Something I wrote in the margins of Language Production and Serial Order: A Functional Analysis and a Model:
perseverations as future-oriented error?
present activation entangling w/ future priming?
I think, if anything, today’s xkcd sold me against getting a DROID. Why is a physical keyboard a selling point? I really like Apple’s decision to make all but the most basic buttons virtual. It allows the phone to maintain the same form factor, and with fewer moving parts that’s just one less thing I have to worry about breaking. Granted, Android is an open source platform, which is good from the developer side of things. And running multiple apps at the same time would be nice (or even just having multiple web pages loading at the same time). But for some reason I just can’t look past the physical keyboard. It seems like a red flag of lazy design, so who knows what other horrors may await? In the end, I’ll wait to see what the early adopters think before casting a final judgement. Part of the reason I’ve been looking at the DROID is that my Gen 1 iPhone is getting kinda old. But since there is little price difference between the DROID and new iPhones, I’m more inclined to stick with Apple.
Migration projects, regardless of the number of exclamation points you put, are never exciting.
Like any institution purporting to be a museum, the Creation Museum has its own gift store. Here one can buy books and videos devoted to Young Earth Creationism, so that they might bring up a new generation of believers. Naturally I had to buy something, opting to purchase postcards for my secular brethren. One of these postcards featured a zorse, which is the offspring of a horse and zebra. The back of the postcard claimed that the zorse is evidence of a divinely planned world because it showed horses and zebras are descendants of the same horse ancestor. Which is funny, because I’m pretty sure a non-Creationist scientist would say that it is proof they evolved from the same horse ancestor. When I read this it sounded like tacit belief in evolution. At this point YEC started to look to me like a rabid fox dancing around a sampling of roadkill infested with evolving maggots, about to be hit by a speeding Hyundai.
Har har!
Why the schizophrenia? Why this dancing around the e word? The answer, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, is that the YEC are reading the poetry as prose. Myths were never meant to be read literally. They are metaphors, attempts to convey some higher truth about the human experience. Jonah wasn’t literally swallowed by a whale, Jesus didn’t literally ascend into heaven, Muhammad wasn’t literally picked up and thrown about his cave, and God didn’t create the world in six 24 hour days. None of these events would stand up to scientific rigor. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful images in their respective parables. It is the poetry that is important, not the prose.
The trouble is, poetry is difficult to decipher. To make matters worse, religious institutions base their authority on the prose. There can be no Christian church without the belief that Christ literally died and ascended into heaven. And since Jesus’ divinity is derived from the prophesies of the Old Testament, all that needs to be true too. So God needs, needs to have created existence in six days. The YEC have anchored their belief system in these “facts”. The only problem is that science has exploded them. Evolution has shown that we are not descended from Adam and Eve. The YEC, then, have to discredit science to protect their faith. But, ironically, since science is the intellectual coin of the realm, they use science to “prove” something that has always been based on faith. Faith is irrational. Faith is poetry. Yet, since the YEC have chosen prose, they must wrangle with science. Science is rational. Science is logic. How can one use logic to prove something that is illogical?
The serpent
The schizophrenia, then, derives from using something in a way it was never meant to be used. In the end, the whole movement hurts the Christian faith. Whatever truth about the mystery of life the myth contains has been relegated, replaced by a literal interpretation. And when the intellectual rigor of the modern scientific community goes head-to-head with the musings of Jewish holy men from millennia ago, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see who will come out on top. The YEC refuse to see this, blinded by their own inability to read their holy text as myth.
My journey into the bowels of the Creationist whale has shown me the perils of reading the myth literally. If you ever want to see religious ideology devoid of religion, and a scientific school of thought devoid of science, might I suggest you take a trip down to the Creation Museum?
I think if I could go one night in this house without hearing my roommate go “Ow!” and his girlfriend whine, I would attain bodhi… Two more months, two more months…
One of the first things one notices at the Creation Museum is the dinosaurs. There is a dinosaur skeleton before the entrance. You have your picture taken cowering in terror from superimposed dinosaurs after purchasing your tickets. And there are dinosaurs shown living in harmony in the Garden of Eden. What, then, is the deal? Dinosaurs aren’t mentioned in the Bible, but I suppose so are a lot of other critters. Do the Young Earth Creationists (YEC) then take a literal interpretation of the Holy Word? Or is some extrapolation done?
