As I was sitting in traffic this morning, I was contemplating the monotony of daily life and the infintesimal smallness of people's brains. Which got me thinking about evolution, as it tends to do, which got me thinking of evolution's counterpart, creationism.
Creationists have usually maintained that the grand scheme of human evolution - that we were once greater apes who slowly developed the skills and features that we possess today - is a bunch of baloney. In their view, we cannot be beholden to those "inferior" creatures.
However, what if creationism directly implicates our history as apes? It would seem to me that the life in an African jungle, with no worries of global warming, car insurance, or political agendas, would be a lot more like the garden of Eden than we would like to admit. Think about it: Gorillas and chimps have no mortal enemies, they live on sweet fruit and plant shoots, with an easy-going familial structure.
So, maybe we were monkeys, as the evolution tells us, living in a beautiful pristine African jungle, akin to the Garden of Eden. Then we got high-minded ideas, which led us out of that jungle and into the wilds of Eurasia and the Americas, blighted with our own intelligence and determined to make McDonalds a staple of our diet. Perhaps both theories are right. We were created, but as monkeys, and our evolution since then is part of the plan to realize the truth and error of our ways as a growing intelligence.
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The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just keep your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.
-Frank Zappa
Chimps are known to kill chimps, and gorillas are known to kill gorillas and chimps. Both gorillas and chimps share one mortal enemy...humans. An interesting paradigm: a species threatened by their own great (x millions) grandchildren. (Is that part of "Intelligent Design"?)
To convolute an old parable...the sins of the children are visited upon the fathers.
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