A non-religious case AGAINST divorce

Divorce is a tricky topic. On one hand, people acknowledge that it's a sad thing when marriages don't work out yet. On the other, we acknowledge that we need to protect people who are in abusive relationships. I am against divorce in the Philippines and unlike 98% of people out there, I'm against it for reasons OTHER than religious reasons. As such, some friends of mine have rightfully pointed out that such arguments can't be found online. These arguments almost always revert to, "God says it's not right" and we have got to realize that this argument WILL NOT and SHOULD NOT convince our policy makers.

This post will be longer than usual as I feel that to get to being against divorce, I'll have to start from the very beginning.

For divorce, we need to start, as with all things, its definition. What is divorce? Divorce is the dissolution of marriage by a court or other competent body. In the case of the state, it would be the courts.

What then is marriage? Now, I know I might get flak for saying this but marriage is the union between a man and a woman. A MAN AND A WOMAN. Not two men, not two women, not three people, and notice that love is NOT a requirement. There is a reason for this but for now, I'll simply pose the question, "Why do you think that across all cultures worldwide, marriage has always between a man and a woman?". Even in cultures where polygamy is allowed, the marriage is always between the husband and the wife and not between the woman and her husband's wives. The next question I'd like to ask, which for some reason no one is asking, is this:

"Why does the state recognize marriages? Why does the state have a vested interest in who's married to whom? Why is marriage held in such high regard in our own constitution?"

Where else to find the answer but in our constitution?

Article 15, Section 2.
"Marriage, as an inviolable social institution, is the foundation of the family and shall be protected by the State."

The family is an immutable part of the human experience. Put simply, we cannot change it. We have to work together with the family as opposed to going against it. Consequently, the state should recognize that marriage is intrinsically tied to family (being the foundation of which) should always work with marriage and never against it. Evidence of this assertion is found in biology. Even with IVF (which isn't available everywhere and can be very expensive), more than 99.7% of the world population is a product of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman. Put simply, it is only in the union of a man and a woman that a new human life is made and thus, a family is made. It is thus very natural for us humans to see that marriage (between a man and a woman) is indeed tied directly to the family and the two are inseparable.

And even without this fact being spelled out in the constitution, it doesn't take a PhD to recognize that families are founded on marriages. We can easily see this in our language. When couples get divorced, we usually call that family, a broken one. The same is never said about single parent households where one of the parents died. In other words, it is the family that the state should protect and as it needs to protect the family, it should therefore protect marriage and both are tied together.

It is therefore very illogical for the state to claim to protect the family while allowing a couple an easy way out of their marriages. In such a case, the state is simply making it very much easier for people to belong to broken families, should the state allow divorce in any case.

Why then should the state protect the family as opposed to not caring at all? What is it that the family has that the state should have a vested interest in protecting? We usually see the state as being concerned with things such as the economy, security and, peace and order. Everything else the state should be doing should tie into one or a few of these. In fact, that's why we expect the state to have policies on public health, education and the environment! A healthier population will produce better for the economy. An educated population will contribute greatly to the economy and to peace and order. Environmental laws ensure that the economy performs well in the future as well as the present. Where does the family factor to all of this?

The basic reason we have family laws at all is that it ensures our country has a future at all! The family is naturally tied to the production of new Filipinos - this is why across all cultures all throughout history, family has always been one father, one mother, and their children. It's been shown through criminal records that children from broken families - ones where the parents are separated or left behind by the father - are more likely commit crimes compared to children from families that are in tact. For this, several sources can be cited but for brevity, I'll simply link to the article which cites these studies:

http://marripedia.org/effects_of_fatherless_families_on_crime_rates#fn__7
http://marripedia.org/effects_of_family_structure_on_crime

Now, I'm not saying that children from intact marriages are all angels and those from broken ones are demons in the making. Such is absolutely NOT the case. It is just that from the date a have, children from broken families have a higher incidence of crime than those from intact ones. As such, the state has absolutely NO INCENTIVE in promoting divorce or the dissolution of marriage under any circumstance. Marriage.com lists the most common reasons for divorce and lists abuse at the tail end. Almost all of the top 9 reasons can be solved through means other than divorce. I mean, weight gain? Really? (Source: https://www.marriage.com/advice/divorce/10-most-common-reasons-for-divorce/). I fear that if divorce was to be legalized here, you'll have several couples breaking up over the wife's spending habits, the husband's hanging out with friends, and more trivial things like a pet dog or piece of furniture. Call me crazy but these things have in fact happened.

