This month, I’ve been looking into the ancient ‘Nature vs Nurture’ argument, and I suppose a crucial root to this debate is understanding evolution. I read a survey, or perhaps for want of words, a meta-analysis of many surveys that were taken over a fifteen year period in America. The surveys were primarily focused on beliefs. I shan’t procrastinate further, here are the findings:
48-51% of the American populous don’t believe that evolution is a valid explanation to human existence. All in this bracket said they do not believe we, as a race, evolved. That’s half of the country. Half.
On top of that, a further 38-40% believe evolution may have happened, but that it was initiated and administered by God. So, effectively, 38-40% are God-fearing Christians who simply do not understand their religion. You are either Christian, or you believe in Darwin’s theory. The Christian belief is that the human race is 5,000 years old and we are the offspring of Adam and Eve. We came to this planet as humans and have been such since. The perceptive amongst you will notice hypocrisy.
Leaving an iota of Americans that, that were ... well ... right.
After discussing my findings with a friend at university, a particularly irksome, close-minded, stubborn individual who seems to answer any penetrative and though-provoking questions with cliched, pre-conceived answers must have overheard. To which she simply said ‘evolution is only a theory’. You know what, that’s fair enough. A really constructive avoidance of answering questions about gaping crevasses in theological morals and perspectives by stating that which is obvious and known by all believers in Darwin. Oh no, wait, sorry, my mistake, it’s a steaming sack of horse shit. I found myself cowering like a lone construction worker, standing before a cracking dam, watching open mouthed at the erupting surge of vacuous ignorance. Maybe you feel the same way about the ‘theory of gravity’? That’s ‘just a theory’, too right? Hopefully you’ll float the fuck away into space. Funnily enough, the answer she gave to the first question was the very same that the Intelligent Design Movement uses in the high courts of American states to try and surreptitiously sneak its pseudoscience into American high schools. The difference is, science alters its views depending on what’s observed and recorded. It is a growing, learning entity that is always relevant. Religion denies all that isn’t written in the book from whence it was born to ensure preservation.
Now, I’m not going to pretend for a second that I would understand the subject-specific lexis used in fully explaining the Theory of Evolution, but given our capacity to comprehend and seek answers through rational and logical thought and reason, it really isn’t too difficult to understand the basic concepts.
Evolution - the change in inherited traits, (whether they be, behavioural, anatomical or biochemical so I hear), in an entire population of organisms through generations. These changes could be mutation or genetic recombination. (Which are fairly easy terms to understand just by studying the words). Some changes are adaptive, (ie. Natural Selection), but not all, some are random mutations. This occurs when the changes do not strongly influence a species’ survival. So, the environment in which the organism lives is a minuscule factor.
Which brings me to my second point. Homosexuality.
Despite GBLT rights and awareness being more widely accepted than ever before in predominantly Western arenas, there still exists a most monstrous monolith of a benighted beast; the homophobe. I’m not talking about your Grandad anecdotally referencing at the kitchen table ‘that poofter Martin’, or whatever. That sort of ignorance is, to a point, relatively harmless and has been spawned of social acceptance in different eras. I’m talking about advisors to presidents who support capital punishment of homosexuals, of those who partake in hate-crimes, of the goddamn Pope. It is incontrovertible that it is written in the Bible to stone homosexuals to death.
‘But what about all the good that the Bible teaches?’
‘What about all the good that The Three Billy Goats Gruff teaches? I don’t persecute those who don’t abide by those morals’.
‘You’re the one who is claiming absolute confidence in evolution. Homosexuality isn’t natural. They can’t continue the race’.
‘Too true, my ecclesiastical, hypothetical friend. Too true. And thank you for leading me so fluidly into my next point’.
If the world was exclusively homosexual, then the human race would most probably die out. (Unless some super-baby was born with the ability to asexually reproduce).
...But it isn’t.
The human race has expanded and existed for countless millions of years. We no longer live in a world where we can be hunted by predators in such numbers for us to be concerned for humanitarian apocalypse, nor is there a disease known yet with the capacity to wipe out every living being. We don’t have to kill each other for food on a global scale, nor is there a shortage of women with the ability to conceive. Our environment no longer obliges exclusive heterosexuality because it doesn’t need to. Maintaining the race is currently irrelevant. We’re fine. Homosexuality has as much-a place on this earth than heterosexuality does given our current gene-environmental cohesion. Not one single person should have the power to say otherwise. Especially a fictional, allegorical, astrological book of outdated myths and morals (and I use the word ‘morals’ loosely) which ceased to serve as a guide to unite humans through good by using anthropomorphizations of natural phenomena to teach us to know our mortality and our insignificance, but moreso, our connection, and is now used to divide, fragment, persecute, tax and pedestalize.
In the words of Rusko, ‘wake the fuck up’.
This institution is the orchestrator of the miseducation and indoctrination of future labourers (children). We’re taught to feel ashamed of feeling basic human emotions, which at some point in our lives serve a worthy purpose. ‘Don’t drink excessively, don’t take drugs, don’t have sex before marriage’ like we need goddamn basic direction. Every fucking person on this planet, in a Christian belief structure, is going to hell. Everyone has done something condemned in the Bible. If you haven’t, why the fuck are you living a boring half-life with none of the sweet little luxuries that being a human has? Fuck off to heaven already. That’s what you’re waiting for isn’t it? We’re taught to see things as right or wrong in accordance with the Holy books. There are no mitigating circumstances.
Here’s some brilliant life lessons from the Bible:
If you eventually have a daughter, a beautiful daughter and she’s raped and doesn’t marry the rapist, she should be killed.
We shouldn’t manipulate human genes or perform experiments to help solve the problems of disease or famine.
We shouldn’t abort children, whether or not they are wanted. (Probably because it gives the Clergy more ‘fish in the sea’ as it were).
We should murder all homosexuals on account of their sexual preference.
But hey, when terrible things happen, the Christian response is ‘God works in mysterious ways’. Wonder if that’d hold up in court...
The question I’m posing here, I guess, is that it truly baffles me why some people will believe outright what has been written in a book of magic tricks without actually reading it, and condemn all who do not believe in it. Why there is so much fear surrounding death that we have to invent something ... else, that we don’t die, we live on, elsewhere.
What I want to know is, what does this world so lack for you not to be satisfied? Why must there be an afterlife, a supernatural, an all-knowing few who could associate every situation in a fictitious book with those we have in this modern day? What is wrong with this world and all its beautiful sights and phenomena; powerful acts of nature and weather; amazing people with stories, feelings, emotions, that you share, so you can feel those too; human creativity and connection, music, art, literature; sex and drugs; the miracle of birth; chaos and order that you feel you need more?
In the words of Tim Minchin, ‘isn’t this enough?’
