Timeline

If the Catholics really believe in Eternity, the same eternity I’ve been taught, then what’s all the fuss over a few centuries in Purgatory?

There is no quicker way to announce to me that you are a charlatan and full of shit than to say, “Well what Jesus really meant was…”

I hear the preachers changing the language with their reinterpretations of some ancient Greek word, I hear them pick and choose which parts of their texts is literal and which are analogies.  I hear them revising their “incorruptible” book, and I let it go.

But as soon as I hear some well-dressed preacher standing behind his pulpit of gold in an air-conditioned arena telling his flock of sheeple what he thinks Jesus REALLY meant…  That’s just too much for me.

That goes above and beyond the usual manipulation.  They have a large book full of imaginary shit but that’s not enough for them, now they’re  just making new things up as they go along.

Hey, someone had to say it.  I guess this is where I earn the hypocrite title because I’m the one who always says how much he hates sensationalistic journalism and misleading headlines…  I’m not really anti-planet, I’m anti-half-assed-hippie.  I’m actually kind of pro full-on-hippie, they at least have a sense of commitment to a cause, even if I don’t agree with them all the time.  It’s these weekend warrior types who drive big Bubba trucks to work all week and then spend all weekend bitching about how we’re destroying the planet.  This BP oil spill has made a lot of the half-ass hippies float to the surface.

I’ve heard enough of this bullshit about saving the planet.  Even excluding the extreme hippies who anthropomorphize the planet and claim “she can’t take much more”…  the rest of them, for the most part, are not concerned with saving the planet.  They are concerned with their living space.  The planet is in NO danger from humans.  Our ecosystem is in danger, our clean place to live may be in danger but this temperate stage of the planet’s existence is only a small part of a larger cycle and on the geologic timescale, it is incredibly short lived.  This bullshit about global-warming, recycling and now the oil spill…  It’s all about inconveniencing the humans and has nothing to do with actual concern for the planet.

If you lose your job, your livelihood, or you can’t enjoy the beach because of the oil spill then I understand your complaint.  If you have a genuine love for the environment, the human ecosystem, the animals caught up in the oil spill then I understand your concern.  But these people are starting to talk about how we are destroying the planet.

It’s another case of taking things too far.  Yes, the Gulf oil spill is a damn shame, it’s going to destroy many lives and we will be dealing with this for many years to come.  I hate to see it and I feel bad for the people and animals caught up in it.  But in the grand scheme, the planet is barely affected.

And then we get the conspiracy nuts who want to make big business or the government responsible for intentionally destroying our lives…  Or they’ll call for a ban of the company.  How many of you idiots out there who are boycotting BP realize that you are only hurting the local station owners and that it’s probable that you are getting BP gasoline at the independent stations anyway because BP’s wholesale tanks had the lowest price that day?  Didn’t know that your local gas station delivery tankers fill up at different wholesalers depending on the day’s price?  Neither did I until I did a small amount of research.  Same way I found out a little about the oil drilling process and how long it takes to cap an open well.  Everyone’s yelling about how long it’s taking them to drill the relief well as if these things go in overnight!  In between signing all those petitions, creating FaceBook boycott groups and forwarding all those chain e-mails did you do any actual research about your new pet peeve?  Have you learned anything new?  But no, I guess it’s better easier to just sit in your computer chair and scream about how we should all boycott a company that you yourself are probably still using.  It makes you feel better anyway…

They blame our legislators, they blame the business but they never take on any of the blame themselves.  They justify their guilt by saying things like “Hey, I have to get to work somehow” or “My consumption is nothing when compared to the big picture”.  These people are wishy-washy, half-hearted morons who will jump on the next bandwagon they see their friends are on.  No sense of commitment.  If they really cared, do something about it.  Bike to work, do without things, change your job if it requires you to go carbon-positive…  make real change!  Otherwise, shut the fuck up!

You know why I don’t go out of my way to bike to the store or move closer to work so I save gasoline on a 75 mile daily commute?  Because I don’t fucking care about saving the planet.  Not in the way these pseudo-hippies are screaming about.  I probably care more about the planet than they do, it’s the humans that I’m not so sure are worth saving.  So purely out of self-interest, I’m hoping that real change does come but I’m not making loud, senseless gestures that do nothing but announce to all who will listen that I am a sensitive caring soul who is somehow better than the guy next to me who isn’t holding up a picket sign.  Hummers and SUV’s everywhere I look and I’m expected to believe that we’re really trying?

One day it will come to a head and we will be forced to deal with it.  I expect that the transition will be traumatic.  You think 4$ gasoline was expensive?  You’ll yearn for those days when we really near the end.  But that’s the only way to get people excited about things, hit them in the wallet.  Humans have devolved to the point that unless it costs them money, it doesn’t concern them.

