Plaintiffs: The American People

Defendents: Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et.al.

Going against European law AND the rules of common decency, Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Rice et/al tortured prisoners in secret CIA prisons.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070608/ap_on_re_eu/eu_cia_secret_prisons

This is not and should not be the policy of the United States of America!

Impeach the monsters who allowed/caused/approved this policy!

Time and time again, I hear a common theme among the more rational creationists: I'll subscribe to the theory of evolution, but YOU'LL NEVER GET ME TO AGREE THAT MAN WAS AN ACCIDENT! OH! THE HORROR!

Why is man is so afraid to admit he is not some cosmic accident? Just for a minute, let's play a thought experiment. Just suppose, for one painful minute, that we all ARE just some freak of nature? After all, how could one account for dwarf throwing, Rudy in Rouge, and genital mutilation? Yea, sure, the Lord works in mysterious ways, but even Muslims above the Arctic Circle have a heck of a time figuring out in what direction to pray and when.

All religions have questions marks they are unable to answer, very few have been able to say that question marks are part of what it means to exist. Religion is a work of man. How else can you explain the corners man paints himself into with his convictions?

Man is convinced he is made in HIS image. Or HER image, as the feminist is wont to point out. From where does this come that our Creator should even consider to lower him/her/itself to our standard of perceiving the world around us? From the Bible, of course, the historical work of literature that the Devout consider to be the direct pipeline from God to Man. But what if it’s not, what if it’s just a work of literature, a series of books cherry picked by the Church to fit a preconceived notion of the events, as the evidence suggests? I cannot answer that, and most do not want that question answered.

But what I will answer is an obvious question both Dawkins and the Devout both miss: How can we possibly claim to accurately observe events about our world around us, since our senses are undoubtedly limited to what our brain can interpret? The answer is that we cannot. We must first be aware of the filter we see the world through, our bodies.

A common myth is that humans only use some small portion of our brains. WRONG. We use a small portion of our brains AT ANY GIVEN TIME. That’s like saying you only use a small portion of the wheels on your car, so the rest of it is being wasted. The distinction is lost on the general public, and it is exploited for entertainment and marketing purposes.

I recently read a biography of the Grateful Dead, in which LSD use was touched on. The idea was, back then, that LSD took the lid off the restrictions your senses put upon your brain, as if your brain had this unlimited processing capacity. Little wonder why people’s brains were often scrambled by the experience, while others found enlightenment from it. Little wonder why hallucinations occurred as the brain tried to make sense of the flood of data piled into it when the chemical opened up the floodgates.

Scientists often talk about “systems” in the environment. You are hearing a lot about this in global warming, and for as long as I’ve been a biologist have struggled with this concept. A system infers design, design infers intelligence, and what environmental scientist is going to start subscribing to Intelligent Design to support his or her research? Well, these days anything is possible.

But consider the Nile Delta. When seen from space, what a beautiful geological feature. Some would even say it’s an ecological system. But it’s not. It’s what happens when water runs downhill, carrying huge amounts of sediment, for millions of years, into a large body of water where those sediments settle out due to gravity and relative buoyancy of the materials. It creates a zone of high energy and nutrients that fosters plant and animal growth.

What appears to be an orderly pattern of events is simply man’s interpretation of those events into a “system”, a cosmic accident. That doesn’t take away from its beauty or purpose, nor does it take away the possibility that God had a hand in its making, or in the events that caused the conditions that led to its making.

We should be under no illusions that we can comprehend the nature of our Creator, or even whether he/she/it even exists. That not for us to decide, and is much less a decision for someone else to decide for us.