In an attempt to put off working as long as possible, I was trolling through my inbox this morning and found this article on a new Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky. I read it (it's on Salon.com) with fascination, since the idea that God created the earth in, literally, six 24-hour days a couple of thousand years ago is the kind of thing I was taught as a child in Sunday school. Well, okay, it wasn't, strictly speaking, taught--but it was heavily implied, and people who believed in Darwin's theory of evolution were misguided sinners who clearly not going to Heaven when the Rapture happened, which was likely to be any day. This is your basic Southern Fundamentalist mindset, and if you think I am making this up, or that I grew up in some obscure, incestuous Appalachian redneck cult, just go read the article, because there are people out there who believe this stuff right this very minute. And you thought Mormons were weird.
Anyway, there were a couple of questions I had in reading this article, and one of them was about a reference made by one Creation Museum enthusiast, who said, "As scripture says, 'They are without excuse' who do not believe"--believe, that is, every word of the Bible as the literal truth. This one really interests me because, as a good little Fundamentalist, I was required to spent a lot of time reading the Bible and memorizing great big chunks of it. (In fact, in Sunday school, the standard procedure was that when the teacher called the roll, instead of answering "Here" you had to answer with a Bible verse you'd memorized. This was how I came to know the shortest verse in the Bible: "Tracy Thompson?" "Jesus wept.") Anyway, while I do not claim to be a Bible scholar, I feel pretty sure that, given the circumstances, this particular verse was one that would have been pointed out to me, and I don't remember it. In fact, I strongly suspect that it's not the first time that people who quote "Scripture" are making it up as they go. My second question concerned the "Biblical" explanation for the Grand Canyon: it was created by the rushing away of all the water after the Great Flood--you know, the one survived by Noah and his family and all those animals in the Ark. But, and excuse me if I am being slow here, if water covered the earth, and then somehow dry land reappeared, where did all that water go? Did the oceans just get deeper, or something? Or maybe it dripped off the earth into space...except that there's no gravity in space. Hmm. Then again, gravity is just a theory.
The next story, which I ran across in the online edition of the British newspaper The Guardian takes us to the other end of the scientific spectrum--if, that is, the Creation Museum exist on a scientific spectrum at all, which I suspect it doesn't. Anyway, this concerns a study done by British scientist Vivette Glover (who is the real thing--I know her to be a respected authority on the subject of maternal depression and its effects on children) which shows that stress during pregnancy--specifically, levels of the stress hormone cortisol--found in the maternal bloodstream during pregnancy can harm the developing brain of the fetus as early as 17 weeks' gestation. That much we pretty much already knew; I think this particular study probably pinpointed the timing of the potential damage, or something. (It's hard to tell from the article itself.) But here's the kicker: Glover's study was released about two days after the British government issued an advisory telling pregnant women they should not drink at all during pregnancy. Previously, the standard advice in the U.K. was that pregnant women could safely indulge in a glass of wine or two per week. Now it's nada. None. So: just in case you haven't followed the logic here, it's this: don't stress out, and don't drink wine. That's like saying don't get hungry and avoid food, but whatever.
I'm pretty sure, though, that if I'd knocked back a few stiff ones during my first pregnancy, my oldest (now a high-maintenance 10-year-old) might have come into the world strung a little less tightly. As it was, putting her to sleep as a baby was like defusing a live hand grenade, and now that she's a preadolescent, her brain runs on a frequency only dogs can hear. The summer I was pregnant with her was, just coincidentally, one of the most stressful in my life, due to a variety of circumstances I won't go into here. So there you go.
Yeah, I know: I'll never be able to actually prove any connection. But maybe I don't need to. I can always just make up a verse of Scripture that proves me right.