The Science of Religion

At the risk of accidentally making this into a Catholic blog, I am going to once again explore themes relevant to today through the lens of the Catholic Church. I know I've been writing about the Church a lot lately, and it seems to have become April's theme, but this will probably be the last post on that topic for a while, Imaginary Readers, and I will return to exploring my neuroses and insecurities shortly. But for now, I think it's important to talk about the Church, because I have a deep and abiding reverence for it as an historical and cultural force in the West, and am a total nerd about it for some reason, despite the fact that I completely and utterly disagree with it's social policies and don't really believe in the whole Our Risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ thing. In fact, sometimes I worry that someday I'll have some sort of religious experience tied to my reverence for the Church and end up back in the fold totally against my will, which may be the most truly neurotic and weird of my anxieties, but whatever happens happens I guess.

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Anyways, what I was intending to discuss today is the relationship between religion and science, because I currently doing research for a paper about the Church and evolution and so I've been reading lots of things various Popes have written about evolution and science in general. The Church had a rough start with the whole science thing, what with Galileo and all, but in the past century, it has been one of the most progressive religious institutions when it comes to integrating scientific discoveries and theology, and the way that it expresses this integration and the reservation it has about it, are some of the most poignant reflections about science that I've read in a long time.

Let's start with the "Letter of his Holiness John Paul II to Reverend George V. Coyne, S.J. Director of the Vatican Observatory" (1987), (and no, Imaginary Readers, I don't expect any of you to actually read this, although it is really interesting if you enjoy Papal writings about science). The letter stresses the need for a new era of critical openness and exchange between science and religion, as it consideres both crucial to the understanding and appreciating "our universe as a whole." It touches on some really important concepts when dealing with the relationship of science and religion in ways that are much more open and understanding than you would necessarily expect the Church to be. For example, it stresses that "[t]he Church does not propose that science should become religion or religion science" something that I think people in the pro-science camp sometimes forget is an option. They seem to think that any religious involvement or discourse with science means that religion is trying to take it over and impose it's own pre-conceived notions upon science, which some do, particularly Christian fundamentalists, but, as demonstrated here, that is not the only way to interact with religion, because "religion is not founded on science nor is science an extension of religion...Christianity possesses the source of its justification within itself and does not expect science to constitute its primary apologetic." Religion should not expect to find any justification for its existence within science, because religious tenets are outside of the purview of the natural; any divinity is by its very nature supernatural, and thus, no direct evidence for it occurs in nature, which is exactly what the Pope is saying here. Religion is free to interpret scientific findings to suit its theological tenants, but it cannot expect science to prove or disprove those tenants. This is again something that people on both sides misunderstand I think. Science is in itself not an argument for atheism, because you cannot prove a negative, thus you can never prove that God doesn't exist, nor can science be twisted to prove pre-conceived religious notions as the Young Earth Creationists like to do. The important thing to take away from this discussion is that "science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purity science from false absolutes." I do believe that an honest dialog between the two camps is needed to do just that, so people can see that they aren't mutually exclusive and not all religious people are science deniers or pseudo-scientists nor are all science advocates rabid atheists who believe any sort of faith is stupid.

I think it says a lot about the theological maturity of the Church that it recognizes the need for honest dialog between science and religion, and that science is the medium through which we understand the world around us. It means something that one of the largest organized religious bodies in the world, one which is notoriously resistant to change, recognizes scientific truths such as human evolution and quantum physics, and that religion itself is not infallible. Here the Church is willing to meet science half-way, without compromising its belief system, so long as the scientific community is willing to do the same. This is not to say that religious beliefs should inform scientific inquiry, rather that while they occupy separate sphere, as it should be, they should be in dialog with each other, because both can grow from attempting to understand where the other is coming from and what values inform each.

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I know that many people don't think that religion has anything to offer science, but I think that John Paul II makes a good point when he claims that religion can help science to "not become an unconscious theology."The reason, I think, many people see science and religion as incompatible (the actually incompatible Young Earth views notwithstanding) is that I think there are some within the scientific community who propagate the idea that they are mutually exclusive, such as the hard core atheists. I want to clarify here that I'm not talking about those people who just don't believe there is a god for reasons of their own, but I am specifically referring to those who yell really loudly about how science makes a god impossible and how atheism is the only logical, reasonable conclusion, and that if you aren't an atheist you are stupid, gullible, and deluded. Those people can stand to benefit from the realization that they are using science as a justification for their own system of beliefs, which is as valid as any, but not inherently better or more reasonable than any other. They have turned science into a basis for their own brand of theology, because they are using it to make claims that it in itself cannot make. Like I said, you can't prove a negative. Absence of proof is not proof of absence, no matter what anyone claims. A dialog between science and religion wouldn't force anyone to believe or disbelieve in God, and might in fact help to open minds on both sides, which I think would be a good thing all round.

