Feb 11 2009
Happy Birthday Darwin!
Dear Darwin,
I know today is February 11, and your birthday isn’t until tomorrow, but I wanted to get a start on celebrating. I just wanted to thank you for bringing into our world your revolutionary theory about evolution. Thank you for traveling to the Galapagos and studying birds and for your studies of fossils. Thanks to you, the religious world (at least here in America) was rocked to its core. You were thought of as blasphemous, a rabble rouser, and a heretic. However, we now know you were a brilliant and free-thinking man, who was immersed in understanding why we came to be instead of just accepting the common religious “we just are because god made us that way”. Thank you for believing in something more.
To this day, your theories are still changing our world, and they are still widely accepted as the current theory. They are also still instigating problems within the Church here in America. While most of the rest of the world’s religions have no problem incorporating the theory of evolution with their religions, here in America we love conflict, and will keep it going until who knows when. We even have prominent political leaders who are obviously not part of your “survival of the fittest” who do not believe in evolution. Or, maybe because they have money they are the “fittest”? Our culture has taken your theory and turned in and twisted it in ways that you couldn’t imagine in your day. The fittest does not mean simply how healthy you are or how beautiful you look to get a mate, but in our day it means how much money you have, if you have diseases that can be cured by our technology, and even how socially acceptable you are. We are pretty “fit” today.
Well Darwin, you were a true revolutionary, and thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, for your contribution to our society!
-Kara
