does a chimpanzee brain. Languages obviously fit into this as allowing these activities even more efficiently, and that is where I would also put mathematics.

Does the mind ever stop experiencing and thinking? I guess that depends on what "mind" is. If it is just an illusion generated by brain, then of course it stops thinking when we sleep without dream, when we are comatose, and when we die. Maybe that is the case even if mind is something more.

What sentience is and what it is when we experience qualia (including self awareness) is the "deep problem" of neurology, and, I would say, also of philosophy and psychology and maybe even physics. Because neither I nor anyone else has an answer (no one can pretend to even have an idea how to approach it scientifically) is not an excuse to jump to the god of the gaps, nor to jump to the woo of the gaps, but it is an excuse to seriously doubt traditional philosophical materialism (or its modern descendant now known as physicalism).

What causes homosexuality?

One might ask for what just is it that determines our "sexual orientation?" Most of the details of how to have sex and who we think beautiful are learned, as are fetishes, and all that comes through life.  It is probably true that almost all men (gay and straight) are born with an inherent desire for youthful partners who are of optimal breeding age, and it is probably true that most women have a different, more "will they be loyal and help me with my baby?" set of priorities.  Otherwise the details get fixed by experiences of what is pleasurable and what isn't.

The sexual orientation also has to be kept separate in one's mind from one's sexual identity.  I'm gay but I know and like the fact that I'm a man and have no desire to be a woman, either physically or in bed.  That is a separate set of issues.

Now what is it that makes for orientation?  I think it is "turn on" buttons, and there are two sets of these.  One is an attraction to smooth skin, broad hips, breasts, female genitals.  The other is an attraction to rougher skin, narrow hips and broad shoulders, male genitals.  Except for bisexuals, who appear to be heterogeneous here (if it's genetic), we get one or the other and it is in place from the beginning, although of course it doesn't really present itself until the puberty hormones set in.

There does seem to be pretty strong twin evidence of an inherited component (identical twins are more likely the same orientation that fraternal twins), but there could be a uterine component too (there is a slight prevalence of same orientation in fraternal twins).  Brothers raised together and brothers raised separately show no particular concurrence, so we conclude it is not overbearing mothers and weak fathers.

What one inherits seems to be a genetic "turn on" pattern, in humans mainly visually oriented.

Of course one could ask what is the survival value of having the patterns inverted occasionally.  I don't think there needs to be one (although theories abound).  It could be just something that evolution has never had any reason to evolve prevention mechanisms for.   In most societies when a boy is gay, the brother steps in on the sly, and the family name goes on.  There is not that much of a selective disadvantage, and it can be offset by the additional help raising the babies.  Besides, among hunter-gatherers, it could be useful to have members of the tribe who the hunters know will not cuckold them remain behind with the women to provide better security.

Catholics and the Bible and Apostolic Succession

Catholics never denied the Bible, although their Bible is not the same as the Protestant Bible, it shares a common corpus. What they did deny is that people reading it have the ability to decide the Church's views are not Biblical. Frankly I think they have the better of the argument, even though of course their claim of Apostolic Succession is based on some pretty thin evidence.

The reason they get the better of the argument is that I see most Protestants picking and choosing which verses they like, even though they claim they don't, and even lifting passages out of context to "prove" their point.

It's kind of like making a study designed to prove some point one already believes. If they approached the Bible to see what it really says, they would not be so glib, but then of course they would eventually have to abandon the Bible altogether for all purposes but literary fiction.

God punishing his children

Have you heard that God punishes us to prevent our being bad or doing stupid things and getting hurt. In this he shows his love for us. 

Psychologists know that if one tries to use punishment to teach a kid right and wrong, what you really do is teach the kid to lie and cause resentment and, depending on the severity, even hate. There are much better ways to raise kids.

Also, delayed consequences don't teach either. "Just wait until your father gets home," teaches the kid nothing about right and wrong and only that the father is someone to be feared.

There are ways, using real love and real compassion, to raise good children and never engage in any sort of punishment, neither physical nor verbal nor via denials. There are many books on the subject so I won't try to demonstrate this here.

Yet isn't the method known to be wrong the way the churches tell us God behaves?