Celebrating Darwin's Birthday (in church!)

Last weekend I had the pleasure and privilege of coordinating a Darwin's Birthday service at Headwaters Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. This year marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the "Origin of Species." Because several folks asked, I am posting Adobe pdf files of various components of the service below.

First-time visitors Shane and Kayla graciously volunteered to help me with a children's skit on the transition from from fish to amphibians: Ozzie and the the Snortlefish. This piece, and a whole bunch of other interesting resources is from thegreatstory.org, a site maintained by fellow UU Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd. I read an extended excerpt on religion from Darwin's Autobiography and my talk focused on the question of a why a church would (and should) celebrate Darwin's birth. Following the lead of Philip Kitcher in his paper Darwin and Democracy, I suggested that Darwin began the closing argument in the "Enlightenment case against supernaturalism" and that religion must be "naturalized" if it is to have a net positive effect in the world. We finished our celebration with a birthday cake featuring Ray Troll's "Embrace Your Inner Fish" featuring Darwin and Tiktaalik.

Hard times for the American Republic?

In Democracy in America (1835, 1840) Alexis de Toqueville wrote that 'The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.' To me, his prescient analysis seems to be on the mark except that we are now being bribed not with our own money but, even more insidiously, with the money of our grandchildren. We don't need an 'economic stimulus' based on inter-generational theft. If our grand American experiment is to flourish we need a fundamental rethinking of the nature and purpose of economic activity (see e.g., Russell Roberts' "Radical Re-Imagining of the Tax System").

The nonsensical belief, championed by the rhetoric and policies of an almost entirely malignant Reagan administration and its ideological successors, that unbridled selfish and greed are somehow good for America has run its inevitable course. Reaganomics has been an abject failure. It is time to move on to something wiser, more humane, more equitable and just. What we need is truly progressive tax policies where the wealthy, who have reaped more than their share of economic benefits, pay more than their share of taxes. As Marx, influenced by Jefferson, succinctly put it, "From each according to ability, to each according to need."

But, the neo-con trickler-downers will certainly splutter, this is a redistribution of wealth! It smacks of socialism! Guess what? We redistribute wealth now but in a reverse-Robin-Hood fashion, with regressive taxes stealing from the poor and giving to the rich in the form of corporate welfare and tax subsidies. Wealth inequalities in the United States continue to increase (see comparative Gini coefficients graphic). The resulting social, health, and enviornmental costs are well documented.

Our current economic situation is not some mere and routine down phase of a benign business cycle. It is a symptom of tragically broken system based on fundamentally flawed premises. There will be no recovery until we align our economic rules with ecological realities. There is no free lunch. We will soon exhaust the fossil fuels that drive our agricultural and economic engines. Human population has reach, and indeed far surpassed, sustainable levels. Put this point somewhat crassly, our prevailing global economic system is relentlessly converting earth's diverse and life sustaining biomass to babies. Why? Simply because a growing global population serves the short-term self-interest of those with the most by assuring a ready supply cheap labor and an expanding market for 'cheap-but-profitable plastic crap that no one needs.'