"Evolution v. Creationism" = Snore v. Bore, but...

Been in bed too much lately. It's windy season here and I've got a bed on the deck upstairs. When I'm not on it, there are usually a couple of neighbor dogs snoozing on it. When I am on it, they scoot over.

It's pretty close to a primeval sky here. A moonless night casts starlight visible on the ground. I see what the ancients saw from high towers in Babylon. They made use of the stars in ways that we don't -- it wasn't for modern-style astrology.

The sight is an everlasting awe. It is realer on the emotional Richter scale than photos. There is no comparison with attempts to wow oneself by dutifully imagining some initial "Big Bang" -- which never happened anyhow.

When you are a child, pretending about Santa Claus is healthier and more fun than that. We mostly knew there was no Santa. It did take some growing up to realize that, in addition, there was no "Big Bang" and no "entropy." Those tales reflect a culture of reubens fascinated with "stuff blowin' up real good" and guilty wishes for their neighbors and competitors to fizzle out... or blow up real good. Perhaps a saner culture would have us originating in a galactic-size bulb on a supercosmic Christmas tree put there by an unimaginably mythic Santa Claus. Maybe mankind isn't meant to blow up and fizzle out all the time.

Lying face up on my bed I can see three-dimensional relationships among the celestial clusters, the planets a hand's reach away, the wind blowing dramatically across the bed whereon I lie. Snatch a planet and toss it with all your might and it would disappear from sight ten thousand lifetimes before it got a fraction of a fraction near the next sunlight. But you and those stars wink back and forth at each other right now.

There are different colors. There are "dark" areas. There are foggy luminous areas, stars so numerous they outnumber the sand grains blowing across this valley of New Mexico Nagual, the whole Great American Desert's, Mongolia's and Africa's sand grains combined. Leaning deeper, these staggering areas of individual suns look like part of a powder. The components composing this powder are also a trillion miles from each other.

Squint and concentrate on those distant powder-clouds and one can sense them moving in some way. Maybe my mind is anticipating movements a trillion of our puny years in advance. They're aware of their own sensations, perhaps electromagnetically like the minute components of earthly clouds.

I close my eyes and can feel those sensations in myself. I'm making them, not contriving them. They're not being made by some biological brain-glitch predetermined by imaginary genetic goblins. I'm quite conscious of imagining this. Nevertheless, it is real.

Open my eyes and there are the stars again; the night wind blows away every other consideration but these stars I've let play in my psyche. This little part of the universe I'm seeing, an instant googol perplex of matter and space visible by eyes inner and outer, is my creation. I feel it the same way I feel my pulse and the activities of various organs moving throughout my body.

...you can sense these things while in the city, too, if your mind isn't habitually noisy with fragmented gobs of undigested thought. "Do the noises in my head bother you?" Isn't a groundless joke in this society any more.

The dogs hear coyotes hooting and have to join in too. You city gringos would probably run for a big hotel to get away from these canine songs. But so intent are the gorgeous, enormous vitality of this night sky and I on each other, the high decibels of the dogs are cute little puppy squeaks nuzzling their mom. The congress of consciousness between me and these star-fogs "billions of light years away" continues, kindly encloaking the enthusiastic melodies of the dogs on my bed.

Such was my experience. It went on for hours, stretching in slow snake-like undulations between enormous friendly unknowns of outer space and the mundane considerations of a middle aged man in the wee hours of night in the blowing wind.

Neither ceremonial pomposities of science or religion entered into the picture.

What's the difference between reading studies about sex and having sex? If during the act all you can do is think about what you read in a study, you've got a little problem with reality, there, bud. You're out of touch with your own. Literally, you're out of your senses.

So too with these obsessive arguments banging an imaginary "Religious Truth" against an imaginary "Scientific Truth" like a toddler banging alphabet blocks together who doesn't understand the letters on them.

You're not experiencing the reality of either thing. You bang heated meaningless words against one another. It's a substitute for acquiescing to the validity of your own mind and its inner sensations. These need no justification from the flapping corrosions of religions or sciences as society presently tries so dutifully to keep believing.

It's just that people who fear the independent sensations of their own minds may cling to decorations that meet with social approval instead. Science? Theology? Fiddle de faddle.

I see so many sentences that go "I use reason." There's usually such a martial stiffness to them, a parrot would be ashamed to imitate reasoning that badly. An individual's conscious sensations are data. What reason arbitrarily deletes data that doesn't fit a theory? That's "Truth-making," the quickest road to Falsehood there is.

Try not to let these tales get you into trouble. Religious fanaticism is boiling even in this country and "evolutionary theory" has allowed justifications for people to extinct whole masses of each other.