OmegaMom

Our (green)house is a very, very, very fine (green)house

So the greenhouse is complete, except for some trim work, as of today.  We happily lugged our two “baby” chickens into the greenhouse to provide a contained greeting spot for old hens and new chickens to get accustomed to each other, in preparation to migrating the new birds into the large coop.

I have to say, the greenhouse is awesome.  OmegaDad did a wonderful job.  It’s neat, tidy, sunny, light and warm inside, roomy, has lots of beams to hang plants from, and looks like it may provide a very nice spot to hang out on chilly days that have some sunshine.  Not that I’m thinking of lazing about there in the dead of winter, mind you.  But it’s really, really nice.

To refresh the memory, here’s what it looked like before:

And this is what it looks like now:

(Pay no attention to the detritus in the foreground of the second picture–there’s a pair of sawhorses with plywood making a work surface, which is covered with paint cans, tools, scrids and scrads of lumber and foam molding, and it provides a nice place to lean rakes, shovels, brooms, etc. while they’re in use.  The whole affair is due to be removed Very Soon Now.)

I am most satisfied.

The bunny…the bunny…oh, I love the bunny

The day after our baby duckling died (I am still sad about that), OmegaDotter went off to play with some neighborhood friends.  An hour later, one of the girls poked her head around the back of the house to ask if we, by any chance, had some carrots?  Why?  Well, see, there’s this bunny that we’re trying to catch…

So I provided some carrots, and figured they’d have a grand time unsuccessfully trying to attract one of the wild bunnies that hang out in the neighborhood (some of them are very interested in our veggie garden, but we have netting over it to deter moose, and it seems to deter the bunnies as well).

An hour later, three girls show up in our backyard lugging the world’s most enormous bunny.  OmegaDad and I take one look and know it’s someone’s pet bunny, but whose?  So we stash the bunny in our downstairs bathroom, animal refuge par excellence, I print up a bunny flier with a picture, and we send the girls out armed with fliers and tape to attach same to mailbox clusters around the neighborhood.

This is the bunny:

You can’t tell, but he’s HUGE.

A day later we get a call from Kelsey, who says she thinks it’s her bunny.  Since at that point I had no idea where the bunny was–A. and G. had taken it home, then A2 and her sister had taken it to their home–I asked her to call later when the dotter was home, so we could return the bunny.

A few hours later, she called and asked if we wanted the bunny.

So now we have a bunny.  His name is Copper.  He’s 7/8ths Belgian giant, 1/8 satin, three years old, and “frisky”, according to Kelsey’s dad.  “Frisky” means he’s not neutered, and thinks people’s legs are sexay female bunnies.

He, too, is moving into the greenhouse as soon as we get the (utterly gross yucky stinky peee-yew) bunny cage and shelter that we got from Kelsey’s family cleaned up.

Fame!

In my last post, I talked about Michael Jackson’s death and how I thought it was tragic.  Please understand, I am not trying to make him out to be any sort of hero.  To me, “tragic” does not necessarily correlate with “heroic”; I was thinking more on the lines of “tragic waste”.  I just think of a boy star who grew up surrounded by people who wanted a piece of him, and not having the maturity to realize that your friends are the people who will pull you up when you’re doing something stupid and say, “What on earth are you thinking, man?!”  There you are, young and rich and talented, and you’ve got people who call themselves “friends” who are not “friends”, but enablers, and they poison your mind against the ones who want you to stop and think for a few moments…to the point where all you have around you are the sleazebags, the sycophants, the wimps who *do* like you for yourself but aren’t strong enough to pull you back.  That is the tragedy to me, that someone with so much promise went off into La-La Land.

Oh, it’s not a new story; it’s so old it shows up in fables and folk tales and (no doubt) the Bible.  But it’s still a sad story, to me.

I’m leaving on a jet plane

The dotter and I board a plane very late this evening to head off to visit GrannyJ for a few weeks.  We leave poor OmegaDad behind to cope with introducing chickens to each other, figuring out how to make a bunny hutch out of the plywood and lumber we have left over, and being left alllll alooooone.  Right now, I’m in that state of semi-frantic obsessive list-checking.  Alas, some things on the list were destined to not get done.

I’ll try to post some entries, but am not sure how often.  The first week coincides with a visit from my bro and his family, so you’re more likely to see stuff after the end of the week.

We have been here in Alaska now for a year and a half.

A while back, the dotter wanted to write a love note to One And Only True Love.  Remember him?

