What's In Your Textbook?

I heard the other day that text books mentioning evolution were banned from Texas schools.  There is little doubt or discussion that this has to do with people’s unwillingness to allow any competition to the creation story in Genesis.  I could do some ranting about a terrible lack of understanding about the Bible’s intent.  An explanation of ‘How’ was not its purpose.  The identification of ‘Who’ was.  Nuff said.

 

But an even more basic discussion is about evolution.  Most consider uniformity the rule.  What is happening now will continue with small changes toward some evident result.  But such has as little to do with evolution as a six day agenda has to do with the Bible’s story of creation.  Evolution has to do with moments of change, sudden jumps and starts, unforeseen lightning strikes pulling forward  unappreciated strengths, altering species’ destinies.  Such a mechanism more closely resembles miracles than it does some ‘natural’ law.  It demands that we pay attention to the meek, the ones who are not dominant, who are not powerful according to the world’s definitions.  Gee, I’ve heard someone else talk like that.  Some guy who was giving a sermon on a hill in a back woods place called Galilee.  Taking all of that into account, I’m more comfortable with evolution than uniformity’s stolid unwillingness to confront God’s and nature’s obvious preferences.  Texas, put that in your pipe and smoke it.    

Omen

 

 

At that time in the morning, we were little more than groggy.  The mug of latte consumed during the walk in the cemetery is designed to peel the veils from the eyes and allow the morning sun into the shaded senses.  We were on the gravel, under the trees that line the road when the hawk squeaked twice and lifted across our path, up into the lower branches to the southwest.  He sat there, looking at us, intruders stopped, stunned by his short flight. 

I broke the silence with a diagnosis.  “It’s an omen.”  “An omen of what?”  A good question, but one that meant nothing to the teen aged red tail up in the tree.  Omens aren’t pointers toward some specific bit of our normality.  We’re going to run out of gas.  The guests are going to be late.   Omens are rumblings, touches of that which is beyond us, outside our cause and effect universe.  They express relationships that dance at the edges of our small vision.  They shimmer.  Reading omens seems so silly, so non-evidential.  What would CSI think? There’s a fallacy pointing to this weak way of thinking.  But there sat the hawk.  I wonder if he knew what he meant to us.  I wonder.

Ghost in the Machine

I have a new computer.  Do you ever wonder if there is a mind inside the machine you're blithely using?  Is it listening to what you're trying to say?  Does it watch what you're trying to design?  Does it smirk at the silliness, the fallacies, the redundancies, the unsupported inferences leading you out of the present tenses toward plans and supposed understandings and opinions?  Or is it a complicated shovel, a lawn mower with many attachments?

I never do that.

I'm pretty sure this is a female.  Shirley or Rhonda.  She doesn't talk much, yet.