Thanks for taking the time.

I don’t mind the jokes, I find some of them funny myself. Yes, you are right, I don’t join in “discussions” about evolution vs creation, people will believe what they want to believe, there isn’t any point in arguing about it. Its a bit like supporting the All Blacks or the Wallabies really if you boil it all down.

I am also a spiritual person as opposed to religious – there are too many religious nuts out there. I hope that my life is an example to people and are therefore not very strong on pushing religion down people’s throats, in fact the people I hang out with are the complete opposite to me (opposites attract…) but I get on with them, regardless of our religious persuasions.

Live and let live. )

Please don’t take offense at my Creationism jokes. I respect other peoples right to their beliefs.

In fact I LOVE talking about it with them.

I actually think we are all wired to believe in something greater than ourselves.

What I really like about the many loving Christians I’ve known is their passion for trying to live each day as a better person than they were yesterday.

That is a beautiful and noble quest. I honour that.

I too try to look beyond the purely material in life and grapple personally with the hard spiritual questions, just like they do.

I personally feel that most discussions about Evolution versus Creation are exercises in miscommunication where BOTH sides are dominated by emotion and they are just not trying hard enough to really HEAR each other.

So they end up generating more heat than light.

Thus both sides miss the point that actually, underneath it all, we’re all in the same boat and just arguing about which single oar is best to paddle with.

But then I would say that as I’m an Existentialist, which is a fancy $20 word that is rather hard to sum up.

I suppose you could roughly translate it as sort of like an atheist or an agnostic or a humanist or a Buddhist but it’s a bit more nuanced than that.

So I usually just tell people ‘I’m spiritual but not religious’ which is the closest I can come in one sentence.

I should probably do a post on Existentialism.

As to your argument about evolution – I SO hear you as a hands-on father of two.

All the Hindu deities have multiple arms – they’re obviously on to something.

This just goes to demonstrate that Evolution is blind. And that your genes are selfish little buggers.

All your genes really care about is spreading. Once spread, they loose a lot of interest in helping out with the dishes.

Any comments about the parallels with male behaviour are completely unnecessary

My argument against evolution is this – if there was such a thing, why do woman still only have one pair of arms? Surely we would have developed a second or even third pair by now, just to do all the tasks that are expected of us!

Have fun dissecting and abusing those comments! )

But don’t mention Heliocentrism around YEC types.

After all, those Helio folks are obviously wilfully ignoring common sense and direct evidence in their pursuit of biblical literalism

Mind you, thankfully YEC’s aren’t going to get into positions of power, like controlling nuclear arsenals.

*cough* Palin *cough*

Young Earth creationists, for example, think the earth is only between 6 thousand and 10 thousand years old. I mentioned this to my mom (who is religious, believes in God and doesn’t think evolution is really how man came about). She said “surely you mean million and not thousand?”, and I said, “No, these people mean 6000.”

To which she replied, “But what about the dinosaurs?”

I am sure this comes from her relationship with her grandsons, all of whom are huge dinosaur fanatics, much like yourself.