One of the benefits of doing a non-niche blog is that I get to see a fairly wide variety of search engine queries. For those readers who don’t have a blog of their own or who simply don’t monitor incoming links I’ll run this down real fast. When someone does a search on Google or some other engine and selects my site to visit out of their list of results, it shows up in my incoming links list as “Google Search: blah blah blah” with the “blahs” replaced with whatever the person searched for, obviously. Search engine queries are like the internet’s confessional booth. The phrases for which you search are between you, Google, and the web page you end up at.

Every now and then I’m going to pull a search out of my incoming links and speak directly to that nameless person who clicked over to my site. How’s that for service?

Today’s lucky search query is “bible versus about global warming” executed at 3:46pm yesterday.

I can only guess what the searcher was trying to learn by this search. I’m guessing that he or she wanted to know if the Bible makes any reference to global warming or climate change (It doesn’t, unless you count Revelations.) The “versus” is the most interesting word in the query because it implies that the searcher wants to find out if the bible is somehow at odds with global warming.

I went ahead and ran that search myself and discovered that my Jerry Falwell post is the #2 result. Also interesting is the fact that Google picked the phrase “According to the Bible the Earth is only about 6000 years old!”out of my post and included it with the search result because it contains one of the search terms. Taken on its own, to a visitor unfamiliar with my site it might seem that this site is fundamentalist. They might have clicked over thinking that they found a supporter of the belief that a higher power will keep the Earth running in tip-top shape for us. It probably wasn’t long before the searcher was disappointed, no doubt (I think I called Falwell a “pig fucker” in the first sentence.)

Well, my Google searching friend, here is the answer you were searching for. The Bible has nothing to do with the Earth’s Climate. It was written thousands of years ago by people who didn’t even understand why it rains in the spring and snows in the winter. It is a series of stories about morality aimed at helping us all live together relatively peacefully. It’s not going to tell you if your someday-grandchildren will be taking glass bottom boat tours of old Manhattan. It’s certainly not going to tell you that everything is going to be alright (it says the opposite of that, actually.)

Global Warming is still scientifically unproven, however, if we assume it’s happening then there are still plenty of books “versus about global warming” that you could read. Walk or ride your bike to the library and ask the librarian to help you find one. If they hand you a Bible then you’re in a shitty library (or the South…one of those two.)