"You have had a good start-- Work harder!"

Oh, man, Thursday was the start of one of my favorite series of Roman holidays and I totally missed it! Okay, so in order to understand these holidays you need to know about Attis. Luckily I have this lovely explanation that I wrote back in December: The Story of Attis.

Anyway. To honor Attis they had a festival, starting on the 22nd. On that day they cut down a tall pine tree and place an effigy of the god in it's branches. They brought it to the Temple of Cybele in a funeral procession and lay it down to rest like a body.

Then today, the Dies Sanguis, the pine tree and the effigy were buried in a tomb and there was a day of mourning, marked by fasting, sexual abstinence, self-flagellation (ow), and self mutilation (more ow). Then the High Priest, playing the part of Attis, cuts himself and offers it as a sacrifice. Initiates to the cult of Attis are baptized in the blood of a bull, then are brought into a state of ecstasy whereupon they castrate themselves.

Hmm... sounds mildly uncomfortable.

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Today was mostly devoted to studying and/or avoiding studying, mostly the latter. In this avoidance I was reading The Atheist Jew's blog, which gets a little preachy at times for me (yes, atheists can be preachy), but has some good lampooning of overzealous creationists, which is always fun.

I shouldn't say that, because Loquatia is totally going to the talk on Intelligent Design that is coming up fairly soon...

ID is strange. I used to think it was just saying that evolution happened and all just as science proves, but a higher power was driving it, which is what I believe. But then I learned about irreducible complexity and various other completely nonsensical parts of the argument and gave up on it.

Is it so hard to believe that science is true, but that there is also a god? An intelligent designer who is more of an artistic gardener than a sculptor or painter, who creates through making things grow over time rather than shaping them and then bestowing them with life? I think of the universe as God's bonsai tree. Start with a seed (a single atom), germinate the seed (make lots more atoms), nurture it and watch it grow and shape it as it does so so that the end result is what you were hoping for, or something just as good. Maybe I'm just reading the wrong things, but people always seem to think that evolution disproves the existence of a creator, because a creator isn't needed.

Science answers "How?" and religion answers "Why?". Two different questions. Why do people want to give them the same answer?

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