I felt more awake than usual this morning, maybe it was the 16 hours of sleep I have gotten in the last 24hrs, maybe it was the decent sex, or maybe it was the fact that I actually got some decent weed. But I rolled off the couch, walked to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet scrolling through Facebook like all the other 20-somethings out there. And I came across this meme. It says, “A lemon is not a naturally occurring fruit, it’s actually bred from a sour orange and a citron, the sour orange itself being bred from a pomelo and mandarin. So it’s not the product of evolution, but selective breeding.” A person responded with “When life doesn’t give you lemons you invent them yourself”
Those who know me know that bad things happen to me frequently. So hearing that life does not naturally give me lemons and it is unnatural for me to make lemonade feels pretty great. But that means that we choose to create the lemon. Though it has many uses now, we had no way of knowing about those uses prior to making lemons. So why exactly did we think it is a great idea to create an extremely sour fruit? Without knowing its cleaning and seasoning abilities one could only assume that it was bred to eat the same way you eat an apple or an orange. Disturbing right? But think about this in another light, when else have we done something with a fruit that we maybe weren’t supposed to…. Hmmm… Adam and Eve I am looking at you!
So this morning I start out in a thinking mood. I was thinking about death mostly. Morbid I know. When I was a child and was going through the self-identification crisis, I came to the realization that I would someday die. It is inevitable and that scared me. It still does. I do not want to die. I used to cry about it when I was a child. Death is such a scary thought. It is scary because I can’t know for sure what will happen. But then this morning I realized that it doesn’t matter. I am terrified to die. I need to believe that there is a possibility for a pleasant after life more than I need to have proof. Once I am dead it doesn’t really matter if there is an afterlife; I cannot change the fact that I would be dead. No one can. But while I am alive and having to face the fact that I will have to face death, I do need to have hope that there is more out there than this life.
Religion was originally created because someone asked the question, “Where did we come from?” and then someone decided to be nice and fill in the blanks. I think all human beings have an instinctual compulsion to ask that question. If you watch people who have been adopted or abandoned, it is evident that many of them live their entire lives just trying to track down the generation before them. Those of us who were born with both parents are much greedier. We want to know where the entire human race came from.
So scientists tell us we came from monkeys. Evolution is just way too broad of a topic for me to make sense of with such little information as I have. So I thought about evolution as technology. That I can understand. If monkeys evolved like operating systems older monkeys would be Windows 98 and humans would be like Windows 10. So if there are newer operating systems out there then why are some people still using Windows 98. I know that there will always be some pecking, 90year old, toothless man who refuses to get on board with the latest software, but will he live forever? Hell no. Will his computer live forever? I don’t remember Nokia making a computer so no. So then why do we still have monkeys? And if monkeys really turned into humans, than we aren’t talking about Windows evolving into better versions of Windows any more. We’re talking about Windows evolving into Mac. Did they get to choose whether or not to evolve? If so, how exactly did that work?
How does evolution work? How do we create a superior being to ourselves? If we were born knowing that having webbed fingers or higher intelligence would help our species survive on earth than why were we not born with the use of those things? Why do we still have midgets? When was the last time you saw on the news that a bear cub was born a midget? My point is that it just doesn’t make sense to have been born with the ability to better our race but the inability to use that advancement in this life time. So how are we passing on change to our children? Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have so it is unlikely that I am carrying eggs, that my body created, that are more advanced that the body that is carrying them. So by process of elimination I am supposed to believe that men of child spawning age have learned enough about human beings to have created more advanced sperm in order to evolve the human race? WHAT THE FUCK? Does anyone else believe this shit?
I couldn’t take this as an answer so I took to google with the first evolution question that popped into my mind…. What did pterodactyls evolve into? The answer is nothing by the way. I know it’s sad. But as a distraction to the both of us, I learned about a species of dinosaurs called pterosaurs, also known as terror birds. Freeze. I know you want to know what they look like so before you stop reading to google image a pterosaur, I’ll just tell you. It looks like a t-rex and an ostrich had a baby. Okay, go google it, but hurry back or you’ll miss the best part.
Now back to the original google search, “If we evolved why are there still monkeys?”. Well google says that basically we are the cousin of monkeys. Evolution is not linear. There are many branches to evolution. But the more I thought and the more questions I asked of the great google abyss, the more I saw the words “Missing links”. The general idea among sources is that there are these points in evolution where we aren’t sure what step is between a monkey and a human or a wolf and a dog. So scientists, these people who solely rely on fact, are telling us that they just don’t know what is in that void. But if you are telling me that you have no idea what happened during that time, how do you know there is anything missing? Why do you assume that there IS a link to be missing?
Doesn’t this sound a little familiar? There is as much evidence supporting missing links in evolution as there is supporting the existence of God.
So maybe God didn’t give us lemons but he sure as hell is forcing us to make our own lemonade.
survivaloftheempathic 