“Dear One And Only True Love:  I will love you forever and ever, OAOTL!  Yay!  OAOTL, you are so handsome!  Yay OAOTL!  I love you!”

Ahem.  Okay; we thought it was cute.  We put it in an envelope and put a stamp on it, and then I let it sit on the dresser by the front steps for quite a while.  Because, while it was cute, it was also a little bit overboard and I wasn’t sure how OAOTL’s mom would feel about such a…overwhelming…note.

Unbeknownst to me, OmegaDad popped it into the mail one day.

A few days ago, in the mail, there was a letter to OmegaDotter.  The return address?  OAOTL’s name and address.  Being Mean Mom, I made her do her homework and help with the chickens before I pointed it out to her, but as soon as she saw it, nothing else mattered.  She ripped it open.  There were pictures (one up above, from the preschool “graduation”–aren’t they cute?!).  There was a drawing of a beautiful rainbow and hearts.  There was a note.  OmegaDotter was walking on air.  She had to tape the pictures and letter up on her wall above her bed.  I was told–rather fiercely–not to tell anyone, especially not K., her current BFF.

I hang my head in shame:  My first thought was to let all my blog readers know. 

There was also a note from OAOTL’s mom (thank goodness!) in which she made it very clear she was immensely amused by the love letter.

So:  Love lasts forever, or at least more than a year and a half.

All of which brings me to a separate topic, yet related:  Surely, even the most rabid anti-Obama people must recognize that he and his wife are (still!) wildly in love with each other–and they really like each other, too!  Every picture of them together at the inauguration, and every picture of them together from prior to that, shows two people who are constantly touching, looking at each other, whispering, sharing, caring.  As someone said in one of the comments to the (many many) pictures of them dancing at the various inaugural balls, “They look like it’s their wedding night!”  And there were a great many “Awww!  They’re so cute!” comments, as well.

I find myself hoping that the dotter will find a similar relationship, one of partners and equals and friends.

(Photo:  REUTERS/Jason Reed)

I also find myself hoping that such an obviously loving and intimate marriage is an inspiration to others, especially people who find themselves in a relationship where they feel one-down, where one person obviously is more invested in the relationship than the other.  See?  There’s hope.  There are people out there who can find True Wuv, and so can you.

The scientific method, that is.  Theories?  We don’t need no steenkin’ theories, man!  Hypotheses?  Pish-tush!  Soooo 20th century!  Experimentation?  Observation?  Oh, puh-leeze!  Who needs that stuff?  ‘Cause we’ve got data.

Gigabytes of data.  Terrabytes of data.  Petabytes.  Hexadeca-bytes.  Google-bytes, even!  (But not Google™ type bytes.)  Infini-bytes!  We have data pouring out our ears these days, thanks to the Intertubes, and so Wired Magazine has declared The End Of The Scientific Method.

‘Cause, y’see, we can take all that data, put it in a big Magic Data Mangler, shake it, stir it, decant it, and ta-da!  New science!  All these nifty correlations will spill out, neat science-y goodness just spread in front of us like a field of diamonds, sparkling and glittering and making us gasp at the magic of it all.  Kozmik All knows it’s much easier to do that than to, say, oh…think.  Who needs to look at the world and wonder "why?" or "how?" or "what would happen if we did x?"

I’m sure OmegaBro will be glad to know he doesn’t need to go traipsing off to all his field sites any more.  Why bother to investigate what happens to sawfly galls on southwestern stream willows in flood years versus in dry years?  Why spend your time counting galls on specific trees at specific sites each year?  I’m sure that information is out there in the interwebs cloud, just floating around, waiting for dear OmegaBro to write the proper program to collect it, stir, shake, and spill, and voila, he will have his community ecology interactions down to a "T".

Of course, there’s that silly little thing like, oh, deciding what to mine from the vast cloud of info out there.  And why.

As someone commented on the essay, "garbage in, garbage out"–that grand old saying about computers and data–applies here.  Given how infested the web is with spam and commercialism and outright crankery, using the "just grab all the data out there and whirl it around in some big-ass computers" approach might deposit a lovely fewmet of, say, colonics cleansing being effective at removing years-old parasites from poor haggard human bodies.  Or someone might use it to prove that Indigo Children really are an increasing influence on world politics today.

