Aya's Stuff Dump

So I got laid off last week.  It’s been quite a shock to my system, to be honest.  Definitely didn’t see it coming.  I was part of a big group of layoffs, company-wide.  It was a ‘head-count’ thing, instead of a budget thing, so they cut from the bottom and from the redundants   I was redundant.  There were other people there that could do the tasks I’d always done, so I got the axe.

I’d worked at my job for eight years.  That’s a pretty damn long time to work somewhere in the industry I’m in.  So, I suppose, it’s been a good run.

I know that a lot of the people who watch my Tumblr found me because of my fanfiction, so I’ll let you all know here that the reason I haven’t updated Again and Again in so frick’n long is because I’ve been in personal crunch-mode at home.  I’ve got 3 months of severance, and I can claim unemployment as well, but that’s only a short-term solution.  It means I’ve got x-many months until things get super-tight, so whatever I can do to start earning some cash now, is important.

Speaking of which, I ought to get back to it.

I have lunch each day with a group of co-workers. We’re all buddies and get a long on a lot of things, but we are also a diverse group. A few of the group are republicans, most are dems, and we even have one very outspoken libertarian, but we still manage to have very decent political debates. Today separation of church and state came up and one of these guys went on into a mini-triad about creationism vs evolution being taught in schools.

Now, before this point, we could agree to disagree on politics and things were cool, but I had not realized before this day that he was a creationist, or that he actually, HONESTLY believed that creationism deserved equal footing in classrooms.

I bit my tongue for the sake of workplace stability, and the conversation topic was quickly changed by the others, eager to get far away from the topic, but I reeeeaaaallly need to vent.

Tumblr, will you be my sounding board, so I can get this out of my system?  I just need to get out of my head what I dearly wish I could have said to him today at lunch.

—As an adult with the capability to get informed, you have willfully chosen to disregard available evidence in favor of your faith-based beliefs. That is your prerogative, and I’m fine with that, right up until the point where you want to impose your beliefs on the minds of children who do not have the presence of mind to distinguish between things being taught to them based on faith, and things being taught based on peer-reviewed, corroborated scientific research and data, spanning more than a century.

Arguing that Evolution is not ‘proven fact’ and if its ‘theory’ is being taught in schools, then your ‘theory’ should get equal footing, is bullshit. I call bullshit, you are full of bullshit. One of these ‘theories’ is based off of years of scientific data. There is legitimate EVIDENCE to back up my ‘theory’. Your’s is based off of scripture and faith, and the evidence in existence collected by legions of educated, well-informed, and peer-reviewed scientists, directly contradicts nearly everything your ‘theory’ holds as fact.

It is NOT the same thing. They should NOT get equal footing.

If you want your child taught scripture in school, send them to a private religious school. But do NOT bring your faith into my child’s publicly-funded classroom.

Gah… okay. That helped.

tldr - my coworker is a creationist and he pissed me off today at lunch and I needed to vent.

Thanks.