I have a confession to make.
Sometimes I cheat.
Sometimes, every now and then, rarely, I miss getting my Cant column in on time and wind up writing it late. Then, because I run the machine on which Cant is run, I turn back time, put in the column, and smooth everything back over. This week is a good example.
Yes, shame on me. Tsk.
I have a good excuse. After seven years, the house known as the Republic is gone. It was a rental house, owned by a Mr. Drew, who acquired it upon the death of his mother. It is the home he grew up in, so he was reluctant to sell it, and instead rented it to us. Lazlor, jasona and I moved in June of 1997. Lazlor and I left in 1999, etphone moved in then, and he and jasona with a few ponas have lived there ever since.
Along with the server which runs republic.org. Although I moved out in 1999, the machine remained there, faithfully serving, until now. On Monday night, jasona pulled the plug on republic.org (and his own server, brimstone.com), and that server was taken to a friends' home and put in the closet. I'll pick it up when I'm in town over Christmas vacation.
Republic.org, however (which hosts thecant.com, if you didn't know), did not go dark, for I spent my entire Sunday getting a new server set up here at my home in Maryland, and have handed over the domain to it. It's working, mostly; all of the picture-intensive web pages will have to wait until I get the old server physically back here to transfer, because copying them over my 1.5Mbps link would have taken far too long. Yes, they are that graphic intensive. So there are things that will have to wait until the new year. And the DNS isn't resolving 100% yet, as there are still pointers to the old IP address out on the Internet. But mostly, republic.org is up and running on its new machine.
I don't mind saying that, although I like UNIX rather a lot, it is still a bitch and a half to set up. Getting my bloody network card to run... under Windows XP it was Plug-N-Play. Under UNIX it took me two hours to set up; I had to open the case and pull it out to find out what model it was (3C905B), and once I had done so it took forever to get the driver running until a random Internet post (thank God for google) told me that, although I had a 3C905B card, I didn't want the 3C905B driver, oh no, I wanted the 3C95X driver. Sure, there is a 3C905B driver, but it's the wrong one.
Yeah, UNIX. It's freaking great.
And speaking of God (which I did, just look), I was grumbling to myself recently about the large number of people who don't like the teaching of evolution in schools. Who want it labeled as "a theory", which is the worst sort of semantic hairsplitting. Evolution is true, until proven otherwise. It's not some guess or opinion. It's as true as anything can be.
But what bugs me is, why does evolution make so many Christians grumpy? I mean, heck, Jesus pretty explicitly used parables. To believe that the world was created in seven days-as-we-know-them (not to mention to believe that Methuselah lived for nine hundred and sixty-nine years) is silly and, I think, wholly unnecessary.
God is, well, God. It's rather insulting to assume that He must have done things in ways that we can easily understand. I'm sorry, but if He created the entire universe, He need not have done so in a way that is easily conveyed to you. "Seven days" is just the best way of explaining it. If you really need to know, they were seven very long "days". You'll note that the order in which He created things is very much the way that science has discovered things actually came to be.
I'm sorry, but we're the children here. We were told "seven days" because, at the time, that was the only way we would understand the concept. Not because that's how God did it. Because that's how we could understand it. Now we're a bit older - just a bit - and we can understand a bit better how things work. Who are we to demand that God did things in a certain way? God did things the way He did them, and we are now mature enough to begin to see the ways in which He did.
Evolution is fascinating, effective, and real. Kudos to God for thinking it up.
And another thing. Time. God also doesn't have to live by your strictures as regards time. Ask yourself this - if He wanted, could He wave his hand and say "this is how things have always been" and suddenly they will have always been that way?
Yeah.
So, just like me going back and writing this column days after it was due and still having it posted "on time", God could have created humans and then given them a complete backstory. (Except God's doing so wouldn't have been a cheap trick.) You, frankly, don't know. You can't know, because He's God and you're you. So stop demanding that everyone disagree with evolution because it doesn't keep God in your little box.
He's bigger than that.
- Sun Ra