For anyone who actually gives a tin turd, the Birdie Cam is up and running again. I fell prey to one of the classic blunders (no, I didn’t start a land war in Asia): I took a system that was working fine and tried to improve it, unwittingly administrering a colossal cluster-type fuck in the process. I was tired of watching my main wifi access point laboring to handle both my regular LAN traffic (both Shawn and Margaret’s computers access the Interweb wirelessly) and the traffic from my security cameras, so I decided to add another access point and split the work between camera-related traffic and computer-related traffic.

Problem was, I could never get the two APs to work and play well with each other, and one or another wireless device (laptops, wireless-to-Ethernet bridges, even our garage remotes) was always getting foozled. Finally I just gave up (at eleven o’ clock at night; why do these things always take until eleven o’clock at night to come to a head?) and went back to a single access point. Everything seems to be both hunky and dory now, knock on phenolic resin.

So, what else has been going on….hmmmm….

Oh yeah, Intelligent Design failed the smell test in Pennsylvania.

Look, I’m not going to re-hash old arguments as to why ID is not fit for teaching in a science class. I think that this most recent case re-hashed these arguments quite nicely, thank you. (I especially enjoyed the fact that the plaintiff’s attorney was able to get one of the school board’s expert witnesses to admit that, under his revision of the definition of science, astrology would have to be granted equal footing with Intelligent Design. Bet that equivocation honked a few noses.)

The people I know who believe that the Universe and everything in it is a creation of God….believe that the Universe and everything in it is a creation of God. They may theorize that He set the wheels of evolution in motion, or they may think that the fossil record is actually a little joke He is playing on all of us, particularly the gullible paleontologists. But they believe the Creator made it all happen. They don’t see the need to dress their beliefs up as a pseudo-science in order to feel good about them.

Hey, Christians (And for that matter, anyone else whose religious beliefs include the concept of a divine Creator)! I’d like you to say something, aloud, right now, as you read this. Say, “God created the heavens and the Earth.”

Go ahead, say it. “God created the heavens and the Earth.”

Wasn’t that simple? Didn’t it feel good? And well it should! You know it to be the truth, why shouldn’t it feel good to say it out loud, for anyone to hear? I bet God is happy to hear you say it as well. He already knew you knew it, but it probably cheers Him up a little to hear some of His children speak sooth, bold as brass, in the presence of others. Particularly us skeptics.

Isn’t that enough? To know that the Creator is on His throne, looking out over (and for) His creation, and that no sparrow shall fall without Him knowing about it? Must you tart up your deeply-held convictions with the lexicon of the anti-faithful, the empiricists? Doesn’t that, in fact, actually cheapen your faith?

It is my opinion that, in a truly enlightened society, those who question the existence of God would not be so quick to look down their nose at those who do not. Conversely, those who have faith would exhibit the maturity to acknowledge that their convictions stem from just that—faith—and would stop trying to cobble together rational or scientific explanations for the things they know to be true. I have no problem with creation myths, and the desire of people to believe that they are true; I certainly have no proof to the contrary. My only problem is with those who seek to legitimize their convictions within another paradigm entirely, such as Science.

To do so is an insult to God. It implies that you are such a megalomaniac as to think you will ever get within a thousand light-years of beginning to figure His shit out.