Evolution, not stagnation

There’s a wonderful scene in that poignant and delightfully sharp movie Mean Girls where the then-compelling Lindsay Lohan explains that her homeschooling wasn’t of the ultra-religious variety. The scene cuts to a group of toothless youths on a farm who say proudly, “And on the third day God gave us the Remington rifle, so we could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals. Amen.”

Which is not to say that a Conservative MP and an Ontario Progressive Conservative MPP advocated killing non-existent dinosaurs or shooting gay people when they tweeted their rejection of evolution recently, but it does open the Wittenberg door to all sorts of questions. That the politicians damaged their party is beyond doubt but more importantly, did they damage the reputation of the Christian faith?

The answer is that they probably did, a little; but to people who had already made up their minds about the Christian faith, a lot. So, we will all recover and move on and, anyway, the evolution fetish is invariably fundamentalist Christian rather than Catholic. The problem is that this denial of scientific fact by some on the fringes of Christianity is an ongoing problem and even infects Catholicism when it comes to issues of vaccination, climate change and various other decided but — in the minds and eyes of some — disputed issues.