Skip to main content

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.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more