Already Spinning

My grandmother hasn't even been buried yet, and I can tell she's already spinning about this. The world is too wonderful a place to reject. Science is about getting into the "guts" of reality and finding out how it adds up. The deeper we go, the more wonderful surprises we find. She may have kept some bits of her religion, but every time I brought up a topic in the news, she'd leap right to the side of science and against the fundies.

A lot of my posts have been openly angry with fundies. I'm from a wired generation, so I probably encounter far more. I get angry over fundie endorsements of complete moral relativism. I get angry when fundies get caught in wrongdoing and get a public free pass for being "people of faith." I get angry when fundies repeat century old lies and pretend they never heard the rebuttals by the time they've moved onto trolling the next thread or forum. I get angry when fundies try to teach the same lack of values to their children.

My grandmother was a bit different. When she talked about them, it was always with a tone of bewilderment and pity. The facts of evolution, a round Earth, heliocentrism, the moon landing, and the human body were just realities to be accepted. It was incomprehensible to her that someone could put in so much effort into ignoring the evidence of the world around them. Even more so that someone would want to put in that effort.

That's how I hope to remember her: A champion of science who wanted scientific thought to be taken for granted in people. Someone who wanted skepticism and rationality to be as natural as buckling your seat belt.