I HATE TO BE BLUNT ABOUT TILLMAN

I was watching a little football this weekend and happened to notice that some college is retiring Pat Tillman’s jersey number. Tillman’s the guy who put off his pro football career so that he could go serve his country in Iraq where he promptly got himself killed. Well, if getting yourself killed is a reason to be declared a hero, so be it. That certainly doesn’t make him a hero to me. You ought to be something more than naive young, cannon fodder to achieve hero status, don’t you think?

But what really gets me about the whole thing is the pious claptrap coming from the pie holes of conservatives who praise Tillman who was naive enough to go get himself killed while electing a man who was smart enough not to go get himself killed in that war of long ago in Vietnam. That conservatives can’t see the ironic blather of such commotion over herodom just goes to show how shallow and limited their thinking is.

I’m furious at the stupidity which is currently misguiding America. I don’t want any Americans to be killed unnecessarily, and so I sorrow for Tillman, not because he was a soldier who got killed, but because some men in America can convince young men like Tillman to go off to unnecessary wars for absolutely no reason at all except by appealing to blind jingoism. When will the stupidity and waste of war ever end? When will we pick our leaders more wisely? When will all young men grow wise enough not to be conned by supposedly religious leaders?


E.O. WILSON, A PIOUS KID AND RIGOROUS NATURALIST

A pious Alabama kid, young Wilson had read through the Bible twice and was a born-again Christian when, at the University of Alabama, he discovered evolution and its comprehensive vision inspired him to “doubt”. He found it “hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago. I suffered,” he writes,” cognitive dissonance between the cheerfully reported genocidal wars of these people and Christian civilization in 1940s Alabama.... Baptist theology made no provision for evolution. Could it be that they [Bible authors] were not really privy to the thoughts of God?”

So Wilson drifted away from a church which knew so little about the natural world, and he maintains in CONSILIENCE that placing “objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger.”

I can agree with that, specially when some scientific vision of reality lifts me up to see into a future I may never experience, but can at least, standing on the shoulders of intelligence, peek at what may be.
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“Thank goodness kids never mean well.” —Lily Tomlin