Science-y Goodness

It occurs to me that I've written a lot about the Catholic Church and it's politics of late, which is because it's been really active of recently, and because I'm working on a paper on the Church and it's policies on evolution, so I've been thinking about Catholic doctrine a lot lately. In order to make up for all of the Church stuff, here's some enjoyable science pictures, because this is the Black Hole Symposium after all, and science is awesome!

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is amazing, and succeeded in making me want to be an astrophysicist for about a year in middle school. Then I realized that astrophysics involved physics, and fuck physics.

This is funny, because science is all about change rather than dogma, which many people who are opposed to actual science, such as creationists and pseudoscientists don't understand. There is no dogmatic scientific conspiracy to keep your pet "theory" down, there just isn't any evidence supporting it.

I don't quite 'see' all of these, but that may be because I know too much about organic molecules that I just see oxygens and bonds. Also, I'm pretty sure 'self masturbation' is redundant and technically only one of these is a polymer, but whatever. And Organic Chemistry is awesome, so I had to post this. 

Get Thee To A Nunnery! Pronto!

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So, apparently the Catholic Church's hierarchy in the US, specifically the US Council of Bishops, hates everything fun, exciting, and awesome (to be fair, I already knew they hated everything fun and exciting, but they have now extended their hatred to awesome things as well). According to this article, which you should most definitely read (seriously, it's from the New Yorker, which is a step up from the Star Tribune or the Creation Science Association for Mid-America's news letter; this is a quality article that you're ignoring, Imaginary Readers), they have now decided that they don't just hate lay women and their issues like birth control, abortion, etc., but they also hate their own women, specifically nuns. The Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has decided to investigate the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the main organization of American nuns, for not being conservative enough on social issues. Basically, they seem to think that American nuns haven't been doing enough to discourage marriage equality, abortion, and the use of birth control in their ministries. Because apparently, respectfully not supporting something and advocating against it aren't the same thing, and in order to be against something you must yell about it all the time.

The shame in all of this is that nuns are really awesome, generally speaking. They are the members of the church who are really affecting change on a grass roots level, much more so than any other group within the church. It's nuns who are really helping the poor and disenfranchised, and who administer hospitals and teach in schools. They are the ones who are out in the community, who are getting arrested for protesting and advocating for those who can't themselves (yes, including fetuses, but I guess if you really believe that abortion is murder (which I don't, but that's a discussion for another time) do you have any choice but fight against it?). Nuns are the real agents of social change in the Church. Bishops sit in judgement of society and act as social commentators, but they rarely do anything other than that to change things (other than give gratuitous sums of money to political causes that promote discrimination, but I've already talked about that). And I don't think that the Church hierarchy respects the work that they do. They are actively discriminated against, as they can't rise in the ranks of the church above heading their own order, and they are treated much harsher than monks or priests (granted, when was the last time a monk did anything but read and sing?).

For example, in 2009, according to the above article, which you should totally read to understand what I am talking about, a nun who was an administrator at a Catholic hospital was excommunicated because she allowed the doctors at the hospital to terminate the pregnancy of a women who was about to die in they didn't. This means that the Church puts a higher value on the life of an 11 week old fetus than on the life of a 27 year old mother. Priorities people. And excommunication isn't the quaint antiquity that most people think of it now as. For someone who is truly faithful, like a nun or priest, being excommunicated, or not being allowed to receive communion until you repent, means potentially not being allowed into heaven, which is kind of a big deal if you believe in all that. This is from a Church that didn't do anything to punish priests who abused children, and just shuffled them around and covered it up. They excommunicated a nun for doing the right thing, but when an entire series of priests molested children they just tried to make sure no one found out and allowed them to remain vested. And now they're investigating the nuns because apparently actually living social justice isn't enough these days.

