I'm reading Margaret Atwood's new book, Year of the Flood. It has a funny little hymn in it that I would like to share. Can you imagine singing this at church?
"Oh let me not be proud, dear Lord,
Nor rank myself above
The other Primates, through whose genes
We grew into your Love.
A million million years, Your Days,
Your methods past discerning,
Yet through Your blend of DNAs
Came passion, mind, and learning.
We cannot always trace Your path
Through Monkey and Gorilla,
Yet all are sheltered underneath
Your Heavenly Umbrella.
And if we vaunt and puff ourselves,
With vanity and pride,
Recall Australopithecus,
Our Animal inside.
So keep us far from worser traits,
Aggression, anger, greed;
Let us not scorn our lowly birth,
Nor yet our Primate seed."
I love Margaret Atwood. She is so clever at taking the measure of the current world with all its crazy technology and greed and then projecting it to a future that isn't too far fetched. Morphing Darwinism and creationism into a religion makes sense to my heathen mind, or at least more sense than the two ideas on their own. Personally, 4.6 billion years makes more sense to create an earth than 7,000, and yet I can't take God out of the 4.6 billion. It makes sense that animals preceded humans on earth, and yet I cringe at the implication that we came from monkeys. Maybe I should just take Atwood's advice and stop worrying about the struggle of science versus religion, and remind myself embrace my inner Australopithecus.
I don't want to get uppity on myself, after all.
4 comments:
That's awesome LOL
I'm glad you pointed it out because I probably would have just skipped over it. I tend to not read words to songs in books.
I'm like Jeanette. Anything even resembling poetry gets a glance from me.
I have no issues with creation or evolution, dinosaurs or anything. I am comfortable with the knowledge that God isn't a magician but creates using laws - some which we've discovered and understand and probably about a million that we can't even fathom yet.
Ditto what Lucy said.
Someone (a famous scientist whose name I can't remember) said he couldn't believe in a God whose time was limited to 6,000 years. (Steven Hawking maybe?) I agree with him and think we can't understand the entirety of everything.
LALLALALALALALALA I'mnotlooking on everything else, because I'm not reading it yet...I want to reread Oryx and Crake first. And I don't want to read it because then it will be read. In the past. and a long wait for a new Atwood again.
Ms. Atwood rocks my world. Consider my inner Australopithecus embraced.
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