December 26, 2007

• When Santa Met Darwin – Christmas 2007

  

  Happy New Year from Rain

  Ho Ho Ho!  I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas.  Fred & Susie had Christmas Eve this year for the first time in their new house.  There was SO much more space than we usually have and the kids had plenty of room to run around and play.  The only problem for me, was the 3 cats but I survived.  We did a grab bag this year, which was really nice.  I got a great leather camera bag and an extra camera battery from Sam. 

  These are some of the little photo Christmas tree ornaments I made this year.  I thought they came out pretty well.  I still need to work on finding the right photo dimensions though.

  

  
  Fred & Sue’s backyard is right out of Gilligan’s Island

   
  There are even banana trees

  
  And persimmons

  
  And a tennis and basketball court (OK, maybe not like Gilligan’s Island!)  Damn, I should have been a sports photographer (not)!

  
  Curtis, Kevin, Susie, Fred, Cody, Kyle & Kenny

  
  Rob, Cole, Tressa & Jenn

  
  Lisa, Andy, Tommy & Joel

  
  Tressa, Tommy, Andy, Carey, Cole & Cody

  

  

  
  Pre Santa

  
  One eyed Buster and Roxy in their Christmas finest

  

  
  We had the webcams going with our family back home in Chicago.  My brother was showing me the snow there, so I took my laptop outside and…

  
  pointed the webcam at the thermometer

  Which kind of reminded me of this photo of my Dad which was taken 30 years ago on  Christmas Day 1977.  We called out to my aunt and uncle in California and (the same ones I’m here with now) and they said it was 80° and they were barbecuing.  My Dad told them he was cooking out too…and this picture was born. 

  
  Nice legs Dad!

  Everyone seemed to really like their presents.  The girls got brand new Nikon SLR’s.  I got the new Stephen Colbert book, and a new Gorilla Tripod, a bluetooth mouse, the Hairspray “shake & shimmy” DVD, the Camp DVD, some toiletries, sweatshirts, hats, a crystal globe from Italy and a heated towel rack.  The kids all got new DS games, and were actually quiet most of the afternoon.  We took them to see Alvin & the Chipmunks tonight (save your money), and then I drove home to prepare for Bassam’s arrival.

  

  As I watched my niece (via webcam in Chicago) open her presents this morning, I was reminded that this year she announced that she no longer believed in Santa Claus  (She’s 19.  j/k).    This is interesting to me, as I’ve had the Santa discussion a few times in the past month with friends.  We discussed it in Portland over Thanksgiving (is it OK to lie to your kids?).  Tyson and I discussed it after the God debate.  I personally feel the power of myth can be a good thing, and that the Santa myth is pretty darn time tested and solid.  I also found it interesting to note that my niece wanted to spend Christmas morning watching her little sister (who still believes in Santa) open presents, before going over to her Dad’s house (her parents are divorced).  So Santa or no Santa, God or no God, most of us can’t resist watching kids open presents on Christmas morning.
  
  

  Children believe in Santa Claus. Creationists believe in creationism. But children eventually discard their belief in the Man in Red on the basis of evidence. So why don’t creationists? The issue here is not so much that creationism is bad science – though it clearly is and that is a serious issue. The issue here is that it is bad Christianity: blinkered, arrogant, literalistic, paranoid, pusillanimous, delusional, anti-truth, world-denying, and cringingly embarrassing Dawkins bait. (This is hardly the place to dredge through the overwhelming scientific case against creationism. It can be done perfectly well in one word anyway: fossils.)  But the parallels between these two beliefs, creationism and Santaism, are more extensive than you might have noticed.

  Both start out as reasonable assumptions. Children are not fools, but believe in Santa on the authority of their parents, who have proved a reliable source of information. Just as Christians have found the Bible an invaluable source of information about the ways of God.

  But new information makes children rethink their understanding of authority: not every story their parents have told them is literally true, but that does not make them untrustworthy in more important things. Likewise the mature Christian response grasps that God might have good reasons for letting myths be told with his seal of approval on them.  Read more…

  And not to beat a dead horse, but Daniel finally responded to the fracas over the D’Souza debate, and seeing as he is one of my most learned friends, I thought I’d post his response here:

  On the subject of atheism vs. Christianity there is much to be said. The subject will naturally submerge us into polemics of the most invidious variety. What it ultimately comes down to is this: there are those whose belief systems are culturally and emotionally grounded, and those that choose not to subscribe to what could be construed as anthropomorphic delusion.
  
