Monkey's Uncle, 1985: natural selection

Why Man Must Question God

Monkey's Uncle
Fun With Genesis Issue, Summer 1985
Editor: E.T. Babinski

WHY MAN MUST QUESTION GOD
Genesis states that God habitually "walked in the garden in the cool of the day," so, presumably, there were open channels of communication between Him and man. If so, why didn't Adam or Eve ask God, "We're curious as to why You don't want us to eat any of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We really like it here, and we don't want to seem ungrateful, but Your rule on this matter doesn't make much sense to us, and we'd really appreciate it if you explained it to us"? Of course they did not ask this. Instead, they ate the fruit without taking the effort to pose a question or communicate with God on a reasonably adult level. . . Were Adam and Eve afraid of what might happen if they were to question God? Instead, they took the easy way out, the shortcut of sneakiness, to achieve knowledge not worked for, and hoped they could get away with it. They did not. To question God may let us in for a lot of work. But a moral of the story is that it must be done.--M. Scott Peck, from The Road Less Traveled, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1978, p. 272 & 274.

WHY GOD MUST ANSWER MAN
Like Scott Peck, above, I believe that man must question God. However, I disagree that Adam's only reason for not questioning God was either because Adam was lazy or fearful, or being sneaky. There is another reason. Adam may have suspected all along that God simply would not have given him a straight answer. And perhaps God would not have! Take the following conversation: "Hey, God, must I avoid eating the fruit you've placed in the middle of the garden?" "Because if you eat of it, you'll die, Adam." Why will I die? Is the fruit poison? Or is it your favorite fruit you'd rather not share with anyone? If it's just your rule that I'll have to die, will you ever change the rules? If so, when? If not, why not?" "AH, ah, BECAUSE! Enough questions! Rules are rules!" "But they seem like reasonable questions to me and Eve. And if you won't discuss them with me (Adam spies talking snake in tree) I'll find someone else." "Fine. Adam. But don't tell me I didn't warn you. (God walks off). "Hey there Mr. Serpent! Why is God so frustrating? My mind is bursting with a thousand questions and newly born thoughts! I'm so curious, and this is all so new to me!" "I understand where you're coming from, Adam. Lately I've been sucking on this fruit and a lot's been made clear to me." "So, that's where you learned to talk! Boy, that fruit must be great stuff!" "Here, try a piece." (Snake shakes branch with his feet, and a piece of fruit falls into Adam's palm. Adam takes a bite. Whereupon God leaps out from behind a nearby bush!) "GOTTCHA!!" The moral is that having your questions frustrated is another road to temptation. So God must answer man!

Fun With Genesis

Monkey's Uncle
Fun With Genesis Issue, Summer 1985
Editor: E.T. Babinski

One small step for man...........................One giant step for australopithecus!

RIGHTEOUS FOLKS DON'T MAKE JOKES! At least that's what some people still believe. But the fact remains that we've come a long way from those "all fear and trembling" days, or even from those dreary days of deadpan devotion to the Deity. And people have begun to accept humorous criticism in many areas of their lives previously sealed off as 'sacred.' Today we joke about sex, death, taxes, politics, race, and even religion. So why aren't there more religious joke books on the market? Probably because burning eternally in hell does not make a terrific punch line.

But on the brighter side it must be admitted even by the righteous few that the Bible itself contains hints of humor! Psalm 105 speaks of God creating great sea monsters just so they may 'play in the sea'. Proverbs speaks of Wisdom playing and dancing before the Lord. According to the Gospels, Jesus spoke about a camel being threaded through a needle's eye, and moving mountains with only a teeny weeny 'mustard seed' of faith. He also told outrageous parables demonstrating how the righteous could learn from the behavior of thieves and moneylenders! (This was undoubtedly big-time rabbinic humor in his day!)

In our century some have even been bold enough to exclaim that "The test of a good religion is its ability to laugh at itself," and "A good joke is the one ultimate and sacred thing which cannot be criticized. Our relations with a good joke are direct and even divine relations" (G.K. Chesterton spoke both quotes). For perhaps all laughter is God's laughter, and no form of hearty humor is unholy!

