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Turtle Talk #4

They are still at it in Dayton, Tennessee.

When I co-taught a course called, "Ever Since Darwin", we used to show the original "Inherit the Wind" movie, not because it was entirely accurate, but because it did capture something that is true about fundamentalist religion and its inability to accept what science knows to be true about human origins.

John Scopes was a 24-year-old teacher in Dayton, who was put on trial for teaching evolution, and William Jennings Bryan, a hugely popular politician, was the prosecuting attorney.  Scopes was convicted, and fined $100.  Not even the famous defense attorney, Clarence Darrow could overcome the Tennessee law that forbade teaching evolution or any other theory that denied the biblical account of human origins.  It was, then in 1925, called "The Trial of the Century".

Bryan College was founded in Dayton, Tennessee five years later, and in today's New York Times, is reported to be putting its own faculty members on trial for essentially committing the same crime.

Professors at Bryan College have to sign a statement that says, among other things, that "The origin of man was by fiat of God".  You know, God said, "Let there be light", and there was light.  Later God said, "Let there be a sun and a moon!", and there they came, too.  But, apparently, people were slipping by "fiat" a little too comfortably, so the administration of the college cleared things up a little:  Adam and Eve, they said, "are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life-forms".

That is what happens when you try to live in two worldviews at the same time; one with gods and angels and a Garden of Eden, and the other with a search for how things really are.  That is what happens when what you know to be true about the world, because it is there for anyone with brains to see, and when you get your truth from the way people used to think when God spoke in Hebrew and Greek and Elizabethan English from his Kingdom up there in Heaven.  That is what happens to religion when it sets aside what we know as surely as we know anything, at all:  it demands ignorance to preserve its talk of gods, and demons, and six-day creations plus a day of rest.

Oh, you know, a thousand years is like a day, and God really does sound a lot like Donner und Blitz at the top of a mountain, and there is so much we really do not yet understand, but one day, after our friends have sung "Children of the Heavenly Father" for us, we shall finally understand fully, won't we?

No.  We won't.

Our only chance is to figure it out, right now, as best we can.




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