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.

I, Me, Mine

Regarding the "intense discussions" at Boston College, which recently hung some Christian artwork:

Kirschner, a professor of biology and the faculty adviser for Boston College’s chapter of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, said he can see it both ways. “On the one hand, BC wants to be all-inclusive. On the other hand, they do things like this to make people feel not included. On the other hand, it is a Catholic university.” He added that in the lecture hall where he teaches, there’s a small sculpture of a mother and child (Mary and Jesus? – “I suppose,” he replied. “Who else would it be?”) – as opposed to a crucifix. “Probably if a crucifix had been placed in my lecture hall, I might have felt more strongly about it not being in my lecture hall.”

What's all this "my" stuff? It reminds me of the line in Saving Private Ryan:

"They took away your company?"

"It was the army's company, last time they told me."

Incidentally, how many hands does Dr. Kirschner have? A professor of biology shouldn't flunk anatomy this badly.

Newspeak (III)

The other day I was writing about the Newspeak dictionary, and the people that are using "god" instead of "God" even when it makes them look stupid. As in, "Thank god it's Friday," or "Thank god the truck missed my car," as if Hera or Aphrodite might be listening.

Today I saw a new one. "Good lord," instead of "Good Lord." The guy over at Hot Air wrote it. He goes under the name Allahpundit, he's an atheist, and he often bends himself into all kinds of knots trying to prove he's an atheist. As if we care. (Random aside: atheism, being the religion that it is, is proving to be a blossoming home of evangelicals and zealous true believers).

I'm no Bible thumper and I haven't been to church in forever, but people like Allahpundit are pathetic clowns. Are they that frightened of the bogeyman - read, religion - that they're afraid to even spell things correctly? And, if the word "Lord" bothers their sensitivities so much, why don't they just say, "Good grief," or "Great Scott," unless they work as serfs on an English estate, in which case "good lord" is apt and I'll give them a pass.

Of course, the answer as to why they can't just say "Great Scott" is because, like it or not, "Good Lord" is part of the language and culture (for now, and shrinking more each year, I'd wager). Has been for a long time. And so clowns like Allahpundit write "Good Lord," realize their horrible mistake, hit backspace a few times, and replace it with "Good lord." I'm sure they feel they're helping to drive the revolution against religion to a higher plane, and are spreading the good word of their own small-g religion, but all they're doing is looking like desperate buffoons.

Is there anything more pathetic than people that take someone else's symbols and words and change them so they can use them too, then deny that those original symbols and words have any value?

Get a grip, Allahpundit. Or is it "allahpundit?"

Killer Regulations

Better people should die than receive help from that dirty thing called religion. What else can be the point of this regulation?

From CBS:

City officials have ordered 22 New York churches to stop providing beds to homeless people.

With temperatures well below freezing early Saturday, the churches must obey a city rule requiring faith-based shelters to be open at least five days a week -- or not at all.

Arnold Cohen, president of the Partnership for the Homeless, a nonprofit that serves as a link with the city, said he had to tell the churches they no longer qualify.

He said hundreds of people now won't have a place to sleep.

Blessed Are The Arrogant

Kathleen Parker is an opinion piece writer. She used to be buddy-buddy with conservatives until she started taking a lot of shots and the GOP and Sarah Palin. Now she's on the outs. You can find her latest piece here. It outlines her view that the Republican Party needs to dump religious people as their base because religion is dying. Her opening:

"As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I'm bathing in holy water as I type."

Cute. But not hateful. Had she been mudslinging at anyone but Christians, then she would be a hateful person. But those Christians are such deserving little targets.

I'm not sure if I should fall into her trap of reacting too strongly. Something about Ms. Parker's writing smacks of desperation, and I have a feeling she's going to be penning a lot of publicity stunts like this from here on out. She's being shunned by conservatives, but that is no guarantee for being loved by liberals (unless Parker is pro-abortion, in which case she'll do fine; I have no idea if she is or not and can't be bothered to search for the answer).

The language in her piece is downright bigoted to a people that have a first amendment right to believe whatever they wish. Some examples:

Christians are lunatics: "So it has been for the Grand Old Party since the 1980s or so, as it has become increasingly beholden to an element that used to be relegated to wooden crates on street corners."

Christians are morons: "Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows."

Christians are creepy: "To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn't soon cometh."

Christians should shut up: "And shifting demographics suggest that the Republican Party -- and conservatism with it -- eventually will die out unless religion is returned to the privacy of one's heart where it belongs."

Christians are old and ill: "Suffice it to say, the Republican Party is largely comprised of white, married Christians. Anyone watching the two conventions last summer can't have missed the stark differences: One party was brimming with energy, youth and diversity; the other felt like an annual Depends sales meeting."

