John Derbyshire, whose writing at National Review has amused me many times, recently expounded on various questions regarding his own religious faith. It amounts to an explanation of why he no longer has any. Today, Wesley Smith delivers a very worthy response over at First Things.

A major part of Derbyshire’s rationale for not believing, as Smith also expands upon, is the biological science that says the human genome has been in a continual state of change, just like the genomes of all other animals. Therefore, he cannot reconcile how humans could have been made “in God’s image.” The Derb wonders which humans would actually have been in God’s image, since all iterations of humanity couldn’t have been. It stumps me how scientific trivia like that can be an obstacle to faith, but then there are admittedly no end to the obstacles to faith that the world throws at you. If I would read the Bible and see descriptions of people I could not relate to in any way — who just didn’t seem to be human, as I can define it — then it would surely be an obstacle to faith. But who can read the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Esther, Job and so on, and not see the same human nature that can be seen when one looks in the mirror, or across the room? Biological science be damned (pardon the expression); we are surely the same kinds of people God has always been burdened with, albeit a little more obese in this part of the world.

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New Bob Dylan discussion forums (more?!?) have been set up at this link: http://the-moonlight-mile.com/forums

I pass it along since it was passed along to me.

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Also passed along to me is this link to a blog piece on the Tharp / Dylan musical. The horror expressed by the writer and the commenters is pretty funny. The writer is actually reacting to the vignette that was seen on “The View” TV show last week:

I’m sure that taken as part of a whole, in context, zombie clowns on exercise balls bouncing around a guy in suspenders with a cardboard guitar make perfect sense.

A dream sequence, maybe? A nightmare? Or perhaps it’s what a drunk choreographer for a touring production of Moving Out sees after hitting his head on a grand piano and blacking out?

It gets much more wild in the comments section. Well, that’s rock n roll, I guess. Seeing a Bob Dylan song performed in this way was a real shock to the system for some. I have news for you: If you can’t take fey performers in feyer (more fey?) costumes traipsing around in front of an absurdly fake (and quite fey) backdrop, then maybe Broadway musicals are just not for you. There’s certainly both a suspension of disbelief and a suspension of the standards of rock n roll so-called “authenticity” that would be required to sit through such a show. Not a problem for someone with RWB’s eclectic taste and live-and-let-live philosophy towards the fey. I mean, it’s like, art, right? Still, I haven’t yet seen the show. I’m just saying that those aspects in and of themselves don’t disqualify it from being a worthy venture, in my view.

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Addendum 7:22 pm: I was just listening to the Guys And Dolls soundtrack, the one put together by Sinatra, with Dean and Bing and Sammy and Debbie Reynolds. Great Frank Loesser songs. Nothing fey going on there. I realize I was wrong to imply that all Broadway musicals must of necessity be inclined that way. Sure, there has to be a certain affect, but what we might still be allowed to call “manliness” should by no means be proscribed. I’m sure it wasn’t in the heyday of the Broadway musical. So, if a musical today is overly, ah, wimpy, it can certainly qualify as a valid criticism. I’m not talking about Times now, because I still haven’t seen it — I’m just talking.

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