This is the one hundred and fifty-fourth installment in The Sounds of Fundamentalism series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a video clip that shows the crazy, cantankerous, or contradictory side of Evangelical Christianity, please send me an email with the name or link to the video. Please do not leave suggestions in the comment section. Let’s have some fun!
Today’s Sound of Fundamentalism is a video clip of David Whitney, affiliated with the Institute on the Constitution, blaming everything from racism to murder on evolution.
In a sermon preached at Cornerstone Evangelical Free Church in Pasadena, Maryland, Whitney stated:
“As in all public schools, evolution is inculcated and it teaches that there is no Creator God and that everything in the universe came into existence by chance and mistake, accident and is wholly without purpose and without meaning of any kind,” Whitney preached. “[Urbanski] was taught that mankind, including himself, was nothing more than a long compilation of mistakes and mutations and chance occurrences.”
“We should not be surprised then if Sean, with that background and education, concluded that life is meaningless, without any purpose at all,” he continued. “Or, if there is a purpose in life, it would be to advance and further the process of evolution; a process in which the strong destroy the weak and indeed, ultimately, that is the purpose for existence. Survival of the fittest therefore has some rather dastardly consequences which we see in the murder committed by a secular humanist of a Christian young man.”
“Evolution is also the basis of racism, [and] many assert that racism played a role in the motivation for this murder,” Whitney said. “You see, evolution is essentially racist. So where did Sean Urbanski learn racism? He learned it in his classes on evolution at the local public high school that his parents sent him to and his parents funded that school by the payment of their property taxes.”
This is just ignorance at its worst. He gets just about everything wrong as to what evolution actually is, because he conflates the origins, both of the universe itself and life, with how life changes over time via evolution. I’d also dispute his use of the terms chance, accident, and mistake. Evolution is random, unpredictable to a large extent, but it is absolutely not any of the terms he uses.
As for blaming racism on evolution that is just plain ridiculous. Nothing on earth has played a greater role in fostering racism than religion itself, and indeed the bible is littered with examples of races being genocidally wiped from the face of the earth by a capricious god.
Evolution is one of those scientific principles that, once considered, becomes so obviously true that you wonder why it took until Darwin to realise its truth.
Dont worry, he is an expert because he learned all about the history of the earth from a bronze age book of legends.
He also seems clueless as to why the Southern Baptists formed in the first place. I am continually amazed that guys like this think the rest of us are unaware of history.
Far too many are ignorant Scott. I was. I was well aware of the racism of Baptists in the South since childhood, but it was only about 20 years ago I learned Southern Baptist was a denomination, not just a regional descriptor. It was only in the last year that I learned of the explicit racist origins of the sect. And I have a life-long interest in religion and philosophy, albeit at a strictly amateur self-taught level.