Creationism in Biology class?!? Really?

Ok, so here's the deal... I was talking to this friend of mine who has 3 kids the same age as 2 of mine (a set of girl/boy twins the same age as my oldest daughter and a daughter the same age as my oldest son) All 5 of them are in high school this year, but at separate schools, and we were catching up and comparing notes having a completely normal conversation when all of the sudden she launches into this little rant about how she is going to go to the school and insist that her kids be allowed to leave the classroom when their biology classes cover evolution because the school refuses to teach creationism as a competing theory.

I had to almost physically restrain myself from responding to her.  I really like this lady and there is a lot that I really admire about her, but when it comes to this subject I just can not agree with her, but in the interest of preserving our friendship, I held my tongue and did the whole smile and nod routine. After all, whether I agree or not I am a firm believer in the idea that if she wants to believe in that type of religious claptrap... well that is her business, but when she suggested that Creationism SHOULD be taught in our schools I almost lost it.  I wanted to scream at her! CREATIONISM IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC THEORY! AT BEST, FROM A SCIENTIFIC STANDPOINT,  IT QUALIFIES AS AN UNTESTED HYPOTHESIS (AND I'M NOT SURE BUT IT MAY NOT EVEN QUALIFY FOR THAT AS HYPOTHESES USUALLY HAVE TO BE BASED ON OBSERVATION AND CREATIONISM REALLY HAS NOTHING EXCEPT THE HEARSAY FOUND IN THE BIBLE!

In fact, I have to wonder how many people who claim to believe that Creationism is true are even aware that prior to the creation of the King James version of the Bible, there were actually multiple versions of the creation story in Christian lore. Most of those versions can still be found from other sources, though a few have been lost to ages due to the Church at the time of King James hunting down and destroying as many copies as they could get their hands on. Furthermore, the biblical book of Genesis, like most other early biblical texts, was not written down at all until the time of Moses, which means that it's most likely not even close to the original version to begin with since we all know how well facts are preserved when spread by word of mouth alone- anyone ever play "telephone" as a kid? Each generation that told that story prior to it being written down would have changed the story a little bit- maybe not intentionally, but it would have happened- and we are talking about a lot of generations here. Not to mention that each time it got translated into another language it would change a little bit more and it went through at least 2 translations before it landed in the King James Bible (Hebrew to Latin and Latin to English).

So near as I can tell, the closest thing that the Creationists have to real proof of their claims is another hypothesis- the idea of intelligent design, which basically says that the fact that all things in the universe follow set rules like gravity implies that there must be a God.... that at least has some observable basis, but it's pretty weak, because while there are indeed a large number of rules that the universe follows, there is also a lot of chance and a lot of random crap that argues against the idea. Honestly I think that I would be more apt to believe in God if those rules of nature didn't exist because then there would be no other explanation for why anything worked.

If any of you have gotten this far (and I would be surprised if you did, all of you folks out there that believe in the idea of creationism), I would urge you to consider this thought: You can not permanently protect your children from learning about theories like evolution (and if they intend to progress in scientific studies in college, they won't have the option of opting out and still getting credit there) but do you really want the scientists that view your "theory" as little more than popular tripe to be the ones teaching your kids about the creationist ideas? It is my opinion that if you believe in creationism as strongly as you seem to think that you do, the better idea would be to ask for an elective class that would have a teacher that believes in it teaching these ideas, but don't be surprised if not even the religious based colleges consider the elective an acceptable alternative to sciences like modern biology.

So Move Already!

So, I was putting my son on the school bus this morning and his bus driver starts complaining about how she had heard that the rains were supposed to start up again in the next day or so and she was going to really miss the sun. I limited my reply to simply commenting that I like the rain, but I wanted to say so much more!

This is one of my pet peeves. I live in  Western Washington State near the Southern most point of Puget Sound and anyone who knows anything about the region can tell you that it rains a lot here. In fact even people who really don't know anything about the region know that Seattle, WA (which is the largest city in the state and technically in the same region as me though it's located a few hours drive North of my town) is known for coffee, grunge music, LOTS OF RAIN. Knowing this, why is it that every time I turn around someone is complaining about the rain here.  Seriously?

If you don't like the rain, why do you live in a state where rain is the norm? This is the birth place of the term "sun break" which was specifically coined because the sun coming out happens so rarely. We have rain or at least unbroken cloud cover almost continuously throughout the year- More than 2/3 of the year we get no more than a diffuse, dull sunlight that barely filters through the clouds, and, quite frankly, I like it that way! The constant rain is the reason that we have a temperate rain forest here and the reason that we have so much green in our landscapes- it makes this area the beautiful place that it is! It helps to keep our climate mild, reduces the opportunities for the  folks around here to gets the sunburns that increase the chances of skin cancer and allow us to maintain a wide range of plant and animal life here.

Sure sometimes the constant grey can be a bit depressing, but that's what vacations are for! And whenever I go visit my cousin in Southern California or my sister in Nevada, it never takes long for me to soak up more sun and heat than I want and to realize how awesome this area really is. Occasional sunshine is a nice change, but I wouldn't want it to be the norm. Let it Rain! and if you don't like it, please don't complain to me- try looking for somewhere less rainy to move to instead- then we can both be happy!

Am I Doing Something Wrong?

