The Ugly Truth

I had a post up last night which I took down.  Not because I didn't mean any of it.  But because it had to do with organized religion.  Mostly it had to do with the religious right, who I just think are a bunch of kooks.

But I know a lot of very religious people who are very smart, who I like a lot and admire.  And I just started to feel guilty about what they might consider me to be poking fun at their very sincere beliefs.

I'm not. 

I think people who actually live Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or whatever lives are pretty admirable.  I mean, it's not easy to actually be peaceful, and kind, and humble, and generous, and thoughtful.

Among the big, angry, fearful, violent, ignorant mouths on the religious right, I just don't see any of that.  Frankly, I have a hard time considering those people Christian at all.  Lots of people say they're Christian.  That's easy to do.  Anybody can do that.  The hard part is being Christ-like.

These people--who hate the poor, celebrate wealth, cheer war, support torture, practice idolatry, hate their enemies, and revel in Old Testament styled vengeance--seemed to have skipped step two.

So, I don't really have a problem mocking those people.  They should be mocked, in much the same way that they mock their own professed religion.

But, again, I just started to feel bad about possibly mocking people, like the dozens of decent deeply religious people in my family, who are sincere and decent and live their religions rather than wear it like a campaign button, or use it as an excuse for misanthropy and xenophobia.  So I took it down.

But Cookie liked it.  So I'll put it up again.  If you're sensitive, or a dumbass, I wouldn't go any further.

DOVER, Pa., Sept. 23 - Sheree Hied, a mother of five who believes that God created the earth and its creatures, was grateful when her school board here voted last year to require high school biology classes to hear about "alternatives" to evolution, including the theory known as intelligent design.

But 11 other parents in Dover were outraged enough to sue the school board and the district, contending that intelligent design - the idea that living organisms are so inexplicably complex, the best explanation is that a higher being designed them - is a Trojan horse for religion in the public schools.

I’m no theologian, but intelligent design is about the dumbest idea religious people have come up with since selling indulgences or the Inquisition, or worshiping oddly shaped stains on trees as the Virgin Mary.

Or voting that regular people, like you and me, are Saints.

Or continuing to insist that Popes, who have endlessly been fallible and decreed ridiculous things, are infallible.

But intelligent design might actually top all that “the sun revolves around the world” silly crap.

Living organisms are so incredibly complex that only a higher being could have designed them?

That is the desperate silliness of people too lazy to learn the science of anything more complex than what primitive people, a couple thousand years ago, knew.

But you don’t have to learn or understand science to know that intelligent design is goofy.  Particularly not if you’re religious. You can just think about it for a minute.

If you were an all powerful being, who could, just on a whim, create the heavens and the earth, if you could, out of nothing, in seven days, create star birthing nebulas, all the fish in the oceans, light, color, sound, every known element, and even elements unknown, why would you bother making systems complex?

Why would you bother making physical laws that everything you made had to comply with?  I mean, that’s just making things difficult for yourself, isn’t it?

Why not just make a big flat world, that people could fall off of? With a sun and moon that crossed the sky once a day like they were on some kind of celestial track lighting?

Why make spleens, or lymph nodes, or crazy shit like gall bladders? I mean, if you’re that intelligent and that powerful, and if you made people out of mud, why not make them like Playdo people?  A bunch of malleable goo with a soul inside?

Why give them an appendix that they don’t even need?

That’s insane.

If there were a God in the way most modern Christians imagine God, the world would not be complex at all.  It would be incredibly simple. It would mindlessly simple.  In the way that Christians insisted it was for thousands of years.

Before scientists, despite torture and execution, finally proved it wasn't.

And that’s the irony of the new “intelligent design” argument. Because, you know, for the last two thousand years, organized religion has been endlessly arguing that the physical world is actually simple, and science has endlessly, again and again, been proving organized religion wrong.

And now, when organized religion has been proved wrong so many times in so many ways that it can’t even pretend to have any reason to defend its previous positions, what does it do?  It says, “Science is right! The world is more complex than religion has been saying for the last two thousand years…and that just proves that…um, we’re right!  When science proved that organized religion was wrong because the world was more complex than organized religion said it was, science merely proved that organized religion was right because, for the world to be more complex and complicated than organized religion could conceive or understand, would take a Supreme Being to make it so!  Therefore, two thousand years of being laughably wrong is just unassailable proof of being right!”

It’s insane.

I’m not saying there can’t be a Creator of this universe.  I’m just saying that if there is one, it’s much more likely that that Creator made physics and chemistry, and the primordial goop from which life rose up from, and that scientists, and geologists, and paleontologists have come much closer to unraveling the mystic truths of our Creator than a bunch of people rifling through thousand year old books, written by people who thought shellfish were a holy abomination.

You can be Christian and reconcile your beliefs with real science. You can be Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu or whatever and still reconcile your beliefs with science.  It’s not that hard.

What you can’t do, if you’ve got half a brain, is try to reconcile the world with a literal interpretation of the Bible.

It can’t be done.

And if you’re so crazy you’d like to try to do it—homeschool your kids, as bad as that is for them.  Teach them at your nutty church. Whatever.

But stop wasting the time and the money of everyone else who isn’t so nutty to believe Women were created from some dude's rib.

Come on.  That’s just stupid.

Plus, it's nutty and contradictory in the face of the new phony baloney "complexity proves creationism".  Then explain the mindless simplicity of all the women in the world simply springing from one guy's rib!  It's ridiculous.

