By Mickey Walker-May 10, 2009
Funny, but in this new millennium, we actually had a presidential
candidate, Mike Huckabee, who said on live television that he did not believe
in evolution. He said the world was only 6-10 thousand years old. So the "Flintstones" was a
viable portrayal of history where Homo sapiens actually did have pet dinosaurs
like “Dino.” Don’t look now, but that conflicts with fossil records where
dinosaurs were destroyed when the Chicxilub Meteor crashed to earth almost 70
million years ago at what is now the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula,
Mexico. Homo sapiens appeared
perhaps 67 million years later. But that’s science for you. Pesky thing, science, with all its
facts and evidence that interferes with Creationist teachings that say our
planet is only 10,000 years old. An iridium layer all over the world at a depth corresponding with 68.5
million years ago indicates a meteor crashed into the earth at that time. The event created a cloud of dust that
shrouded the planet for over 200 years. Plants died. Animals
starved. And it was then when many
larger life forms went into extinction all over the planet. The new Creationist Museum in Kentucky
shows man and dinosaurs coexisting as peaceful as lambs. Funny how we
heard little to nothing about the huge lizards in Eden or marching into the
Ark, two-by-two. Wouldn’t
the T Rexes and Allosauruses made for some great Christian-eating sport in the Coliseum,
so why no mention of these giant carnivores? Oh, Rome might have been after the extinction? Well, then why weren’t these thunder
lizards mentioned in the Bible about the time of their falling into
extinction? Israel could have sicked
a trained T-Rex on Goliath and saved the Jews a lot of teeth-gnashing for a
hero in David as a boy. We don’t
even get a footnote in the Bible about Wooly Mammoths roaming about Europe and
the Middle East, nor any stories about how the Mayans and Meso-Americans before
the White Man came, used them as beasts of burden. Heck, I bet they would have invented the wheel with beasts
of burden like Triceratops. The
Creationists say they were there with man at the same time.
Ah, truth! The
point is that we know very little about what is true and what is not. We are addicted to spin and good yarns
told to us. We believe crooked
politicians if they are smooth on camera. We allow ourselves to believe that Iraq is worth attacking and occupying
based upon Saddam having missiles trained on the U.S. while attempting to buy
yellow cake uranium from Niger. Why our own President Bush said so.
A year ago, the Houston Museum of Natural History became the
first museum outside of the African continent to receive and display the
"Lucy" exhibit. Lucy is
the splendid collection of fossil bones of a million-year-old ancestor of ours,
though we are not direct descendants of hers. Nevertheless, this
Australopithecine, found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in
northeastern Ethiopia in 1974 has promoted some heated arguments
around Houston these days about whether man descended from apes or not.
Of course, we did not descend from apes, but that scientific fact does little
to soothe the savage breast of fundamentalist Christians about town. They fiercely reject that Lucy was our
cousin who might have shared a common ancestor with man a million years back on
the tree of evolution. It is an
outrage to them to confuse the issue with evidence and scientific proofs.
You remember those dudes, the ones who declared that Republicans had high
morals and Democrats had none and that global warming was the work of God, not
man? I at least, wish these Creationists could get it right and
stop their nonsense about how evolutionists and Darwin contend
that man descended from apes. Just because the Lucy exhibit model has some chin hair doesn’t mean that
Sarah Palin doesn’t, does it?
A Fundamentalist asked me, "Is Lucy real?" Many
think Lucy is a hoax, despite the Fundamentalist-threatening fossil skeleton
behind the glass in the Houston Museum. I asked, "Well, what is she,
then, the evidence you see before your eyes?" Some say Lucy is
counterfeit, manufactured by godless liberals in California or even immoral
Democrats in Hollywood. Further dialogue and resistance to science from
the Thumpers revealed the Christian sentiment that Lucy was an animal and,
unlike Homo sapiens, did not have a soul. "Really?" I
asked. "Says who? How do we know that God did not give Lucy a
soul?" The quick answer was that God made us in his own image, and
Lucy was different. "How?" I persisted. "All
of us have relatives or in-laws who have reduced cranial capacities like
Lucy's, right?" I laughed. "And who look very primitive,
just like Lucy, right? And a
little facial hair, right?" No. They just would not have
it. We, they repeated, are different. We have souls.
