Darwin´s Birthday: Humans from Murderous to Visionary

Darwin´s Birthday. In his novel Cell, Stephen King has a character say that Darwin was too polite to call humans anything but smart or mean, and that humans are really the worst kind of murderous scoundrels (mofo´s).

Yeah, that´s called "sensationalism," a la a popular fiction author known for it. Now, I got my college degree in bio anthro, at a good school, and have drawn on my thesis on the interface between biology and culture to help defuse that kind of pop pressure cooking. While I´ll agree that human murderous capacity has shown its extremes, I trace that to tool-using focus that lay behind the first stone tools up to bronze-age weaponry and modern profiteering corporate biz ideology and the status obsession syndrome that has made possible.

Yet, while there were no lack of merchants, soldiers, and monarchs, the Buddha taught about addictive desires as the problem, and Jesus about "cleaning the cup inside where there is iniquity." I´m a UU interfaith Christian because I have built up around scholars and figures like Huston Smith, Alan Watts, Lao Tzu, Mary Baker Eddy, and Buddha to learn that Darwin stated that he thought Jesus wasn´t relevant to science, except in evaluating evidence honestly. Meanwhile, he volunteered in church with Emma and treated AR Wallace with warm Christian integrity. Evangelical Richard Owen who named "dinosaurs", on the other hand, has a slightly lesser historical reputation since he tried to take credit for others' work. He also opposed evolution. Darwin´s US Harvard friend and famous biologist Asa Gray was also evangelical, but supported evolution. Darwin´s actions, and those of his colleagues, speak louder than their words for better or for worse, much like Lao Tzu taught. "The Tao that can be told is not the real Tao...." and for which Alan Watts later practiced Tai Chi.

For the record, Brit William Jones pioneered scholarship of India that began to gush through Schopenhauer, Emerson, and others, and Max Mueller at Oxford in Darwin´s day. Thank the Divine Source that UU´s own roots and heart allow for words that can revive spiritual and shamanic vision. Darwin, in fact, lived in an era when they still called his kind "parson naturalists" and "natural philosophers," while his contemporary JS Mills would have still been a "moral philosopher." The amazing slavery-ending Quakers organized their own London U, while FD Maurice brought Christian Socialism to life, later supporting the co-op social biz movement. As for getting all hot-blooded with blood, sweat, and tears of "human´s inhumanity to humans," rap artist Kool Moe Dee sang, "Knowledge is King" and Rihanna "American Oxygen." They´re killer songs, and I dedicate them to Darwin, Russell, Gray, and Schopenhauer on his birthday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H270_6WHjBY