The Passion of the Lemur

I was reading a story about the new - well, old - fossil that somebody found in Germany. I studied anthropology back in school, so I was mildly curious to check it out. Sure enough, another old primate skeleton. It's being heralded as "the missing link" between humans and lemur-like tree dwellers.

Color me unimpressed. Every once in a while a fossil turns up and somebody says that we're descended from apes. But I bought that a long time ago, so new skeletons are only of vague interest to me. Evolution? No argument here. Missing link? Umm...no. One skeleton out of the 4.5 billion years of Earth history won't convince me of much except that a monkey-like creature once drowned in the mud of what we now call "Germany." Using that skeleton as Man's "Start Here" square doesn't square with me.

I feel about evolution the way I did about Pangaea. I was in grammar school looking at the world map that hung over my boring teacher's shoulder. I found it cool that Africa fit into the Caribbean, England into France, Greenland-into-Baffin-Island-into-Quebec. A few years later a high school geography teacher told us about this Pangaea theory, about how the Earth's landmasses were once attached. I thought, "Gee, what a revelation." I wasn't being a know-it-all, and my grades proved I wasn't the brightest kid in class, but honestly: anybody over the age of 12 should be able to look at a map and go, "Huh. Funny how they all fit together."

Same thing with evolution. When I was kid, I saw moneys and gorillas and thought, "Wow. They really look like us." I don't know if I consciously thought that we were related, but somehow it just made sense: they look like us. We're...similar. Come to that, why does everything on land have two eyes? Why do most animals have five toes, just like me?

I was really taken with the skeletons of whales. I remember the book, a big tome in the school library with lots of bright pictures, and in there they showed what whales looked like. And underneath those flippers - wouldn't you know it? - there were five fingers. Big fingers, but fingers nonetheless. That struck me as very, very cool.

Eventually I read that some people today are born with tails, and somehow this made sense, too. In the end, I believed in evolution before I knew what it was. When I learned about Darwin, I was flabbergasted that it took thousands of years for someone to come up with the idea. Were my ancestors really that dumb? Couldn't they see?

Some of these thoughts led me to major in anthropology. Indiana Jones it wasn't. Professors would unload a ton of bones onto a table and we had to classify them and put them into their proper boxes, then graph the results. Took eons. I hated bones after that.

Anyway, evolution seemed very elementary to me. The evolution debate has never been that big a deal. For me, it wasn't a debate at all.

What I find much more interesting these days are the Atheists that jump on new fossil discoveries in order to celebrate their faith. When a fossil is discovered purporting to be the beginnings of Man, five minutes won't go by before an Atheist celebrates the news. As the self-proclaimed preening Atheist on Hot Air put it: I love the smell of fossilized monkeys in the morning. Smells like … victory.

Victory? What exactly have you won?

I'm not one way or the other about religion. I know for a fact that if I was in a bunker, out of ammunition, and the enemy was closing in, I would pray. If me, a friend, or a family member was told they had a couple of weeks to live, I would pray. I don't pray now, but there is no doubt in my mind that I would pray then. To believe otherwise would be foolish. Way too many hardcore Atheists have written books and articles about how they "found God" after being told they were goners. To think that I would be any different than them when the crap hits the fan is fantasy.

Human beings are a praying animal. We may not all believe in God - or a god - but all of us eventually pray when the going gets tough enough. All we need is time. If a bus runs you over, you may not have time to pray. But if the bus runs over your kid and she's on life support in the ICU, I'll bet you anything that you'll pray. Hard.

My dad was once reading a book written by an Atheist about Atheism (random aside: I capitalize "Atheist" and "Atheism" because they are no different than "Christian" and "Christianity," or "Muslim" and "Islam." All have their religious observers, zealots, priests, gospels, prophets and sacred artifacts - er, fossils). I leafed through the book for a little while, but I couldn't get into it. It smacked of phoniness. No doubt the author believed what he was saying. I didn't fault him for it. But it was phony: if a doctor told him his daughter was going to die next month, his Atheism would go out the window in a heartbeat, royalty checks be damned. I know that.

