I first wrote this back in June. Having just returned from a couple of weeks travelling around Virginia seeing all of our children and grandchildren, it bears some revisiting.

There are a lot of things I like about all that The United States and our Constitution mean to our everyday life. One of the most dear is that each generation need not be stuck in the situation their previous one has dealt them. That means that God is in his Heaven, all is right with the world, evolution is alive and well. Each generation can be better than the one before.

“We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life.”

Anyone who does not believe in evolution is insulting their progeny. I know it works because our kids are so much an improvement on us, a living and breathing proof of the beauty of evolution. My wife and I must have done something right.

And the grandchildren! They are the most dramatic proof of all.

It is always difficult, even in retrospect, to narrow down root causes of complex situations such as the unrest in the Middle east. Even if we had Arthur C. Clarke's Foundation, could anything have altered this idiotic bunch of nations?

Perhaps the blame lies with England and France and the Treaty of Versailles where the developed countries treated the Middle East with such dishonor and contempt. The end of The Great War caused so much horror and it still does. Does it go to Roosevelt's administration's failure to address the situation and the Jewish refugees? Or to the rest of the “developed nations” and their treatment of that area at the end of World War II?

Or does it go all the way back to the Crusades? Is it still religion, people slaughtering other people in the name of God? Or is religion just a handy excuse to do what they would have done anyway? Is it just politicians doing what they do best? What is the real reason for mass idiocy?

The television news today is full of horrible news about this stupid war. It is also full of talking heads – talking about the same events but you would not know it. Once again, politics is more important than human lives.

To repeat a story I heard from a television comentator, a frog and a scorpion on the banks of the Jordan River. The scorpion asks the frog for a ride across. Of course, the frog says “You will just sting me when we reach the other side.” The scorpion replies that he promises not to. So they start across. In the middle of the stream, the scorpion stings the frog and they both start to drown. The frog asks “Why?”. The scorpion replies, “Because this is the Middle East.”

Back in the Arafat – Sharon era, I thought that the solution to the problem then would be to erect an impenetrable steel wall with no doors around the whole area. They could solve their own problems and we could come back in ten years to see if anyone was still alive. If the gunfire and bombing had stopped, they could be admitted to the rest of the world. It still sounds like a great idea. It would just take a bigger wall. There must be something in the water over there that makes idiots out of regular folks.

There are a lot of things that cause me to doubt the sanity of some humans. This conflict is definitely one of them. The Prime Minister of Lebanon was on a show, blaming everyone else. Lebanon's own wishy-washyness puts their army and government right in the middle of the blame. And, of course, Israel's slaughter of Lebanese folks is unconscionable. And then, the radicals on both sides. Maybe there are a bunch of things I just do not understand. Or am I the one who is stupid?

If there are any words in the Bible that can be proven, it is those first ten words. Following the Stephen Hawking proof of the existence of God as Copernicus' Artisan, Galileo's Author, Kepler's Founder, in the beginning God did create the Heavens and the Earth. Not that the rest of the Bible is not believable nor that I do not believe, But belief and proof are not the same.

Now the question is, did He do it in six days? The general order of God's creation of things is not the question, it is the time – six days or fifteen billion years? Those who understand “time” also understand that time defies understanding. Relativity! What we measure with our watches is very valuable but it is not really time. Is God a slow poke or a speed demon? How much gravity is there in Heaven? Time is dependent on those measurements. And of course, God is above and beyond time. He was there before time was even invented – by Him! Six days? Whose days? Measured in whose time?

The bottom line is that time is a variable, God's creation of the Universe fifteen billion years ago is not. And why are we arguing about the time it took Him to do it? Why not just revel in the miracle of it. And the bestest miracle of them all, evolution.

Blogging is enjoyable. Both the writing and surfing through blogs posted. People are interesting. Surfing through my four blog sources (http://sinannblog.blogspot.com/, http://sinannblog.blogstream.com/, http://scdiv.spaces.msn.com/, and http://360.yahoo.com/sidaugherty) has brought up some major differences. The easiest to surf are Blogger and Blogstream. They offer a random or next button that lets the surfer just plain surf. They are the oldest and have a wealth of members from all over the world. I found that every so often, however, one of their blogs contains a virus. There are also some that are obvious ads. The ads I can understand. Viruses on blogs, however, cross over the morality line. My AVG virus checker (great free program) picks them up no sweat, but it is still basically in the realm of lying, cheating, and stealing. I do not enjoy going where there are viruses waiting. The MSN and Yahoo ones are newer and probably better managed. Which brings up the concept of whether corporate giants should be policing this kind of thing. All in all, experiencing a couple of virus encroachments makes me think the policing needs to be done. There seems to be cruds everywhere these days.