My university campus, ASU West
That's how I feel about my schooling this summer. It is going to take me five and a half years to get a four year degree. I guess this is mainly my fault, because I didn't know which direction to go for my first few years. Plus I had some bad counseling at my local community college. "Here, you can take this class instead and it counts as the same credit." "Really?" Pff. I guess I now have an idea of what I want to do with my life now, and I just want to hurry up and graduate. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, I've gained so much momentum that I want to hurry up and get it over with. I want to graduate! I only have one more semester left to go, but despite all this I'm afraid I am starting to slow down and lose concentration on my studies.
Sometimes school just pisses me off. Like when I have to read books written by these eloquent jerks who write total nonsense. I had to read a chapter in this book In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution by Camin et al. for my Mexican History class this summer. Take this sentence for example: "If Calles discovered the future of the Revolution, Cardenas somehow imposed its character of perpetuity." What the heck is that supposed to mean? I had to read that sentence many times before it made sense. I'm burned out. I'm tired of it. I just want to graduate.
The people at ASU West are great, and I like going to the university far more than Glendale Community College, which I went to for three years. I took a Japanese class at ASU main campus in Tempe for a while in the fall 98 semester, but I ended up having to drop the class. Immaturity was rampant there, and I realized how spoiled I was at ASU West. My university is an upper level college that's a part of Arizona State University, but is more of a separate entity since it's located on the West Valley area of Phoenix. People here are great, for the most part. At ASU main campus, there's plenty of people with bizarre body piercings, tattoos, hair colors, and all sorts of stuff that people do to themselves for the self-defeating purpose of being an individual. "Yeah, you're unique. Just like everybody else." People at my own campus are more mature than that. It's an upper level division school, with 300 and 400 level courses, plus a graduate school. It's a much smaller campus, so you get to meet people and make friends easier. Plus parking is free and it's easier to park, to boot. The teachers in the School of Management like to stay stuff like "certain ramifications" and "in essence" and they like to ask, "to what extent?" Plus, everything seems to be "strategic." That kills me.
However, there are a few things that kinda get on my nerves at my university. This is mainly the attitudes of those at my school. It's not too difficult to figure out that I'm a Christian, or at least I try to make it fairly easy to tell. When some people discover this, they react as though I'm ignorant or something. Occasionally this reaction can sometimes be antagonistic, such as one co-worker of mine who even insinuates that I am uneducated.
Uneducated in what? Science? Many people today believe that science has somehow disproved the existence of God, and that religion is merely an impediment to the progress of our intellectual minds. "Science" meaning "Evolutionism" and the "Big Bang." I purposely said "Evolutionism" instead of "Evolution" since I believe that Evolution is a religion in itself. And as the philosopher Ferris Beuller once said, "Isms, in my opinion, are not good." I think that it's more of a leap of faith to believe in Evolutionism than accepting the fact that there is a God. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the idea of Evolution, divorced from Intelligent Design, was concocted out of a desperate unwillingness to accept that there is a God the Creator, and a complete ignorance of genetics. Science is the study of the observable and the repeatable. Evolution is neither. Again, I'm talking about the transmigration of species, not plants turning into somewhat different plants and such. They don't find missing links in fossil records. Species just spontaneously began existing at one point.
If you do a research project and come to some conclusion in the lab and proclaim a great discovery, they'll ask you how you did it so that the process can be repeated. If you say, "Well, it is irreproducible and it only happened once. It only happens by random chance," you probably won't get a Nobel Prize. If you stick to the strictly observable, then evolution has never been observed. Some scientists have practically driven themselves mad trying to force evolution on fruit flies, moths and insects. Some deviations occurred, but the breeding stock always reverted back to the norm. If evolution is a fact, then I would say that it is evidence of God/Intelligent Design, because the complete randomness and statistical impossibility for such things to work out is astronomical. There is no reason to say that religion disproves evolution or that evolution disproves religion.
Evolitionism (again, a completely Atheist view of evolution that is practically a religion in itself) is the belief that something came from nothing, and that DNA has the ability to completely alter itself into something completely new and incompatible from the original. We have different DNA than apes. We even have different sets of chromosomes. There are people born today with a different number of chromosomes than normal people, and it's called Down's Syndrome. I'm sure most of them are nice people, but I can hardly say that they are the next step in evolution, nor a step backwards. Let me tell you once again about my Siamese Betta fish Steve. If you've ever seen a Betta, they have long, wispy fins and beautiful, bold colors. They don't exist like this in nature. Natural Bettas are rather bland looking, and not very colorful. But with a good knowledge of genetics, breeders have developed rather striking colors and long fins which serve them no purpose in a natural environment. All they really needed to do was just breed and breed and eventually produce the colors and traits that make them so appealing just by isolating certain genes and developing them further. The human stock is the same way. We're all made of the same stuff; we just look different. People went their separate ways, and different visual characteristics were the result. If two Caucasians give birth to a child, they're certainly not going to have a child with obvious Asian or African features, for example. It took thousands of years for us to become so different. Yet it's more improbable that a human child would be born with feathered wings, or a fish to be born with hairy arms. The only thing Charles Darwin saw at those islands were variations of beak features of birds of the same species and went from there. This was at a time when we had no concept of genetics, let alone DNA. His father (or grandfather, I forget), Erasmus Darwin wrote a book on evolution about how if a man has his leg amputated, he will have a child with a missing leg. This half-baked science is what inspired Charles Darwin to write that preposterous book of his. DNA locks evolution into place. Evolution is therefore a religion of time. Given enough time, anything can happen, one would think. But time is meaningless without the context of space, Einstein proved. If God does not occupy space, and is separate from our existence, Wouldn't time therefore be meaningless to God? Some people say that since God made the earth in seven days, then these must be the 24 hour days as we know it. This isn't necessarily so. It could have been millions of years for all we know. And I certainly can't swallow this Big Bang Theory that they propagate on the Discovery Channel and PBS. To think that gasses condense in the vacuum of space when they actually dissipate is absurd. And on top of it all, if the Big Bang created our universe, what created the Big Bang?
