Justice Designed

Intelligent design proponents have an interesting conundrum on their hands.

They have the prima facie plausibility of creatures that are, in many ways, suited to their environments and activities going for them.  But they also have the European bee orchid.  They have the too-human tendency toward pareidolia and the assumption that everything complicated is also manufactured, but they also have to answer for the Maltese “fungus.”

That’s where a hidden perversity in the reasoning behind intelligent design emerges, and where the irrational nature of the entire beast becomes particularly obvious.

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Justice Designed
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The Other Side of the Coin

It’s time for some perspective.

I’ve been very lucky, in many ways. I’m part of the minority of the human race that gets to even try to have a developed-world standard of living, let alone succeed at it. I’ve never lived outside of one of the world’s economic powerhouses long-term and never known firsthand what it’s like to live somewhere where electricity isn’t a dependable resource. The closest I’ve been to the depths of destitution this world has to offer is at a resort run by Royal Caribbean on the coast of Haiti, where I watched the staff (all locals, to RC’s credit) collecting trash at the periphery of the cordoned-off beach. It would not have been a long trek to find villages that would look right at home in DR Congo, and where the only constants were mud and violence.

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The Other Side of the Coin

So Yesterday was National Coming Out Day

So it’s National Coming Out Day.

I’m not gay. I occasionally contemplate sexual encounters that, if I’m honest about them, pull me a little back from the far end of the Kinsey scale, but not far enough that I’m comfortable calling myself bisexual. Finding out that someone I’m attracted to is trans* would not change my attraction to them, so I suppose I could also call myself pansexual to a degree. That’s nothing compared to the statements so many of my friends have made today. Hopefully it’s small enough that the family members I have who have tried to encourage my gay relatives into reparative therapy think better of starting that fight with me.

But if it’s permissible here to extend the “coming out” concept to my own experiences, then I’ve spent a lot of my life coming out.

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So Yesterday was National Coming Out Day