HELLFIRE AND HORSE MANURE

Southern California is GREEN!

All our hillsides, at least the ones that haven't turned to mud and slipped into the sea, are full of beautiful green plants right now because we have gotten drenched with rain this season. In fact there was more rain in the first month of this year than in all of the last three years, and still the rain is coming down. I've lived here more than twenty years and I've never seen anything like it. It's been said that this season was the third rainiest since they started keeping records in 1878, and the biggest rains in Southern California since 1966. Really? So what happened in 1966? Certainly it wasn't global warming back then. Hmm, maybe it was Satan!

Closet Philosophy Comedy Alert: To those of you who did not have a mental chuckle after that wisecrack, you are ordered to go listen to all the Bill Hicks CDs, squeegee your third eye clean and then call me in the morning. And definitely don't go to see Constantine! I rather liked that movie but all through it I was wondering how many people really buy in to its overwrought brand of Catholic hellfire. Probably it's not people who love action fantasy movies that have a superstition problem though.

Why should I be worried about that in the 21st Century? Because too many people are spouting medieval nonsense when we should all know better. In early January after the tsunami hit the Far East, I saw Billy Graham's son Franklin say on TV that the big waves were "the work of Satan." For a split second I thought he was trying to get a laugh doing a lousy version of Dana Carvey's Church Lady, but sadly, Graham was serious. I might have expected something like this going on the overtly preachy channels, but this was going out to millions of people as "news" on that "fair and balanced" channel. (I dare not speak its name; you might be seduced into watching it! It was only through a great effort of will and the Helping Hand of God that I was able to turn away from the Scion of Graham myself!)

Get it right people, earthquakes will happen and they will cause tsunamis when they happen underwater. It is not the work of Satan; our planet has this kind of problem and it always will. We don't know how to accurately predict earthquakes yet, but we might eventually. That is, unless the superstitious numbskulls among us prevent the next generation of researchers from getting a proper scientific education.

I am ashamed to say that in this country, in this supposedly enlightened time of scientific wonders, Reason itself is under attack. For example, in my son's science class the other day the teacher asked how many people do not believe in Evolution. My son said more than half of the class's hands went up. You wonder why I don't take my kids to any church and home school them about religion? It's because so many churches push their mythology as truth over this established piece of science. People like the electric lights, the cars, the disease cures and the iPods that science has given them; why do they suddenly stop at Evolution?

Because it's a meme that tends to destroy Blind Faith. I mean destroyed, because Blind Faith broke up over thirty years ago! (Sorry, I couldn't resist!) Church leaders fear that faith might fall apart if people were allowed to question it, so any competing meme must be destroyed with extreme prejudice. As far as they are concerned, The Bible is always true, so never mind all the evidence -- Evolution's just a theory and not fact.

Sure, Darwin's idea of Evolution is a theory, but so is Einstein's Theory of Relativity and we all know atomic bombs work. Scientists will label all ideas theories because they recognize that our ideas may need to be modified when we discover new facts. If an old scientific idea doesn't fit the new facts, it is refined or it is tossed out. This is how we were able to move out of the Dark Ages and build flush toilets. Of course the Theory of Evolution doesn't directly solve our plumbing problems like other branches of science, but it does present a much different story about how we came to be human than the Bible, and there's the rub. Face it people, Evolution fits verifiable biological facts, the Bible does not.

Strange, many of my generation thought that the question of a billion or so years of evolution versus a seven day creation was settled decades ago. Even the Vatican says that Genesis is not to be taken literally, but many of today's fundamentalist preachers, especially the televangelist types, still insist on the literal truth of every word in the Bible. Okay, go read those chapters in Genesis sometime; it's only a few pages. You'll see that its story of creation is a wildly unlikely one. For starters, there's no mention of dinosaurs in it, but dinosaur fossils can be found on every Continent. Even the fossil record for humans stretches farther back than the Bible records, but when science presents facts like these, fundamentalists will say you simply must believe Genesis as written.

Lots of people do as they are told at this point, but a flat answer isn't good enough for some. For these questioners the fundamentalists have built towers of tortured logic to justify their Biblical notions. They will say that dinosaurs were wiped out in Noah's Flood. They will say scientists aren't dating things right. They will say that the Devil put fossils in the rocks to fool us. They will say that animals could not possibly have evolved the way they have, that an unseen hand has guided the process. They used to call this flimsy edifice Creation Science and now they call it Intelligent Design, but it's the same old Biblical mythology trying to put a supernatural spin on things when a natural explanation makes perfect sense.

