Okay, who brought the golden calf to my barbecue?

Can we just for five minutes forget that we once lived in caves and thought birth was beyond our control and that even the weather was a totally mysterious entity outside the realms of comprehension? Please?

There are fundamentalists in every corner of the globe fighting and whining about this or that silly point of religious idiocy, sure, but even here in these United States there are fundamentalists who’ve gone completely mental. This effects you, so listen up.

There are those who want to teach Intelligent Design in schools right next to Evolution as though there were some equitable distinction which could be assigned to them both. I ask you all to read this Open Letter to the Kansas School Board.

One of the most brilliant pieces of satire not written by Johnathan Swift, clearly. However, it seems inevitable that there will arise some buffoon who buys this as gospel.  (I haven’t looked through the entire letters section, but there’re probably a couple already.)

I worked with a guy recently who decided that he needed to invent a new god because of all the rain problems here in Seattle. So he went out and combined two ancient gods from different mythologies into one Seattle rain god. He assures me that since he has begun worshiping this newly christened—pun intended—god he as seen a marked reduction in the amount of mud that his dogs track in on rainy and post rainy afternoons.

I agree that the human mind is incredibly powerful at creating intellectual connections between otherwise utterly disparate mental entities (under the amplified influence of hallucinogens these AnyThings become interconnected—this is not a fact of the world but a fact of the mind). These perceived inter-relations may be useful as insights or creative impulses, but they are not fact nor are they science per se (as creative impulses they can lead to new discoveries, sure, but that’s just a roll of the dice waiting to be tested and verified).

Now, I love gods just as much as the next mostly human entity.  But can we please take one more step away from the Dark Ages. This is the 21st Century, right?