At age 16, I converted from Methodism to Seventh-Day Adventism, the theological equivalent of going from the frying pan into the proverbial fire.
Since I was struggling to change my gay sexual urges at that time, this switch from moderate Protestantism to fanatical fundamentalism had a devastating effect on my psyche. After years of waging a foredoomed battle with my same-sex orientation, I finally capitulated to my true homoerotic core and gave up all religion entirely.
A major step in that odyssey and transformation was seeing "Inherit the Wind," the wonderful Broadway play, and later movie, freely adapted from the actual Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, TN, in 1925.
For me, the two big players in the trial were card-carrying atheists, attorney Clarence Darrow, who volunteered his considerable legal skills for the defense, and the columnist H.L. Mencken, who covered the trial for his newspaper the Baltimore Sun.
History Lesson
It was Mencken who dubbed the event the "monkey" trial and the benighted area where it occurred "the Bible belt." It was Darrow who once famously said, "Doubt is the beginning of wisdom."
Against such formidable talent, the ever-popular Christian apologist William Jennings Bryan didn't have a prayer in his pitiful efforts to demonize evolutionary theory.
My favorite line from the courtroom drama was Bryan's feeble attempt at humor when queried by Darrow as to whether the seven days of creation were necessarily literal 24-hour periods:
"I am much more interested in the Rock of Ages than I am in the age of rocks."
That ridiculous retort struck me as a desperate attempt on the part of Bryan to defend the indefensible.
The starkly dramatic contrast between Darrow's calm, cool and collected demeanor and Bryan's emotional, feverish and impassioned sermonizing left an indelible impression on my questioning mind. It surprised me not in the least that Bryan, worn and haggard, died just five days after the trial ended.
Today, I wholeheartedly subscribe to the late, great paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's rational argument that since humans represent the only species aware of our own mortality, adoption of religion becomes a coping mechanism in order to deal with the unpleasant certainty of our eventual and inevitable demise.
Gould's threefold metaphor of how insignificantly human life figures in relation to the overall age of planet Earth helps me keep things in true perspective:
(1) If you use the total height of the Eiffel Tower as a scale for the age of our globe, human life only equals the layer of paint on top of the monument;
(2) If you use a year as a measure of the duration of our own celestial body, our human civilization occupies only the last few minutes of that time period;
(3) If you use a mile as a yardstick for the length of earth's existence, humanity fits in only on the last few inches of that distance.
Look No Farther for a Hero
Clarence Darrow, the real hero of the Scopes Monkey Trial, anticipated Stephen Jay Gould and other evolutionary scientists many decades ago when he gave us his unique, succinct and memorable reduction of where we humans stand in importance relative to the rest of the universe:
"We are a speck on a speck."
That terse summation says it all for me and aids me immensely in living each day to the fullest because, as British rationalist Barbara Smoker argues so persuasively, I have been lucky enough to win in the great cosmic lottery called life.
Mr. Akerley may be contacted at
benakerley@aol.com
