After a traditional July 4th meal of hot dogs, hamburgers, and BBQ-flavored chips, the family settled down to watch Planet Earth on my sister's brand-new, obscenely-large plasma screen TV. We watched the segment about jungles, a personal favorite of my sister and brother-in-law. Now, I am not generally a fan of nature shows, in fact, in the past I believe I have told people that I hate them. I love animals and all that, but I find nature programs boring and useless. Planet Earth turned that all around. Have you seen it? Turns out our planet, with all it's animals and plants and such, is actually pretty neat. Planet Earth is an amazing show. Totally engaging and endlessly fascinating, it boasts some of the finest nature footage ever committed to film. I would've been happy spending the remainder of Friday evening parked in front of my sister's giant TV, but the Lawsons love their party games, so we had to break out Catchphrase. 
Anyway, at the close of episode Jungles, narrator Sir Richard Attenborough is talking about chimpanzees and how human beings are their closest relatives. Instantly, my father scrunches up his face as if one of the three dogs lounging around the room farted and he had just caught a whiff. My mother was a little more vocal with her exclamation of, "I didn't come from a monkey."
I sat up and responded, "Well, I mean, you know, scientifically, we're very similar to chimpanzees." My mother retorted with, "What do you mean 'scientifically'," her tone suggesting that she didn't trust this newfangled science thing.
"Genetically," Jen said, providing a second rational voice to the conversation. The conversation stopped here, probably because my parents adore my wife and trust anything that comes out of her mouth. She was after all the valedictorian of her high school class and she graduated from an Ivy League school. My dad actually referred to her as the "Brains of the Family" once, in front of me, no less, his beloved son.
But this is not an article about my parents, who I love very much, or even evolution, which, as far as I know, never comes out and says, "hey, everybody, you used to be a monkey!" No, this is actually an article about the conservative Christian's knee jerk reaction to things he/she doesn't fully understand. You see, in my mother's world "evolution" means "you came from a monkey and God had nothing to do with it, so there!" Suggesting that human beings have something in common with the apes is enough to label one a blasphemer. I hope she never finds out about Lancelot Link. "You mean somebody out there thinks a chimpanzee could be as successful a super spy as 007? That is crazy!"
I don't ever knock people because of their beliefs. If they want to believe it all started with, as David Cross says, "a talking snake in a tree," that's fine by me. I'm not offended. I do find it startling that a large group of people could denounce things like evolution and the Big Bang, but to each their own, I guess.
It's this whole knee-jerk reaction to things that so many Christians I know display that irks me. From gay marriage to Harry Potter to stand-up comedy routines. My dad said to me once, "Seems like Christianity is the only thing people think it's OK to make fun of now." That's actually not true, but I guess one is supposed to be separate from the world when they've decided to align themselves with a particular faith, so believing everyone else is against you helps out with all that. And maybe the reason comedians poke fun at the Christian church more than other world religions is the fact that the majority of well-known Christian spokesman are either completely ridiculous or completely corrupt.
Listen, Christians, no one is out to get you (except maybe Satanists, but they're douchebags who don't even believe in the fictional evildoer their church is named after). Before you react, take a moment to reflect. The reality of evolution does not leave an all-powerful God out of the equation, nor does it suggest that we were all once vine-swinging, poop-flinging howler monkeys. So, cool it with the knee-jerk reactions, OK. Take a moment, read a book other than Daily Devotions for the Extreme Sports Teenager once in awhile, and
STOP ALREADY!
