California, 2007

And this has been the busiest couple of weeks I’ve had so far, what with tracking down three different job leads, which involves hoofing it to what feels like the ends of the earth. Or at least the ends of the BART and MUNI systems.

Yes, I’ve spend most of the week commuting around the Bay Area. Daly City to Dublin/Pleasanton, and back. Then down to Fremont, to a data center. Apparently "near the BART" means thirty minutes away by bus, plus two blocks on foot.

Getting my hopes up, then dashed, then up again. They call me up to tell me they’ve gotten someone else… then a couple of days later, call me in for an emergency interview, ’cause their first choice seems to have backed out.

Anyway. Three interviews per week is far better than the slow drag of the two months we wasted in LA. At least I’m too busy going around the city to mope about in an empty apartment. Especially since the phone company hasn’t gotten us a dial tone two weeks after they told us the line was up.

And I’d prefer not to be left alone on my own for too long, as I don’t know how to cook anything except greasy fried stuff. At least I’m learning a lot about the proper application of garlic. And cheese. Lots of cheese.

French toast and bacon, for example. Typical brunch. I know I should have more salads and less grease, but you know what they say about living forever…

Oh,
well. Still trying to get used to the extreme change in temperature
once you cross the Bay Bridge, going from the sweltering high 90’s of
the North and East Bays, to the chilly fog of the Outer Sunset and Lake
Merced.

Still, could be worse. At least we’re getting far more fresh air than in the smog down south.

The weekend isn’t any less busier, but at least we’re having fun noodling around downtown San Francisco with friends. Must remember not to drink too much coffee while on a hangover, though. I have a really slow metabolism, which means the effects of any beers I have on Friday night do not go away until Saturday evening, and any caffeine I take will keep me up for the next twelve to sixteen hours.

So in this post-alcohol caffinated state, I take a couple of minutes to sit in Union Square and listen to some long-haired bearded gentleman speaking on why despite having gone to several universities and other educational institutions, he believes that the big bang theory isn’t true, and anybody who tries to tell you otherwise hates Jesus.

American society has a troubling contempt for education in general, and scientific education in particular. You read about all the debates about putting Intelligent Design into schools alongside (or instead of) the Theory of Evolution.

Other people hang rosaries or scapulars on their rear-view mirrors. We seem to have Great A’Tuin hanging from ours. I wonder why, we aren’t Omnian.

Turtles all the way down. Sounds better than what I hear on TV these days.

I mean, there’s an unspoken assumption that scientists are all godless atheists, intent on driving the steamroller of Big Science over the sacred beliefs of God-fearing, right-thinking folk everywhere.

I remember when we were in grade school - a friend told me that I shouldn’t want to be a scientist when I grew up, because scientists didn’t believe in God. I told her, "your father’s a scientist, right? And he takes you guys to church, right?".

Thing is, there shouldn’t be an argument in the first place between Creationists and Evolutionists. Pick apart Genesis, and you’ll see a pretty clear description of evolution - they’ve even got avians evolving before reptiles, as recent studies indicate - as long as you accept that one "day" in Genesis corresponds to hundreds of millions of years in human time.

It all boils down to people refusing to accept that they descended from apes. And that, by most definitions, falls under the sin of pride. Why do you think a chimp has less of a soul than you do?

The guy on the podium, he says he refuses to believe that Man came about as a result of random chance. He says that fossils are a load of bunk, that evolution did not happen.

Me, I think God was just giving everybody, even the trilobites and dinosaurs, an equal chance at reaching sapience. Every organism, past, present or future, extinct or existing. Everyone deserves an equal chance of getting into Heaven.

Of course, that also means everybody has an equal chance of getting into Hell.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 12:33 am and is filed under Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.