You might be curious to know that I never heard one religious conversation in all the time I studied anthropology. Not one. Sure, we talked about the religions of various cultures, and we debated whether or not a certain artifact showed the presence of religion in an ancient society. But not once did an atheism/religion/evolution debate break out. I think we all took it for granted that evolution was a fact, but it never occurred to us that this should start a debate over the existence of God, or that Creationists were foolish for not agreeing with us. It just never came up. That seems stunning to me now. It would have seemed equally stunning then to have Atheists celebrate an anthropological discovery as proof of their beliefs. We would have thought they were weirdos.

I still do.

The Gospel According to Hitchens

In the last few years there have been a number of books declaring the lunacy of religion in general and Christianity in particular. There was one called The End of Faith, another called The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and John Paulos' Irrelgion. Each makes the same point: there is no God (or god with a small "g"), and religion is a hoax.

Nothing new. Nietzche happens to be one of my favorite philosophers, and he couldn't stand Christianity. He despised priests above all other human beings, and argued for their destruction, or at least permanent ridicule.

I never faulted Nietzche for that. It was his take, his murmur, and from the rest of his writings you could see that he hated priests because he thought they were beneath reason. They hindered a human being's will to power, the very core of Nietzche's philosophy.

I'm not sure what I believe, but I don't dwell on it much. I've said before that I'm not the praying type, but that I'm glad many people still are. The pressure to turn our culture completely atheist seems very shortsighted to me, and it doesn't surprise me to see it coming from the media-types and literary wags (by atheist, of course, they mean anti-Christian; it's been a while since I heard an "intellectual" take a turn at bashing the Dalai Lama).

The literary types, like Hitchens, are attempting to be the modern Nietzche, but they fail because of their transparency. Like all socialists, they distrust religion because it gives the natives funny ideas about who's running the show. All socialist dictators that take power immediately outlaw religion, or at least try to bring the religious leaders to heel. Hitler did the latter with the Catholic Church, and did the former with the Jews. Stalin destroyed religion inside the Soviet Union, and made atheism a central tenet of communism.

It's no surprise then, that atheism is the central tenet of the socialists today. They still hold a soft spot in their hearts for Stalin, and at least go along with him in the belief that the peasants can't be left to make up their own minds about what they want they want to believe. The state dictates all, and there can't be any distractions.

Atheism is a funny thing. People that are proud of their total lack of beliefs don't see the irony: that they have created a whole new religion, and zealously believe in it.

After all, what constitutes an organized religion? Take two examples.

One man wears a black coat and a white collar. He stands behind a pulpit. He gazes down at his followers. He tells you to believe in God, and that the words in the Bible are the way to a good life. He can't show you God, but he asks you to take it on faith that God exists. He reads a gospel from his Bible. Later during his sermon, the ushers pass a basket around the room and ask you to toss in a donation. At the end of his sermon, the priest invites you to the front of the church, where he gives you communion. Then he blesses you and says good-bye.

Now take the other man. He wears a dark suit and a necktie. He stands behind a podium (pulpit). He gazes down at his fans (followers). He tells you not to believe in God, because there is no God. He can't prove that God does not exist, but he asks you to believe (take it on faith) that there is no God. He reads a paragraph (gospel) from his book (Bible). During his speech (sermon) his assistants (ushers) pass a microphone around the room to ask for your questions (you've already paid your entry fee (donation) before entering the hall). At the end of his speech (sermon), the man invites you to the front of the hall (church) where you can have a handshake (communion). He will autograph his book (Bible), and he will wish you well (bless you).

Try as I might, I can't see the difference between Christopher Hitchens and a priest. They both want you to read a book and believe its findings. Though neither of them can irrefutably prove their points of view, they demand that you believe it, or else they pity you.

By writing Bibles and giving sermons, Hitchens is not an antidote, but simply another brand of the poison that he claims to despise. At tens of thousands of dollars in appearance fees, I hope he gives a pretty good dose.

Photo: Nigel Perry/New York