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August
of 1999 will not go down as a good month for religion.
We
had Buford Furrows shooting up downtown Los Angeles, doing
his own ethnic cleansing in preparation for the Second Coming
of Christ. Before that, we had the Kansas Board of Education
declaring evolution to be an unproven scientific theory
and therefore not fit for Kansas school children, a move
clearly motivated by conservative religionists who prefer
the Bible to Mr. Darwin.
Okay,
so maybe it's unfair to blame everything on religion, but
let's face it, these acts were NOT undertaken on behalf
of the agnostics and atheists of the world. Both acts were
undertaken in the furtherance of deeply held religious beliefs.
Mr.
Furrows' personal theology was in part built around the
credo of a group called Christian Identity. This group believes
that before Christ can come again for Judgement Day or whatever
it is He is coming back for, the earth must be cleansed
of Satanic forces, said Satanic forces being the usual suspects-Jews,
blacks, homosexuals and the various and sundry anti-Christs
known to be walking the Earth. (Why it is that Christ can't
handle this sort of thing Himself is never made clear.)
The Kansas Board of Ed is apparently under the control of
a handful of Biblical literalists who believe that the world
is only about 10,000 years old; a belief that hardly squares
with the notion of deep time needed for Darwinian evolutionary
theory to operate. Rather than rely on something as suspect
as a scientific theory, these folks have put their faith
in the Old Testament, which was written a couple of thousand
years ago, at a time when myth was still a powerful tool
for explaining the hidden workings of nature.
What both of these events have in common is a need to feel
the hand of God at work in our present day world. The idea
that perhaps we are just drifting through an endless sea
of time on a heading we cannot know, that idea is frightening
to a lot of people. They need to believe in a Divine plan.
For Mr. Furrows and the millions who think like him, that
Divine plan includes a Day of Judgement, a day of wrath
when God will punish sinners and everyone else who has pissed
them off. For the Kansas Board of Education, the notion
of a Divine plan is more reassuring than the apparent randomness
of survival of the fittest. Man's creation cannot be seen
as a chance event, a mere rolling of the genetic dice. There
has to be a reason, some kind of end game beyond death,
preferably a Heaven for the righteous true believers and
a Hell for everyone else. Otherwise, what's the point?
At
my place of worship, the Church of the WYSIWYG, we look
at things differently. Our religion is built around one
very simple premise: If you want to understand God's plan,
just look at the world about you. If you see it, then it's
part of the plan. If you don't, then it's an assumption-an
attempt to explain what may be unexplainable.
Death...real. Heaven or hell...assumption.
Evil...real.
Satan...assumption.
Chromosomes...real.
Predestination...assumption.
Getting the idea? Deep time and the genetic commonalties
that run from bacteria to humans to plants are facts of
life. There is NO direct evidence to support the notion
that the Earth is only 10,000 years old, besides what the
begats add up to in the Old Testament. There is NO direct
evidence that the advent of mankind was a singularity in
time orchestrated by the hand of God. And given the number
of times the Day of Judgement has been unsuccessfully predicted
(even Christ didn't get it right), I have a little trouble
believing that one, too.
Maybe
some folks feel better believing in those things, but in
the Church of the WYSIWYG, mere belief doesn't cut it. We
accept the world as we see it. We have faith in the plan,
even if we have no clue what the plan is. We don't need
to know what it is. We can even accept the idea of a Divine
plan that includes randomness and that provides for a little
torquing of the outcomes based on what WE do. Truth be told,
we kind of like it like that.
Copyright
© 1999 G.J. Lau
G.J. Lau toils deep in the bowels of the Washington bureaucracy.
A long-time observer of American politics and mores, he
now edits his own e-zine Singleminded, which can be found
at: http://www.pipeline.com/~gjlau/emag/
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