Lots of other folks have said it, but I’ll say it, too:  Theory is not dead.  The scientific method is not passe.  The Wired essay is waving its hand at statistical correlation being science, all gee-gosh-golly-wow charts-n-graphs.  But that’s not science.  It’s cool, yes, I’ll grant that.  And lots of interesting information is coming out of the expanding ability to correlate disparate groups of data and seeing what patterns emerge.  But science is asking "why?", trying to figure out the natural world, trying to understand underlying laws that drive the universe, delving into genetics and fossils and tokamaks and outer space and multi-dimensional math and gravity and thermonuclear processes that make stars burn bright…

All that kind of stuff.

Y’see, the information mining that Wired is going gaga over has–as its very basis–human beings who explored the world and teased out important basics based on theories, based on thousands of years of human beings asking questions, posing hypotheses, testing them out, deciding what works and what doesn’t, and why it works that way and not another, and how to harness the way it works to make life easier (or more complex) for humanity.  And it requires humans asking "why?" and wanting to know the answer to even decide to make the Magic Data Manglers look at one particular set of data in particular, before the MDM spills out its oh-so-pretty correlations.

So I have to say, the scientific method–theory, hypotheses, testing, experimentation, revision–is not dead yet; it’s not the red-shirted Away-Team member who always bites the dust in any Star Trek episode.

When I was growing up, there was a saying:  "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."

Of course, kids still called names, and it still hurt, but having that said often enough sort of conditioned one to think that being called names was an ephemeral thing.

Then there was the "turn the other cheek" philosophy, in which, if you were hurt, rather than hitting back, you offered a further target.  Sort of pre-Gandhi-ism.

So what’s changed?  What makes a nice middle-class mom decide to fake an online personality to gain friendship with a depressive teen, then yank the "friendship" away, all as a way of "teaching a lesson" or some such thing to a girl who had "hurt" her daughter–resulting in the teen’s suicide?  What makes fresh-faced cheerleader gals decide that a previous buddy’s namecalling on MySpace warrants a half-hour long smackdown to be posted on YouTube?  What makes the mother of one of the beaters go onto national television and say–in all seriousness–"This is all blown out of proportion"?

Of course, these incidents have caused folks to come out of the woodwork to blame the Internet.  It’s MySpace’s fault!  It’s YouTube’s fault!  My girl wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeeevul Internet wasn’t there!  Or, I wouldn’t have done anything like that if the eeevul Internet hadn’t made me do it.

Seriously.  In these cases, the parents seem to have something missing.  Us old-fashioned folk would call it "conscience", I guess.  Or morals.  Or a sense of proportion.  Or something.  What happened to saying something like, "If that girl is trash-talking you, surely you don’t want to associate with her?"? 

Currently, the dotter is deep in the midst of the standard "If you don’t do x for me, I won’t be your friend anymore!" pronouncement phase.  I give her the hairy eyeball at such statements to me, until she breaks down into a grin and giggles.  She knows that saying those things doesn’t cut it with me.  And I’ve had to intervene once or twice at after-school care when one or another of the girls says something like that as well.

The idea being that it’s not what someone else thinks of you that’s important:  It’s what you think of yourself.  It’s knowing you’ve done the right thing.  It’s knowing when you’ve done the wrong thing.  It’s realizing that some of these great dramas won’t mean a damned thing when you’re forty years old.

These internalizations don’t spontaneously emerge, of course.  You have to work on them.  And it’s not faux self-esteem B.S. that we’re talking about here–the "I am Special" entitled attitude.  It’s the feeling that you’ve worked hard on something, tried your best, done the right thing, have stuff inside you that is worthwhile…

These girls–and their parents–seem to have missed the boat on all of this.  The jockeying for prestige and station becomes the be-all and end-all of their existence.  They’re judging their own worth by what other people say, in the heat of the moment, either to their friends or on MySpace.  Now, I realize that names hurt.  They sting.  You can, indeed, end up crying in the middle of the night over what one of your acquaintances said behind your back.  And it continues even when you’re forty-something.

But the thing to do is move on, concentrate on what’s good and going well in your life.  Not beat the shit out of your former best friend so you can toss it up on YouTube and get lots of comments.

The perennial discussion about “Gotcha Day” is rearing its head once again on a China adoption site.  First there’s the person who posts a link to an article about how “Gotcha Day” is offensive to some adoptees with a “something to think about” comment.  Then some more folks post pointers to other articles.  Then someone gets offended by the offense and says it’s all PC-talk.  Someone says that the kids feel kidnapped by their adopters.  Someone takes real offense to that, saying they didn’t kidnap the kids, and should they just leave them in an orphanage?!  Things escalate, and feelings get all hurt all over the place.

