A life well worth celebrating
Posted on January 24th, 2008 by armineh
A celebration of Darwin’s birth has been held since 1980. Darwin gave humanity the concept of natural selection, which led to the theory of evolution. Lincoln gave humanity the Emancipation Proclamation which led to the theory of slavery as an abomination.
Western civilization now accepts that slavery is evil.
Some persons aren’t convinced about evolution, however.
The reference to Lincoln and the emancipation Proclamation prompts this comment.
At about the same time as the Emancipation Proclamation in the US, around twenty times more people were liberated in Russia by the abolition of serfdom than slaves liberated in America.
Slavery was ended in the British Empire about thirty years before America got around to it. This includes the West Indies, on our doorstep, and also includes South Africa, later the icon of racism among societies of the world.
The ending of slavery was largely the work of evangelical Christians, such as William Wilberforce. The evangelicals of that era were nothing like today’s American fundamentalists who have hijacked that term. The real evangelicals were reformers and liberals.
Today’s American fundamentalists are not being honest in trying to appropriate the honorable name of the real evangelicals.
If Humanism had existed in the era of Wilberforce, I think the Humanists would have made common cause with the evangelicals in working for the abolition of slavery.
As to evolution, it is worth noting that although there was resistance to Darwin at first, the theory of evolution was accepted by the Church of England within one generation, and when Darwin died he was buried in the “holiest” of England’s burial sites, Westminster Abbey, given all the recognition due to a major intellectual figure even though he had declared himself an agnostic. The English were proud of him. You can visit his tomb there next time you are in London.