While looking at a beautiful painting, I see the work of a creative, imaginative artist. An evolutionist would explain it something like, "A long time ago, there was an explosion of paint on the canvas and over the eons, the paint came together and formed a picture of a windmill overlooking a field of flowers with the sun setting behind the mountains." What we observe is the universe we live in. That which is beyond existence as we know it, which we cannot possibly observe, must be something that we cannot even fathom. Take an architect. Let's say you're in a house or any type of building. If you look for the architect in what he has created, you won't find him. He won't be like, "Hey, I'm over here! I'm the hat rack!" No. He would be the creator, not the creation. If I form some vase or something out of clay, I cannot by the very nature of creating ever be a part of the clay. Therefore, you cannot point the Hubble at space and see God waving back at you. If you do, you're probably pointing the telescope at your friend's house or something instead. So what I am saying is that it is impossible to actually view God. Science is the study of that which is observable. Therefore, God is unprovable through science. Conversely, God cannot be disproved through science, since He is apparently unobservable. Yet going back to the architect example, although you cannot see him or her, you could observe aspects of the architect's personality by noticing the design of the building. If you take a look at Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural creations, you could appreciate certain aspects of his nature without even knowing him or seeing him. Just by looking at his designs you can tell how he thought, and the influences he had on his work.
If you ask people what they think absolute evil is, they might say "Adolph Hitler" or "Stalin" or something. But what is absolute good, then? Mother Teresa? Kermit the Frog? Hello Kitty? I'm stumped. Personally, I can only think of what is absolute good, and that is God. Some people think that absolute evil would therefore be the devil or something, but what is evil but the corruption of good? You can do something good for the sake of doing good, but people don't do something bad just for the sake of doing bad. Bad acts are usually committed for the selfish pursuit of pleasure, and pleasure in itself is a good thing. Therefore Satan is not the antithesis of God, but merely a creation of God turned bad. He fell from grace because of the pursuit of selfish desires and jealousy of God.
Yet this selfish pursuit of desires is what seems to be celebrated so much in our society, and especially promoted on the campuses of American schools. This would be called Hedonism, I believe: the pursuit of personal happiness above all else. A coworker of mine recently told me that alcohol is a central aspect of nearly every country's culture in the world. I'd have to say that even more fundamental that is common among every country's culture in the world would be a belief in God, in some way or another. People don't really want to accept this fact. What also is interesting is that so many religions (even the obscure, "heathen" religions) have some sense of sacrifice that needs to be paid in order to atone oneself with a superior being, whether it is a monetary sacrifice or some animal sacrifice to the volcano or something. Some people take the easy way out and say that every religion in the world is valid as long as the individual believes in it. This makes about as much sense to me as if a teacher asks what two times two is and one child says four, another says five, another two, another twenty two, and another says that he does not believe in the multiplication table since it is merely fabricated in the mind of mankind. And then the teacher says that all of the answers are correct. Yet these same people are quick to point fingers and accuse people of being religious zealots if they dared believe that their own beliefs are true, thus invalidating any other beliefs. What is the point in believing something when you do not accept in your mind that it is true? I suppose I could buy into the belief that all religions are valid explanations of God only under the assumption that God has never made any attempt to reveal Himself to mankind. But once again, this is ridiculous.
In what should I place my hope and faith in, then? Society? Technology? I think not. If I remove God from my mind, then my very existence is mathematically impossible, and I am just one person among billions on this planet, circling a star among billions in our galaxy, among an infinite number of other galaxies, spinning through space like colossal frisbees. Pretty sad. But to think that I am someone special, and that the very One who spoke the universe as we know it into existence would actually know be by name and to love and care for me... Perhaps it's merely wishful thinking, but I'd say that the alternative of our universe as being some great mishap is even more wishful thinking.
But what the heck am I talking about? I'm just unintelligent and uneducated, and obviously incapable of thought. I just had my pet monkey type this for me. He's evolving, you know.
Go to the next chapter of "Greg's Life" or you'll be sorry!
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"You're atheist? Would you mind selling me your soul?"
"Frisbetyrian: When you die, your soul goes on the roof."
mail: greg -atsign- stevethefish -dot- net