INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where today we assess the intelligence of the Intelligent Designer who intelligently designed this complex universe we live in.

Sort of a celestial IQ test.

Okay, I'm a goat judge, not an astrophysicist. But even so I can see that the universe is pretty doggone fantastic, and the variety of life on this rock we all share is staggering (despite our best efforts to weed out the many superfluous species of plant and animal in the service of corporate greed).

Could this all have just happened? Wow, it doesn't seem likely, does it? Has to be some brilliant mind behind it all, setting the physics and chemistry in motion, providing for tsunamis and bird flu and HIV.

Intelligent design. Yessir, the Great Designer, in the time it takes you or me to earn $400, cook 12 meals, and do six loads of laundry, created ALL OF THIS. Bugs that hide on sticks by looking like sticks. Toads that make you see weird stuff if you lick them. Bones buried deep in the ground that, when put together by people trying to hoodwink the public, resemble huge beasts that no longer roam about.

Okay, Great Designer. We concede your unparalleled ability to design a universe that could randomly plunge any one of us into the clutches of a serial killer on a day that starts out with a walk to the subway. Or the Subway. Tell me there's an intelligent design to the stuff Subway passes off as food!

If you go through the Great Designer's week from Sunday to Thursday, He's looking to outpace Albert Einstein by a country mile. But then we get to Friday - and beyond. And we wonder if the Great Designer started smoking that cannabis He created, the substance that is said to affect the ability to perform tasks and learn new ideas.

Mark Twain put it this way: "Well, you see, God created Man at the end of a busy week. And God was tired."

Tired or stoned, or fresh out of lively ideas. Take your pick.

But here's where the Great Design shows its warts. Because buried within this Great Design, from that first Celestial Cold Fusion, was a Plan of Salvation for Mankind. (Remember, we never use inclusive language here.)

And here's the Plan of Salvation for Mankind created by the same Intelligence who brought us prairie dogs and parrot fish.

First, we're gonna send millions upon millions of people to Hell just because they had the bad taste to be born before their Savior arrived on the earth.

Then we're gonna send a Savior. He'll be a modest carpenter, probably not terribly literate, living in a marginalized culture in a desert. We'll give this modest preacher three years to save the whole world, which he'll ultimately do by rising from the dead. And after rising and walking around with his buddies for a few days, he goes to Heaven and promises to return for everyone who believes in him. Two thousand years and counting, he's still not back.

To Hell with anyone who doesn't hear the message. To Hell with anyone who hears it, thinks it's a nice message, but goes right on chanting Buddhist prayers. And especially to Hell with anyone who hears the message and says, "Gee, that's the very best an Intelligent Designer could do for the human race? Makes me glad to be a woman, because it is a Plan for Mankind."

Intelligent Designer, I hate to rain on your parade, because you were doing okay right up to the Creation of Mankind and the Plan of Salvation. But, to be blunt, I think your average truck stop waitress, given a pencil and a sheet of paper, could draw up a better Plan of Salvation. Sorry. No, I mean really. I'm sorry I have to be so mean about this. But facts are facts. If you had enough gut intelligence to set a whole universe in motion, how could you only give your chosen Savior three years to plant his message, and that through secondary sources? Couldn't you have intelligently designed The Gospel According to Me, by Jesus Christ? Heck, Muhammad worked on the Koran for decades. And I guess that gets Muhammad a better sort of eternal torture?

Folks, there's nothing particularly intelligent about the design of this planet. And there's certainly nothing particularly compelling about our species. In fact, we're one of the worst the planet's ever seen. Like kudzu we're running amok, creating a huge, tightly-packed pool of meat that some hungry virus is gonna chomp through wholesale. If you don't believe me, you aren't following the news from Vietnam.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for the Intelligent Design people. No matter how hard it tries, the human race will not be able to destroy the earth. Our species will go extinct eventually, and the earth will rock on.

Pardon the pun. Fairies like puns. They also love intellectual cleverness. And they never claimed to have created the earth, only those crop circles near Stonehenge.

Contemplating the rape of 34 million acres of untouched wilderness in search of a non-renewable energy resource, I am,

Your humble servant,
ANNE, CREATOR OF NOTHING IN PARTICULAR