And now the Church is also considering readmitting the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), the super conservative group that split with the Vatican after Vatican II, because the Church was just too liberal for them. This is all indicative of a more conservative turn in the Church of late, precipitated by the election of Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, which is rather ominous considering the conservative swing in US politics recently, and what they might accomplish if the US fundamentalist Christians got over the whole 'dirty Catholic idol worshippers' thing and they teamed up. It would be like Voldemort and Magneto working together. Not a pleasant thought. Anyways, I'll stop rambling about the Catholic Church now, because I'm sure we've all got better things to do...

'Rouge Feminist Lesbian Catholic Nuns' are apparently a thing  (on the internet at least), and I'm not sure how I feel about it... (via)

Exploring the Rabbit Hole

I lieu of ranting at the internet about politics with poor writing and most likely flawed logic, as my last couple of posts have done, I thought I'd return to what makes this blog great*, Imaginary Readers: complaining about my perceived emotional problems. Because there's nothing quite so cathartic as talking about my (probably imaginary) issues on a blog no one reads. (For the record, I am only partly joking there. It is actually incredibly cathartic, and I'm kind of glad no one reads it, otherwise many awkward conversations would occur.)

Lately I've been having a little bit of insomnia, nothing to write home about, but enough trouble falling asleep to annoy me and make it that much more difficult for me to break my current habit of spending too much money on Starbucks. I suspect that it has to do with stress, because I've been super busy the past couple of weeks with my latest round of midterms and inane math assignments, and as the end of the semester approaches, my motivation to get stuff done wanes and the amount of things I have to do increases exponentially. This equates to much stress, which leads me losing ground in my war against my acne and some bouts of insomnia. I have to say, though, that it is very manageable insomnia, because mostly it seems to manifest as my not being able to shut my brain off for long enough to actually fall asleep. This belays a larger issue I have wherein I can never quite manage to shut my brain off. I can't not think, which wouldn't be an issue so much if the part of my brain that I can't turn off wasn't the part that seems to be directly keyed into my anxieties.

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I should specify here that for me there are two distinct ways of not being able to not think, both of which I encounter. The first is the issue of not thinking and just feeling; being in tune with my body. This is a useful skill when doing physical things for enjoyment/pleasure such as dancing or having sex. Considering the former, I continue to attempt to enjoy dancing, because I figure it might be an acquired taste that I just haven't quite acquired yet, like beer which I almost like, but I still only enjoy it for about an hour at most, after which my brain kicks in with a near constant commentary of boredom, foot pain, and a general feeling of awkwardness. Dancing is fraught with self-consciousness for me, and while I try to ignore it, because I don't want my insecurities to control me, I have yet to have an experience dancing that has given me any confidence or made me enjoy the pure feeling of it, as I gather that's what makes it fun. My research into the phenomenon of dancing as a socio-sexual exercise is ongoing; no conclusions have yet been reached. As for sex, in my limited though existent experience, I have yet to be able to separate myself from my brain for long enough to just feel it and enjoy it. Granted, mostly I just end up thinking something along the lines of 'Holy shit, I'm having sex right now,' but that usually (granted 'usually' in this context is about twice) devolves into 'and now I'm thinking about it. Should I be thinking about it? I should stop thinking about it...and I'm still thinking about it.' Drinking doesn't really help with the not thinking, in any context, because when I drink I'm just more likely to say and do what I'm thinking. Alcohol, at least in the moderate amounts that I have ingested, only peels away the first layer of the big ball of neuroses wrapped in inhibitions that is me, but it doesn't actually dampen the thinking aspect of it (at least that I've noticed, but it is difficult to compare, because when you're drunk its impossible to imagine being sober and when you're sober it's impossible to imagine being drunk; and I'm still not sure what counts as "buzzed" and/or "tipsy"; it's all very subjective and relative.)

The second issue of not being able to not think is not being able to shut my anxieties off. Now I understand that nobody, at least that I've talked to, can really decide to not be anxious, and I am somewhat of an anxious person, and I'm not saying that I strive to never be anxious, because anxiety is evolutionarily beneficial and as a human being, I will always have some anxiety. I would also like to clarify at this point that I don't think that I'm anxious in an uptight way, but rather in a worst-case scenario/hypochondriac way. I also recognize that I also probably don't have an actual anxiety disorder, because I don't think that it is so severe that it controls me in any way that I can't deal with, but I do have a tendency to fret about things and I have anxious moments, where I worry about something that has very little possibility of actually happening and I realize that it won't happen, but I can't help but worry about it. It seems to be related to how much sleep I get.

