Mad Madalyn hired and exploited one too many rehabbing felons and paid the price. Madalyn wasn't murdered for prayer in school; just like Jesus (gasp) she was murdered for pieces of gold that she kept in a storage locker. Mad Madalyn didn't even need Judas to betray her and The Grand Jury never got around to indicting God.

But it didn't matter. You can't argue with the faithful anymore than one could argue with Mad Madalyn while she was alive, RIP. She was no more murdered by intelligent design than natural intelligence. She was murdered because she was greedy. Too greedy. And stupid. Stupidly greedy.

Out here in pagan coastal California we have another religion sprouting up: Natural Intelligence. Natural Intelligence asserts that there is an intelligent force behind nature that makes it all work out the way it does. In other words, the final result is due to the dynamics of natural intelligence. This system implies that natural intelligence is also smart and can override anything left up to chance, like the effects of mutations on evolution.

Similarly intelligent design attempts to prove that certain aspects of "creation" are structured so that they had to have popped out completely done and could not have evolved slowly over many millennia.

The problem is that intelligent design and natural intelligence are concepts that can never be empirically tested. Big surprise. That is because both concepts depend totally on faith and belief as opposed to science and reason. In fact one can say that a lack of science and reason have led to the formation of these grandiose concepts themselves.

We humans simply cannot stand a knowledge void. When our caveman ancestors could not understand something they developed whatever explanations they could imagine to 'explain' it. That's how humans developed myths and religion, of course not including 'your religion' which is special and the Absolute Truth.

Intelligent design attempts to explain how we got here and natural intelligence attempts to explain how things work right now.

One of the last words I heard my grandma say were 'be sure you take that son of yours to Sunday School. Don't want him growing up to be a heathen.' RIP, grandma. (What's reassuring is if she just googles my name up in heaven, and that is most certainly where she is, she would be pleased to see that I still fondly remember her.)

Intelligent design is the culture I grew up in; Grandma. Natural intelligence is the culture I now live in; The Confused.

While the intelligent design folks call the natural intelligence folks heathens, like my grandma, the natural intelligence folks call the faithful 'the Stupids.' That is simply because all of the natural intelligence folks rebelled against their parents and part of that was rebelling against religious dogma. Anything that smacks of religion is 'mind control' yet natural intelligence is not.

The funny thing is the heathens have unwittingly helped the intelligent design cause. All the intelligent design folks have to say is that natural intelligence equals God or gods. Boy are they sure smart proving that intelligent design exists, no? Find 'God' and Replace with 'Natural Intelligence' and everybody goes home happy.

All the heathens, mostly affluent youth rebelling against their bourgeois parents, strut around so proud that they no longer are bound by the mental chains of religion. The fact that they are now bound by the chains of natural intelligence seems irrelevant.

In fact this is another common attribute held by both: everything that does not support the cause is irrelevant. Like the faithful say, "if it doesn't support what I believe than I don't want to hear it because it does not exist."

In turn, the heathens say that if it doesn't support what I believe than I don't want to hear it because it does not exist.

Ah those rebellious young heathens! They go all out to get away from the restricted thinking of their parents and yet cannot see they are exactly the same. All they have done is swap one premise for another and in fact as we have seen here the premises are exactly the same. It all comes down to a question of faith...

In other words, Junior may sit up in a tree protesting the environment but he is the same as Good Old Dad who protests the progressives protesting. The formulas and equations are the same for both and with Find and Replace they interchange 'seamlessly'.

Well there you have it. Now that you are totally confused congratulations. At the end of the day ours is not to reason why because if we put too much of our reason in, it just won't make any sense at all.

But watch out. If you start thinking intelligent design and natural intelligence were fabricated by cavemen that didn't know better, you are in big trouble amigo.

Beware! You are certainly headed for sure down that disastrous path to a free and inquiring mind...