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I thought it was the smugness

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Sun, 2009-10-25 11:15 — The Conductor
Topic: 
Culture
Places: 
U.S.A.

You’ve seen the bumper sticker icon for evolution—the fish symbol with feet. As a graphic, it’s great. It conveys a concise message and is easily recognizable. Quite a feat to get that much communication from a handful of lines.

I have come to find it annoying. It seems to be a proud profession of close-mindedness about the origin of man. Evolution is the answer, and if your fish symbol doesn’t have feet coming out of it, you’re some kind of simpleton who isn’t cool enough to laugh at the Bible.

Yes, there are some assumptions prejudices in my description. But it seems apt. Smug people who think they know it all bug me.

Thanks to TJIC, I can see better that the smugness is more annoying because it pretends to represent sophistication where there is actually ignorance:

Heck, even look at the bumper stickers – the fish with feet, although clever, really bugs me, because it doesn’t attack creationism, it attacks Christianity. “Your world view is stupid, and we can update it / replace it by adding feet to the fish”. The fish represents Jesus, not creationism, and has been used that way for about 2,000 years – long before evolution, or anti-evolution, were topics of debate.

Evolution, or the theory thereof, can fit within Christian teachings. A closer look reveals that most people aren‘t even sure what evolution means in context of the origin of man. And a person need not be a creationist to be a Christian.

Pretty much everybody with one of those fish-feet stickers is telling the world that they found and answer they liked and then stopped thinking. The ignorance is worse than the smugness.