Nothing new.  It’s been a topic of discussion for years.

Articles by adult adoptees who say they find the term offensive have been available for years, too.  I read those articles way back when, and posts by adult adoptees on adoption triad lists, and decided to ditch the term myself, because I could see how it could be offensive.  I “got” a car.  I “got” a dog.  No-one asks when I “got” my husband, eh?  They always ask when I “met” him.

So we’ve gone on our merry way, and I’ve trained myself to use the phrase “when we met you” to the dotter so it’s become ingrained in my psyche.  When talking about that day, I use “Metcha Day”.  But other than that, I don’t think much about it until a hoo-rah like this rises up.

A few months ago, when we were newly come to Alaska, the dotter and I had gone for a hike along Little Lady River in Margaret Pass and were returning to the parking lot.  As we emerged, my Caucasian-parent-with-Asian-children radar went off, focusing in on a guy with a bunch of boykids with him, all of whom were Asian.  At some point he hailed me and I wandered up to introduce myself and the dotter.

At some point in the conversation, he asked, “We got him” (pointing at one son) “in (some city), and him” (pointing at another) “in (some other city) and him” (yeah, there were a bunch!) “in (third city).  Where’d you get her?”

Now, he was an utterly nice guy.  The boys all looked like fine, happy, healthy lads, playing all over the place and doing boyishly romping things in and out of his eyesight.  But y’know, this was the very first time someone had ever asked me that question in that way, and it just…jarred me.  And I guess I hesitated, or something in my face showed, because he was suddenly somewhat defensively apologetic, saying, “Or are you one of Those Folk who don’t like that term?  I know some people don’t like it!”

Erg.  Well.  Um.  Yeah, I guess I’m one of “those folk”. 

Anyway, I answered that we had met the dotter in Guilin, avoiding the whole question of where I stand on “get” versus “met”, back in 2002, and yadda yadda yadda.  We talked some more, the dotter and I left, and I sort of forgot about it until the topic came up again.

I don’t know how OmegaDad feels about it.  I’m pretty sure he’d like the cuteness of “Gotcha Day”, and thinks more in terms of the daddy chasing the giggling girl, catching her, and going “Gotcha!”  Whereas I listened to the nice guy at the parking lot “getting” his boys (a pre-teen two of whom were sitting right there listening to the conversation), and just imagined going to the kid shop and “getting” one.

I dunno.  I suppose I’m turning all PC, and a lot of my readers are rolling their eyes at me and my oh-so-Victorian sensitivity to the term.  But for some reason, that meeting just cemented in me why I don’t like it, and made me understand just why some adult adoptees (and teens) might find it offensive or just icky.

(On a totally different note:  Have any of my blogging buddies gotten a slew of separate multi-page hits in a row from a new-to-them reader, all of them direct links without a referring page?  It’s just kind of weird…)

One of the intriguing things about having a child in the house is that you (the adult) realize just how many things you take for granted that are hard to learn (for kids).

Walking.  That’s a big one.  A toddler demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, just how difficult walking upright really is.  It requires immense concentration.  A sense of balance isn’t intrinsic–it requires practice.  It takes months of constant practice before a toddler can turn the Frankenwalk into something graceful and thoughtless.  Daily practice.  Hours and hours of it.

Somewheres along the line, after all that practice, the brain switches from conscious effort to unconscious act.

It’s fascinating.

Dimes, pennies, nickels, quarters.  It’s only with a kid around that you really grasp the idea that it’s utterly senseless, to the naked eye, that the different sizes of these different coins has no correlation to the “worth”.

Then we come to reading.

English is a language with lots of input from a variety of other languages.  It’s a mutt, pure and simple.  There’s Latin.  There’s Saxon.  There’s medieval French.  There’s a slew of native American words, from a variety of different native American language families.  There are Arabic words.  Made-up words.  Acronyms.

Then there are regular verbs versus regular verbs.

Then there are the archeological remnants of old pronunciations that linger on, like a linguistic appendix.

When you get down to learning to read, how do you distill all these disparate ingredients into a set of rules?

