Spark in the Umbra

I was reading a fellow bloggers site today after he was kind enough to post a comment here.

In one of his recent posts, he talked about how he had seldom ventured into the topics of religion and evolution, despite the fact that he was quite passionate about them.

I commented that I personally wished he’d talk more about them, even though it can be rather controversial and could be a lot of work since they are topics dear to my heart and central in my thinking.

It then occurred to me that I would be being a little bit hypocritical if I didn’t do the same.

So here goes.

In a broad sense, the idea of evolution has been a constant part of my life from a very young age.

So I’ll start there.

When I was 6 or so, I was fascinated to discover the world of dinosaurs. Particularly, Tyrannosaurus Rex. They were huge, scaly, had claws and teeth for Africa, and made loud gutteral roars as they tore huge dripping chunks of flesh from their prey. As a boy, with those traits, you had me at ‘hello’.

OK, I made the last part up – no-one knows what dinosaurs really sounded like. But in my head, that’s the noise they made. As an aside, there are some recent strains of scientific thought that suggest that many dinosaurs may have had feathers, not scales. But I digress…

It wasn’t just Tyrannosaurus either. I loved all the dinosaurs I could find mention of, which was quite a few: Diplodocus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Ankylosaurus … OK, OK, I admit I was somewhat obsessed with them.

Hey, I was a geeky kind of kid. So sue me.

Anyway, my family happened to travel down to Dunedin to see my great grandfather and grandmother. We called him ‘Granfa’ for short and he was an amazing old man. He’d lost a leg in the Great War but his mind was sharp as a tack. He used to happily play this game with me called ‘Tip It’ with 3 cups and a five cent piece. In fact, he’d play it with me all afternoon, interspersed with stories.

And I loved him for it.

My great grandmother and maiden great aunt Nath (short for Nathalie) who lived with them were a different story. They had joined the Exclusive Brethren, a fundamentalist and fairly isolationist sect of Christianity that had a community in Dunedin.

Severe and stern, I think they had decided by then that my mother and father were a lost cause. Likely because they were sure that I’d been conceived out of wedlock and had dim views of fornicators.

Anyway, they decided to focus their evangelical energies on me and my sister. They gave us our own bibles to keep and encouraged us to read them. My mother seemed to feel this was fairly harmless and didn’t intervene.

My sister was not that keen, being 4 years younger, whereas I loved books. Particularly ones without pictures that adults normally read. So I started reading it – from the beginning – I knew that was how proper books were read.

Genesis.

Aunt Nath was very pleased and encouraged by my sudden fervour for bible reading and started taking a close personal interest in me, thawing greatly and often hovering nearby, warmly offering to answer any questions I might have.

Well funnily enough, I had read Genesis by now and I did have a question. You can probably see where this is going.

Aunt Nath came in and sat down very close beside me on the bed, folding her hands over her lap and leaning forward with anticipation. This was obviously going so much better than she had hoped.

“Where is the bit about dinosaurs being created?” I asked.

Aunt Nath frowned.

“There is NO such thing as dinosaurs.” she replied, archly.

Sacrilege.

So being the helpful and enthusiastic young boy I was, I proceeded to tell her about all the dinosaurs I knew of – at great length and in great detail.  It was obvious she hadn’t had the benefit of reading all the wonderful books I had, being old and all, so I proceeded to make up for this deficit.

As she had sat so close to me, probably to secure my conversion, it was now rather hard for her to just get up and walk out without appearing extremely rude. I was rapt to have an audience so I was in full flight to her growing horror.

When I finally paused for a breath (probably about the mid Cretaceous), she leapt at this opening and offering mumbled excuses, beat a hasty retreat. I followed her out of the room, still talking and waving my arms animatedly and offering to continue my lecture later.

My mother was standing in the hallway, trying somewhat unsuccessfully to stifle a smile. She’d been keeping an ear on our conversation, probably to ensure I was safe from Aunt Nath.

Aunt Nath has never really spoken to me since.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Evolution, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.