Day: October 16, 2001

Okay, they’re not as cool as Legos, but we’ve been having a lot of fun at my house with Magic Nuudles. These things look sort of like colored packing peanuts, but they’re made out of corn starch.

When you apply a little bit of water to the edges, the pieces sizzle like they’re being melted with acid, and then two of the pieces can be connected. They form a somewhat solid bond pretty quickly, which hardens to an acceptable level after 10 or 15 minutes.

The really cool thing, though, is the price. The manufacturer sells a giant bag of 12,000 of these things for $99.95. My daughter and I could do some really cool things with 12,000 of these suckers (as my wife’s eyes begin to roll).

Emma and I are going to be stuck at home for about two weeks when she has surgery in November, so I’m thinking we can build a castle out of these things in the middle of the living room.

The latest issue of the New York Review of Books has an interesting article by Frederick C. Crews in which Crews slams various books which attempt to reconcile religion and Darwin. As Crews notes, it has become fashionable for scientists and religious leaders to try to stake out some sort of middle ground where both God and evolution co-exist, but usually such a meeting of the minds is possible only by downplaying the most important implications of either belief system.

On the other hand, Crews himself ends up regurgitating the secular religious view of humanity as a destructive species responsible for “overpopulation, pollution, dwindling and maldistributed resources, climatic disruption, new and resurgent plagues, ethnic and religious hatred, the ravaging of forests and jungles, and the consequent loss of thousands of species per year” responsible for numerous “transgressions, not against God but against Earth itself and its myriad forms of life.”

Early in his piece, Crews dismisses claims by neoconservatives that evolution undermines traditional morality and leads to a weakening of social bonds, but just can’t help himself but provide what is little more than a parody of problems that neocons see with natural selection.

This is a fairly common theme in non-academic atheist thought. On the one hand, Christian morality and ethics comes in for a withering attack. On the other hand, however, many secular thinkers offer moral views which are far more repugnant than anything offered or implied in the New Testament.

Crews reminds me of some particularly fanatical Christians my wife ran into several years ago (college campuses, for some reason, attract these sorts of folks). My wife’s friend was pregnant and after a brief discussion, it came out that these folks believed that anyone who died without believing in Jesus — including infants — was barred from salvation.

This is a pretty repugnant view, but it is little different from Crews’ formulation in which what my four-year-old daughter really needs to understand is that she is a dangerous and disruptive animal who lives in a society that lives outside the natural grace of its own local ecosystem.