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The past few days have not been pleasant. Saturday, I awoke to find my $600 cell phone lying submerged in my dogs' water dish. Then I came down with a cold that had knocked me flat by Sunday evening. Monday was a bit better, but I did spend the time between my morning and evening classes snoozing on the sofa. As I write, it is early AM Tuesday here in Korea (almost 2:30) and I'm feeling quite a bit better. Still not 100%, but noticeably more well. My only immediate problem is that the cold medicine has made me drowsy (the OTC drugs in Korea are usually more potent than those back home in the USA). I've spent enough time sleeping over the past couple of days and don't really care to do so now. But, I likely will snooze for an hour or two before my first morning class. Since I haven't felt much like doing any programming, blogging, or holding a book up to read, I've spent the majority of my few hours of consciousness browsing for reading material online. Over at the Richard Dawkins site there were a couple of great articles reposted from elsewhere. The one about the clerical soccer match made me chuckle. On the one hand, it's a serious issue as it's yet another demonstration of the regressive nature of religion. But reading about religious folk acting the fool always brings at least a giggle. What really perked me up, though, was Dan Gardner's article that takes on the 'atheist fundamentalist' stereotype. It's one of the most well-written articles I've seen on the topic. As one commenter posted:

I really think the simple essays like this one are the ones that have a chance of making a difference. It's hard to imagine reading this and not thinking to yourself "Hmm...in that light, my faith looks kinda silly."

That was my first reaction as well. When it is put like Gardner puts it, it seems impossible for a believer not to slap himself in the forehead and exclaim, "What a fool I have been!" Then I snapped back to reality. People of faith have faulty logic circuits, so they'll miss the point entirely. This will only register as yet another attack on religion. But I very much enjoyed reading it. I read through quite a bit more and then Stumbled Upon an Asimov essay, The Relativity of Wrong. I love Asimov's fiction, but I also enjoy reading his nonfiction as well. This one, published in a 1989 issue of The Skeptical Inquirer, I had never seen. In response to a criticism he received regarding another essay, Asimov explains how he sees 'right' and 'wrong' as fuzzy values rather than absolutes. He uses the refinement of man's understanding about the shape of the earth to explain. But near the end of the article he has a tie-in to the creationism vs. evolution farce:

Again, it is because the geological formations of the earth change so slowly and the living things upon it evolve so slowly that it seemed reasonable at first to suppose that there was no change and that the earth and life always existed as they do today. If that were so, it would make no difference whether the earth and life were billions of years old or thousands. Thousands were easier to grasp. But when careful observation showed that the earth and life were changing at a rate that was very tiny but not zero, then it became clear that the earth and life had to be very old. Modern geology came into being, and so did the notion of biological evolution. If the rate of change were more rapid, geology and evolution would have reached their modern state in ancient times. It is only because the difference between the rate of change in a static universe and the rate of change in an evolutionary one is that between zero and very nearly zero that the creationists can continue propagating their folly.

Sort of makes you wish evolution had sped up a bit, doesn't it? If it had, we'd be living in a time free from religious quackery (assuming, of course, that the religious quacks hadn't gotten us all killed).