If someone told you that your cat popped out of a your dog's rib, would you believe that?  If you had a boy gerbil and a girl gerbil and they were sleeping on the same pile of straw together, and the girl gerbil had baby gerbils, would you celebrate the amazing virgin births of your gerbils? 

How damn big would the boat need to be to pack in two of every kind of animal in the event of a worldwide biblical flood? 

These crazy creationists do understand that at the same time Noah was floating every single living thing in the world on his ark that there were people, animals, and plants on the other side of the world, who were migrating towards and through North America, that had never ever been in the mideast?

Whatever.

As a creation tale, as allegory, the Bible's fine.  The New Testament's as good as it gets.  Shame that the loudest Christians conveniently skip the best parts, like the Sermon on the Mount...But as reality?  If you believe that, that Old Testament stuff?  As history? As science?  You’re out of your fucking mind. 

And the New York Times, the "liberal" press, should have the nuts to point that out.

Comments

[Meg]

I hear what you're saying, but you know what? With all the outrage about intelligent design, progressive folks are taking the Republican bait, and hooked fish can't swim.

True, it is about intelligent design and abortion and gay marriage to the religious right.

But it is most decidedly not about intelligent design and abortion and gay marriage to the neocons.

The neocons love that progressives are getting worked up into a lather about intelligent design because while we're so busy with that we ain't doing squat about poverty and voting rights and listening to the poorer and less pale among us.

The neocons know something else: Many Democrats who are poor or aren't white Anglos oppose abortion and support intelligent design. They're seeing almost no action from their party on health care costs and voting rights, and Democratic city governments are aggressively supporting the condoization that's making them lose their homes. When the Democrats aren't serious about anything that's important to their life and livelihood, what might they do?

You guessed it. Just what a whole lot of Latinos did in 2004.

It's time we stop letting the Republicans set the terms of the debate.

And it's time we listen to people of color, poor people, and immigrants.

Otherwise, we're just laying down in front of the fascist steamroller.

Meg

[ricky]

Oh, Meg, I agree with you. The Gee Oh Pee political machine doesn't believe in intelligent design, they could give a rat's ass about the Ten Commandments in Court Houses, they don't care about gay people getting married, and they certainly don't want to see abortion outlawed.

And I have, from time to time, sort of blithely supported letting the Gee Oh Pee--or at least demanding that the Gee Oh Pee--overturn Roe v. Wade.

One, because it's a poker bluff these clowns have been pulling for nearly thirty years. Call them on it!

Two, because I'm a man. If I'm wrong, I didn't really lose all that much. That's not callousness. That's honesty.

And three, because sometimes I feel like the very important social benefits of preserving the right to choice and seperation of church and state and freedom of speech are finally being outweighed by the unprecedented damaged to our national treasury, our government, and our world in general.

I go back and forth on it.

Sometimes, again, I think, forget the Pledge. Focus on the big picture.

Other times, I think: fuck them. Let's not win a half assed battle. Why concede anything to these pricks?

If you're right, you're right.

Let's play for high stakes. Let's play for America, let's play for our children, let's play for our future.

All in.

Last man standing, wins.

Fuck them.

[Jo]

Ah ricky! You are indeed excellent.

[Ellen]

Now you've ruined all of those stories for me! :p

Well said as usual.

[Elisson]

There's nothing wrong with Intelligent Design, although it does a piss-poor job of explaining the existence of both the vermiform appendix and Karl Rove. My problem with Intelligent Design is that it's not science, although it tries to masquerade as such.

As something that is unprovable and that requires faith in the unknowable, ID is just another form of religion. If you want to teach it, fine: teach it in the context of Comparative Religion classes in which students can learn about, and pick apart, all kinds of religious beliefs. But keep it the fuck out of my kids' science classes, because it Ain't Science.

Why, O why, must our country be run by morons?

[ricky]

I guess what I think is stupid about "intelligent design" is not the belief that there is some kind of mystic force that's ultimately behind the unfolding of the universe.

What I find stupid about it is why these people have such difficulty reconciling evolution with that belief.

These people reject Darwin, when there's nothing about natural selection that's incompatible with religion.

Why are happy accidents so repugnant to these people? Isn't that what the gift of choice is all about? That the future is unsettled? What we make of our lives is entirely up to us?

Intelligent design smacks of Calvinism to me. Nothing happens that wasn't predetermined. The whole world is nothing but a bunch of chess pieces someone else is moving around the board.

And the logical fallacy behind it: if things are complex, they must be intended. The corollary to that is? Simple things are always unintended?

That's counter-intuitive, isn't it?

And there's the even stupider idea that these people of "faith" are pursuing scientific--fine, pseudo scientific--means of proving their faith.

It's idiotic. Why bother? The cornerstone of faith is: no proof required. To justify your faith with proof sort of undermines the value of your faith, doesn't it?

Oh, yeah, and also, you're right: it ain't science.

[Margaret]

You are a wise man on many topics, Ricky.

[Brandon]

Rich,

I have nothing to add to this stream of concurring comments other than I think your posting on the Intelligent Design Issue is possibly the best-written opinion on creation/evolution I've ever read. And I'm not just sucking up to you to get invited over to the speedo-headgear-Liz Phair-a-thon. Great piece.

Brandon

[cookie]

speedo-headgear-Liz Phair-a-thon!!??

um, did my invitation get lost in the mail or something?????