Thank Outer Space for Small (Yet Beneficial) Random Eventualities!

Let me write this out to get it straight. I just want to get it clear in my own head so I don't make an ass of myself...again...

In our enlightened modern era, people think the idea of God and an afterlife is ridiculous. Science is the thing; I've even called it the new religion, somewhere else...

This being what it is, many of these devotees to science, with a complete dismissal of any theological beliefs, follow a Facebook page with the boringly irreverant name of "I F*#@ing Love Science" -- a site that looks, to me, often, like it f*#@ing loves Photoshop. (But that's neither here nor there.) A site that posts its revelations in memes. As if that is not enough, though the devotees to the surface layer of modern science don't believe that we can move, in spirit, to another place after death -- because this is just plain silly -- they are willing to accept the fact that there are parallel universes full of copies of all of us. After all, "IT IS WRITTEN" -- by the scientists... Black holes? Quantum mechanics? As long as the priests wear lab coats instead of collars, members of the Church of Science are cool with believing in things without explanations. Oh, and many are perfectly willing to accept, at the click of a mouse, that a picture of Bill Nye the Science Guy, superimposed with a quotation, is enough proof that he actually said it. Remember what John F. Kennedy said: "Just because you see it on the Internet, it doesn't mean it is true."

(This, of course, despite the facts that actual scientists, like David Eagleman, are far less dismissive.)


The rest of the world? We are evolving, my friends. No time for belief in things without concrete proof; no time for things without clear and documented cause and effect. Time was that one would go to a shaman or to the village witch to ask about the future. The bones would be tossed and maybe spit upon and stirred around with a curling fingernail and the future would come clear, as if the condensation had been wiped from the window.

Not anymore...unless we count the economist witch doctors whose knowledge of the future of finance is based on data. Hard numbers. And, of course upon stuff like when rats in a warehouse in Kuala Lumpur is going to make the New York market drop one tenth of a point. These are modern people, not tribal spiritualists, dear readers. Their finger is on the pulse of the economic universe. We believe in them, because they know that the economic health of a country is based on the employment numbers...I mean, on the national debt...I mean, on when to stop pouring stimulus money our into the business world...on....Well, it is based on something -- something that they know that we don't and that we should just accept. Because, after all, we are not privy to the mysteries of finance. All hail Mammon!

Thank heaven (whoops...) Thank Outer Space that we don't fall into those old medieval traps. No more boiled frogs and voodoo puppets for us, friends. Data-driven beliefs are the only ones for us; we of the bigger and bigger crania and the increasingly skinny arms.

We would never just substitute one ignorance for another. We're too smart for that. We would never dismiss one unfounded belief in favor of another. We're too educated. We went to college. We listen to public radio. We read "Calvin and Hobbes," daily and we watch "Breaking Bad," nightly. We'd never be taken in by the same fellow in a different cloak...