Truth, Hold The Faith, Please

I have about had it with faith. Everyone these days wants to let everyone know that they have faith. People who are not religious at all want to assure us that they are very "spiritual" people. TV shows, wanting to be as innoffensive as possible yet make us all feel good, talk about the importance of faith and the power of believing.

Faith is a type of believing that is based on an absense of proof or verification. When you seek to verify, you deny faith. In an age where the Powers That Be are lying to us more than ever, and we in turn lie to ourselves in order to justify our servicing of our own appetites and addictions, maybe we should all just give faith a rest for a little while and seek out truths that can be confirmed and verified by generally held scientific and evidentiary methods. I know of course that reason can not and will not in the end explain EVERYTHING, but those who babble on about how much their imaginary friend loves ME are sounding more and more delusional every day.

I guess I have been put in this frame of mind by the rather terrifying artical about Tim LaHaye in this months "Vanity Fair," and a wonderful book about science I am reading by Bill Bryson entitled _A Short History of Nearly Everything_.

Remember folks, nothing can be known for certain. That includes the satement that nothing can be known for certain. In other words, it is possible that one could know something for certain, but we will never know for sure, really.

Wide variety of oak leaf types found on my very short street. Lots of different lobe arrangement patterns and leaf serration. Aside from the post oak (2nd from left, bottem row) they do not correspond very conveniently to the pictures in the Peterson guide. I was once told by a botanist that oaks hybridize freely. I am particularlu fond of the highly serrated white oak, (2nd from from right, bottem row). The cuts go almost all the way to the center vein.