Author: Ruben Bolling

These wonderful books offer encouraging advice on how to do things despite advancing years, but the last one seems a bit odd.  I don't know if you really should be doing that.

And I don't know why this guy is even offering this advice.

… I was on the great Boing Boing podcast GWEEK, with host Mark Frauenfelder and fellow guest Clive Thompson.  Comics, pencils, virtual consciousness, envelopes, etc., etc. ETC!!

Click here to listen!

I was a guest on Andy Beckerman's podcast Beginnings, and the episode was just released.  It was a great time, and the podcast has an interesting premise: he talks to creative people not about their careers, but about their childhoods and formative years.  I've listened to a number of episodes and they are very good — Andy is a probing and unpredictable interviewer, and the results are fascinating and a lot of fun.  Anyway, we had a lot of laughs.

Based on the comments that have appeared in response to the Creationism Math comic, I just wanted to make a couple of points:

1.  Some people have pointed out reasons, justifications and explanations for the supposed Biblical errors brought up in the comic.  (And by the way, there are many other examples, including errors in basic counting.)  I'm not saying in the comic that it's impossible to explain away "errors" in the Bible.  Over the centuries, some of the greatest minds of humanity have used exquisite creativity to explain away difficult passages in holy texts.  I'm saying that the particular character in this comic has taken a very literal approach to these passages, and refuses to bend that interpretation to the realities of "secular" mathematics.  This is obviously an analogy to the very hard-line Creationists who could take one of the many options for interpreting Genesis specifically, or faith generally, to line up with geological and biological facts, but instead insist on literalism.

2.  The point of the comic, therefore, is not to make fun of people of faith.  What I'm making fun of, and where I draw the line, is people who not only take this literalist view of religious text, but also insist that it replace or inform scientific learning in schools.