Lucy doesn't. "But in His Own image could mean many
things." I said. "God is in the entire Universe, and He
lives in all things, does He not?" Sure, some allowed, reluctantly,
wading into the strange waters beyond rote memorization and blind
acceptance. So I said: "Well
why couldn't God's image be manifested in all the things of His creation,
including bears and trees and men, mountains, and............................even
Lucy?" Oh, well, they wouldn't have that, either, because their
exclusivity as the one and only chosen species in the Universe might get
threatened. Only man has a soul! “Even Ken Lay and Bernie
Madoff?” I asked. “Yes.” “Even Osama bin Laden?” They hesitated. The question was troublesome. It became a question of belief, and bin Laden was a Muslim. A few far-out, tar-brushing red necks
labeled Obama a Muslim last election, but, in truth, he was never a
Muslim. Beliefs and propaganda to
smear often come dressed as the Truth. I thought man had been truly evolving all along, but here come the
preposterous statements that Obama is a Muslim when, in truth, he is a
Christian. But maybe there is some
progress in human thinking. It’s
only recently that Blacks have been accepted as Christians. Heck, some
Fundamentalists have even begun to believe that the Jews didn't really kill
Jesus, do you love it? Yet accepting that we could be descendants of
Lucy, or even cousins, might be too much of a stretch for some people to digest
right now. Maybe next millennium.
I shuddered to think Huckabee could be president, my
God. He might even prove kookier than Bush. Huckabee, as a
self-proclaimed authority on the Bible (and Fox News show host) might bring his
take on the book of Revelation to the missile silos controlled by his own
personal buttons in the White House. Fundamentalist
Christians and nut case Muslim terrorists seem to have similar
agendas. They seem to feed from the same dark trough of religious prejudice
that has afflicted man since the beginning of time. Why question it? Why not hate and discount that which is
different from what you believe, and demonize the non-believers as the enemy?
God will assuredly be on our side. But how do we know? Faith.
Faith in what? In His Word, in the Bible. Whose
interpretation? The King James Version? The Book of Mormon?
And how can we know that what we believe is the truth as God’s Word
intended? God guides us and directs us, they say. How?
Like when President George W. Bush said that God told him to attack
Iraq? Something like that. And
when Sarah Palin said we should support Bush on the Iraq War and occupation
because it was “God’s work?” Caint
you just picture Palin in Joan of Arc armor?
So what do we really know about the truth and what is
what? Will the world suffer and
survive in spite of man’s ignorance of the truth and unwillingness to convert
one’s views from his unquestioned beliefs to science? I submit that much of our troubles today have their origins
in our willingness to believe the spin and the untruths that brought us to hold
still while Bush attacked Iraq, a country that was never a part of the al Qaeda
attack on America. It causes us to
look down on a whole race of people (Arabs), or religion (Muslims) by spinning
the belief that some people and religious sects are just no damned good. And that God is on our side.
We lose our compass. And then falls our respect as a nation. And the value of our currency from all our borrowing and
spending for war and nation-building and the promotion of democratic ideas.
In 1938, Brian Cleve, author and philosopher wrote:
“What has happened in contemporary Western society is the
promotion of democratic ideas beyond reason. It's often been noted that
democracy carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
“In our modern eagerness to be tolerant,” Cleeve
stated, “we have come to tolerate things which no society can tolerate and
remain healthy. In our understandable anxiety not to set ourselves up as
judges, we have come to believe that all judgments are wrong. In our revulsion
against hypocrisy and false morality we have abandoned morality itself. And
with modest hesitations but firm convictions I submit that this has not made us
happier, but much unhappier. We are like men at sea without a compass.”
So let us persevere and navigate by the stars until we get
our compass back and pay attention to what we believe and who is bringing it to
us as the truth. 