[thoughts of   ~a burning woman~  Sha’Tara]

This planet is cursed.  It is cursed, not only through a faulty mechanism of reproduction and survival viability of species, but through intellectual folly: an evolutionary process of intellectual ignorance on the part of those bureaucracies and their lackeys that front for certain systems, or better put, belief systems.

I thought this was the 21st Century but I’m not so sure I’m not living in some sort of nightmare Dark Ages masquerading as an age of science and technology.  I was working in the local ‘university’ yesterday and was attracted to the cover page headline of their paper called The Cascade: “Can Jesus and Darwin Ever be Friends?”  I glanced at it and yes, it was about a group of fundamentalist Christians promoting their ideas culled from a brain dead, sanitized version of “Christianity Today” upon the supposedly gullible denizens of said university.  They already know they cannot defend an actual, literal interpretation of biblical genesis accounts which Christianity, in one form or another has foisted upon Europe and America (and wherever else it followed the imperial conquerors) for hundreds of years, so instead of ‘proving’ the biblical claims, they attack the Darwinist theory of evolution. 

Here’s a truism for you: when you can no longer hide your sins, and you cannot even begin to live according to your claims, get hold of the spotlight and twist it so it shines on the domain of your enemy and make him squirm in turn.

Tempest in a teapot, what?  But if you can find one ignorant person who can’t think for himself enough to open an umbrella in the rain, who knows but you get a convert, putting money in the pot and hopefully bringing your opponent down another notch through numbers?  And if your long-term goal is political domination, that ignorant convert can be a great asset down the road.  You could turn him into a Luddite… or a fundamentalist Greenie, who cares as long as he’s brainwashed and anti-science?

Sure, there isn’t an iota of proof for biological evolution.  I’ve never seen any ‘half-this or half-that’ creature in my years of wandering the wildernesses of Alberta and BC.  I’ve never seen a member of one species ‘evolving’ into another species.  I used to chuckle at times thinking that my ‘daddy’ was really an ape.  (We didn’t get on that well when I was growing up on his shaky homestead.  He liked leather, in the form of a belt, and he liked hearing the slap of his heavy hands on my kid’s flesh.  There was that weekly punishment ritual for whatever sin to go through.  He enjoyed it, I didn’t.  We did settle it eventually.  As they say in the movie, “Nobody’s Fool” – I won.)  But I learned that apes didn’t beat their kids just because they were in a bad mood, or the price of pork had dropped, or the job had been terminated and hard times loomed.  So much for evolution.  As for ‘creationism’ well, who knows how it all came about?  It’s here, isn’t it?  And we’re in it, long or short haul, and I think that’s what we should be looking at.  As the gobbler says to the turkeys after they’ve been rounded up in the pen just before Thanksgiving: “Now that we’re organized, what do we do?”  How do you define ‘organized’?

If there is something to be said for ‘evolution’ it would be this:  creatures don’t evolve, they adapt.  That I’ve seen.  Snowshoe hares grow long hairs on their feet to run over the snow without falling through.  They also go from grey-brown in summer to white in winter, as does the weasel.  Bears learn to control their hunger through hibernation.  Millions of creatures survive by developing coping mechanisms.  Earthian pseudo humans are a blatant exception: instead of adapting themselves to changing conditions, they blame each other for causing these changes and scream at their politicians and other rulers.  They bring more and more people into a world that rejects and kills some 40,000 a day through famine alone.  They build bigger houses that require increasing amounts of various non-renewable forms of energy to maintain.  They complicate their food intake, wear clothing that has nothing to do with weather conditions, acclimate their bodies to air conditioning, and watch TV for exercise.  Let that technology supporting this lifestyle begin to crumble and watch the death toll rise.  Inevitable.  I am quite certain that belief in creation or evolution isn’t going to make a lot of difference when ‘winter’ comes.  Neither side will be inclined to see it as ‘the rapture’…

What I mean to say is this:  we can evolve – spiritually and mentally, though not physically.  We can each become a better person.  And that begins with respecting, and validating, another person’s beliefs, especially if it has to do with the after life – something that cannot be proven, though I can give much subjective information about it.  I don’t want to be told I’m going to hell because I don’t believe some man was horribly tortured and killed because I did wrong.  Shit, that was 2000 years ago!  And Christians say they don’t believe in past lives?  Omigosh, I killed Jesus because I sinned 2000 years ago.  And the ones who killed him knew this.  They saw me do the bad thing and they couldn’t find me, so they beat him up instead.  No thanks, I’ll die for my own sins, if you don’t mind.  Then I’ll know it’s for real.  I’m a spiritually evolved being and that means if I screw up, I pay for it, not someone else.  Nobody dies for me.  So you can disband your military forces and your religions, all at once.  Freedom at last!

All joking aside, what good has it done? 

Are Christians, however you look at them, any better in any visible way, than anyone else?  Is there some way we could set them truly apart from the rest of the ‘organized’ turkeys?  The only test anyone can apply to Christians is from the teachings of Christ in the gospels.  That’s it.  Pretty basic.  Love your enemies.  If someone steals your possessions, don’t ask for them back.  If someone forces you to go with him one mile, go two miles.  Do good to those who hate you.  Feed the hungry; house the homeless… yes, basic stuff. 

But I never found a single instance where Jesus exhorted his followers to ‘build great big churches to meet in on Sunday and hang a great big cross in the foyer so they’ll all be reminded they owe it all to me.  And admire your successful preachers and pay them as you would your politicians because if they’re rich, you’ll be rich by association.”  Not there, not anywhere.  In fact the only thing that comes to mind is this: “Sell your possessions, give the proceeds to the poor.  Then come and follow me.  The Son of Man does not have a place to lay down his head…”  Jesus’ heaven is at the end of a long, bleak, arduous and dangerous road.  There aren’t that many on it that I have observed.

Can Jesus and Darwin be friends?  Well they’re both dead, so we’ll never know will we.  Jesus said, ‘love your enemy’ so I guess Darwin was loved by Jesus.  I never heard of Darwin badmouthing the lord either, so maybe they did get along after all, in their own way.  They each had a job to do, and did it to the best of their abilities, bless their souls.  I can state this categorically however: Christianity and Science (both being faith cults in today’s world) are deadly enemies.  Not because creationism is a good thing, evolution a bad thing, or vice versa or whatever, but because of Almighty Buck.  Yes, the Lord Buck calls and many are those who run to his service.  Who gets the Buck?  The one with the most numbers, the most power.  Religion wants more perks in government bureaucracies and science wants more grants.  It adds up to one thing: POWER over PEOPLE.  Not ‘for’ and not ‘with’ and not ‘of’ but over.  Let’s keep that distinction clear in our minds especially now since it appears there’s that voting virus coming up across the continent… or incontinent.  I took my ‘once in a lifetime anti-vote shot’ long ago, so I don’t worry it will affect me.

This is how the Cascade article ends:  “both sides had asserted their case and converted no one.”  Well, this is still Canada, not the American Mid-West, and we still know how to wear our wool without having it pulled over our eyes by people more ignorant than ourselves.

This was fun… I should do it more often.  Now it’s your turn.