...What they do.

If this entire post gets censored, I apologize - that includes you Clarke and Meredith.

Let me tell you about where I'm from.

Greenville, North Carolina is a funny town.  It's centered in the Eastern North Carolina Bible belt.  Its temperature can only be compared to hades - and the surrounding Baptists are convinced that this rise in temperature correlates to the morality of the college students at East Carolina University.  Anyone under the age of 23 is considered a heathen unless they have attended private schools for the majority of their life and they have perfect church attendance (that means both Sunday services, Bible study, and the Wednesday night service).

So my parents were very much aware of the religious craze in the quiet town, so they attempted to find a church (because they liked the God aspect, not the religious one).  We found one, and I still attend this church, but then this church formed a little private school - the school I attended for four years.

Well, as I was at the normal private school, I was able to avoid any kind of total indoctrination, however, I always received an extremely skewed view of things - and today I write to tell you the story of the visiting scientist.

Since we were at a Christian school, it was mandatory that we all agree that the world was less than ten thousand years old - no matter what kind of evidence was out there, it was demanded of us that we agree that  global warming doesn't exist (that's another story), and the world is about 6000 years old.

Now I was in the sixth grade, and I was in love with science (both my parents had scientific and medical backgrounds), and when science said the world was billions of years old, science was going to be right.  So secretly, in my mind, I disagreed with everything my teacher said.  Had I stood up for science, I would have been considered a heretic, and Miss. T would have sent me straight to the principal.

I suppose it was the principal who brought the guest speaker - the lone scientist - the one of maybe ten scientists who agreed with the under 10000 year earth idea.

It was a special event.  The school and the church was invited for an special evening "lecture" where the scientist would prove that the earth was a mere six thousand years old.  It was funny, because it was this older man and his dedicated wife, and I guess they had never used power point, because he rolled into the lecture with a giant easel made of great prints of graphs and pictures of fossils.

The only picture I really remember was of a fish type creature giving birth to a smaller fish and I suppose the umbilical cord was still attached.  The scientist told us this fish had rapidly fossilized, proving the fact that fossilization couldn't happen over millions of years.  As he was saying this, my twelve year old mind imagined a fish (an angry mother fish in pain) giving birth to another fish at the foot of a sea volcano.  Just when mama fish thought it was over - bam, she gets hit by a volcano eruption.  That took two seconds.  Maybe that explains the rapid fossilization.

The mother fish had been the scientist's final argument, and as he finished, everyone leapt to their feet in applause, like the hope they had held onto for so long had just been confirmed - that the world was only six thousand years old, and all because of one fish.  Being the follower I was, I stood up with them too, confused but overtaken by the emotions incited by a birthing fish.  It was a beautiful thing.  I think my teacher, who sat maybe two or three feet away, was letting tears roll down her smiling cheeks.

In the end, I convinced myself he was right.  I told myself that if the group of 60 people watching the scientist were impressed, I should be impressed too.

I see the mistake of my actions, and I think after the ridiculous performance, I swore to question everything.  So that is what I do now.  I question things, because nothing is worse than putting your faith in a female fish.

I am by no means calling people out on their beliefs, nor am I putting any system down (other than indoctrination), but I am just showing you where I came from and how it shaped me.  I just would like to make the point that there are bigger things to fight over, like world hunger and poverty.