[2946] in Humor
And God said
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian T Sniffen)
Wed Sep 22 02:52:00 1999
To: humor@MIT.EDU
From: Brian T Sniffen <brians@MIT.EDU>
Date: 22 Sep 1999 02:51:06 -0400
------- Start of forwarded message -------
And God Said, Let There Be Light in Kansas
By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 14, 1999; Page C01
Memo to: The members of the Kansas Board of
Education
From: God
Re: Your decision to eliminate the teaching
of evolution as science.
Thank you for your support. Much obliged.
Now, go forth and multiply. Beget many
children. And yea, your children
shall beget children. And their children
shall beget children, and their
children's children after them. And in time
the genes that have made you
such pinheads will be eliminated through
natural selection. Because that is how it works.
Listen, I love all my creatures equally,
and gave each his own special
qualities to help him on Earth. The horse I
gave great strength. The
antelope I gave great grace and speed. The
dung beetle I gave great
stupidity, so he doesn't realize he is a dung
beetle. Man I gave a brain.
Use it, okay?
I admit I am not perfect. I've made errors.
(Armpit hair--what was I
thinking?) But do you Kansans seriously
believe that I dropped
half-a-billion-year-old trilobite skeletons
all over my great green Earth
by mistake? What, I had a few lying around
some previous creation in the
Andromeda galaxy, and they fell through a
hole in my pocket?
You were supposed to find them. And once
you found them, you were supposed
to draw the appropriate, intelligent
conclusions. That's what I made you for. To think.
The folks who wrote the Bible were smart
and good people. Mostly, they got
it right. But there were glitches.=20
Imprecisions. For one thing, they said
that Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel, and
then Cain begat Enoch. How was
that supposed to have happened?
They left out Tiffany entirely!
Well, they also were a little off on
certain elements of timing and
sequence. So what? You guys were supposed to
figure it all out for
yourselves, anyway. When you stumble over the
truth, you are not supposed
to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and
proceed on as though nothing had
happened. If you find a dinosaur's toe,
you're not supposed to look for
reasons to call it a croissant. You're not
big, drooling idiots. For that, I made dogs.
Why do you think there are no fossilized
human toes dating from a
hundred million years ago? Think about it.
It's okay if you think. In fact, I prefer
it. That's why I like
Charlie Darwin. He was always a thinker. Still
is. He and I chat frequently.
I know a lot of people figure that if man
evolved from other organisms, it
means I don't exist. I have to admit this is
a reasonable assumption
and a valid line of thought. I am in favor of
thought. I encourage you to pursue
this concept with an open mind, and see where
it leads you.
That's all I have to say right now, except
that I'm really cheesed off at
laugh tracks on sitcoms and people who make
simple declarative sentences sound like questions?
Oh, wait. There's one more thing.
Did you read in the newspapers yesterday
how scientists in Australia dug up some rocks and
found fossilized remains of life dating back further
than ever before? Primitive, multicelled animals
on Earth nearly 3 billion years
ago, when the planet was nothing but roiling
muck and ice and fire.
And inside those cells was . . . DNA. Incredibly
complex strands of chemicals,
laced together in a scheme so sophisticated
no one yet understands exactly how it works.
I wonder who could have thought of
something like that, back then.
Just something to gnaw on.
