A few weeks past I saw a documentary in which ‘believers’ in ‘evolution’ were interviewed, and these clips were alternated with interviews with fundamentalist Christians, offering another polarized glimpse into the fractured human psyche which held out absolutely zero hope for a real dialogue.

The subject of this film was Charles Darwin. I was fairly certain that most of the people interviewed had never read his work, and since I read it 36 years ago while sitting at the back of a classroom in which the teacher droned on about something I could have cared less about, in between gawking at Lisa Bruno’s pear-shaped ass, I no longer trusted my interpretation.

This week I consulted The Man—yes, he’s white, Ebo, but dead at least—who I suppose is the founder of my cult, as I do claim to be a ‘Darwinist’. Essentially the book is an argument supported by observations of wild and domestic life forms studied by Darwin and others. As for readability, I have a lump on my forehead still, from the three times I fell asleep reading this on the bus and banged my head on the seat back in front of me when the bus braked. The old boy was another bland, long-winded Brit.

My favorite section was on ‘the slave-making instinct’ among social insects. This was fascinating, particularly in that ant colonies act so much like human polities that they are virtually indistinguishable by their actions on a macroparasitic scale. Just like the bible thumpers today, I doubt that the bible thumpers of Darwin’s day read the book, otherwise there would have been caricatures of Charles Darwin’s head on the body of a slave-maker ant, instead of on the shoulders of a chimp.

The style of the book is so dry that I was having trouble with retention as well as consciousness. Fortunately Uncle Charlie knew he couldn’t write his way out of a wet paper bag and provided cliff notes to his own book at the end! The man was humble.

In the course of his 40 page Recapitulation and Conclusion Charles Darwin first challenges his own theory, and does find objectionable aspects to it. However, he comes to the conclusion that ‘special acts of creation’ would reflect badly on God. After all, what kind of omniscient deity would fail to set in motion a self-perpetuating universe, and instead consign himself to being the micromanaging equivalent of a cosmic Jimmy Carter? Well, he did not actually predict our peanut-harvesting Chief Executive of the Malaise Administration of late 1970s America, but he could have.

So why don’t I let the old boy, who once said that him contemplating God would be tantamount to ‘a dog contemplating the mind of Newton’, state his position for himself. After all, after being grotesquely quoted out of context for over a century, I think he deserves a sentence—hell, let’s give him two—in his own defense.

“To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.’

Uncle Charlie then goes on to give me some material for a far future sci-fi novel, and, finally becoming eloquent at the end of his drab tome when addressing the question of God, concludes with:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers [a bit catholic there—look out for those WASPs Chuck] having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

If that sounds like the statements of an atheist to you, then by all means, continue to do God’s good work, by imbibing a whole lot more of whatever drug has brought you to your present state of enlightenment.