okapi drinking

 

My Thursday, today, dawns with quiet and coffee, thinking, reading, warm conversation with Linda when she came out at eight o'clock with her cuppa and for her PCNH, me thanking God for Genesis 2:24. Resume reading, pause for most excellent breakfast of elk sausage (baked 15 minutes 350F, cut into one inch bits), each bite dipped in an elegant French mustard; and brings me to now.

Following on - - which in soon a dozen years of blogging, I've almost never continued a blogpost beyond one day - - after writing and posting yesterday's blogpost, I finished my book, having saved it for a couple days before diving into the seventh and closing section, "The Eyes in the Trees", which so ties back to "Genesis", the novel's opening section, that I was compelled to go back to the beginning and read it again for my own closure, and the mind's still not done with Kingsolver's perception of the connectivity of all that is, written into the story.

It has been one of my powerful reads, and I'm grateful, appreciative, and impressed with the intellect that selected it as a Christmas gift for her grandfather, thank you, Charlotte. What a nice compliment to me for you to realize Papa would appreciate the book. 

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If we are what we eat, we are as well what we read, and I love noticing how the books I read turn on lights in dark closets of my mind.

Including in yesterday's book and today's book, renewed awareness of the incredible damage that can be done by the curse of one religion's certitude being forced on others.

As I was musing yesterday, Kingsolver also, in "The Poisonwood Bible", shows that "nothing doesn't matter" in the overall of life, such that an okapi spooked in the deepest African jungle, a little white girl from Georgia squashing a spider on an African jungle floor, may ripple unrealized repercussions in time and space and eternity. Nothing Doesn't Matter.

Noting that I'd read 546 pages and closing the book, I picked up a short, half-day read, "Inherit the Wind" written by Lawrence & Lee as a stage play script around and alluding to the 1925 Scopes trial, about teaching science in public schools as opposed to the rubbish mandated by crowd pleasing legislators as the bigoted purveyors of ignorance. It is discernible that both the book and the movie are quite slanted against the fundamentalists. But,

thanking God again, this Time for the instant resource Wikipedia, even though Wales and Sanger started it, I enjoyed detouring to read about the Scopes Trial and about William Jennings Bryan; and about Charles Darwin, stirring enough interest to download Darwin's autobiography, copy and paste it as a Pages document as my next book. 

Why? To find out what all the fuss was about. All my growing up years in the Bible Belt of the South (me starting from 1935, ten years after the 1925 Scopes Trial), public feeling ran strong against Darwin and the idea of Evolution as an obscenity blaspheming the Bible and God and Jesus and Christianity, and specifically the seven-day creation story in Genesis One. When I was growing up here in the South, if one thought Evolution was evident and logical and obvious, one only thought so, one dared not say so. Even fairly recent, in the last fifteen years, in a mid-weekly congregation gathering of the parish I was serving at the Time, a man spoke up to challenge something I was saying (I don't recall my topic, but I well remember his outrage and emanating hostility), raising the specter of Darwin and Evolution as the ugly enemy of righteousness. And I remember thinking, though not suggesting, that the man had never read Darwin and had no idea what it was that he hated with such vehemence and certainty. Nor, I realized at the moment, had or did anyone else in the head-nodding, evolution-abhorring literalist inerrantist world around me. So, what to say that could be helpful, never aggressive or baiting or stir antagonism? (fast forward to the wise Storekeeper - - who in the film is not a storekeeper but at the stand selling hot dogs) 

That same certitude and vitriol against Darwin rose again in "Inherit the Wind" - - which currently is free on Amazon Prime Video, and I stopped and watched it - - with Matthew Harrison Brady standing in for William Jennings Bryan, asked about his knowledge of "The Origin of the Species",

"I am not in the least interested in the pagan hypotheses of that book."

Drummond (Darrow): Never read it?

Brady: And I never will.

Drummond: Then how in perdition do you have the gall to whoop up this holy war against something you don't know anything about? How can you be so cocksure that the body of scientific knowledge systematized in the writings of Charles Darwin is, in any way, irreconcilable with the spirit of the Book of Genesis?

(lifted from Act Two, p.86. Ballantine paperback)

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So, I also am ignorant. Scopes Trial realities aside, I'm thinking to reduce my own ignorance by reading what C Darwin said about himself, though not "Origin". Maybe "Origin" on the bucket list but probably not.

In the meantime, finished but my mind still on "Inherit the Wind", specifically the Storekeeper, who, asked his opinion of Evolution, replied (p.17): 

"Don't have any opinions. They're bad for business".

The Storekeeper's is a common position in the "Mainline Christian" church - - opinions can be bad for business.

"Poisonwood" and "Inherit" have characters in common: a fundamentalist preacher who is as certain as sin of everything he believes, and his enlightened daughter who grows up terrified of him and in the end leaves him behind in the evil he peddles as godly righteousness - -

both fictionalized accounts, a fact to bear in mind in forming one's own opinions.