Kansas: Birthplace of a Brand New God!

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored! What is Kansas famous for, my friends? Why, Dorothy, the Tin Man, and Glenda, the Good Witch, that's what! But more recently, Kansas has become the birthplace of a fabulous new deity Whose followers have grown so numerous that you can find them in every state! And today we are blessed with an interview with our Noodly Master, the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Please give Him/Her/It a warm, wonderful, "Gods Are Bored" welcome!

Anne: Arrrggghghhg! Avast, matey! How be you today?

FSM: That's what fills my pasta bowl. Respect! You speak in pirate, which is required of all My disciples.

Anne: Well, I'll give it the old heave-ho try, Noodly Master.  Arrr, can You hoist the top'sl and tell us how You came to the attention of Americans everywhere?

FSM: The Kansas Board of Education declared that teachers would be required to tell students the false story of some god who created the world in six days. False, false, false! I created the world. Me, the Flying Spaghetti Monster! It was a complicated process. Very scientific. With meatballs.

Anne: Arrr, speak, matey, about how this boiled over to the Kansas Board of Education?

FSM: One of My disciples wrote a strongly-worded letter to the KBE, declaring that students who were taught about Genesis in science class should actually learn about Me instead, since I'm the One who got the meatball rolling, turned down the simmering seas, and touched humankind with my Noodly Appendage. This concerned disciple said that he was dismayed that students would be taught lies, when they could learn about the scientific principles behind My Godhood. It's not fair to teach one bogus creation story when there's a True One out there.

Anne: My readers can see the whole revealed religion here. And, arrghghgh, while I'm lashing landlubbers to the mast, I'll wave my cutlass at that ship of fools called DC40, who couldn't even slash and burn themselves into a dot.org! You, Noodly Master, are a certified, nonprofit religion!

FSM: Recruiting pirates and wenches everywhere, especially around Halloween!

Anne: Flying Spaghetti Monster, You have some powerful enemies. Not terribly bright, but powerful nonetheless. They'd like to simmer the al dente right out of You.

FSM: Not a chance of that! Knowledge is Power! And please note that many of My disciples were atheists until they found Me. These disciples are some of My most ardent! I am definitely ready to serve the millions!

Anne: Arrghghg! And a goodly feast t'would be too! Please accept my gift of virgin olive oil, O Noodly One!

FSM: I am pleased by this. Anne Johnson, from here to the day of your death, you will never eat a bad pasta dinner ... ever.

Anne: Considering that I live in New Jersey, and there's an Italian restaurant on every corner, that's a pretty scientific prediction. Noodly Master, look at this brilliant portrayal of Yourself by disciple TJ Morgan of Atheist Nexis!

FSM: That's a recent rendering. I'm boiling over that those idol-worshiping Christian fringe wingnuts would want the District of Columbia to be the District of Christ, and not the District of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Anne: District of the Flying Spaghetti Monster! Arrrghgh! That has a certain ring to it, it does! We could require the president to wear a frock coat and a feather in his pirate hat during his inauguration! (The irony of this does not escape me.)

FSM: My disciples will see that this is done. They are praying about it even as we speak.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
This includes, and could for my money be limited to, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Pray on, pirates!

Which Came First, the Universe or the Gods?

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," pondering deep philosophical questions and cleaning delicate upholstery since 2005! Sometimes you've just got to ask yourself, "What would Billy Mays do?" Go, therefore, and do thus, Pilgrim.

I'm acutely aware that the physics behind the Big Bang theory eludes me completely. Yeah, yeah, I know, there was an explosion, and stuff got thrown around, and time passed, and here we are. How did this happen? Beats me.

With the news this afternoon that Stephen Hawking will be publishing a new book shortly, a book in which he demonstrates that Divine Intervention was not a necessary prerequisite for the creation of the universe, I think it's high time we at "The Gods Are Bored" weigh in on Intelligent Design. Yet again.

Could it actually be possible that we've got the sequence of events wrong? I mean, just for the sake of argument. What if the Big Bang happened, and through its energy, Divinity was produced? No "chicken or egg" here, just BANG! and then the Divine.

Throughout history our great thinkers have pointed to our Earth's uniqueness as a repository for organic life. Well, even before astronomers began finding other stars with planets around them, I would have given you good odds for the existence of other planets, and even for other planets with life on them, and even for other planets with intelligent life on them, and even other planets with higher quality intelligence than what you find here. (On that last point, contact me if you want the wager!)