Dinosaurs everywhere, but no sense in sight
The cursory view of YEC beliefs that I took is probably not enough to answer that question with total competency. But what I found looked like some ugly chimera of science and religion. The first point the “museum” attempted to hammer home was that, yes, they are scientific, but they have a different set of axioms. So while human reason says that dinosaurs died out 65 million years before the rise of homo sapiens, the alternative, infallible, Word of God states that dinosaurs died out in the Great Flood. At this point in the tour they had a video of an older white man explaining that his conclusions about the dinosaur fossil he was digging up differed from his colleague’s because he began with the Bible, whereas his colleague did not. I thought it important to note the fact that the colleague in the video was of Asian descent. The thing to take away, then, is that science and religion are not mutually incompatible, just that religion offers the correct starting point for scientific study.
Human reason vs. the Divine Word
So we see that the YEC viewpoint is a little more sophisticated than “The Devil buried fossils to turn man away from God!” But where did these fossils come from? Apparently, the Great Flood is the explanation for a lot of things. The Great Flood buried the dinosaurs in a massive mud slide, thus fossilizing them. The Great Flood carved the Grand Canyon, “proof” of which can be found in the explosion of Mt. St. Helens, the mudslides of which cut canyons down the side of the volcano in a matter of hours. The Great Flood is an incontrovertible fact (employees have to believe this to work there, by the way). Of course, what the “museum” doesn’t explain is why dinosaur fossils are layers and layers deeper than mammal fossils, or that the Grand Canyon was cut out of harder rock than the canyons created by Mt. St. Helens.
Another idea the “museum” was trying to push was that all the stages of the Earth’s landmass, from Pangaea to today’s continents, formed under the Flood. At first I wondered why it would be necessary to “extrapolate” this idea from the Bible (Genesis 7:11, apparently), but then I remembered that there are fossils of the same species on both sides of the Atlantic, which those dastardly scientists use to prove tectonic motion (and so that the Earth is a little older than 6,000 years). Of course, with an omnipotent god you would think reasoning that away wouldn’t be necessary, but YEC seem to treat the religion as a science, to steal a phrase from Reza Aslan.
Flood 1, Earth’s surface 0
For a group that believes in the Divine Word of God, the YEC sure do steep their ideas in a lot of “scientific” terminology. I think the reason for this is that it is an attempt to combat the secular scientific community, essentially using their own ideas against them. Because science relies on axioms to build ever more complex models of the world, if the axioms cannot be agreed upon then the system becomes meaningless, right? The only problem is that this approach by the YEC seems misguided at best, and really is only convincing for other Biblical literalists, although as we have seen YEC aren’t even true literalists.
In part 3 I will discuss the schizophrenia that becomes apparent when the YEC takes a myth and attempts to interpret it through the prism of scientific logic.
I almost forgot, even though I was making a point to remember, that twenty years ago today the “People’s Liberation” Army descended upon Tiananmen Square, violently putting the kibosh on a movement that began as a way to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, but ended as something much, much more. The episode is decidedly a blight on the Communist Party of China, but what saddens me more is that Deng Xiaoping was so thoroughly able to co-opt the Chinese public with his grand bargain: forgo democracy and I’ll make you rich. At least he kept his end of the bargain, but what the CPC has to realize is that at some point the ghosts of Tiananmen will return. Lest they forget, no matter how much they want to, the world must remember this day, when a band of university students and proletariats, given the choice to return home, stayed and dared to stand up against tyranny.
As I found out too late, learning about the Creation Museum through the press is the wrong way to learn about the Creation Museum. But so it was some time back, and upon learning of its existence I thought it would be a bit of a lark to see what the creationists would put in a “museum.” Memorial Day weekend I discovered the lark was akin to Jonah’s journey into the belly of the whale.
