Warning, Contains Nudity

I have a problem with faith – well, fanaticism - when it's manifested at the expense of intellect. The two may very well be mutually exclusive.

I think for the most part humans follow a code of live and let live. It’s when this code is violated that folks start to get ornery. Unless you’re trading a cup of cream for a bag of crabapples or forming a block watch community, there’s no real reason to go and fuck with your neighbour, hence, occupation -> convoy bombing. But people get especially riled up when it comes to matters of faith. That includes messing with the way god-fearing people believe the way their future will unfold. Imagine being entitled to such a thing!

Lately, the religious ranks, including the laic, have been coming out of the woodwork with a very concerned collective voice. So what’s gotten them so agitated? Who violated the code first?

The scientific community, of course, who are mere weeks away from switching on their biggest and, some say, most irresponsible toy to date. The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest particle accelerator and is built in a 27 km circumference underground at the Franco-Swiss border. It is intended to smash together beams of protons at nearly the speed of light and have a multitude of readings and pictures taken of those collisions. It is expected to recreate on, a sub-microscopic scale, conditions that may have existed only a few nanoseconds after the big bang. A universe baby photo, if you will. Scientists are also hoping to create the first observable circumstance of the Higgs boson particle which is theorized to give otherwise massless elementary particles their mass, given that particles are made up of smaller particles which are made up of smaller particles, etc., which are made up in the end of only energy. It should be noted that the Higgs boson particle is also known as the “God particle”.

And the fear has been rolling in. Cowering troglodytes have been ringing in with their two cents ever since the machine’s completion. Everything from saying "leave well enough alone" to the rehashing of Nostradamus’ doomsday prophecies to detailed video animations depicting exactly how, get this, the earth will get sucked into a black whole created by the LHC. (Apparently fanaticism and computer graphics animation are not mutually exclusive.) I especially enjoy those diatribes that, claiming science is doing nothing but hurtling humanity towards its own destruction, are themselves based on science, albeit erroneous. Some simply ask the scientific community how we are going to be fundamentally better off by knowing just a little bit more about the universe, sounding like a plea to turn off the scary bright light of the future. Others appear to think we’ve tinkered under the hood to create a 6th gear in a car for which there is not enough safe road – and everyone is in the back seat. Perhaps hanging a rosary from the rearview mirror would help. At any rate, every argument seems to come from deeper within the holy cave.

Godspeak from small children is tolerable because they’re cute, and at their age it’s understood they’ve not stood a chance against the imposition of fully subscribed parents. Growth-stunting, back woods, paranoid propaganda is dumbfounding, however, from adults, especially ones who hold teaching and political positions.

So why the armageddon attitude? Is it simply a fear of dying? I can certainly understand that. But then why bathe it in religious rhetoric? Are there Christian soldiers out there who are not ready to be judged by their maker? Or is there something they don’t want the world to learn, like Creation may be nothing more than a cool story with nudity, for instance? One thing seems to be certain, every religious doomsday alarmist is grossly under-informed about the function and capabilities of the LHC, to say nothing of the nonsensical theories they purport. So I ask, why must fanaticism come at the expense of intellect?