Now I'll go one step further. Many of us sense the existence of Higher Powers. That's how we get the bored and busy gods! We sense Higher Powers and throw human construct on Them until ... voila! A jealous god, a love goddess, a trickster. Suppose those Higher Powers exist beyond our ability to comprehend Them at this particular juncture in our evolution. And suppose those Higher Powers evolved after the Big Bang.

Are you comfortable explaining the entire universe with just your five senses? What if there's a Deity Planet out there where everyone has ten senses? What if there's a planet with a God School on it, where super-sensory Beings train to communicate with organic beings at various stages of evolution? (If you've seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, you may be thinking of it now.) Why can't there be a planet with a God School? Hey, I bet you there is one! It's a big universe out there. Don't be thinking that you, or Stephen Hawking, or even your deities have the final word on it.

So, if the Big Bang came first, and then Divinity, then what happens when the universe grinds to a close? Does everything just die, including deities?

Well, I say we cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, though, we here at "The Gods Are Bored" are not ruling out the possibility (we actually think it's a probability) that in the beginning there was a Big Bang, and from it sprang Divinity ... powerful energy we can feel but not understand. Everyone knows that when you can't understand something, you activate your inner database to try to make sense of the feeling. So here come the gods and goddesses of every stripe, the faeries and angels and demons and spirits and ghosts and extraterrestrials. We endow Divinity with human traits simply because that's our schema.

The moral of this sermon is that it's a great big universe out there, and if we understand all of it at this moment in our history, why are we still paying physicists to study it?

Think of the universe as a race that began with a blast from a starter pistol. Everything is off and running! Forget the finish line, and enjoy an interesting contest.

Natural Selection at Work

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," mystified by morons since 2005! Actually it was long before that, but I only just started writing about it.

The Intelligent Design morons like to prove their case that some things are too complicated to have evolved. They trot out some bacteria that moves with this little propeller that looks -- and works -- like the rotor on a helicopter. Had to have been made like that! Where's the intermediate step?

Okay, all you ID morons, explain MRSA.

Over the past year, my daughter The Spare has gotten two nasty boils on her leg. They started as little nicks and wound up red, hot, and oozing pus. For the second time, she will be taking antibiotics ten days straight, for something you or I would have cured with a little Bactine, back in the day.

The Spare has MRSA (Methycillin Resistant Stapholo .... oh for the love of Sarah Palin's fruit flies! It's a long name.)

MRSA is bacteria that can withstand the onslaught of antibiotics. It is proof positive that natural selection works -- and works fast -- especially with bacteria.

My good friend Seth put it this way: "If you use an antibacterial soap on your countertop that promises to kill 99 percent of all germs, guess what? You leave behind one percent of germs that rock on, immune to the soap. These multiply, and pretty soon you've got a big, fat, naturally selected problem on your hands."

Just think of bacteria that live by the rule, "That which doesn't kill me only makes more of me."

Antibiotics have only been around for about 60 years. That's not even a blip of time in the great, grand history of Planet Earth. Even so, there are now bacteria that can thumb their flagella at antibiotics. Because their predecessors lived through previous assaults by antibiotics.

It's called NATURAL SELECTION, YOU ID MORONS!

It's very worrisome to me that The Spare, at 14, has already had problems with MRSA. This does not bode well for her future. (This, and the fact that she doesn't give a fig about her schoolwork.)

On the other hand, MRSA has a Right to Life. I'm sure Mrs. Palin would agree that MRSA is a living thing, and all living things have a Right to Life. Except perhaps fruit flies.

I've saved the worst part for last. The doctor says that Mr. Johnson and I are also carrying MRSA, although we're hardy enough to keep it at bay -- just now. (I'm surprised the little buggers didn't get in my surgical site, but I might not be out of the woods on that.)

The doctor wants my spouse and I to swab the inside of our nostrils twice a day with antibacterial ointment. And to not pick our noses.

Dammit, when you get to my age, nose-picking and flatulence are two of life's pleasures that it's hard to live without! I'll try not to pick my nose, but my fingers just want to gravitate to my nostrils. I'll have to take up knitting or some such.

Yours from the forefront of Natural Selection,

ANNE
THE MERLIN OF BERKELEY SPRINGS

Avoid the Textbook at All Costs!

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," hoping you are healthy and wealthy and wise today! With accent on the healthy.

I've come to the Vo-Tech to substitute today, and my assignment was the nursing care class. I can't help myself. I always have to look at the books on the teacher's desk. Not while I'm trying to maintain classroom decorum, of course, but at odd moments when all the students are working on something.

How did I forget what class I was in and open a nursing care textbook? Every ailment known to the human condition is carefully pictured ... nay, photographed. Oh my. How fragile we are!

