Okay, so Creationists are taking copies of Darwin's Origin of Species and passing it out to college students, with an added introduction that alleges Darwin as a racist, sexist, and the origin of Nazi ideology. I hate sticking my nose into these things, but should people who believe in evolution pass out copies of scripture with a foreward that sites all the crimes done in the name of Christianity? No. Because that would be missing the point of Christianity, just as Creationists are missing the point of Evolution.
I am not one to delve into the God question, I see myself as a Humanist, Agnostic, however you'd like to say it. The fact is that, if there is a God, I don't have any beef with them, and I have a feeling that She or He (or It, really) would be of a high and wise enough mind to place damnation on a level somewhere a bit higher than what we do and don't read. Censoring yourself from every possible outlet of information in this world is just as damning as watching pornography. The world is big and complicated, you can't root things out between Sin and Virtue. But these ideals are not, I think, sent down to us from a higher power. We see something that offends us, we call it wrong. Something makes us happy, we deem it right. eventually enough people see one thing as wrong or one thing as right that we assume it a universal truth. The Ten Commandments are a perfect example of this.
And don't think that I am only coming out against Christian Fundamentalism; I get just as irritated by Atheistic Fundamentalism, that teenage stubbornness where one refuses to read scripture or take any heed from it, and who assume that anyone–and anything–involved with the practice of religion is a result of boorish stupidity. I have read scripture, I have prayed, I have been to church. I have said grace at the table at Thanksgiving. And at no point did I feel that I was being simple or stupid, or oppressed. There are things to be found in faith that Atheism will never provide; and there are emotions that Atheism cannot explain. Is it possible, really, for me to look at Mount Ranier when I'm driving north and not have a fleeting thought of "Whoever made that is a damned good artist"? Or to know someone has died and not pray, secretly, quietly to myself, that they are in a better place?
Atheism rejects our human need for faith, for the belief in something greater than ourselves. This was not always the sky-cult of Judeo-Christian belief. Before that, it was the Earth and the deities that were wrought from it. But it has always been something; we always need a cosmogonic myth and we balance it with an apocalyptic myth. Science, with the Big Bang and the Universe's endless expansion and semi-predictable chaos, is another form of myth, though I will not say that it is false. All myths are true in their own way, all myths are useful. Science has proven to be one of the most useful because it denies that it is infalliable; its laws are subject to change upon each new discovery. I trust science to explain the workings of my world, and I admit (as most scientists do) that it does not explain everything.
Humans, when we get down to our core, are too complicated to accept a single explaination for the way things are. Only following a single doctrine, then, is going against what being human is. We did not fall from grace out of the blue. We got curious. But if it weren't for that curiosity (to use a Biblical metaphor), there would be nothing more than two naked people sitting in a garden naming animals. And I, for one, think that Original Sin did us a world of good.
So, back to the issue at hand: distributing copies of The Origin of Species explaining that, despite laying the foundation for modern Biology, Paleontology, and a host of other disciplines, gave Hitler a good reason for Genocide. Not only are these allegations false, but they go against everything that academia tries to promote. If these ladies and gentlemen (amongst whom is former Tiger Beat cover boy Kirk Cameron) really want to break into the academic world and make Creation level with Evolution in classrooms everywhere, they could start by promoting something that is less sensationalist and more guided by reason and willingly open for debate. Also, you have to remember that, though it is the basis for so much scientific study, it has always been called the Theory of Evolution, not the Indisputable Fact of Evolution. If Creation is to be taught, then it, too, must be posed as a theory, therefore negating its very purpose in the eyes of those who promote it so intensely. Academic institutions are places of debate and discourse, and therefore could never really promote fundamentalism in the classroom. Calling one of the most influential academics of all time a liar based on false accusations of racism is just childish.
I read a small portion of Sarah Palin's new book in a review of it online, where she says that she can't look at everything people have done and think that they were once fish crawling out of the ocean. We've heard that argument before; the assumption that Evolution is an insult to humanity since it infers that we are descended from monkeys and fish and not borne directly from the mind of the Almighty. Hogwash, I say. There's something, to me, that's even more beautiful about the idea of us, out of the billions of possible organisms, somehow changing and evolving, turning a simple backbone into a spine and a few electronic pulses into the most complex brain that's ever been known, to go from floating to swimming to crawling to walking upright when no other species really could, to grow hands for building and turn small families into civilizations, surviving mass extinctions throughout millions of years, until we reached the point where we could dream up hundreds of possibilities for our own origins and millions of hopes for our own future–is that not, Ms. Palin, the ultimate underdog story? Is Homo Sapiens not a cunning and wise and adaptive survivor? Have we not proven ourselves worthy of the Gods we create and hold fast to?
There is nothing to be ashamed of in the idea of once being small. Everything was once small, even in Genisis, there was chaos from which light and life was created. We are above throwing stones into the gears of other's ideas, and the only way to continue to evolve as a society is to allow free thought, as well as freedom of worship. But please, let's do it in an arena where we can at least be courteous to one another.
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