My Uncle (the Monkey)

Happy Darwin Day!

I kid you not.

Nearly 450 Christian churches around the country plan to celebrate the 197th birthday of Charles Darwin on Sunday with programs and sermons intended to emphasize that his theory of biological evolution is compatible with faith and that Christians have no need to choose between religion and science.

More …“I find deep spirituality in the truths of evolution.”

And, of course, the Creationist response is just as monkey-fied:

When pastors dismiss the creation account as a fable, he says, they give their flock license to disregard the Bible’s moral teachings as well. He shows his audiences a graphic that places the theory of evolution at the root of all social ills: abortion, divorce, racism, gay marriage, store clerks who say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

Then again, I believe this writer actually IS related to Uncle Monkey:

[Today] is Darwin Day, and I plan to observe it by thanking God for evolution. Without it, we’d all be living in caves.

The debate over Charles Darwin’s theories pits scientists against fundamentalist Christians, who take the Bible’s version of creation literally and equate evolution with atheism.

Where does that leave Christians like me, who have no trouble reconciling evolution with faith? Frustrated, and out of the game.

That’s why I welcome Darwin Day. I hope it evolves into an international movement showcasing the common ground between science and religion in the 21st century.

If you must …

If you want to read something a whole lot more enlightening — there’s this — wherein we find:

In a word, I feel sadly that the Church and contemporary society are in danger of waving goodbye to each other. You could say that was already happening with the existing legislation on divorce, abortion, genetic experimentation, and in the current pressure towards the legalization of the direct killing of terminally ill people. But the dangerous and deeply unwise social experimentation and engineering involved in these same-sex civil partnerships seems to me to be taking the alienation between the Church and society to a new and potentially disastrous level.