The Charlie Hebdo controversy. Photo from Twitter
Channeling our inner chimp
Let’s hurry up and hate Muslim people
By James Giago Davies Even otherwise clear thinking progressives can force the wrong bit into the wrong horse’s mouth, enter him in the wrong race, and put a hate filled little monkey high on his back, impervious to reasoned argument, brandishing a cattle prod for a riding crop. Okay, that’s a humdinger, but it can happen, just takes the right Pavlovian trigger, because we all have one, and when that bell rings our minds dust off deeply entrenched hidden agendas, get hijacked by dark, blinkered Manchurian Candidate motivations. Take world renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. His landmark book the Selfish Gene changed my life. Many other great books followed, freeing my mind from deluded, socially imposed shackles, and his speaking tour with the equally formidable theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, should be mandatory viewing for every high school student in the country. That would help prepare them for the online video of some poor chimp locked in a zoo cage. He poops in his hand and throws it at the people staring at him. Apparently they pushed his poop throwing button, and Dawkins might reason the Chimpanzee poop throwing gene must have been selected for back in the chimp’s ancestral environment, where it presumably served utility. Placed in an alien zoo cage situation no evolved programming could have prepared him for, the Chimp aberrantly reacted by throwing his own poop at human oppressors. Not sure how I would have viewed such behavior before reading Dawkins, but many people have a huge problem with evolution as science. They cannot imagine how a creature as magnificent as Man evolved from primates not much different than the chimpanzee. Many have singled out Dawkins as the champion of such science, and he revels in this edifying role, one good genes appear to have perfectly equipped him to play, and he is an expert at explaining hard science over faith deluded superstition. Like you or me Dawkins has friends and enemies, and he has to socialize professionally somewhere, and some years back, he got mad at a woman, and he posted some extremely hateful invective he later apologized for. The woman had attacked a friend of his, and nobly coming to her rescue, Dawkins reacted aberrantly. You see, there was no internet in the ancestral environment, and Dawkins instinctively channeled his inner Chimp, he took a cybernetic dump in his hand—and threw it at that woman. You would have thought he had learned a lesson from that unfortunate experience, to keep that inner chimp on a very short leash, maybe stretch out on a professional’s couch, and say, “When I get really mad, Doc, this poop throwing gene, well, makes me throw poop.” “That’s interesting, Richard, but before we discuss it I’ll need to put on this hazmat suit...” Charlie Hebdo is just the latest evidence of the hateful religion run amuck that Dawkins details in his wonderful book, The God Delusion. That horrific incident prompted Dawkins to single out Islam as being relatively more dangerous and evil than other prominent religions, like Christianity, and people, on the left and right, applauded him for his reasoning. Religions are born of the history, culture and geopolitical realities of a particular region, and can be warped by centuries of social oppression and economic exploitation. On my reservation we have the highest murder rate in the nation, violence, rape, incest, suicide, rampant alcoholism. No religion made our reality this way. No religion can unmake this sad reality. Dawkins factors little of the geopolitical into his take on Islam. He prefers to unchain that inner chimp, he prefers to poop in his hand and throw it at a powder keg of over a billion angry people. Latent bigotry warps our perception of Muslim people, it tells us to separate them from ourselves, to see them as a dangerous radical inferior; we dehumanize them so we are free to violate their humanity with impunity, without compromising our perception of our own, a violation that flies in the face of the same lofty principles that prompted us to dehumanize them in the first place. Powerless people turn to religion to empower themselves against a hated oppressor. The Lakota did this in 1890; they believed the prophet Wovoka, they believed his religion would turn away Army bullets, but at Wounded Knee, in the very village where my mother was born 40 years later, they wound up frozen corpses on the blood stained snow. Muslims think their religion gives them a power Western imperialism cannot stand before, and they are dead wrong. If Islam did not exist they would be just as violently and fervently behind whatever religion filled its void. They are not made evil by their religion—they warp the religion of Muhammad to empower them to fight a hated enemy no other power can touch. Dawkins apologized for his last poop throwing incident, but he will not apologize for this one, not even recognize he should apologize, and millions upon millions of otherwise open-minded progressives, will cheer his misguided attitude as enlightened thinking. They will all collectively poop in one monstrously misguided true believer hand, and chuck it at the humanity of a third of this planet’s population. (James Giago Davies can be reached at skindiesel@msn.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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