Age of Aquariums

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Someday there will be a spiritual awakening in this country in which people of honest religious conviction will realize that not only are Catholics, Protestants or Pentecostals aspects of Christianity, but Christianity is, itself, a subset of a greater religious conviction of the other religions based on the practices of Abraham—Judaism and Islam.

This awakening will not be legislated in government halls. It won’t be shoved down people’s throats by school boards. It will not be fired out the barrel of a gun.

I believe this because I believe religious intolerance is not a sustainable human value.

There are a lot of things out there that have put this on my mind.

For one, there’s the monkey business going on in Kansas. That’s where, because of No Child Left Behind, which said, “Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist,” school boards are trying to establish a superstitious curriculum to run alongside authentic scientific thought.

Are you familiar with the argument of “intelligent design”? There are things in this universe that are so complex, the simplest explanation is a designer (Occam’s razor). I, myself, find the designer to be an incredibly complex entity. The problem is that if this designer were so smart, why are so many of these complex things so poorly designed? Doesn’t take any Stephen Hawking to know that noses shouldn’t drain backwards into the lungs—didn’t that happen when we changed our posture?

I’m not foolish (or arrogant) enough to say there is no creator—you know, absence of proof isn’t proof of absence, although absence of evidence is evidence of absence. I guess I do know one thing: An intelligent designer wouldn’t approve of his creation breaking his other creations over disagreements of how the creations should perceive the creator.