Take, for instance, the word “knight”.  Once upon a time, it actually was pronounced somewhat like it is spelled–kunihcht, with that ch being one of those gutterals that modern Amurrikans can’t handle.  But a child just learning to read, and sounding out the letters…you have to explain, well, the “k” is silent.  Why?  Um.  (Here you can diverge into two vastly different approaches:  “It just is.”  Or “Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a Germanic language that pronounced the ‘k’ in a word like that, but as time went on, people who spoke English slurred that ‘k’ more and more until it simply disappeared…but our spelling still shows it.”)  Then you have to explain that “igh” is pronounced “eye”.  (At least, in this case it is.)  And decide whether to do the short version or the long version or the medium version (”English is a funny language, dear”).

Or the letter “e” in all it’s variety.  Why, for example, is the “y” at the end of the word “variety” pronounced “eee”?  Why did we stick “y’s” there, instead of something else?  Why is the “e” at the end of most words silent, but in “the” and “he” it isn’t?

How about “ed”?  Why is it pronounced just like it looks in the word “red”, but not in “looked”?  Why does it sound like a “t” there?

And on and on.  And on.  Oy!  It’s a miracle you guys can read this bloggage at all!

This is brought to you courtesy of the dotter, who read her first full page from a Jack and Annie book today.  Woot!  (OmegaMom is doing the Snoopy Dance.)  Yes!  A full page!

But man.  That one page of The Magic Tree House #2,721 was full of such pitfalls that adults (read:  OmegaMom) skip right over as they read, while children (read:  OmegaDotter) stumble over and question and wonder why.

Yes, in reality there are rules.  But there are so many of them!  And so many exceptions!  And so many rules that depend upon the placement of letters!  And lots that depend upon the word itself!

And, yes, it’s easier than ideographic languages, such as Chinese, where a literate person has to learn between three and four thousand individual ideographs.

But, still!  Good lord.  OmegaDotter was simply exhausted by the end of that one page.  It takes a child an immense amount of focus to do something like that.  Thank heavens for the vast variety of reading material out there, so that most kids can find something to read that interests them enough to motivate them to focus that hard, that gives them a reason to continue to practice, practice, practice.  Because the only way to internalize that intricate, labyrinthine mazework of phonetic rules is to just keep plugging away at it…just like learning to walk.

Right now, the “No, I wouldn’t”s are in the lead.  The tally is OmegaDad, EzFez, Margaret and Theresa, all of whom essentially say “Why?  It’s just another thing I would worry about!”

I do like Theresa’s idea of “just feed me ice cream and gummi bears!”

The “Yes, I would want to know”s either have a family history of Alzheimer’s or a deep-seated need for control.  ;)  Del says while he might use it to prepare, he might just blow his retirement savings on fast women and booze.  Sister Carrie doesn’t quite put it like that, but says she wants to enjoy while she can, as does Kat.

I’m squarely in the middle on this one.  On the one hand, Medical Science Is Doing Amazing Things These Days.  (Hear that plummy announcer’s voice?  I swear I have Marlin Perkins’ voice forever engraved on my mind–pseudo Alzheimer’s aside.  “As the sun sets on the Serengeti, my intrepid assistant Jim is dangling from a rope in front of a hungry lion…”)

Anyway, Amazing Things.  The point being that, perhaps, sometime soon, they’ll come up with drugs or therapies or a brain-artery Roto-rooter that scrubs the plaque away, and Alzheimer’s will no longer be the soul-sucking personality destroyer that it is now.

In which case, hell, yeah, I’d like to know ahead of time, so that I can trot myself down to the local medico and say, “Gimme drugs!”  (Or “Gimme that Roto-rooter; I’ll do it myself!”)

On the other hand, I have the experience of OmegaBro’s maternal family to scare me silly.  Aunt J. (OmegaBro’s mom, dad’s first wife) had an ongoing edgy relationship with her own mother, with a hefty thread of resentment coloring everything.  And then her mother started the downward spiral that is Alzheimer’s.  She got tossed out of the assisted living home–either because she had become so nasty and bitchy that no-one wanted anything to do with her or because she kept forgetting that she had put a pot of water on to boil for tea.  Then she lived with Aunt J., who had to cope with a slew of emotions based on obligation, resentment, tainted love…

Of course, to me, L. was a lovely lady, but I still remember the first year she lived with Aunt J., when, at Christmastime, over the course of five hours she asked the same set of questions five or six times.  It was my first experience with Alzheimer’s, and made me incredibly sad, because L. was a vivid, vivacious, witty, proud and self-sufficient lady, or had been.  And that was at the early stages; by the time she died she had been bedridden for a year, no longer recognized her daughter, her grandsons, or her great-grandsons, couldn’t clothe herself or take care of herself in any manner.