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Anyways, the frustrating part of it is the way that the part of my brain that is always on is also the part that will go down the rabbit hole of worst case scenarios at the slightest provocation. This seems to manifest most often lately with respect to social things, and my friends in particular. I'm not used to have close friends, as outside of sort of/kind of [Princess Leia Vampire] in middle school I've never really had any close friends before. And now, all of the sudden (as of the last year), I have about three different people who I would consider myself really close to (for me at least), and I have no frame of reference for how to deal with that. Because of that, combined with my general feeling that I lack basic social skills and the fact that now that I have friends I am terrified of losing them, every encounter with a friend that leaves me feeling less than stellar for whatever reason is immediately spun into a narrative of how this is going to destroy said relationship. And sometimes it's not even a valid reason, for example, a text that doesn't get answered because it doesn't need to be, or I say/so something that later I worry came off wrong (this is somewhat common because I have yet to figure out that I can't actually convey tone via text message). Usually (probably always, but I can't be sure) it's not a big deal, because either it's completely in my head or they know me well enough to know what I meant or not care. I'd like to think that the relationships I've built in the last year or so are stronger than the sheer force of my perceived idiocy, and given what some of them have withstood I have fairly good evidence that they are, but I can't help but worry about it. Every time I don't hear from someone for a while, or I we have a truncated conversation for whatever reason, or there's an uncomfortable silence it must be my fault for some reason I don't yet know, or some horribly stupid reason that I've managed to come up with, and it must inevitable lead to us never speaking again or something of that nature. I know that none of that is true, because I do realize when it is just my anxiety speaking, but that little irrational part of my brain usually wins the argument and I have to force myself not to freak out because I'm being an idiot and of course it's not a big deal. That's how friendship or any interpersonal relationship works: while you hope that it's generally good, it isn't always, but hopefully an awkward moment or someone being in a less than stellar mood doesn't matter.

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Also, sometimes I decide for no apparent reason that something has happened to someone and I worry about it until I have verification that they are fine. It's never that specific, nor is there usually a reason, and I don't ask if they're okay because then I would sound crazy, because it's crazy. 'What if...' is possible the worst thought I can have because it usually means that my imagination is about to take me down an insane path of things that I don't want to think about, realize would never happen, and can't help but worry about. At least it's usually something plausible like car accident or appendicitis and not something completely unrealistic like terrorist attack (at least in this part of the world on a per capita basis) or flesh eating bacteria. When I was little, if my parents went out I would stay awake in my room until they came home because I was worried that they would die in a car accident or something. I still get worried if someone is late by more than a reasonable amount.

The point being that my default setting seems to be to go right to the worst-case scenario, and the best I can do sometimes when it happens is to recognize that I'm being irrational and tell my brain to shut-up because it's being an idiot. It doesn't always happen, and it seems to be tied to my mood/the amount of sleep I've been getting/whether or not it's a Tuesday/what my expectations for said encounter were/a variety of other factors. I don't always want to think, but I can't seem to shut it off, but I shouldn't complain, there are worse things than my mild to moderate anxiety issues. There could be an uncontrolled fire in my immediate (or not so immediate) vicinity, but that's a completely different rabbit hole...

*I really only used the asterisk for visual effect and to make a sarcastic point, but I hate it when people don't carry asterisks through, so I had to put something down here for the not statistically significant number of you that saw it and immediately scrolled down to the bottom to see what it referred to. (If you did actually immediately scrolled down to see it, you win at this blog and have bragging rights until the next arbitrary competition.)

Fuck the Archdiocese

Apropos of my previous post please read this article, from last week's Star Tribune. I'll wait.

Now that you probably haven't read it, Imaginary Readers, let's talk about it. It's about an incident (incident might be too strong a word) that happened at my high school about two weeks ago now (I would've been more prompt by I've been super busy the past couple of weeks) involving the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul sending representatives to talk to the seniors about the importance of traditional families. They've done this at most of the Catholic high schools in the area apparently, and according to both the article, and the little I've heard about it from people current at De (my high school), the brunt of the presentation was about how family is important, etc, etc, but at the end they got into defining family, and talking about how how adopted kids, kids raised by single parents, and kids raised by gay couples are at a disadvantage because they're not raised by their biological mother and father. I'll get back to this later. Anyways, the point of the article is that several of the students didn't take so kindly to this message, especially once it became clear that they were only talking to the seniors because they can all vote in the upcoming election on the Marriage Amendment. Some of them started asking very pointed questions, and defending the rights of non-traditional families.