Now, the only case I found compelling in legalizing divorce is in cases where the marriage has become so toxic that it affects the children negatively and abuse. The state does have the duty to protect all of its citizens and maybe divorce may be the only way to protect the children and in many cases, the mother from an abusive father. However, here's what's wrong with this case. Divorce may cease the spousal relationship but it cannot stop the paternal and maternal relationships. The father will always be the father of his kids no matter how abusive he may be. Philippine law already has a provision for legal separation but stops short of dissolving marriages. As such, the couple remains married but do not maintain the same household and it protects the core family from otherwise destructive behavior. However, both husband and wife cannot remarry (at least legally).

Divorce packages itself as one of the essential women's rights alongside other things. But like some of the women's rights, it forgets something more important - children's rights. We often forget that one person's right ends where someone else's begins. Children have the right to grow up in as healthy as possible a household. Divorce threatens this and as such, we shouldn't allow it to become legal in our country. The Philippines is the last country in the world to not allow divorce aside from the Vatican (and really, that doesn't count). People often say we have it backwards here because of this. I say, we're the only ones who got it right.

My first ever shiny Pokemon

Right now, I'm 29. Back when Pokemon came out in 1996, it was the in thing. As I didn't have my own Gameboy or Pokemon game, or Pokemon cards, my enjoyment of Pokemon as a young boy was primarily through other people who had the game and I'd watch as they played through Pokemon Red, Blue or Yellow. I didn't even watch the anime so my enjoyment of the Pokemon games was purely from a third person perspective.

I didn't mind though and when the next fad came along, everyone else moved on as well. I was lucky enough in college to download an emulator and I was able to play through my first Pokemon game shortly after college in 2011 - Pokemon Fire Red. I refused to play the other games as I really only knew the original 150 and Fire Red was set in the same region as Red/Blue/Yellow so I knew the maps ahead of time by heart.

I was playing through the game normally and casually (I never even knew people played Pokemon hard core) and I knew what kind of team I wanted to assemble. One of my Pokemon would be a Kadabra so the first area you find an Abra is north of Cerulean City so I went there to go Abra hunting. Now, Abras are tricky to catch. If you don't incapacitate them fast enough, they'll just teleport away. I had a specific kind of Abra in mind as well. I wanted one with a specific ability and one that was male. So if I chanced upon a female, I'd escape the battle. After I'd catch a bunch, I'd go to the PC and check if the Abras I caught had the abilities I wanted. I picked one and it was that Abra I trained and evolved into a Kadabra.

It wasn't until I was going to fight Koga that I noticed something strange every time I sent out my Kadabra. Stars would fly around it and his shoulder pads were more purple than the brown I expected Kadabras to have. What's more, when I'd look through my party, there was this small star that the other Pokemon in my party didn't have. I thought it was some sort of bug that I needed to have fixed or something. Little did I know, the Kadabra I had just trained from an Abra was a shiny one.

I googled, "stars fly when Pokemon sent out" and I had my answer right away. I didn't even know that shiny Pokemon was a thing. The old Gameboy games didn't have color so this was all really new to me. I found out that you could get shiny Pokemon from breeding 1 in 8,192 times and catching one in the wild was an even rarer feat. I was thrilled! My Kadabra which was already a powerhouse in my party was more special than I had previously anticipated. I had party wished I knew this ahead of time but part of me just saw how lucky I was at having incidentally caught an Abra which was exactly the kind I wanted and it just so happened to be shiny as well. Damn! Game Freak really knows how to entice their player base.

Shiny Pokemon don't excite me as much now as they did before though but I can't forget how that first one excited me so much. Really, the shiny-ness of a Pokemon has nothing to do with the strength of the Pokemon but it's just a tiny incentive to keep playing in case you find another one lurking in the wild or in eggs.

Now, especially with Pokemon Go, my nephews keep coming up to me and showing me all their shiny Pokemon and I like that it still excites them. Looking back, I feel lucky to have gotten a shiny Abra instead of a shiny Caterpie or Pidgey.

