"Hey, hey, I'm the monkey, belly getting chunky"

This line, in fairness, was written a long while ago, when I smoked and ate food, and before I became the finely tuned athlete I am today.

But the question it begs is: are we related to monkeys? Or only to chimps? This is a question I ask myself every time I have a banana.

Several years ago  I read Charles Voldemort Darwins “The Origin of Species”. This was in the days when I was a Christian, and I was getting a little miffed at a lot of the simplistic explanations and dismissiveness towards anything scientific in the circles I inhabited. I think I read it  after I discovered that there were Christians I respected who didn’t think that a belief in evolution was incompatible with being a Christian. That in itself was a bit of relief. It’s very painful cutting off the blood supply to parts of the body, for instance the brain, because you happen to think that God wants you to.

So I read the book and the lightning didn’t strike. I mean the judgemental lightning. The book itself was never going to set the world agog as pure literature. It is very methodical, detailed, and to be quite frank a little boring. But it sets out it’s argument very clearly, and it was a kind of revelation to me. It enabled me to think about the world as it actually appeared to be rather than as I had been told it was by years of  fairly “fundamental” evangelical christian upbringing. And as a result I found myself breathing air that felt a little bit fresher and more honest.

If you like reading and are the littlest bit interested in the why’s and wherefores of our being here then I would recommend it. But if you have faith, don’t expect it to take your faith away. Belief in evolution has nothing at all to do with belief in God. It only messes with the world view of a particular kind of mindset that boxes God into a corner as a kind of Magic Conjurer behind the Curtain.

It happens that these days I would describe myself - simply in regard to faith because this is not a label that has loads of other beliefs attached to it - as an agnostic atheist. Google it. But that fact is nothing to do with Charles Darwin, who only ever described what he observed, and he observed a lot. He simply, and really quite bravely, drew the obvious conclusions in an age where the power brokers were using the bible as a science textbook. As some still are in parts of the world. He is esteemed for his incredible thoroughness and clarity of thinking. Not for declaring “Avada Kedavara” in the face of the Almighty.



"Hey, hey, I'm the monkey, belly getting chunky" is from my song A Cord Of Three Strands (unreleased).