This was an amazing event(The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 ) where natural reason pushed itself up through the prevailing and socially required religious superstitions of the past millennia.
Few things like the discovery that nature has all come down to us by the way of gradual and uncertain evolution- not some immediate creation of things by an exact pre-planned perfect design. This coming to consciousness in a little Tennessee town shook our Western mentality like few events ever have in America. (This story is told in the movie Inherit The Wind.) And even still this world view changing information has not soaked in to a relative large part of the American public. Strong political and religious mentalities still fearfully resent it. It is still resisted by what is called Intelligent Design, another name for Creationism, which is a direct confrontation of the findings and the spirit of serious science.
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| Evolution's Erratic Path Is Captured In Fossil Record. |
If only those who still fear the implications of evolution could realize that evolution does not push one away from any real experience of God but simply opens the door to discovering more the actual nature of God. That God is not the all powerful perfect mind, and perfectly content within itself, being behind everything. But an imperfect evolving mind not yet completed while still being an all pervading mysterious and partially guiding universal reality. A psychological reality continually affecting us all and now earnestly seeking us humans to participate much more consciously and fully in what it started. We now can come to know that no long term epoch changing good can come to the world unless a respectful mutuality between God and Human begins to happen far more concretely than it ever has in the past.
So in ways far beyond the reasoned and rational even a little Tennessee town cannot resist the pressure of unconscious forces(that surely must come from the inner activity of a living and changing God) which nudge us all to let our idea of God change and evolve. Tiny Dayton, TN finds itself building a monument, like the ancients naturally did for their new gods, to push us all in the direction of a new epoch of Sacred -Human compassionate consciousness. This is a very hopeful sign that God's evolution continues to operate within us and seek our conscious awareness and participation.
A test of Bible Belt tolerance: Can the town of the Scopes “monkey trial” stomach a new statue of the famed agnostic lawyer Clarence Darrow?
nytimes.com
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