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That some dinosaurs still exist . . .

Today alone, I have seen news articles that ought to scare the bejeezus out of most religious people, but they don't.  I think it is evidence that miracles do exist, or maybe only that thinking is not needed for survival.

For instance, somebody with a shovel or a hand trowel dug up a skeleton of an incredibly huge dinosaur in Argentina:  the Dreadnaughtus schrani.  It was described as having a body about the size of a house, and nearly as long as a Boeing 737.  It lived about 77 million years ago, and weighed about 65 tons.

Millions of people reading about that believe that the earth is . . . oh . . . 6 or 8 or 10 thousand years old.  That is to say, Dreadnaughtus schrani is 77 thousand times as old as creation.  And if you can digest that without choking on the absurdity of a recent creation, you might try to think about how old the universe actually is:  more than 13,000,000,000 years old.  13 billion.

Syria and Iraq are being overrun with people who believe that if you do not believe what they do, religiously, you deserve to have your head cut off.  And one of our own mental geniuses on one of our own TV shows says we should offer them the same deal:  convert to Christianity or have their heads cut off.  In other words, join them!  The Spanish Inquisition was way ahead of its time!

The Church of Latter Day Saints has put on display some of its own magical mystery artifacts:  an original page from Joseph Smith's translation of a document revealed to him by an angel, written in "Reformed Egyptian", whatever that is.  "Reformed Egyptian" is not a known language, except to Joseph Smith.

All over this good land, there are people who say, every day, that we ought to be, or that we are, a religious nation, ourselves, with our own official religion; not Islamic, in our case, but fundamentalist Christian.  Dreadnaughtus schrani did not exist 77 million years ago, the earth is a recent doodad, and God wants all of us to be ignorant of most of the things we know to be true.

Most of the religions we know had their beginnings very recently, as things are measured geologically, but even so, the view of the world as described in those religions is a bit like seeing something encased in pitch a couple of thousand years ago.  Our normal, schoolbook, common sense, and scientific view of how the world works, of what is possible or desirable, is very different from the way people thought even a few hundred years ago.  We can see in Syria and Iraq today, what people thought a few hundred years ago, and what happens when you give people who think like that an Uzi or an axe.

Angels do not bring books written in Reformed Egyptian, and the earth was not created millions of years after Dreadnaughtus schrani died; may they rest in the rocks!

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