Double Flee A

To commemorate the changing of my lead from "...now watch this drive" to "the anti-indoctrinator", I thought it was called for to justify my self-dubbing.

I was fishing with a friend out on one of the nineteen-thousand-odd lakes in Minnesota last weekend when the beers brought up between us the subject of god. My reasoning went like this:

So let's say Jesus is the son of god.
We know it takes forty six chromosomes to make a human being, so obviously twenty three came from his mother, twenty three from god. If all forty six came from mom, then he'd be a clone, a woman who looks just like Mary, which he wasn't.

So we're in a great position to figure out almost exactly what god looks like! Did he have curlier hair, different colored eyes from the rest of the guys around at the time? No! He looks just like the rest of the Hebrews! Ok, so god looks like a Hebrew.

Not a big deal. Except that God looks like a human being.

That's a problem.

Human beings are well adapted to their environment, wouldn't you say? The ears really help us to hear the sounds that pass through the atmosphere, the eyes help us see light that reflects off of things, the colors, the movements, etc. The skin has receptors in it that work great for feeling heat and cold and wet, which comes in terribly handy for not getting burned, infected, and dying. We have fingers, thumbs, vertebrae, it's great being a human on earth! And if we're made in god's image, then god himself must look a lot like us!

But what does god need ears for? How can we be made in the image of someone with no need for prehensile appendages, for sight, for hearing? How is it that our entire physical makeup, so well adapted for earth living, came from somewhere necessarily other than here?

God really needs to hear. So he can interpret sounds that pass through air.

AIR, WHERE?!

This reasoning can be repeated with any part of the human body. Did I hear this anywhere? No. I made it up. I don't need coaching, hounding, hectoring, bothering, jostling, winking at or indoctrinating to help me twist my putty-like belief system around something as knotted and misshapen as the concept of you-know-who being the son of you-know-who.

Anyway, my fishing companion either slept through this tirade or faked like he was drunker than he actually was. He held steadfast to his belief that I'm the one who's got it all wrong, when all I advocate is using the noggin.

Am I an atheist? No, I think about things and those who don't think about them have to come up with a name to call me. It helps the indoctrination process to make your belief system the norm, which can only be done by ostracizing the element of the "other". The human race makes progress when the old is thrown out and the new is perceived accurately and without bias.

Where bias is concerned, I have the bias which accompanies having rigorously applied the tools of logic at my disposal. Which is to say I have a bias, but it's better than most people's and on a case-by case basis I can and will be glad to tell you why.

Now I'm going to see if I can buy a car. I've been selected to receive junk mail from a repo car sale so I must be pretty special.

posted by dale @ 2:01 PM