Makes me wonder. What kind of Intelligent Designer made us? We should have body armor built in. Limbs that self-correct after an injury. Heck, crabs have those, and what do they do? Scuttle around the bottom of bays. Do they pray to a Designer? I don't think so. Then why do their claws grow back if they lose them?

And while we're on Intelligent Design, I've always wondered why we have sex with the same organs we use to go to the bathroom. That's one of the first things I'd change about mammals. But don't ask me how. I'm no Designer, Intelligent or otherwise. I get queasy when I see photos in nursing manuals.

Bad Homo! Bad, Bad Homo!

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" We'll bet that title has you wondering, eh?

Okay, we're not going to talk about homosexuals. Our subject today is the genus Homo, which is us and some other critters that have gone extinct.

When I was in college, studying human evolution pretty closely, my professors were excited by fossil finds of a bipedal hominid they called Homo habilis. This hominid walked upright the way we do and used its hands the way we do. It had a small brain, but that brain was still bigger than some of the other hominids that were contemporary with it, called Australopithecines. Homo habilis looked like a prime candidate for human ancestry, especially since it appeared in the fossil record before a critter we're sure is a human ancestor. That critter is named Homo erectus. (For some reason I've always loved that particular hominid name.)

Today, fresh out of Tanzania, comes news that the celebrated Leakey family has found both Homo habilis and Homo erectus living in the same environment at roughly the same time. Ergo, Homo habilis and Homo erectus probably have a common ancestor, but the one is not grandma to the other.

Well, dear ones, we are sure to get a tidal wave of "I told you so" from the Intelligent Design contingent. A hypothesis of human evolution, held by peer-reviewed scientists for 25 years, suddenly deemed wrong! New evidence proves this hypothesis wrong, wrong, wrong!

Ahem. Discovery Institute dudes? Sorry to spoil your party, but finds like this actually work against you. Finds like this show that as new evidence becomes available, scientists will alter their views. Let them come pouring from the ground, these fossils that confound the pretty progress of human evolution! Because, tsk tsk tsk. They still don't prove that the world was made in six days by an Intelligent Designer.

Science starts with a proposition and seeks evidence to prove it. If the evidence doesn't prove the proposition, science moves on to a new proposition.

Intelligent Design starts with a certainty and seeks evidence to prove it. Any evidence that disproves the certainty is either skewed, ignored, or downright falsified.

For the record, we at "The Gods Are Bored" are not paleontologists or anthropologists. (In order to study human evolution as a graduate student, you have to take Gross Anatomy. Trust me, we at "The Gods Are Bored" would rather write blurb copy for K-Mart circulars than cut up a dead person, so that was that.)

No one on the staff of "The Gods Are Bored" is an expert on the genus Homo. However, in our humble, unscientific, but perhaps provable opinion, many species both gone and among us are probably really Homo. Herein, a sampling:

Genus Homo Should Include

Australopithecines, including Afarensis and Robustus.

Pan, and that would be your chimps.

Us, and that would be Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens.

One final puzzlement for today. Who named us Homo sapiens, "Thinking human?" The majority of us don't think worth a rat's ass. I don't have enough Latin to coin the name we ought to have, Homo crap on the world and call it progress.

FROM ANNE

THE MERLIN OF BERKELEY SPRINGS

Tepeyollotl Explains the Creation of Caves

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," raving about caving since 1976!

That was the year I went into a wild cave and crawled through a passage 12 inches high, and got to thinking about what would happen if the rocks moved just a little bit.

Haven't been caving since.

But today I find myself thinking about caves. Have you ever been in an active cave? You find these stalactites that have itty bitty drops of water on them, which means they're growing at the astonishing rate of ... wait a minute, I'll have to look it up ...

Hard to find the answer to that. Predictably, the folks at the Creation Museum say that stalactites can grow as fast as Rapunzel's hair.

Conversely, the folks that have taken mathematical measurements and extrapolated from known rates of cave formation growth say that stalactites lengthen about an inch every 100 years.

If I'm wrong about that, correct me. I couldn't even find the answer to that in a geology textbook on my desk!

Were all the thousands of the world's caverns, known and unknown, created mostly in a fell swoop by that big old Noah's flood?

Damn, that was one busy-ass flood, huh? Canyons, mountains, caves. Sheesh. I'll bet that flood's been napping ever since.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" have invited a God of caves to comment on this. Please give a warm, wonderful welcome to Tepeyollotl, awesome Aztec God of caves!

Anne: (to herself) By my soul, these Aztecs had a god for every occasion! I wish they used easier spelling! (to Tepeyollotl) Welcome, honored God! Caves are magnificent spectacles of Nature at its finest.