Belief in Intelligent Design is especially funny to me because fundamentalist conservatives who wear their faith on their sleeve also claim to be more rational than liberals. I once got a solicitation to subscribe to a conservative journal that smugly said I couldn't possibly claim to be rational if I was left of center. Umm, excuse me, but if you believe horse manure about a being with horns and a pitchfork running around putting fossils in rocks to fool us, I cannot give you any intellectual respect. I don't care if Bob Jones University gave you a master's degree in economics, you are NOT RATIONAL.

Maybe these are the people that believe the things Constantine says about the Devil and God. Like the movie, there are Biblical passages that make God seem like he's got a gambling problem; read the Book of Job sometime, he makes a bet with the Devil there too. Of course that's not literally true; the authors were really using the story to describe why bad things happen to good people. There were trying to make sense of things. Likewise, the ancients had no scientific explanation for natural disasters like tsunamis, so it was easy to call it the work of an evil demon or God's punishment. In the 21st Century that's a cop out. God is not mad at a bunch of Indonesians for living too close to the ocean, and the Devil doesn't even exist, so don't even start to blame the tsunami on him. There is no divine hand moving against us. There's things that are caused at a geologic level and there is no "meaning" behind a natural disaster, at least not one at a human level.

We are left with the natural laws put in place at Creation. Put in place by what you ask? Call it God if you want, but I think the how and why of Creation is Unknowable. (And worth a lot more words than a puny column like this.) Knowing the laws helps us predict things but it only goes so far, because the natural laws include the spice of serendipity that we call Probability. For instance the laws of physics we've discovered say that two hydrogen atoms must form one helium atom, given enough pressure. This is what is happening deep in our sun. Physics also says the reaction also gives off energy in the form of light and heat, but it does not specify exactly where that energy goes. Maybe that's God in the details, deciding which direction each photon escapes the sun. Maybe even He/She/It doesn't know which way the photons will dance, but delights in the surprise of it all.

Probability does not always flow in the concrete channel we expect, like the one we built for the LA River to carry away the torrential downpours we get every few decades. As deep as we made the channel, unlikely events will splash out from time to time. Some events in this world happen only once every fifty years or so, some happen once every thousand or million years. We know things like geologic disasters are possible, even probable; unfortunately no one can say exactly when they will occur. We will get better at prediction, but we will still be surprised from time to time.

These answers are not good enough for some. They cannot handle a world where some things are left open, so they seek any answer that sounds good to quell their anxiety. Churches happily provide the old traditional answers because it's in their interest. Their leaders shout down Evolution, but they still use all the other things science has brought into our lives, like TV to broadcast their services and the modern medicine they get on their health plans. A guy like Franklin Graham probably never questions his Christian mythology as he types sermons into his laptop but he sells the superstition anyway to keep his organization strong. Even when that makes society as a whole less strong. This is a shame because there are so many good people who are sincerely trying to do what God wants by going to church, it's just that there's a difference between what God really wants, and what these fundamentalist leaders say God wants. To me God is so far beyond our comprehension that He/She/It is probably way past any form of wanting.

Unfortunately things are changing in this world and fundamentalist thinking isn't solving any of our problems. In the coming decades we're heading for another doubling of the population while we use up the last of our petroleum. We need new sources of energy and food. Like bacteria in a Petri dish, are humans going to use up all the food and die in our own toxins? We need science more than ever.

Science is necessary because it brings us knowledge about the world. Wisdom is necessary too, because scientific knowledge needs to be applied wisely in order to give us any benefit. Religion? Well, reverence for God is good too, but ancient texts need to be applied with wisdom like anything else.

Call me a heretic if you like but even I mutter my thanks to God now and then. Lately I've been thankful for the lovely green hills around the City of the Angels. With so much rain lately I'm starting to think that maybe Southern California isn't a desert any longer. Maybe it's Seattle's turn to be a desert! But then we can't base a trend on just one year. Bottom line, I believe we can still rejoice in the presence of the Lord and we could make this world a sea of joy if we learn to live more wisely, more in harmony with this planet as it really is, by continually improving our knowledge of it.

But enough of that. Right now I have this strange compulsion to go back into the Closet and dig out my iPod to listen to some nice digital Blind Faith. Sure beats the scratchy old vinyl copy. Science marches on! Thanks for reading and until next time, the Closet is closed.

© 2005 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: The editors and publisher of Cosmik Debris Magazine feel it's in our own best interest to say... Fossil record, schmossil record! It was the BIG guy, and the seven days, and the fire and snake and that apple, there. See, what you gotta understand about Rusty is... he's goin' to hell, along with the communists, the queers and the Democrats. But not us. No sir. We're being good. And Noah! That was a neat trick, too. So we're saying we just print the stuff. We don't even read it because there are too many, you know, big words.