Following up on reading Matthew Chapman’s 40 Days and 40 Nights, I’ve now started in on Edward Humes’ Monkey Girl, another of the three books out there about the Dover Panda Trial. There’s one passage in particular in the first section (in which Humes sets some of the national context for the dispute) worth sharing here.
… Speakers at “Steeling the Mind” were very much into predicting the immanent end of the world on the basis of biblical prophecy. It affected their outlook, making them supportive of aggressive U.S. military intervention in the Middle East (more signs of the approaching apocalypse); dismissive of classic Christian notions of charity and doing good works as useless gestures; and contemptuous of environmentalism, fears of global warming, and efforts to seek world peace. “These are the closing days of the world,” said Gary Frazier, a Texas-based minister and collaborator with Tim LaHaye in “Left Behind” seminars around the country. These seminars capitalize on the juggernaut best sellers about Christians swept up in the “Rapture,” while the rest of humanity gets what’s coming to it, left behind on a war-torn, anti-Christ-ridden earth. “War will come at the end,” Frazier promises with a small smile. “That kind of blows away the world peace crowd. The truth is, we are never going to have world peace. God says there will be wars and desolation until the end.”
Such is the face of good old-fashioned, yet somehow thoroughly modern, American Fundamentalist Evangelism.
And yet it’s these same people, as epitomized by Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, who decry humanism and rationalism as “a message [that] will lead to despair” and nothing more than a recipe for “hopelessness and purposelessness”.
Theirs is an extreme religion that doesn’t just accept the suffering and death of millions of people, but dictates it. For them to be the ones left standing in eternal bodies next to the sword-wielding and heretic-slaying Jesus Christ, there must be “wars and desolation to the end”, and we need not worry ourselves over pretty concerns such as charity or doing good works.
There’s your message of despair. There’s your lack of hope and purpose.
Theirs is a belief far more ugly and brutish and dehumanizing than any of their much-touted complete misconceptions of the so-called “survival of the fittest” they fear so much when someone so much as whispers the name Darwin.
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