Hopefully we’ll die off and make room for another species to have a chance at the big game.  I’m all for human extinction.  I’m not planning it, I’m not even rooting for it.  I just know that it’s coming and I’ve accepted it.  I also think it deserves a bonus giggle if we caused it ourselves.  But we’ll go soon enough and your “Mother Earth” will still deal with things like this latest oil spill.  (Come to think of it, what are the possibilities of an earthquake or volcano shifting the crust enough to rip open an oil deposit?)

George Carlin summed it up pretty well when he said, “The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles… hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages… And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference?”

So “bad” shit will still happen to the planet, there just won’t be any humans here to assign blame and feel superior.

This latest “God Equation” isn’t even laughable, it’s just sad.  Last night, the “news” promised us a story tonight about a local man who has come up with a mathematical formula that proves the existence of god.

I’ll just let that sink in for a second before I continue because there is so much wrong with that statement…

Ready to move on?  Okay, let’s look at that for a second.

My first problem:
If this guy has proved the existence of god, wouldn’t that be an important enough story to tell us tonight instead of running a teaser for tomorrow night’s broadcast?  I’d think that, especially here in the “deep” south, it would lead the headlines.  I’d be VERY interested if you could show me proof.  I think the whole world would want to know about that.  But no, we’ll cover sports and weather and wait to tell you about the most important thing ever tomorrow night.

Second problem:
Since he’s not leading the headlines, they’ve already relegated him to “quack” status.  This isn’t the first God Equation and sadly it won’t be the last.  In every new incarnation of this “formula” many of the variables are arbitrary and when someone produces “results” they are proving correlation, not cause.  Every few years some new idiot comes to the conclusion that people are so dumb that we can just mix together equal parts “math” and “science”, add in a dash of “quantum” and they’ll believe it.  Hey, if they swallowed a monotheism made up of a trinity of gods, why the hell not?

Third (and biggest) problem:
Isn’t the point of faith to believe in the unprovable?  If they DID prove god, wouldn’t that ruin the point of religion?  If you prove it, everyone will join the club and that’ll ruin that “holier (and therefore somehow better) than thou” attitude that super-religious people have.  Religion is a hobby of mine and in the many conversations I have had with people of varying denominations, I have attempted the standard reconciliation of science and religion in order to keep the peace.  And in almost every single case that argument is refuted.  Religious people have a desire, maybe a need, to believe in the supernatural.

I tried to allow for both, I was willing to let science and religion sleep peaceably beside each other but it’s the religious folks that insist on causing the friction.  I attempt with “Maybe the Big Bang is just the physical result of ‘let there be light’ and maybe creating the world in six days refers to six trips around the galactic core” and without fail I am always told that I am wrong.  Six days means six 24hour periods of day/night they insist that the Universe was created whole and intact and never formed slowly from the result of the Big Bang.  They insist that the Earth is only 6000 years old.  Some of the people I talk with will let this one slide but still cling to most of the rest…  That book is to be taken literally.  Some (very few) people insist on taking it 100% literal, almost all of them will pick and choose which parts we have to take literal and which parts can be ignored. (Citations available if you really want to get me rolling on this but for now, let it slide)

So we end up with a group of people that cover their ears and close their eyes to science while embracing an ancient holy scripture.  Wouldn’t a mathematical equation (even one with pseudo terms and faulty logic) just infuriate these people?  For once I’m coming to the defense of religious people here…  If they are happy in their delusions and they are so hardened that evidence and proof will not shake the foundations of their faith, isn’t a “God Equation” kind of an insult?

These are the same people responsible for censoring Copernicus and imprisoning Galileo.  Scientific method is not their strong suit.  When carbon dating says the Turin cloth was created in the 1300′s, science is wrong.  When that same carbon dating tells of a 4800-year old piece of wood near Mt. Ararat, science has proven the Noah’s Ark story.  They point to archaeological expeditions that have dug up ancient ruins of cities mentioned in the Bible and scream “vindication, proof the Bible is fact!” just because the city is where the Bible said it was.  Then these people go read a Tom Clancy novel and never think about the story as fact simply because he mentions the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial.

It would seem that science has no place in religion so why is this guy trying to dupe people with seemingly “difficult” math?  He thinks that if he talks over our heads and throws around enough big scary “sciency sounding” words and a few Greek symbols, some bubba in a pick-up truck will declare that proof enough for him.  The rest of us (believers and non-believers alike) will just laugh at him and probably explain why his equation is flawed.  This is the same crackpot that will point to the banana as proof of God’s intelligent design.  One word refutation; Pineapple.

Someone once told me a line that I’ve come to adopt as my own mantra when I explore the Christian Bible.  Some words that if we could just come together and agree on, we’d all bump elbows a little bit easier in this world; “That book is full if truths, not facts.”