It must be the heat

The summer sun has heated up the rails and this train keeps on a derailin'.

(back to Escalante soon)

If you believe that the Earth was created in 4000bc (or thereabouts) and/or that the Bible is literally true you are an idiot and this post is going to offend you, but then again, Ziggy probably offends you. It offends me, but in an entirely different way.

There are plenty of Bible questioning sites out there, my favorite being The Skeptics Annotated Bible, helpfully organized by topic and always there for you when you need some reminders about how God hates Jews. (or at least he did at the end) Check it out, they've greatly improved the look of their interface.

No one that's gone through even the worst public school should misunderstand the means and methods of scientific theory. And if you believe that 'scientists' have something to gain from saying the Earth is more than 4 billion years old please explain exactly what that is.

And so, if you're right, you're right. I'll be damned to eternal hellfire, possible forced to eat my own shit or spend every night in a tent with two sweaty guys, with the rain fly on. So what's your problem? Isn't it enough for you to be right without having to force the rest of us to agree with you? Your faith should be enough to sustain you through any trial just as it did Jesus. He had his doubts along the way, but in the end he believed (in himself) and did what he had to do despite popular public opinion. That should be a powerful lesson. Forcing people to believe the way you do has no success stories, not on big ticket items like this anyway.

But I suspect the reason that you feel the need to force your beliefs on others is the result of two things. One: extreme insecurity about what you do believe, since you really never thought it through very thoroughly and pretty much just accepted it all without questioning it. Two: there is no safer place than in the anonymous middle of the crowd and if everyone thinks the way you do then that will assure you that you made the right decision.

These two things dominated most of our lives, for a while. Insecurity is part of growing up, but what you're supposed to do is push your boundaries, make new ones, and question all the original thinking that put you where you started. Just like the scientific method. Make a theory, test those theories, revise the theories, rinse, repeat. But you are afraid of those boundaries. You've never gone outside of them. That would mean you would lose your anonymity and have to leave your safety blanket behind.

So you adopt the most common view of the day, accept things as they are given to you, slowly building up a cocoon to shield you from those stray unforseen ideas that come your way. You don't read challenging books, listen to challenging music, or even watch challenging movies. Safe is safe and you know all you'll ever need to know. You've been on a path, a path with lots of secondary paths leading off of it into the unkown, but you stuck to the wide clear path, the one that all of your neighbors and friends are following. Together you won't get lost. Together you'll be safe from the strange things off in the distance.

And even though you stick to a narrow set of beliefs, you don't really even understand those beliefs very well. You are the victim of circumstance at every turn. The reason you know anything is because it always happens the same way. You don't understand the mechanisms, you just know that they happen and that is enough for you, especially so long as it keeps happening. You know the stories of those people who experience things they don't expect. They get lost down one of those overgrown trails, often never to be seen again. If they are seen again, it is through a tangle of leaves and branches that shows you only scary things you never want to see again, and shows them the same old shit. Their path is more interesting (even if it requires some bushwhacking), but you'll never know.

Life is much easier if there are well defined answers to everything you face. You could get by on applying a more universal principle, but that would require applying knowledge to each situation you come across. Nope. It's much easier if you can just run down the checklist and simply pick the only option you're given. That both keeps you on the path, and also keeps things happening when they need to happen. If you had to stop and consider the consequences of your action each and every time a new situation arose, that would be horrible. Something might come up from behind as you stood there pondering, something even scarier than the thing you were pondering, since everything you know is travelling at the same speed, and if you slow down, you might get left behind.

So your life boils down to this:

• Birth
• Childhood - one that possibly included you as an interesting individual, being free from the mental malaise that would afflict you later
• School - where you learn the benefits of being alike, while exorcising the last of your demons
  
• Job - yup, this is where you were meant to be
• Marriage - ready or not here you come
  
• House - for the kids.
• Kids - because you have a house
  
• Bigger house - because that great room isn't big enough for that high definition rear projection television
• Church - because....children have to learn morality somewhere
• Graduation/college/etc
  
• Grandkids....it's all just a little bit of history repeating
• Retirement....because you deseve it
  
• Golf....because it is like life
  
• Death....because you're not a God, that would be blasphemy
  
• Heaven - you certainly deserve it, having never done anything wrong with your life
  

Of course, there's nothing wrong with any of these things (even golf) except when done in this particular order. For whatever reason, this particular sequence of events comes together like some fatal elixir in a large number of people. Something about their chemistry seems to take potentially wonderful events and makes them rote, and excruciatingly predictable. Too bad too, since most of those things are potential goldmines of wonder.

My derailment has derailed and led me to here. Funny how that happens.

My only advice to you is: everything you've been told may be a lie, and it's up to you to figure out what is the truth. Choose wisely.