Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Basement Philosophy

I take the blame for all the stuff that accumulated in the basement over the past few years. I admit that my organizational skills have not been as keenly honed as they probably should be. Without casting aspersions, this deterioration in organizational skills could be due to a possible previously unknown organic side effect of Freon exposure caused by a ruptured refrigerant line when I was forced to remove a refrigerator from the basement a few years ago ... or it could be due to that very incident, psychologically-speaking now, in which I was held up to public ridicule when three police cruisers, the city fire department’s full complement of fire rescue units, and the regional haz-mat team arrived on the scene after someone in the house called 9-1-1 after I calmly asked, “Oops … er, can you go on the internet and find out if Freon is poisonous?” As an aside here, 42 police officers, firefighters, and paramedics arrived on the scene with all kinds of rescue gear, some thinking, for some reason, that I was trapped under a fallen refrigerator; and not one of those public servants offered to help me get the fucking refrigerator out of the basement.

So, suppressing my well-grounded, understandable fear of the basement, I distracted myself when I was cleaning the basement and getting rid of stuff that had accumulated over the years by letting my mind wander to other subjects. And one of those things that popped into my mind over the weekend, while picking up old stuff, carrying out trash and all, was … intelligent design.

And I got to thinking that this idea of intelligent design, which evolved so that religious fanatics could bring God into the public school classroom by claiming that intelligent design is some kind of science (when everybody who is anybody in the scientific world knows that the answer to every question one might conceivably have about the universe, life, and living comes down to one word, physics, but I leave that discussion for another day).

Intelligent design seems to be -- and I say "seems to be" because they keep changing the rhetoric -- based upon the notion that living things are too complex to have sprung up by what is basically chance, natural trial-and-error. The thinking is that there has to be this intelligent being out there which thought up all these animals, plants, one-celled organisms with organelles and mitochondria and stuff. That sounds very comforting -- kind of like God making the heaven and the earth and the rest of the stuff in six days, but without invoking God's name.

I'm not going to get all scientific right now to dispute "intelligent design" because as with all cockamamie beliefs that someone makes up as they go along, there’s an answer for every reasoned argument against the idea, whether grounded in reality or not.

I'm just going to point out that intelligent design is a pretty stupid idea.

Here's why. One word -- centipedes. No, two words … centipedes and millipedes.

Who the fuck could think of shit like this? And why? Intelligent design, my ass!

Posted by Bill at July 6, 2005 07:00 AM