I believed in Intelligent Design ... and then I met you

Okay here it is. This is for Steve, my silent, but apparently loyal reader (whom I had never heard of until today).

Let’s talk about “Intelligent Design!”

A brief synopsis: some people think children should be exposed to all the facts and allowed to take more than one unproven viewpoint into consideration about the earth’s foundation. Not surprisingly, the idea of their party not having a total monopoly on our children’s education greatly upsets those self-proclaimed champions of tolerance, diversity and open-mindedness on the left.

Experts at painting pictures of the right as morons waving their Bibles in the air and demanding the stoning death of girls in short skirts, they have set to work with a vengeance to discredit intelligent design. The current picture: President Bush forces children to recite chapters of Genesis in class while a frustrated parents, bound and gagged, look on.

It would be pointless for me to pretend to be unbiased about this debate, since everyone who reads this blog knows that I believe God created the earth (idiotic I know, when you hold it up next to the alternative – that it burst into existence by magic).

Let’s overlook, for a moment, all the arguments against evolution and assume against all reason that there was nothing, and then, quite suddenly, there was something huge that contained all the exact conditions required to support millions of different life forms all living in relative harmony – what the new-agers would call “the circle of life.”

Let’s pretend “science,” the current vanguard of the liberal agenda to control your child’s mind, has not found numerous large holes in Darwin’s theory (no, I promise you, it IS a theory, no matter HOW loudly you scream over me).

If it’s so OBVIOUSLY right, why don’t you think your children are smart enough to figure that out? Why try to stifle every peep of opposition? Creationist families have been forced to allow their children to sit through classes where theory is taught as fact and opposing ideas are ridiculed for years. And the outcome is that our kids know both sides of the story. Yours don’t even know what they’re ridiculing.

This has been evidenced in my own experience more than once.

My friend Ben and I, on our way to a camping trip, got into a discussion about it once. I told him that there are plenty of scientists who were also creationists – the two are not actually mutually exclusive.

He smiled condescendingly, and, (looking a little embarrassed on my behalf) said, “but … not real scientists.” Silly, stupid Kate he added silently.

On another camping trip (one I wasn’t on) Ben, stepped in his own campfire after eating a few too many mushrooms.

The funny thing is, Intelligent Design is not religion. It’s merely the idea that some evidence suggests there was a plan behind the earth. No one is suggesting we beat our kids about the heads with Bibles until they can chant our religious mantra.

Just that you give them an alternative to the utter nonsense with which you’ve been filling their impressionable young minds.