The coat of arms of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul (via)

Personally, I think it's awesome that they did that, the students that is, and that the school administration let them, because it brings home just how accepting my high school is, particularly for a Catholic school. The school had to let the Archdiocese say whatever it wanted, because it is under the purvey of the Archbishop, but the administration always made it very clear that it doesn't necessarily agree with our current Archbishop, who is very conservative, even for a Catholic archbishop, and has made the Marriage Amendment his pet project. Archbishop Nienstedt to so passionate about not letting gay people get married that he has given over half a million dollars to the amendment campaign and has sent out several DVDs to every Catholic household in the Archdiocese about the dangers of gay marriage. It's so ridiculous that extents he has gone to that [MaternalUnit] thinks that he is secretly gay, although she thinks pretty much everybody is secretly gay these days.

I don't agree with the Catholic Church on most issues, both politically and religiously, but I do generally respect it, because it's beliefs are consistent. I have no problem with it being against gay marriage because it is against any form of sex that isn't specifically for procreative purposes within a marriage, and it is also against divorce. It has the right to be against whatever it wants, it's a religion. What I don't like is the way that it has been attempting to impose that belief on everyone else by codifying it into law. There is a difference between civil marriage and religious marriage in the US, a fact which many seem to forget because we use the same word for both. All legalizing gay marriage does is making it possible for a gay couple to form a legal contract granting them certain rights in the civil sphere. No one is forcing the Church, or anyone for that matter, to approve of it or grant such unions it's blessing, nor should they. Religions will always have the right to believe what they like and approve what they see fit, but they shouldn't be messing around in the civil sphere. The Catholic Church is not the ultimate authority on morality, even if they like to think they are, and I don't think they should be involved with making laws, but they are, just like every other major Christian group in this country.

[MaternalUnit]'s opinion (via)

But I do think that the position of the Archdiocese is not necessarily the position of many Catholics in the cities. Just that fact that there is at least one Catholic high school that encourages it's students to engage in a dialog about these issues rather than accepting them as rote fact is encouraging. The face of the Church is changing, slowly, but it is changing. The hard line position that Nienstedt is taking is driving away the moderates, who like the community and structure that the Church provides, but don't necessarily agree with its politics, and he may never get them back. For example, this who debacle has caused my parents to decide to officially leave the Church, to the extent that it is possible to leave the Church, after staying for years because they liked our local parish. And there is always the question of whether St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church will end up succeeding from the Church altogether and become Lutheran or Episcopalian or something. Liberal Catholics do exist, but they may not for much longer, because they are being forced out of the Church by Nienstedt's politics.

This election cycle certainly will be an interesting one. Also, as [Honorary Robot] so eloquently put it, fuck the Archdiocese. It's getting really goddamn annoying to read about. Any pride I had left about being Catholic is pretty much gone at this point, as the Church has gotten nearly completely indefensible.

Separating Church and State

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As I've mentioned before, I'm taking a class on the Creationism Evolution debate this semester, which has generated some interesting discussions and readings and is also the reason that I'm convinced that Google thinks I'm a creationist. There is only so much time I can spend on Answers in Genesis before the fact that it is for research stops being a good reason to be reading about how dinosaurs and people coexisted 6000 years ago, and I surpassed that limit a while ago. Recently we've been talking about the Creation Science movement in the US (which is sort of redundant because fundamentalist Christianity is fairly unique to the US) in relation to various court cases pertaining to the teaching of evolution is public school. This prompted my professor to assign us an article to read unironically titled "Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Roam Free in the Land?" It is from the news letter of The Creation Science Association for Mid-America and it was written in 2008 by Tom Willis, who has also written gems such as "Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Vote?" In case you were curious, he answers both questions with a resounding "no" on the grounds that

"Hard-line evolutionists spend their entire life declaring Christians to be ignorant, crazy and, probably dangerous. But evolutionism is totally contrary to the empirical facts of science. Anyone truly believing evolution is either totally deluded or ignorant. Regarding who is really the dangerous group, in their unmitigated, and totally unjustified arrogance, evolutionists have caused more misery, and killed and tortured more people, in the last 90 years than all the wars of the last 2000 years."

