waxing philosophic

the Skills and Dynamics curriculum, despite being a touchy-feely subject, has proven to be pretty challenging. Today it was really "storming," with some of the discussion really putting my sympathetic nervous system into overdrive -- starting innocently enough on the topic of diversity and finding ourselves (or maybe just me, at least) deep in the mire of conflicting belief systems and world views. That's diversity for you, I guess.

But I didn't really want to talk about class. It was just the starting point for a conversation which fed into some web surfing that sparked a semi-random thought process which brings me back here. Thinking. And wanting to write some of it down.

There's an undercurrent of national politics that I've been trying to hide from since November, but I'm feeling like I'm being slowly dragged back into it again, awareness creeping in around the corners. You can't avoid hearing about radical activist legislators trying to brute-force their judicial nominees; I take a peek at the Downing Street Memo after seeing a reference on WWdN. There's always more if you really want to look for it. I don't, but I poke into the Huffington Post anyway; I read something about Warren Beatty versus the Governator, find myself drawn to the headline: "Darwin's theory evolves into culture war." Memories of the PBS series that had one show dedicated to discussing the relationship between religion and the theory of evolution.

And I think to myself: I may not believe in the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent (and let's not forget jealous and demanding) Judeo-Christian God (or His apparently intolerant and megalomaniacal contemporary American counterpart), but I do feel like you can see something of the divine in all the things in the world around us, in the simplest processes of basic life.

We may be able to build machines that can manipulate individual atoms, but even if we could configure the carbon and hydrogen atoms perfectly, the amino acids, all the necessary pieces parts, we still couldn't truly create life -- create the systems that make a leaf grow with all it's beautifully complex structures or even simply make a cell divide. You can call it God and I can just leave it as the mystery of Nature and we can call it even.

I'd be cool with that. Just sayin'.

Ok, bedtime.