Thursday I’m flying off to NYC to shoot the One of a Kind Show and Sale New York. I’ve been shooting the show here in Chicago quite a bit since its debut eight or nine years ago.
I’m so excited about getting back out to the big apple. The last time I shot in NYC was for another client in 2006. I was only there for 24 hours, but I had so much fun. NYC oozes the cool. I went to a total locals’ bar for a beer the night I was there. It was a hole in the wall right off Times Square. I could overhear conversations around me, and there was a beautiful sophistication to everyone’s conversations. There was a knowledge of current and world events that I don’t even get here in Chicago that often.
My last work trip was to Omaha or some fool place like that last spring, and Boston before that. It’ll be nice to get back into an international city like NYC.
I read this editorial from Michael Shermer, and it got my ire up. I’ve studied the hell out of science. Even when I was told evolution was false as a wee teenager, I had a sneaking suspicion that I was being told it was false because of an agenda.
Intelligent Design. I get it. I really do. I get that if you consider the wonder of life, it seems too good to be true. It appears marvelous and amazing. I would like Intelligent Design to be true. But it’s not. There’s no proof. None. Nada. Zilch.
Yes, I understand that by “proof” you mean, how wonderful and marvelous the universe “appears”. But apart from an emotional connection to some photos you saw from Hubble or a picture of a flower, or the miracle of birth that’s been happening for millions of years — that don’t qualify as “proof” but rather an emotional response — there is no empirical proof for ID.
Intelligent Design attacks evolution from the standpoint that an Intelligent Designer created the universe, but ID proponents don’t have a particular god in mind who created the universe. This alone is a copout or admission to failure. This alone should be a breaking point for Christians. Because if Intelligent Design has no particular god in mind when it says it’s the truth, then how the fuck are you supposed to prove that the creator god is the one in the Christian bible? If this is an argument, than any old yahoo wielding a wand and spewing a creation story could be THE Intelligent Designer.
Why Intelligent Design proponents pat themselves on the back for this bogus bullshit option blows my mind. There aren’t peer-reviewed journals regarding ID “Theory”. There’s just a bunch of heavily-funded jackasses at The Discovery Institute whining that evolution is a big, bad, ugly monster that threatens “faith” in an “Intelligent Designer.”
What is this “fictional” wall separating church and state, Becky Pooh? You want to tear down the “fictional” one? Oh, you mean the real wall that our forefathers built to keep the government’s grubby hands off of the people’s rights to believe or not believe whatever they want? You mean the one that makes it so that your kids don’t get stuck learning about the Islamic creation story over the Christian one in public schools? You mean the wall that protects believers and non-believers from being forced into one idea set or faith? You mean the wall that John Locke helped build? You mean the concept established in the first amendment of our constitution and the one that Thomas Jefferson wrote about in this letter (emphasis mine):
“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.”
Oh, I get it. Beck doesn’t work with a teleprompter, and he was inadvertently leaving out the word “non”, as in “non-fictional” wall. If he wants to tear down the “non-fictional” wall, he’s in for a mountain of work, as the forefathers fought so hard to build the establishment clause as the first amendment which handily separates church and state.
Clearly, Beck is worthy of watching on a regular religious basis. Clearly he gets his facts straight and clearly he leads by example.
Beck is the builder of a huge fictional wall that tries to separate people like you and me. He makes a wall of fictional issues not based on any rational, educated or logical information. He makes it so that issues like these force people into thinking that liberals are assholes and conservatives are superior.
Liberals ARE assholes, but so are conservatives. Liberals are also really solid people with lots of good ideas, and it pains me to admit, but conservatives have good ideas too. Both sides have great attributes, but you wouldn’t know it if you turn this shit on every night. The party leaders on both sides want to make the gap large, where really it’s quite small.
Robert Frost said it best, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall / that sends the frozen ground swell under it.”
Beck is the “old stone savage armed.” He is a man-made speculum inserted into the loveliness that is this country, he cranks it open left and right as far as it can go.
Ask any woman, that speculum is a cold, man-made device of torture.
Le Café Wittypoots 