The Voltage Gate

Expelled is opening up tomorrow and while they seem to be avoiding most cities in the Northeast with showings, Atlanta and the surrounding area will be, of course, a hotbed of ID back-patting and finger wagging. The film opens up on Peachtree tomorrow evening.

I don't think I'll be paying to see this movie. I can wait for a night where I would like to be pissed off and irritated and get it shipped to me from Netflix. It would, however, be interesting to see the lines of people waiting to see the film and perhaps interview a couple. Maybe start a riot.

I haven't said much about Expelled or the most recent framing incident; I've been trying to figure out just how I feel about it all. It's almost tiresome to discuss at this point, to some extent, because the entire movie is just the same rehashed bullshit creationists have been spewing for over a century. The only difference is the frame of the movie, the glamorous storyline of the suppressed intellectuals who dare challenge the monolithic evolutionary establishment, which, not surprisingly, is exaggerated in the film.

To me, the most troublesome arguments against evolution have always been the ones that claim that "Darwinism"* is the cause of a particular social or metaphysical philosophy. They claim that an acceptance of evolution directly causes people to lose their faith and become atheists, implying that the theory was crafted specifically to do so.

I would be willing to bet, among the 30+ million agnostic/atheist Americans, the theory of evolution was only further support for their decision to turn away from religion, especially considering the state of science education in this country. I think stronger repellents to organized religion are found within the individual religious group--scandals, administration, philosophical rigidity--and between religious groups of different cultures, sects and denominations. The inevitable conclusion that "they can't all be right" can be justified in two different ways: The rest of them are wrong and mine is the one true, or they're all wrong.

I chose the latter, obviously. My parents raised me in the Catholic church, but they taught me how to be a moral person, not the church, not God. Christ's words are a good jumping off point for teaching morality, but more than a surface reading of the Bible reveals just how jumbled the messages from the some of the "inspired authors" really are.

And that's what turned me away, actually reading the Bible and other religious texts, not evolution.

I read Lord of the Rings when I was 11 and fell in love Tolkien and subsequently, the Norse myths that inspired him. Throughout my teenage years I devoured books of myths and fairy tales of as many cultures as I could find. They fascinated me. There are hundreds, thousands of myths with vastly different backdrops, from vastly different time periods, telling the exact same stories.

Until I picked up a couple of books from Joseph Campbell, I was reading all of these stories for entertainment. Campbell's works pushed me into Hinduism and Buddhism which I explored thoroughly and finally brought me back to the faith I was raised with, Christianity.

It always bugged me when I would get into a discussion with some people about Bill Moyers' extended interview with Campbell The Power of Myth, because they would always interpret it wrong. I would hear people say how lovely the program was and that Campbell was such a holy man, and I would bite my tongue; Campbell wasn't a holy man, he wasn't even a believer. Obviously they missed the part where Moyers asks:

MOYERS: And yet we all have lived a life that had a purpose. Do you believe that?
CAMPBELL: I don't believe life has a purpose. Life is a lot of protoplasm with an urge to reproduce and continue in being.
MOYERS: Not true--not true.
CAMPBELL: Wait a minute. Just sheer life cannot be said to have a purpose, because look at all the different purposes it has all over the place. But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, "Follow your bliss." There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam.

These new age whackos walk around quoting him saying "Follow your bliss," as if it's an excuse to believe in animal messengers and fairies. What Campbell is really saying is, you have one life, this life and no other. Physically, you may be little more than protoplasm with an urge, but your experience of life is more than the sum of your biological parts and shouldn't be limited to the rigidity of one particular philosophy. Instead, take them all in and understand the human experience, realize that religion (or more correctly, mythology) is merely an interpretation of the wonders of this world and the mysteries of our lives, both internal and external. As science progresses and the mysteries retreat, religion has been less and less capable of accurately describing our experiences. That's part of the reason more people are turning away.

When I realized that, when I acknowledged the multiplicity of purposes and the limits placed on possibility by religions, I lost interest. My love of nature and my fascination with science only supported my newfound focus on this life I am living and the people and places around me. For once in my life, it just made sense.

Since this post is running a bit long, I'll stop for today. Tomorrow I want to pick up on a much more damaging and destructive claim that Expelled and other creationist propaganda makes, that evolution led to anti-Semitism, Nazism and eugenics.

*They use this word specifically not only to imply a religious quality to evolution, but also to invoke the bad connotation it bears for many Christians. My mother, who accepts that humans evolved but remains a devout Catholic, was appalled when she heard the term, thinking that it was synonymous with fascism. The revulsion to "Darwinism" is built in.