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.

For Blank and Country

According to Yahoo News, Jeremy Hall, a soldier in the US, is miffed that he got passed up from promotion, saying the reason he didn't get a new set of chevrons is because he wanted to hold atheist meetings while in Iraq. Hall and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation are now suing the military, and have included Defense Secretary Robert Gates as a defendant.

So much for sleeping with the general's daughter or bombing Hanoi to end the war in Nam. Those are decent excuses for not getting a promotion. Atheist meetings? Talk about dull days in the military.

An attorney that brought the suit said, "It shouldn't matter if one is Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist or atheist. In the military, all are equal and to be considered equal."

Not exactly Full Metal Jacket: "If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death praying for war. But until that day you are pukes. You are the lowest form of life on Earth. You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit. Because I am hard you will not like me. But the more you hate me the more you will learn. I am hard but I am fair. There is no racial bigotry here [insert racial bigotry labels]. Here you are all equally worthless. And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps. Do you maggots understand that?"

Hall didn't receive Hartman's classic piece of motivational speaking. Instead, Hall says that his platoon sergeant told him that not praying with his troops or being able to put aside his personal convictions would be detrimental to leading his men.

If his platoon sergeant really said that, then I have a sneaking suspicion that Hall was not merely an atheist, but a loud-mouth one at that. And his platoon sergeant is absolutely correct. Leading men in battle might be a little easier if you weren't known as the NCO that says things like, "Boys, if you get shot, it's all over. Gomez, put away that Bible. That worthless pack of lies won't save your soul, because you don't have one to begin with. All right, let's synchronize watches."

A while back I read a piece by Ben Stein asking when the US had become an atheist country. Overnight, it seemed that religion (read, Christianity) had taken a nose dive and that it was now uncool to pray. I'm not one way or the other about praying, but I can see why the military would take an interest. The military is only concerned with two things: following orders, and winning. Having someone leading men who are going to die, while at the same time holding meetings that tell the same men their death will have no hereafter, is not exactly a pep talk.

Still, Hall has found the answer: he is going to plead in the biggest church in the USA. The courthouse.