Ranking the fairytales
SantaHad a pre-post for the next five reasons series. A little bit of humor. Being attacked by migraines, I am not able to concentrate but can have a little fun so here we go.
Alphabetical order, the top five fairytales:
Big Bang
Evolution
Extra-Terrestrial Aliens
Santa Claus
Tooth Fairy
Here is how they rank by level of believability:
1) Santa Claus (believability 2 on a scale of 100) -Hey, at least this guy is based on a real person. Saint Nicholas was a good man who became Bishop of Myra at a young age, a guy who gave to the poor, helped the needy and is not thought to have ever climbed down a chimney. How did we get from celebrating a good Christian man as a role model to a fat guy in a red suit with flying reindeer climbing down your chimney into your front room?
Now, maybe 100 years ago or so most Western houses still had fireplaces and big chimneys and even hand-washed socks and hung them by the fire. But when people still tell their little children about Santa, it must soon occur to them that the idea that a stranger is able to break into the house for any reason must be alarming on some level. I am surprised more five-year-olds don't sleep with baseball bats.
Besides that, to give presents to five billion people in one twenty-four hour period would require millions of Santas all moving at super speeds, causing widespread airplane crashes and worldwide panic. Dogs would be ripping off pieces of red furry coats, radar operators would retire with massive headaches, the world would be turned upside down one night each year. Who would pay for all of this? Who could coordinate it? Maybe two on a scale of 100 is too high?
2-3 is a tie) Evolution (macro) (1 on a scale of 100). So Santa is based on a real guy. Well, micro-evolution is a real thing. We call it variation within kind. A very simple thought process by a very simple mind might conclude that since dogs can have litters of puppies with different colors and coats, they might well be able to have litters of velociraptors as well. But a scientist should not believe it! We can identify a coding mechanism within living organism that allows for variation within kinds in order to help kinds of animals survive differing environments but there is simply no evidence at all for one kind of animal becoming something else. As a dog owner, I am content with this. I do not WANT a velociraptor of any age in my home! So this one gets a one in that the simple mind might consider it for a few minutes. But scientists have been able to test this one and all that still believe in macro-evolution should simply be ashamed of themselves.
tooth fairy
2-3) Tooth Fairy (1 on a scale of 100). So there is an operation that occurs in many families, in which a tooth is left under a pillow before you go to sleep and, when you awake, money is there instead. That earns this fairy tale a one, since something is happening. But, again, simple logic soon leads children to realize that it is a parental unit and not some Tootherbell who is leaving coinage under the pillow.
The budding scientist will pretend to be asleep and observe the parent sneaking in with that half-dollar for his or her self out of half-closed eyes. The alarmist will begin to think about home security and then the baseball bats come out again. Oh, and if you are past the single digit years and a parental unit is sneaking into your room at night you may well decide to lock the door? Parents? Once kids are no longer little any sneaking into rooms at night borders on creepy so just forget about rewarding extracted wisdom teeth from teens, okay?
4) ET the Extra-terrestrial. (0 on a scale of 100). Seriously. Have you given any thought to how long it would take and how much energy to travel at even one-fourth of light speed from what might possibly be a planetary system in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri or Sirius? Would ET decide to live for thousands of years having generations live and die in space just to reach Earth? Where would he get the energy to go that fast and then where would he get it to stop once he got here?
Are there all sorts of sightings of a supernatural (apparently) or otherwise other-worldly nature? Yep. But the whole space alien thing is childish. There is no warp drive, space cannot be folded, you could not survive a trip through a black hole, there is not enough energy to begin and steer a bubble in space and etc. Give it up!
*cartoon courtesy of xkcd, written by randall munroe, a guy who probably thinks I am a nut case. I think he is hopelessly indoctrinated and sometimes too raw or crude but at heart he is often hilariously funny and remarkably clever. how come this is all lower case?*
5) The Big Bang. (is there a less than zero on a scale of 100?) C'mon, man! Everything came from nothing with no cause? You intend to call that science? We did that kind of let's pretend stuff when we were four years old...well, by the time you were six or seven anyway, right? Don't tell me you were still pretending to be Spiderman when you were a teenager? Okay, maybe you were. Fine. There needs to be a little bit of child left in someone or they are going to be insufferably boring.
Okay, but how about that Bang? When I read all of these theories they are like playing an unwinnable game of Whack-a-Mole! The background radiation doesn't work, so you adjust and then there are too many subatomic particles, and then there is the red-shift problem and the shape problem and all the evidence that if there was an explosion it had to be in phases and under some kind of control and still the composition of the Universe does not compute. Scientists have bent and shaped and spun this idea into marvelous origami designs but nothing that actually comes close to fitting the evidence.
I think it is tragic that brilliant minds like Stephen Hawking would spend their lives contemplating this ludicrous hypothesis. What if it turned out that the entire Universe was composed of vibrating strings? What if space turns out to be a medium that is too difficult for us to observe properly? What if light is neither a particle nor a wave but something else again that we cannot define? What if subatomic particles know that they are being observed, or rather, what if the Creator of the particles knows? What if?
It cracks me up when people critique the Bible account of creation because it does not fit their idea of how the Universe SHOULD have been created. What, did you go to the library and check out Universes For Dummies? God tells us how He did it. He didn't ask for your permission to do it. Granted, He didn't ask if you wanted to be born either, but you were, so go ahead and choose to believe in God or not. Go ahead and believe that nothing created everything by no means for no reason. Go ahead and believe all things just happened. Now tell me why there should be any logic or meaning or purpose in such a Universe? How dare scientists expect the Universe to be governed by logical and consistent laws and yet deny that such a Universe would have required planning and execution? Utter foolishness. Unfortunately an IQ test does not account for common sense and wisdom. So there are large numbers of educated fools indoctrinating our children (attempting, anyway) in the ways of foolishness. The Big Bang is a perfect example of ludicrous raised to the nth degree and accepted as part of the accepted paradigm.
Good grief, I forgot the Easter Bunny!!!
What the heck, if you believe in any of the other five, you probably buy the idea of a rabbit hiding eggs all over the place for you, too. I give up!