OK, so there’s this newfangled thing out there called “Intelligent Design”.
The basic nature of it is “Hey, this is so complex that we dont really understand it, so it must be God!”
While it is commendable that the Intelligent Design fanatics in this way admit that they really aren’t very intelligent at all, it’s pretty serious when they want to try to teach it in elementary school to kids who aren’t bound to know better.
Anyway, Creationism .. yes, that’s what it is, no matter what else you call it. A turd is still a turd, even if you stick it in a candy wrapper. It’s no tastier for it.
I’ve had the oppotunity once to date one of these creationists – well date is probably a stretch, because after discussing this on the first date, there really wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that there would be a second date. See what I did there? Used a reference to hell in a blog entry really very anti-religion. Well ok, it’s not really anti-religion, it’s just anti-nonsense. Anti-religion is scheduled for next week.
Back to the issue. I asked her about various things after it became apparent that she believed that the earth is 6.000 years old, and that the bible is in EVERY detail a factual and accurate account of events (at this point I thought it was kind of funny so I played along slightly .. by not rolling on the floor laughing at least).
My first question was about fossils. If the earth is only 6000 years old, why are we digging up fossils of extinct (and non-extinct I would suppose) species all over the world? Her answer was “God put them there”. Ok, how can you argue with that? Why did God put them there then? “I dont know, but he did”.
My next question on this withering date was about carbon dating.. here we have this accurate scientific method that you can prove works, and that tells us that the world is a SMIDGE over 6000 years old. She had no answer for that one, she just mumbled something about God making it look that way.
I didn’t really think there was much point to asking her why we have climate records from the arctic ice sheets from hundreds of thousands of years ago, but I did anyway. Again, God made that.
If God is just making all this stuff up for us to work out, then…
RIDDLE ME THIS, BATMAN: If God made everything, and everything is according to his great Intelligent Design (yes you thought I’d forgotten this wasn’t about religion didn’t you), then God also made me to not believe in his sorry sadistic ass. Why would anyone with that kind of ability care one little bit that some inferior creature believed in him anyway?
That is akin to me getting an antfarm, just so the ants will believe in me, fear me, worship me. It’s … strangely alluring, except ants wouldn’t give a flying fuck about me. Except maybe the very insecure ants who really weren’t able to trust their own abilities, or the very lazy ants who really didn’t want to take any responsibility themselves… they might go, “You up there, yes you, could you do this for me, cos I can’t be buggered myself?” or “Hey this is all YOUR fault I’m starving, it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m too dumb and lazy to actually go find some food myself”.
Anyway, if we are all parts of this wonderful creation .. sorry, design, then God will have no trouble with us annihilating the church, putting everyone believing in him on a big raft in the Pacific Ocean with no food, one knife, and a book on cannibalism, and going on with our merry little lives. Well, hey, everything is according to his design, so that part would be just another scripted chapter in his design manual. We could all wave at them and yell “Your God made us do this!” and smile at them as they drifted off.
Then we, the enlightened ones you could call us, could worry about the actual problems of the world, and approach them from a scientific angle so we can solve them, instead of just praying they get solved for us.
We don’t understand, so it must be God! … No dumbass, you don’t understand because you haven’t tried to work it out, or you’re too dumb to do so. Both reasons are probably applicable in most cases.
Certainly I weep for the children who will be taught this, unwrapping the candy and finding… a turd.