IN THE BEGINNING GOD WAS A STAND UP COMIC, WITH A GREAT IMPROVISATIONAL ACT THAT HE CALLED, 'THE CREATION.' IT WAS ONLY SCHEDULED TO PLAY SEVEN DAYS (in a little bistro on the edge of the Milky Way), BUT IT RECEIVED SUCH RAVE REVIEWS THAT GOD DECIDED TO LET IT RUN FOREVER. Remember Job?
He was down on his luck and on the verge of cursing God. But at the last moment God swept down from heaven and spoke out of a whirlwhind-playing with Job's hair, blowing his rags around, and ticking Job's ribs. And God performed one of his funniest stand up bits, just for Job, to make him laugh. God said: "Have you ever in your life commanded the morning? Has the rain a father? Can you lift up your voice to the clouds so that rain falls on your head? Can you send forth lightnings that they may go and say to you 'Here we are?' Do you know the time the mountain goats give birth? Who sent out the wild donkey, free? The ostrich's wings flap joyously with the pinion and plumage of love. For she abandons her eggs to the earth, and she forgets that a foot may crush them. Though her labor be in vain she is unconcerned, because I have made her forget wisdom. She laughs at the horse and rider. Do you give the horse his might? Do you make him leap like a locust? Behold now Behemoth, which I made as well as you. He eats grass like an ox! With barbs can anyone pierce his nose? Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Can you put a rope in his nose? Will he speak to you with soft words? Will you play with him as with a bird? By this time, of course, God, the ticklish whirlwind, had Job in stitches. In fact, Job was laughing so hard he cried, "I lay my hand on my mouth!" (see Job, chapters 38-41, for the verses given above).

Longevity

Monkey's Uncle
Premiere Issue! April Fool's Day! 1985
Editor: E.T. Babinski

LONGEVITY
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH

"But when you are as old as I am!" I said to the young lady in pink satin.

"But I don't know how old you are," the young lady in pink answered almost archly. We were getting on quite nice.

"Oh, I'm endlessly old; my memory goes back almost for ever. I come out of the Middle Ages. I am the primitive savage we are all descended from; I believe in Devil-worship and the power of the Stars; I dance under the new Moon, naked and tattooed and holy. I am a Cave-dweller, a contemporary of Mastodons and Mammoths; I am pleistocene and eolithic, and full of the lusts and terrors of the great pre-glacial forests. But that's nothing; I am millions of years older; I am an arboreal Ape, and aged Baboon, with all its instincts; I am a pre-simian quadruped, I have great claws, eyes that see in the dark, and a long prehensile tail."

"Good gracious!" said the terrified young lady in pink satin. Then she turned away and talked in a hushed voice with her other neighbor.

T.H. Huxley's Famous Answer To Bishop Wilberforce

Monkey's Uncle
Premiere Issue! April Fool's Day! 1985
Editor: E.T. Babinski

T-H-HUXLEY'S FAMOUS ANSWER TO BISHOP WILBERFORCE
Six months after the publication of Darwin's Origin, Bishop Wilberforce addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science, attempting in his presentation to crush the newly born Darwinists. At the conclusion of his speech Wilberforce turned to T.H.Hux1ey, seated in the audience, and with smiling insolence begged to know, "Was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?" Huxley struck his knee with his hand and remarked to an old friend seated beside him, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hand." whereupon Huxley was called upon to rise and speak. Huxley recorded his answer to Wilberforce's taunt in a letter to a friend: "Has the rumor of the (Darwinist) row reached you? It was great fun--I had said that I could not see what difference it would make to my moral responsibility if I had an ape for a grandfather then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means & influence & yet who employs those faculties & that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. Whereupon there was inextinguishable laughter among the people and they listened to the rest of my argument with the greatest attention."

EXCERPT FROM T.H.HUXLEY'S EVIDENCE AS TO MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE
We are told by those who assume authority in these matters, that the belief in the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage. whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger?

Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once a fertilized egg cell, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a Dog?

Or is the philanthropist, or the saint, to give up his endeavors to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its foundation, all the selfish passions, and fierce appetites of the merest quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it? (As Mark Twain wrote, "Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in." --Ed) The common sense of the mass of mankind will answer these questions without a moment's hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding over speculative pollution to the cynics and the "righteous overmuch" who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility to the nobleness of the visible world, and in inability to appreciate the grandeur of the place Man occupies therein. (i.e., creationists criticize evolutionists for the ignoble and demeaning idea of "coming from apes," and say that man is more noble than that, and then have sermons where man is called a miserable worm worthy to be burned eternally in hell--Ed).

The Grass Snake Vs. The Oppossum

Monkey's Uncle
Premiere Issue! April Fool's Day! 1985
Editor: E.T. Babinski

-- SCENES YOU WON'T SEE ON WILD KINGDOM --

If threatened, a grass snake hisses and strikes with its mouth shut. If that fails to scare an enemy it produces a foul smell. Finally it will sham death.

The Grass Snake Vs. the Opossum
Night. James Bond theme music slowly rises. Camera focuses on grass snake slithering through grass. Opossum, overhead, dozes off and falls out of tree, landing beside the snake. The grass snake strikes with mouth shut. Opossum feels itself, and notices that it has not been bitten. Angered opossum slaps snake in mouth. Snake farts. Then both animals feign death. An apt illustration of 'survival of the deadest!'