Tepeyollotl: Thank you. I am very proud of my work.

Anne: Do you mean to tell me you have created all the caves in the world?

Tepeyollotl: Absolutely. What, do you think only Yahweh can create? He and I once had a cave-off, and his cave caved. You see, I'm a specialist. He's a generalist. Take your world-obliterating floods. I couldn't do that in a month of trying.

Anne: Glad to hear it. And I really must toddle. Sorry to keep this interview so short.

Tepeyollotl: Perfectly all right. I have a bridge game tonight.

Anne: So, readers. There you have it. Science proves beyond any doubt that Tepeyollotl, Aztec specialist god of caves, created all the caves in the world. And he's the god of earthquakes too, so you'd better not send any mathematician or scientist to contradict him!

Beannachd leat,

Anne

Dinosaur Husbandry #1

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where today we come out of the closet and "out" one of the most secret of secret societies!

Yes, finally we can cavort in the open, herd up our special charges and parade them through the streets like circus elephants!

Oh, readers. You can't imagine what a burden has bee lifted from my shoulders, and from the shoulders of super-secretive breeders all through Appalachia. They might not like me spilling the beans, but now that David Ham's fabulous Creation Museum is open, we need no longer run and hide, sneak around at night and in the worst weather, and practice draconian secret handshakes and code words to save ourselves and our super duper classified charges.

Friends, gods, and countrymen, let me be the very first to claim membership in the Dinosaur Underground Mobilization Brotherhood. That's DUMB, for short.

You see, the Creation Museum is correct. There were dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. And some of them survived Noah's Flood!

This topic is way too big for one post. Today I will only cover one aspect of it: how the dinos survived the flood, and how the evil, corrupting, materialistic, murdering, falsifying, misleading, and devil-worshipping Darwinists have conspired to exterminate the few remaining populations of dinosaur from the face of the Earth.

The Bible says that Noah's flood lasted 40 days and 40 nights. But that was only where Noah was. In Appalachia and the Rocky Mountains, for instance, the waters rose to the tip-top of the mountains but only stayed there for a day or two. The dinos wisely climbed trees and waited for the water to recede. Then they climbed down and had all of America to themselves for awhile until Noah's descendants used the ark to get to the Western Hemisphere.

At one time, every Native American burial site contained evidence that Indians ate dinosaurs and also, in some cases, kept them as pets. This evidence has been deliberately destroyed by the Darwinists described above.

Luckily, some parts of the Appalachian Mountains are so remote that remnant populations of dinosaurs survived. By the time the first intrepid mountaineers arrived in these regions, the dinosaurs had established small enclaves here and there. The mountaineers decided to nurture the dinosaurs as a good source of meat -- and protection from city slickers like Burt Reynolds.

Along came Darwin. The temporal existence of even a single T. Rex would reveal evolution for what it really is -- EVILution. Thinking quickly, the mountaineers formed DUMB to save the remaining dinos.

Thank goodness for Appalachians, because the situation was completely different in the Rocky Mountains. There, the evil, etc. etc. Darwinists arrived first. The evil, etc. etc. Darwinists murdered every Rocky Mountain dinosaur in cold blood, then chemically treated the bones to turn them into rock. The evil, etc. etc. Darwinists even went to the trouble to gouge out bone-shaped holes in rock strata to make it look like they were unearthing ... the word turns to ash in my mouth ... fossils.

In other parts of the world, the mountains were just too high and too cold to support dinosaur populations. Take your Alps, for example. Dinosaurs are cold-blooded. They couldn't deal with those glaciers. They also couldn't handle Yellowstone, for the opposite reason. Hot springs cook a dino.

Appalachia formed a perfect habitat because it is:
a) remote, and
b) temperate from the Mason-Dixon line on south.

So it has fallen upon the shoulders of the people of Southern Appalachia to hide, herd, and husband dinosaurs.

Whew. I'm glad this is out in the open. You have no idea how hard it's been to shelter T. Rexes since satellite imagery became so precise.

Tomorrow, or soon, I'll tell you all about some of my personal favorite dinosaurs! I've raised dozens. All of them very polite and well-behaved, very good with children and other pets. They really are wonderful animals. Everyone should have one, just like they show in the Creation Museum.

Darwin DNA

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," where we proudly trace our DNA back to some itty bitty speck in the primoridal sea! If you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old, please explain to me why I can't grow diamonds in my backyard. I've got a pile of coal just sitting there doing nothing!

Mr. Johnson likes to go to book sales. He's always on the lookout for books that I'll find interesting. He hit the jackpot early last spring with a title called Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir, by Matthew Chapman.

