Well, it didn’t last long. I had just discovered God and was attempting to bend the world to my perception of the Bible. I remember being in a plane, crossing the Atlantic, when I read an article about the Dover School District creationism scandal (must’ve been 2005–so long ago!) My gut reaction was, unsurprisingly, “Of course evolution is bullshit! The handiwork is God’s and His only.”

What is surprising–or surprisingly unsurprising–is that this holier-than-thou attitude followed a lifetime of secular normalcy. It was due to my recent “discovery” of God, and my consequent insistence on fitting the universe into my nutshell conception of that God, that was responsible for such a foolish thought. This now seems inconceivable to me, like a brief loss of memory before I awoke to my rightful place among thinking, reasoning humanity.

Creationsim is not science. The Bible is, in many ways, a fascinating and wonderful book (so is Moby-Dick, for that matter). But it is not the true tale of how things have come to be as they are on this earth. It is a collection of writings by humans who knew far less about the nature of the universe than we do, and even the least educated among us is better informed scientifically than the authors of the Torah and Gospels.

I just wanted to get that off my chest.