My travel partner (names have been redacted to protect the innocent from, well, the crazies) and I made our way west of the Cincinnati International Airport along I-275, quickly leaving the trappings of civilization and entering what another friend of mine would affectionately call “Banjo Country.” We left the highway, driving through picturesque countryside. Out of nowhere materialized the entrance gates, imposing rather than welcoming. Think “Jurassic Park,” only instead of keeping dinosaurs in, they were there most likely to keep vandals out. At this point it hit us: we had crossed the threshold into the heart of creationist country. The anxiety was palpable because, hell, none of us knew any creationists, and frankly they aren’t the most rational of people. And so I decided to say a little prayer to Ahura Mazda to watch over and protect us as we walked amongst the unenlightened (I’m sure creationists say a similar prayer every morning). The fact that I survived to tell the tale I think proves beyond doubt that Ahura Mazda is the one, true Lord of Light, not some Canaanite thunder deity (my apologies to the Ahl al-Kitaab I inevitably just offended).
Looks like a normal science museum…
…with fancy, modern looking font assuring us it is, indeed, a “museum”
We passed, unmolested, through the impressive glass doors, the off-duty police officer kindly greeting us. The first challenge had been passed. The next challenge of purchasing tickets would not be so easy. Here we were grilled about how we had come to hear of the “museum.” As mentioned earlier, our answer, through the news, was not the correct one. Later, in the safety of Ohio, my travel companion and I mused about what the correct answer would be, concluding that the only proper way to hear of the “museum” would be through one’s young Earth creationist (YEC) church. No doubt the ticket salesman, who appeared to be a savvy, devoted YEC, denoted something off about us, given that I was not wearing a Dale Earnhardt, Jr. commemorative t-shirt, and my travel partner was not dressed in a bonnet and ankle length skirt. In the end the sway of the almighty greenback put two tickets into our hands, and we made our way to the main exhibit, getting our picture taken with “scary” dinosaurs first, which I’m assuming would be added later since we were just standing in front of a green screen. You can’t accuse YECs of lacking a sense of humor.
Dinosaur and little girl living in harmony
The lobby leading to the main exhibit serves the purpose of preparing the patron for the divine message within. Here we found various video screens stating “facts” that are to be extrapolated from the Bible, as well as the above pictured display. That’s right: a creepy, wax figure little girl (the “museum” was full of creepy wax figures) co-existing peacefully with a dinosaur of some variety. This branch of YEC believes not that dinosaurs didn’t exist, but that they lived side-by-side with humans. More of such shenanigans were awaiting my travel partner and I as we passed through the exhibit entrance.
There’s a reason they don’t tell you this crap in school, kid
Only YEC can prevent a dystopian future!
The main exhibit is one part romp through the Old Testament (which I would expect everyone there to know, but whatever), one part statement and “proof” of YEC beliefs, and one part vision of the dystopian future to come when man has rejected God (because Europe is a real hell hole). Frankly, the whole thing became interminable real fast, and by the time we watched an automaton Methuselah impart his antediluvian wisdom we were essentially breezing past displays. Because, honestly, there is only so much of an obviously wrong ideology one can submit their brain to before they start to crack. Besides, we weren’t there for the displays so much as observing the people engrossed in them. And there were a lot of people in the “museum” that day. Too many people. Any mirth that could have been derived by the hilarity of the exhibits was automatically canceled out by the fact that someone was taking this seriously.
After spending an hour or so drifting through the museum we were hungry enough to take lunch at Noah’s Cafe, feasting upon cheap pizza. It was a little too muggy to eat outside beside the artificial pond, although dining options are available there too, if you are interested. Satiated, my travel partner and I decided to saunter down to the petting zoo, which was somewhere in this stylized wood which included a swingy bridge frequented by little kids who were most likely expending the pent up energy they had after being bored to tears from the “museum” (although ads placed throughout would have you think otherwise). At this point we had decided we had had enough of creationists and would very much like to return to more secular activities, like visiting presidential graves in Ohio.
In part 2 I will discuss the YEC beliefs encountered during the visit. Stay tuned.
This weekend I had a little refresher in why I love city life so much when I took a trip to go gallivanting about the Five Boroughs with a friend of mine from prehistory (he did sing the Flintstone’s theme song during karaoke):
Apparently I should just go with my first instinct when it comes to gift ideas. Questioning myself for reasons beyond my comprehension, I queried my brother about what he might be wanting for his upcoming birthday. Lo and behold, it turned out to be the very thing I was thinking of getting him in the first place. Stupid brain, quit second guessing crap! Also, going through my e-mails, I found that my manner of asking my brother what he wants for his birthday seems consistent from year to year: it involves the words “anything”, “particular”, and “hankerin’”.