So, on the third hand, knowing ahead of time, coupled with my memories of L., would give me incredible incentive to investigate any and all possible treatments and rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But, on the fourth hand, I am prone to stewing, and, like all the “Hell, no!” folks above, it would be just yet another thing to stew about.

Okay, so far I’ve got four hands going here.  I am not an octopus.  But obviously I am not decisive on this issue.  Finding out early if I had cancer?  Hokie doke.  No problemo.  Let’s find out, let’s kick that cancer’s ass, and if it doesn’t work, well, we’ve fought the good fight.

Ditto with diabetes, heart disease…

But these are all physical.  It’s the mental and emotional capacities that get clobbered by Alzheimer’s.  It’s so easy to be strong (at least in theory) with physical problems, but not so easy with a shrinking fear of the Essential Me just…fading away.

Anyway, it’s an interesting mental exercise.  Part of my issue is that I have all these incredibly long-lived women in my mother’s side of the family…so I keep thinking it’s not possible that can last more than three generations, that the strong pioneer stock must be diluted by now, so there must be some catastrophe awaiting me as a legacy from my dad’s side, to put the kibosh on the long-lived Mills women.

In the meantime, given that the first of the Baby Boomers has just begun picking up her social security check, and there are millions more just like her following along, the field of gerontology and elder health is just going to be busy and booming for quite a while.  Since I am towards the end of the Baby Boomer cohort, it’s quite possible that all the research that is going to go on in the next twenty years will pay off with exceptional dividends for me…and those like me.

Onto less morbid topics tomorrow!

That’s me.  Yup.  Because I’m an atheist.  (Well, okay, agnostic, but in many people’s minds, it’s all the same.)

Tsk, tsk.

Ah, well, at least this person didn’t pull out the usual chestnut about atheists being immoral, and how all morals are the result of religion.

I know I run the risk of running off bunches of my readers with this, but statements like the above just bother the heck out of me, and they got trotted out on a regular basis.  A writer on a group blog wrote about his lack of religion, and how he is teaching his kids that religion isn’t needed to live a moral, just life, and the very first comment that pops up says that all the atheists this person has met are “unhappy, cynical people”, and that religion is all about luuuuuuve.

And when some other atheist, agnostic, or (gasp!) liberalized Christian types said that, to them, religion reeks of justifying hatred, this same person comes on and tut-tuts, saying that this just exemplifies the ignorance about religion in the U.S. these days.

Let me just say to that:

• The Crusades
• Northern versus Southern Ireland
• Palestinians versus Jews in Israel
• Jihadists whose dream is to fly an airplane into a tower filled with unknowing businesspeople who are just living their daily lives.
• Fred Phelps and his ilk
• Kicking a city manager of 17 years out of his job because he’s going to have a sex-change operation
• Hitler (what?  You think Hitler was an atheist?  No, he was a Christian.)

Need I go on?  Ah, sure, there are plenty of atheists who have tolerated or promoted or inflicted hideous miseries upon their fellow man en masse, and I know it will be brought up to justify how good religious people are and how narsty atheists are.

My point is:  we’re all human beings.  And human beings are a wild and wooly bunch, subject to the same passions and inclinations towards unpleasantness, regardless of religious belief or lack thereof.

I personally feel that a great deal of the inequities and injustices that man has inflicted upon his fellow human being are historically justified on religious grounds.  Don’t talk to me about being “ignorant” of religion; I am merely looking at the evidence.

And when someone trots out the “Jesus says he is the way, truth, and light” as a counter-argument to someone talking about how all religions seem the same to him, what on earth can one say?  How about, “Well, Mohammed said the same thing.  So, I am sure, did Zoroaster.”  Why should I believe the one over the others?  They all seem equally improbable to me, and equally worthy, or unworthy of my respect and belief.

As I have said before, I am an agnostic, not an atheist.  I don’t know.  I don’t claim to know.  I have my own woo-wooistic set of feelings and beliefs about an inherent harmony in the universe…but I’m not going to go out and kill my fellow human beings if they don’t believe in the same Kozmik All.  And I sure as heck know that my beliefs are just that–beliefs, totally unbacked by any evidence, totally unscientific, and I have absolutely no right to tell anyone else that My Way Is The Right Way.

Grumble, grumble, grumble…

(And, to add to my grumblishness, the “B” on my keyboard is being recalcitrant and causing me no end of misery.)

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