Though not a religious person, I've never fallen into the "hate religion" pit. It's bogus on its face. When people say they despise religion, they aren't talking about religion. They're talking about Christianity. I don't know how Parker wound up feeling the way she does about that faith. It would interesting to hear the explanation. In any event, she believes the problem with the Republican Party can be summed up with two words: "white and Christian."

I wonder if she gave any thought to black Christians? Or Asian Christians? Or Latino Christians? Certainly she must know they exist, as she is very fond of quoting all kinds of numbers like how many Jews voted for Barack Obama. So let me ask: if blacks and Latinos voted heavly for Obama, and their main religion is also a form of Christianity, how can Christianity be the problem for the Republican Party? If she wants to make arguments using base politics, shouldn't she be more concerned with race than religion? And why would such a bright light as Parker not see the opposite of the argument: if the Republican Party managed to bring all Christians under their umbrella, they'd win every election by a mammoth landslide.

Ah, but I forgot: Christianity is passe. Loopy. And once completely private, dead. Or so Parker would hope.

For all of her bigoted remarks (and make no mistake, they are bigoted; writing similar screeds about Jews, blacks, gays, or women, and telling them to shut up, would be received with daggers drawn), Parker's most revealing line is this: "But nonwhites won't get whiter. And the nonreligious won't get religion through external conversion. It doesn't work that way. Given those facts, the future of the GOP looks dim and dimmer if it stays the present course. Either the Republican Party needs a new base -- or the nation may need a new party."

That's pretty heavy stuff. She's advising a political party to cut itself off from a loyal part of the population for political expediency. Her solution to GOP problems? Put the loony grandma in the attic and lock the door.

According to her, white Christians, especially evangelicals, need to be dumped. Nevermind what they have to contribute to the national dialogue, or that they may want to be heard in Congress. They're dying out anyway, so they might as well just take a seat and do it quietly.

Kathleen Parker is a strange person. Though 24-hour news may make politics seem like a meaningless game, some people still think it matters that they get to be heard. For her to declare that the winning formula for the Republican Party is to betray millions of their supporters overnight is incredible. For her to claim that Christians are becoming a minority, but that this minority should be silenced and shunned by the political system is shameful.

But not hateful. No, not that.

Word Game/Head Game

I was reading an article by Brian Bethune in Maclean's today, which had the sub-headline, "The newest view of Christ - activist, politician, not very Christian - is hard to square with the Bible's. Now some believers even say the faith might be better off without him."

I'm not surprised to see that kind of stuff these days. Over the past two decades, we have been in a terrible hurry to remove all memory of Jesus Christ from the culture's language.

Again, I am not a religious person. But again, I think this swift dismantling of one of the cornerstones of Western culture is very shortsighted. (The very fact that I just felt a need to write those two sentences should speak volumes, huh? I wrote them without thinking, because I wanted you to read more without seeing me as a nutcase. Sometimes, I even amuse myself at how evolved I'm becoming -- don't you?)

In the Maclean's article, I found the term: 70 CE. I knew it had to be an abbreviation of something, probably a reference to when the second temple of Jerusalem got knocked down in 70 BC. So I went looking and found that CE is the new term for AD.

Common Era (more or less the Gregorian Calendar we use today), as opposed to Anno Domini (the year of our Lord). In my university days, the erasure of Christianity was still in its infancy. The profs tried to sell us on BP (Before Present), but that made you do math while hungover and writing term papers, so it didn't catch on. BCE and CE have a better shot this time around.

You'd better get used to CE, because if it's appearing in magazines without a footnote to translation, then it means it's already on the way to becoming part of the language. BCE (Before the Common Era), by the way, is what is replacing BC (Before Christ).

"Common" is an apt description of our increasingly bland world of Equality Through Sameness, though it is a bit hackneyed. "BC" and "AD" have been the "common" way of looking at things for ages, for Jews and gentiles alike. But that isn't the point: the point is to specifically remove the Christ element from the abbreviation.

If you don't think that is the purpose of the change, let me pose an example. Let's say a child asks you why some old book says AD, while a newer book says BCE. You tell the child that the term was changed some years ago. Then the child asks you why it was changed. And you say...?

Make no mistake, the changing of words is a conscious decision to influence the change of thought. If a word is changed, then the previous word must have been "bad," while the word replacing it must be "better." If that's the case, then the ideas behind those words must be taken into account, and judged "good" or "bad" accordingly.

Eradicating and changing words is the simplest way to destroy someone's ability to think, argue, or remember. As Orwell pointed out, if someone cannot say something, then they cannot think it. It has a wonderful simplicity to it, or as one of his characters says, "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

Remove Christ from the Bible, and Christ from the calendar. Pretty soon it's, "Who's Christ?"

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