When I was a kid and I used to get in trouble and complain about my punishments, like any kid is apt to do, my mother would tell me that she was sorry, but if all of her children where happy with her at once then she wouldn't be doing her job right.

Fast forward to today...

I have 4 kids, one less than my mother, and I'm not going to waste my breath claiming that they are never in trouble, but some days reading through the daily posts on CafeMom, especially the Moms of Teens group, I get the impression that MY kids don't get in trouble enough and when they do it's never as serious as many of the posts that I see. But what really gets my worried is that my kids all seem so... HAPPY. I even had one of them tell me that their friends have asked her if we would be will to adopt them if something were to happen to their parents. Does this mean I am obliviously over-looking stuff that they should be in trouble for? Or have my husband and I actually found a way to keep them happy AND well- behaved? I mean they are all doing well in school, none of them have gotten in trouble with the law, neither of my girls is pregnant, neither of my boys has a pregnant girlfriend, we haven't had any major arguments around here in months, everyone does their chores with minimal nagging required and somehow our kids still seem to enjoy spending time with me and hubby, even our almost 16 yr old (Are't they supposed to start hating us once they hit puberty?).  As much as I would love to just take credit for being THAT AWESOME, there's a nagging voice in my head that keeps recalling what my mom used to say about how she wasn't doing her job if we were all happy and I worry that somehow I'm missing something... 

The Pink Cadillac Cafe

I got an e-mail from my mother last night about my uncle. Apparently last month he had brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor that was had grown there and they are asking for people to pray for him.

I have very mixed feelings about this news. On the one hand he is family and I do care about him and his kids, but on the other hand, this is a man who for reasons that apparently are only known to him has avoided contact with most of the family for as long as I can remember. I can in fact only remember seeing him on 3 occasions during my entire life and the last time was over 2 decades ago when I was in high school.

I was visiting my grandparents who only lived about 10 min. from his house, and I had called them because I wanted to see them while I was there. It took 3 days for me to get any response and when I did, it was my older cousin who responded. He was 18 at the time and was thrilled to get a chance to see me like me, he considers family to be important but since his parents tended to change the subject whenever the extended family was mentioned, he had had no way to contact us, but he had accidentally intercepted my message on the answering machine and decided to take it upon himself to come see me.

He and I spent most of that day together. He took me to his parent's house where I got to briefly see my aunt and uncle, neither of which said more than 3 words to me before leaving the house on an "errand", but I also got to see my other cousin and he joined his brother and I for the rest of the day.

We went to the mall for a while and about mid-afternoon, we decided that were hungry and they took me to one of their favorite hang-outs, The Pink Cadillac Cafe. Situated right in the middle of downtown, it was 50's style diner with the largest booth in the place being a bright pink colored Cadillac convertible who's front seats had been reversed to face the back and a table was embedded in the center. (Kind of like the car booths at the restaurant in the movie Pulp Fiction when John Travolta's character takes his boss's wife to dinner) A few of my cousins' friends met us there and we had a great time just visiting  and joking around while we ate. And after we ate they all took me to a nearby video arcade where we goofed around for a few more hours before they gave me a ride home.

That is my most vivid memory of any of them. I never saw any of them again and though I did send my cousin a letter about a month later, and again a few months after that,  he never responded and I am not even sure if he ever got them. It's always been one of my greatest frustrations that I didn't get to know them better, but after more than 20 years without any of them even acknowledging my existence, there is a small pouting child in the back corner of my mind that is still angry at my uncle for basically rejecting his little sister and all of her children, though I know that she tried repeatedly to establish a relationship with him and that kid thinks he has a lot of nerve expecting us to offer any kind of support now that something is going wrong in his little world that he never wanted us to be a part of.

How Do You Know You Have A Healthy Marriage?

I see posts on CafeMom or articles in magazines or on-line all the time talking about how important it is to keep up an active sex life in your marriage and it just makes me laugh. Sure it's important to keep that spark going, but you don't have to measure success by how many times a day/week you have sex.

In my opinion, one of the biggest things that my hubby and I  have going in our marriage is not the sex (though that is definitely important- LOL). It's the fact that we can spend time together for hours on end talking about things other than our family and not run out of things to talk about that we both care about. We share some of the same hobbies and like a lot of the same music and have the same basic beliefs when it comes to religion/faith and politics. It's very important to make sure that you married couples out there are spending some time together just being a couple and talking about these things that you have in common as well as your family. I don't think that my husband and I could have lasted the nearly 20 yrs as a couple that we have under our belts if we didn't keep those communication lines open and find time to just enjoy being the friends that we were even before we got romantically involved.

So, how do you know if you have a healthy marriage? I guess to some extent that depends on what a "healthy marriage" means to you. For me, it means that your spouse is someone that you want to spend time with doing things both with your kids AND on your own; someone you still enjoy sex with, but who understands if you just don't feel like it tonight so that you don't feel like you have to do it; and most importantly, it means that when something upsetting or really awesome happens, you can't wait to tell them about it and when you do tell them, they actually CARE and RECIPROCATE! In my opinion, if you are forcing yourself to have sex with your partner some arbitrary number of times a week out of a feeling of obligation or from some misguided notion that somehow doing so will fix your marriage, but you never do anything else together without the kids and you have nothing else in common, it's time for some serious couples counseling and soul-searching.