Matthew's Random Thought #2

Right Wing Fundamentalist Christians beware! Don’t come to the Galapagos!

I wonder what would happen if a “young earth” creationist accidentally got on a plane to the Galapagos only to be inundated by a host of God’s creatures sporting countless scandalous “adaptations”. What would he/she do with the dozens of species of “Darwin’s” finches, so similar yet so perfectly adapted to survive in their unique environments? Or the saddle backed turtle with his shell evolved to allow him to reach high cactus on his desert island home? And let’s not forget the classic blue footed boobie, inspiration for countless cleaver t-shirts in the gift shops along Charles Darwin Boulevard; surely a creature with such a racy name cannot afford to exist in this undersexed puritans supposedly safe world. Undoubtedly given our unique human capacity to explain away the most obvious of realities our poor lost soul would most likely avoid coronary heart failure by reminding his/herself that scientists are instruments of the devil and that that Noah’s ark was really, really big… But in the end it seems that our innocent traveler would probably be better off served going to someplace nice and safe like Disneyland.

Seriously though, why do we (and this most definitely includes myself) so often try so hard to ignore truth and try to fit reality into the nice neat boxes in order to package it up and move from one house to the next? Whether it’s wasting time trying to defend tangential (and arguably misinterpreted) religious positions, demonizing those that are different than ourselves to bolster our conviction that we are the chosen  and righteous ones, or taking everything personally because the world obviously is all about us; it seems that much of the human race, like the ostrich (and if you don’t think evolution produced this one, surely it was a pretty cruel joke on God’s part) can’t help but spend most of the time with our collective heads buried in the sand.