If Only Rainwater Was Beer
Believing things that aren't true has its costs

an article by Lowell Grisham
printed in the Northwest Arkansas Times, Fayetteville, AR
March 5, 2007

My college roommate Bubba used to say, "I wish rainwater was beer, but it ain't."

Happily, it is a free country, and we have every personal right to believe anything we wish. We can believe that rainwater is beer -- or that God created the earth from nothing in 144 hours -- but there is a dear price to pay for believing in things that aren't true.

In America you can form a Rainwater Beer Drinkers Society, freely assemble and enjoy fellowship together while sharing communion enjoying your favorite rainwater. You can create and publish books that compare the various beer qualities of different types of rain. You can encourage your followers to learn more about beer-rain, and even fund chemical researchers to publish non-peer-evaluated academic papers listing the chemical properties that prove rainwater is beer. You can fund long lists of experts who testify to the glories of rain-beer.

You can spread those "scientific" findings through any open communication means you wish and quash any critique on your own website. You can call real science "junk" and redefine what science means to allow your own scholars to redefine rainwater as beer.

You can start your own schools and teach your children your truth about rainwater. As long as you can keep your children isolated from the rest of the world you can control their minds. You can build a museum to display the glorious beer qualities of rain. You might even get the Discovery Channel to run something glitzy about your findings. You can grow an industry to promote your theories, create hundreds of "proofs" about rainwater and so flood the argument that the average person will be so overwhelmed that they can't tell rainwater from beer. And whenever you are challenged, you can say you are being persecuted. Say that those people who believe in non-beer-rainwater are all atheists, and they are attacking everyone's religious convictions.

Whenever those pesky scientists try to assert that rainwater is just rainwater, you can demand equal time. After all, saying that rainwater is only rainwater is just a theory. You've got a theory too. The media believes they must report both sides of every issue, so if you can make it an issue, they'll give you good quotes. Create a big controversy -- "New Findings Suggest the Presence of Hops and Barley in Rainwater." If any pointy nosed university academicians challenge you, sic Bill O'Reilly on them. He'll shout 'em down.

In a free country, you've got every God-given right to believe and to express your belief that rainwater is beer. I'll defend your rights, and so will the ACLU. But I don't have to agree with you.

We have such a tolerant society that you won't run into too much complaint until you begin to cross lines and try to force others to swallow your beer unwillingly. If your motivated, well-organized minority takes advantage of low-turnout public races like school board elections and gains a majority of rainwater beer candidates on the school board, and if they then require public school teachers to teach the rainwater-is-beer theory alongside the rainwater-is-rainwater theory, you'll wake some people up.

By all means avoid going to court. If you ever go to court you face a substantial obstacle. Courts base their judgments on evidence. You're gonna lose. Just like 100% of the creationist-intelligent design cases that have made it to trial. Even conservative beer-rain drinking judges will apply the law to the evidence.

The problem with any organization, especially a religious one, attaching itself to a scientific untruth is that the organization loses credibility. It risks losing its children as they grow up and taste rainwater and discover for themselves, it is not beer. Unless they are kept in controlled religious isolation, all Christian children will discover one day that evolution is true. If their parents and churches have taught them otherwise, the children are either going move courageously toward a more progressive faith or fearfully conform to untruth to get along with their authorities or throw religion out entirely. Ferdinand Magellan famously mused, "The Church says the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church."

For churches and religious people to be afraid of science and its noble search for truth is a betrayal of our witness that God is truth. Truth is continually unfolding. All new discovery of truth reflects God and adds to our understanding of God. Enjoy the wondrous journey. And have a mug of rainwater on Bubba.