Could YOU Be an Intelligent Designer?

Once in a while, even the most dedicated of us get tired of separating church and state. That’s when Jefferson would pull out his fiddle, or make a trip down to his wine cellar. Me, I go trolling through the Internet to find mindless time-wasters.

So, okay, if you pull the elephant’s back legs down slowly, first to the right and then to the left, you can fashion a decent tail; to form two distinct flukes, put a little indent in the middle. Then stretch the front legs slowly, one at a time to turn them into flippers. If you press down on the critter’s back, not too far behind its head, and then do the same around its rear end, you’ll be left with a bump on its spine that you can shape into a fin.

Thus, your elephant becomes a sea mammal.

You can perform this little exercise in unintelligent design by playing a kids’ “game” called Animal Warp at ChristianAnswers.net. Besides the elephant, you can try your hand improving a toucan, a rhino, a monkey, and various other species. What, exactly, this activity has to do with Christianity is sneakily withheld during the game. Just a few clicks away, though, you can learn all kinds of wondrous misinformation about nature, creationist propaganda written in the kind of simple language that any Christian — child OR adult — can understand. The most important lesson, of course, is:

In the beginning God created everything perfect ...

If you’re an inventive and shameless parent, you can use “Animal Warp” to show your offspring what a shitmess they could make out of god’s allegedly perfect creations. When they push and pull the poor animal's picture, they're probably gonna wind up with some unidentifiable goo, looking like a chocolate Easter beast that has melted way beyond recognition. Why? Because your kids don’t have a really great plan like the big guy's.

One thing he probably didn’t anticipate, however, was sea debris: floating condoms, cigarette butts, plastic straws, indestructible gum, pages ripped out of bibles, and the like. Which is why I went to the bottom of the elephorpoise’s trunk and pulled on both ends until it looked like a vacuum cleaner attachment.

Why didn’t god think of that one, huh?