This may be a huge departure from my regular topics I write on but I just wanted to write about something different and one which was light hearted and easy to read. Aside from my opinions, I do enjoy playing video games (as do probably 90% of guys my age). This is just to show the different aspects of my life as well as my different interests.

Can the Truth ever change?

I was pondering this question a few days ago as some people I personally know would claim that truth is subjective. What's true for one person may not be true for another. To be clear, I'm not talking about favorite dishes or a movie preference. I'm talking about The Truth.

One way to test the truth value of an assertion is to see if the negation draws up some absurd conclusions. As my assertion is "Truth cannot change," I'll begin with the negative of that. It would be strange to state the negative of my assertion as, "Truth can't not change," so I'll state it more simply.

Truth can change.

It's quite unsettling but then again the truth value of a statement cannot be determined by how good or bad it sounds. The thing about this statement however is that if it were true, it should be able to change as well. Meaning, sometimes, it may be the case that Truth can change and sometimes, it may be the case that Truth cannot change.

And here lies our first contradiction. If it were the case that sometimes, Truth cannot change then surely, it can no longer change back to being false now would it and so we're left with an unchanging Truth.

Let's say now that the statement cannot change and it is always true that Truth can change. There again lies our second contradiction. If the truth value of the statement cannot change then it can be asserted that the statement is always true and cannot change. Written in bullets, it would go:

• Truth can change.
• The truth value of the statement above cannot change.
• Truth cannot change.

I was quite pleased with myself having come up with this. Actually, it may be the case that someone else has beat me to this. It is, however, simple enough to memorize so that we as a culture can continue to remember that truth cannot in fact change. What was true before, is true today, and will be true in the future. What's more, what's true for me should be true for you and should be true for everyone else in the world.

A lot of ideologies stem from the idea that Truth is relative and it can change. Sometimes, it presents itself as, My truth instead of The Truth. We should all be careful not to go down that rabbit hole if we're to keep our sanity.

Discussing Abortion (sort of)

Before leaving for the States, Faith, my friend from the gaming community, and some other friends decided to gather together. Since we had been putting off the abortion discussion until last Wednesday, we thought it was a good a time as any to have our very first coffee and abortion session.

Originally, we were to just have four people but two more people joined us that night - one of them didn't know that an exchange of ideas on abortion was one of the topics to be tackled. Thankfully, no one shied away from the topic and the discussion was very fruitful. I doubt anyone's mind was changed that night but then again, such was never the goal of this discussion. The discussion was meant primarily to show both sides of an issue, probably touch on some grey areas and what not.

To my surprise, the case that gathered the most intrigue that night was not one of abortion though it did touch on it very slightly. Here's how the story goes:

Faith was telling us about this girl in the US who got pregnant and since she didn't want the baby, wanted to get an abortion. Her boyfriend, as was the case, wanted the baby and so they both decided that the girl would carry the baby the term but that the guy would have to take care of the baby. The went as far as getting papers signed in court saying the guy will not hold her responsible for the child.

Months later, the guy was demanding that the girl have a more direct active role in the child's life - it must be said the woman was paying child support. The girl declines and cites the papers they signed in court and the guy goes on social media bashing her and calling her a deadbeat mother.

Now, upon hearing the story, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I'm always against social media bashing but in my gut, I could say that the mom was indeed a deadbeat. I, however, was the only one who took that position. Two of the guys said that they didn't think it was right but that it was legal as the the mother of the child does have the papers to show she doesn't want anything to do with the child. As it would be legal, they couldn't say it was wrong.

The issue ate at me for the rest of the night and during a trip to the bathroom, it hit me why we didn't think it was right. Everyone in the table was so focused on the mom and the dad and their agreement and we all just forgot about the third person involved in the story - the child. I pointed out that whatever the agreements on paper between the mom and the dad, the child will never cease to be the child of both.

Further discussion brought everyone to the conclusion that the signed agreement between the parents can be viewed as one signed under duress. The mother was practically holding the child under hostage. In a way, it was a classic case of, "sign on the dotted line or I pull the trigger". Once the issue was framed this way, it became much easier for everyone to see what was wrong with it.

We then moved onto abortion but it was the interaction I mentioned above that set the precedent for the rest of our conversation. Essentially, when we're talking about human rights, we need to consider all the humans in the conversation - including the child's, the mother's and the father's.