Matthew Chapman is the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin. I can't speak for you, but I'd sure like to have that kind of DNA swirling around in my cells. Packed to the plimsol line with pure genius.

Like many a fine writer before him, Mr. Chapman did not attend college. He wasn't great shakes in high school, either. He even bypassed that fine bastion of Higher Letters, the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Damn good thing.

In Trials of the Monkey, Chapman (a dapper filmmaker from New York City) travels to Dayton, Tennessee to revisit the site of the Scopes Monkey Trial 80 years later. If you know anything about Scopes, you'll know that Chapman's good ol' ancestor got roughed up there, albeit posthumously. Chapman uses the trip to muse on his great-great-grandaddy's legacy and also on his own life, which has been interesting in and of itself.

Yes, it was a smart idea for a book, and smartly executed too. We at "The Gods Are Bored" place it on our "recommended reading" list.

This spring Chapman has released ... ready for this title? ... 40 Days and 40 Nights: DARWIN, Intelligent Design, GOD, OxyContin, AND OTHER Oddities ON TRIAL IN Pennsylvania. I know my capitalization stinks as a rule, but I didn't add all those caps. They're in the title.

In late 2005 a school board in Dover, PA (stuffed to the gills with fundamentalists) decreed that students would have to hear a statement about intelligent design before learning about evolution in biology class. The statement -- too long to be printed here -- suggests that evolution is a theory, not a fact, and that students interested in another theory, intelligent design, could consult an alternate available textbook, Of Pandas and People.

Needless to say, a cluster of parents jumped all over this, with the help of the ACLU and a couple of pro bono lawyers from Philly. The school board didn't back down. Thus, a trial that lasted 40 days.

The defense, led by the Thomas More Law Center in Michigan, dragged out some scholars who believe that certain forms of life (most notably some itty bitty bacterium with a fancy tail) could not possibly have had ancestors with less complicated machinery, because the whole thing had to be created at once.

That's one bacterium tail stacked up against an Everest of evidence supporting Darwin's un-fact.

Chapman used the good ol' family connections to secure a front-row seat for the trial and to interview personally many of the participants on both sides of the aisle. In the end he came to a conclusion about intelligent design that we here at "The Gods Are Bored" heartily endorse.

But here's the scary part. The attempt to insert God into public school has taken a sinister turn, y'all. Witness:

1925: Tennessee's Butler Act outlaws teaching any theory that contradicts the Bible. Specifically the Bible.

1978: Inspired fundies start a "creation science" movement consisting not of any provable, peer-reviewed science but rather a misrepresentation of the theory of natural selection and a general dissing of Darwin. Still it was hard to get around the "creation" part. Court cases arise, creationism crashes and burns.

1995 (approx. date) Inspired fundies re-name "creation science." Now it's "intelligent design." Stuff has been created, all right, but the creator is only "intelligent." Could be God, could be Bumba, could be some alien from the Crab Nebula. (We at "The Gods Are Bored" know it is Bumba.)

(Cue horror music) ID took a bashing at the Dover trial, where even a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench couldn't find any scientific credibility in it. So the nasty little belief has morphed again.

First of all, if you have a copy of Of Pandas and People (you moron), hang onto it. The newest edition of this hardcover tract is called Design of Life. And "intelligent design" has been replaced by a newer, snappier word for your better class of moron: "sudden emergence."

A certain portion of our American population will not rest until American students are told in public school classrooms that stuff has suddenly emerged on this planet. Which is true, but if they're not giving credit to Bumba, they're not really being scientific.

Seriously, my friends, take notice of this. Hard-core, un-Christian Christianity has learned how to spin. Never mind that we'll raise generations of mini-morons. Science is bad anyway.

Do you think this "sudden emergence" stuff will sell in China? Me neither.

Back to Matthew Chapman. I wanted to send him an email telling him how much I enjoyed 40 Days. He's elusive. I guess I would be too, in his place. So, maybe he'll see this and feel good about a great book that offers a wake-up call to people who think this Creator Yahweh science is gonna just evaporate. (Evaporation is a theory, and a theory is not a fact. Remember that.)

One last "Gods Are Bored" extra on 40 Days. When we were researching our own book on the Scopes Monkey Trial, we learned that Charles Darwin had a host of illnesses that historians think might have been psychosomatic. It turns out that Matthew Chapman, by his own admission, is phobic about germs.

There's the old ancestor peeking through again.

Moral of this long sermon: Bumba created the universe, and He is very intelligent.

Beannachd leat,

THE MERLIN OF BERKELEY SPRINGS

My book's now available on Amazon for cheaper prices. It's called Defining Moments: The Scopes Monkey Trial.