  Although I would not purport to be a Christian per se, (despite my interest in Jewish literature and Church history) to declare myself an atheist would be both limited in scope and suggest I am seemingly indigent of imagination. An atheist believes there is no God. The problem with an absolute declaration like this is that it begs the question: what exactly do we mean by God? If by God we mean the God of the ancient Hebrews (and subsequently what some would consider the figure of Christ himself) then yes, I am an atheist on the basis that I reject the notion of a personal God. This is partially because I believe that neither the Hebrew nor the Christian weltanschauung has any right to sanctimoniously declare their self-proclaimed, respective apexes of the theological realm to be the center piece of world religions. Their rituals, which are by and large a hypocritical pre-occupation and overindulgence in sin and self-righteousness, limit the average parishioner’s ability to enter the realm of authentic spiritual ecstasy (unless you count those freaky quacks having fake orgasms on the Christian music commercials). Contrast their practices with those of the Hindus or Buddhists, and you will find that by comparison, many Christians don’t really enter into the true realm of spirit (not to level that those seeking nirvana or Krishna-consciousness would be). Buddhism and Hinduism spiritually engage their followers and encourage their quest while in the midst of life (I have witnessed this first hand). Granted, like the Christians and Jews, those religions likely mold, limit, and shape the views of their followers, but at least they are getting more spiritually advanced in the process. There is no waiting for the afterlife (which is why Marx called it the opiate of the masses) as the central focus of its tenets.
  
  On the other hand, to deny any possibility that there is any mystery to the magic of the living realm and how it originated (as the atheist might purport) would be just as narrow-minded as the belief that missionary work is necessary because the whole world should be subservient to just one arrogant admonition (or the ethnocentric Ann Coulter imposistionist view). Empirical science should inspire awe and wonder in humans; not the close minded, fixed views that characterize the repugnant nature of many organized religions. 

  Speaking of “fossils” and creation, get a load of this:

  

  It’s an exhibit at the “Creation Museum” in Kentucky (I couldn’t make this shit up!), that depicts a “penis free” Adam naming a sabre tooth tiger in the Garden of Eden.  Nice kitty.  But wait a Kentucky minute!  “Genesis 2:25 clearly says that at this point in Adam & Eve’s life, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed.” If Adam courageously sat there unencumbered while he was naming saber-toothed tigers, then why, six thousand years later, should he be depicted as a eunuch in some family-values Eden? And if these people can take away what Scripture says was rightfully his, then why can’t Charles Darwin and the accumulated science of the past 150-odd years take away all the rest of it?” 

  The first thing one notices when walking into this den of deceit is the dinosaurs.  Interestingly, they have saddles and are being RIDDEN BY PEOPLE!  I’m sorry, but I found this concept ridiculous at the age of 8 when I saw it on the Flinstones!!!  (This is like shooting fish in a barrel!)

  
  Welcome to white trash (the woman in this picture is likely holding a Bic Mac and a cigarette in her other hand.)

  As this excellent Esquire article points out:

  The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become”charter members” of the museum.

  “Dinosaurs,” Ham laughs as he poses for pictures with his visitors, “always get the kids interested.”

  AIG is dedicated to the proposition that the biblical story of the creation of the world is inerrant in every word. Which means, in this interpretation and among other things, that dinosaurs coexisted withman (hence the saddles), that there were dinosaurs in Eden, and that Noah, who certainly had enough on his hands, had to load two brachiosaurs onto the Ark along with his wife, his sons, and their wives, to say nothing of green ally-gators and long-necked geese and humpty-backed camels and all the rest.

  (Faced with the obvious question of how to keep a three-hundred-by-thirty-by-fifty-cubit ark from sinking under the weight of dinosaur couples, Ham’s literature argues that the dinosaurs on the Ark were young ones, and thus did not weigh as much as they might have.)

  “We,” Ham exclaims to the assembled, “are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” And everybody cheers.  Read more about the broader dumbing down of America…

  
  The Times of London, said this, when this creationist crap pot opened last May:  “The $27 million (£14 million) exhibition is funded by evangelical Christians, who apparently believe that by reclaiming dinosaurs and fossils for their literal biblical interpretation of natural history, teenagers are less likely to look at internet pornography or get pregnant out of wedlock.”

  It’s 3 AM and I’m going to bed.  In the meantime, here are the rest of the photos and a couple of videos I shot.  The first one is of the kids opening their presents.  The second one is of me singing Darcy the Dragon to Andy & Tressa on Christmas Eve and for some reason it’s all jacked up.  I think it’s a codec issue, but I’ve already spent way too much time trying to figure it out and it’s still messed up.  You’ll get the idea though.  I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!  –Carey

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