Rant on.

 

I have several times ranted about the ignorance of creationists here.  I have refuted their arguments.  Until this past weekend, however, I must confess that I had not heard anyone I personally knew spout one of their points of view.  One of my co-workers stated the billions of years the Earth had been around was not enough time for things to evolve.  This is a fairly common misconception among the Intelligent Design group.  They follow this, as my co-worker did, by saying something like “According to evolution, things like the eye, they just appeared, poof!”  Yes, that’s almost a verbatim quote from my co-worker.  He mentioned eyes (and I think ears) and “just appeared” and “poof.”  No evolutionist has claimed any such thing.

 

I’ll go over this again, for the record.  There is evidence to support the evolution of the eyes and ears and neither just suddenly appeared.  The eye began as a light-sensitive patch of skin.  Creatures who had it were better able to sense the approach of predators or prey and react accordingly.  Evolution is not about random mutations, although those do happen and sometimes are beneficial.  The mechanism of evolution is not understood.  Mutation is part of it, but life, over generations, adapt to their environment in very specific ways.  So the light-sensitive patches got better because this made them better than those with less sensitive parts.  The patches developed as tender things, so eyelids were developed to protect them.  Muscles had already been developed for movement, so it wasn’t surprising some would develop to allow eyes to move around.  Those with two eyes did better than those with one as two eyes makes three dimensions easier to perceive.  At some point, the eye was more or less perfected, although I would wager they are still evolving.  In humans, there are likely adaptations being made to respond better to monitors and televisions.

 

The ignorance doesn’t stop there, of course.  For those not aware of it, the world ended this past Saturday.  At least, that was the day calculated by a religious nutcase who in 1992 figured the date of the apocalypse to be either September, 1994, or May 21, 2011.  More people listened to him this time around, based on the publicity, but his doomsaying was just as wrong.  A few interviewed were baffled by the fact it didn’t happen.

 

The scary part to me is that even a religious skeptic like myself was forced to wonder.  I never thought it would happen, but my mind is open enough to wonder “what if?”  So it’s no wonder, I guess, that more devout folks went to a few extremes.  Some fellow in New York spent over a hundred grand advertising the end of times.  A family from the east coast drove to the west coast because that’s where they wanted to experience the rapture, and they wanted to take in a few sights before they were destroyed with the rest of the world.

 

Speaking of dangerous religious ignorance, I’ll finally mention what inspired me to rant about this.  The comments by my co-worker this weekend were part of it, but this morning I went to CNN and found an article about people objection to a mosque being built in Murfreesboro, TN.  The people objecting claimed the Muslims behind the effort to build it wanted to replace the U.S. Constitution with Sharia law and that Islam was not a religion.  Islam is clearly a religion with theological beliefs.  The Muslims of the area have been meeting for over twenty years, but have outgrown their current space.  They have made it clear they are happy with the U.S. as it is, and they are not part of some extremist Muslim group.

 

This, by the way, is key:  They are not extremists.  Those who object, however, don’t understand this.  Their ignorance leads them to see all Muslims as being Al-Qaeda sorts who would, if they could, enforce Sharia law all over the world.  Just as the more extreme Christian types would make homosexuality a serious crime.  Neither group is likely to have their desires met in the U.S., but that doesn’t stop some from seeing them as trying.  Again, ignorance holds sway.

 

So I applaud the efforts of the Muslims in Tennessee and hope they get their Mosque built.  I hope those who thought the rapture was coming have lost some of their ignorance and question their faith at large and maybe see a few more things as they are.  Evolution, perhaps.

 

Rant off.