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My God — life! Who can understand even one little bit of it? — Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

Some folks at Harvard, apparently.

Warning: the following video may be educational. It’s an eight-minute animation of the inner workings of a cell, down to the molecular level. Unless this is your field, you might not understand it all. I didn’t, anyway.

Some people believe the intricacy and complexity of the internal mechanics of life force us to one inescapable conclusion: that life was formed by an intelligent designer. That leads to an inescapable question: where did the designer come from?

There’s a hoax email going around about an atheist who files a discrimination suit because religious people have all sorts of cool holidays and atheists don’t have any. The fictional judge says that atheists have April Fool’s Day, quoting Psalms: “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.'”

John Wilkins thinks we may be onto something here:

Though this is legally and constitutionally false, and the judge would immediately be censured by a higher court, I actually think it has a germ of a good idea.

Let’s celebrate the foolishness of religious beliefs on April Fool’s Day. If you happen to be religious, celebrate the foolishness of all other religions that day. If you are agnostic, celebrate the foolishness of definite opinions about Gods. If you are Catholic, celebrate the foolishness of Protestants. If Protestant, of Catholics. Sunnis can celebrate the foolishness of Shiites, and vice versa. Mormons can celebrate the foolishness of all Christian religions, and everybody (I mean everybody) can celebrate the inane gawking train wreck stupidity of Scientology.

What a great idea! I know what I believe, and I’m certain that my beliefs are correct. For one day, each of us could revel shamelessly in our certainty, knowing that anyone who believes differently is some kind of idiot, at best.

Every other day of the year, while still feeling secure in our own beliefs, we’d have to accept other people and their right to their beliefs.

That could change everything.

As always, Bob Geiger has collected another good batch of political cartoons. The second cartoon, comparing Newt Gingrich and John Edwards on family values, is particularly illuminating.

Interesting comic on belief vs. reality.

A million people can call the mountains a fiction, yet it need not trouble you as you stand atop them.

But there are exceptions.

The Scientific Indian paid a visit to the Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C..

The quotes engraved on the bench on which Einstein sits:

As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance, and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.

Joy and amazement of the beauty and grandeur of this world of which man can just form a faint notion …

The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.

Einstein knew that the world is not pure. The United States he lived in was deeply flawed, but he knew there were places in the world far worse than this place. He knew he might not be free to choose where to live.

How do you suppose he would feel about today’s America?

Josh Rosenau says that while we’re all focused on the big political stage, extremists are making their move at the local level:

One of the great ironies of politics is that the most local offices, the ones that ought to be most responsive to constituent needs, are often the least-known. Presidential elections are hotly debated, even in a state like Kansas where the outcome is fore-ordained. But a local or state school board election can be decided by a few hundred votes, yet draws substantially less interest. That apathy towards local races has made them prime targets for extremists and ideologues…

A disturbing number of local extremists wind up in Congress. Time to start paying a lot more attention.