Frankly, both of these articles are so ridiculous from my perspective, that of someone who is well educated, particularly in the sciences, and isn't particularly religious, that it reads as satire, which my professor assured us that it isn't, and in fact, the organization was a driving forced behind the Kansas State Board of Education removal of things like evolution and the age of the earth from their curriculum back in 2000.

But the fact is, there are people in the US, a not so small number in fact, who actually believe things what Willis is saying. Things like "Evolutionists are largely incompetent" and that "[Evolutionists] are manifestly the most dangerous and destructive people on the planet (Well OK, Muslims are strong competitors)." [Parenthetical part of the original text]. It should be noted that he defines Evolutionists as anyone who accepts the tenets of evolution, regardless of their position about the genesis of evolution. Born Again Christians who believe that God put evolution is place and that the earth is older than 6000 years are just as bad as hard core atheists and Muslims to him. He counts Evolutionism as a religion that is bend on destroying True Christianity (his specific brand of fundamentalist Christianity and Young Earth Creationism), and anyone who isn't a Young Earth Creationist is incompetent and intellectually incapable of anything. Ignoring the blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric he employs as well as the myriad logical fallacies and conflated arguments, these articles are still really frightening, because they serve to remind me that the US is really quite a religious country, and the religiosity particular to the US is one that favors fundamentalism and demands political action in favor of fundamentalism.

The fact that a (somewhat) successful presidential candidate has said that the idea of the separation of church and state makes him sick and it isn't an issue outside of the liberally bend media outlets says something about the priorities of America as a whole. Sometimes I forget that the US is so religiously conservative, because I attend a large public university in a fairly liberal mid-size city in the Upper Mid-West. I am fairly well insulated in a liberal bubble where even people who don't believe in macro-evolution, and I have several here at school, can study science and engineering and are not yelling for creationist to be taught in schools. But that doesn't seem to be the norm among the Christian fundamentalism movement in the US, particularly the farther south you go. They are the moral majority that has been pushing politics ever father right as of late, and not just is a fiscal conservative kind of way (which, for the record, I am totally on board with, fiscal conservatism that is to say). This election cycle has been full of issues that are important to the religiously conservative, which is fine, but they have been manifesting in scary ways that have gotten more support than my bubble would have lead me to believe was possible. The recent spate of highly invasive anti-abortion bills and the way that issues of women's reproductive rights have been arbitrated by conservative white men, as well as the perennial issue to which state is voting on making gay marriage (more) illegal this time. It seems insane to me that it is okay for the Catholic Church here in the Twin Cities to give more than half a million dollars to fund a constitutional amendment making gay marriage more illegal than it already is in Minnesota (it's already banned by state statute).

This is a little more meanspirited than I like, but it's fairly accurate (via)

I forget sometimes that our separation of church and state is already fairly loose, particularly when controversial issues are concerned, which is all the more reason to recognize that there is a fairly powerful group of Americans who want even less separation than we already have. They want school mandated Christian prayer, and they want Genesis taught as scientific fact, and they want gay people to not exist and women to not have rights concerning their bodies. Granted that's the most extreme view, and most Christians are very nice people who don't believe that God is out to punish people or that all of modern science is a lie. This is solidly the case of a very loud and powerful minority influencing policy and making everyone look bad, but they are still getting laws passed across the country.

I know this got kind of ranty, but I feel very strongly that people should respect others beliefs and not try to force their own religious beliefs down others throats via legislation. It frustrates me that the US, which presents itself as a bastion of freedom and tolerance, can be so intolerant to both differences and progress. I shouldn't be surprised every time I realize that Young Earth Creationists are incredibly powerful in some parts of the country, and that conservative Christianity as a whole is a major force in certain realms of politics these days, but I always am. Call me an idealist, but I think that it's just plain fair for real science to be taught in public schools, and for me to be able to marry whomever I choose, and for it not to be a big deal for me to be able to get affordable birth control, and I think these should apply across the country.

This is more political than I generally like to get, because I don't believe in forcing my opinions and beliefs on others or that my opinions are necessarily correct or the only valid ones, and I wouldn't go so far as to say that fundamentalist Christians are crazy or bad people, I just wish they would keep their beliefs to themselves. Having a diverse society is a good thing, because it forces us to challenge our belief systems and expand our horizons, just don't tell me that people who accept scientific fact shouldn't be allowed to vote or should be sent to labor colonies in Antarctica (I'm looking at you, Tom Willis).