Remember the old 'Six degrees of separation' game? As dated now as hula hoops and the Da Vinci Code, but very big in its prime, the author appearing on talk shows and everything, so it must have been true. See he reckoned that any person anywhere on the planet could be linked to any other person anywhere else on the planet in just six relationships. You know someone who once appeared in a movie with someone else, who once went on a trip to Africa, and met someone who had once traveled in the Congo, and there met a nun who had once worked with pigmies.
Complete nonsense of course, just like so many of these popular beliefs that sound so right at the time - flat earth, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear energy. But people fell over themselves at parties trying to make impossible seeming chains of connection (often just to try to get some girl to have sex with them) and convincing themselves that they had accomplished a mission, rather like seeing a statue being pulled down in the streets of Iraq.
So, six degrees, so yesterday. I have a new game for you - how many degrees of separation between an evangelical from Kansas (but choose your own state, don't just copy me) and the primeval slime? Easy - one degree to the great apes, two degrees to the reptiles, three degrees to the amphibians, four degrees to the fish, five degrees to the invertebrates, six degrees to the single-celled organisms, seven degrees to the primeval slime.
There, that's easy isn't it? Six degrees to link Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, or George Bush to Jack Abramoff, or Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden (come on, you remember them don't you?), and just one more to link evangelicals to the Slime from the Green Lagoon.
But that isn't right, I hear them cry, our preacher told us that that evil Darwin fellow said we came straight from the slime. And I knew that wasn't right because I knew my mammy and pappy, and they weren't slime (well, some people thought my pappy was a bit slimy, but he was really a good old boy Christian), they were just regular republican-voting, church-going, gun-toting, pickup-driving, gay-hating folks like everyone else in the country (except them San Francisco commie traitor liberals of course). And also in the Bible they sort of moulded people out of clay or something didn't they, and clay isn't slime, is it? Now this fellow Horton is saying it took a long time and many different evolutionary stages to get from the original life forms on the planet to human beings. I mean, that almost sounds reasonable, doesn't it? And if it is reasonable then all of my ethics are out of the window and I might as well move to San Francisco (I bet that Pelosi woman is only SIX degrees from Slime) and practice gay marriage and abortion and burn the flag and everything.
So there you go, try it in your own home, use your own religious starting point, your own evolutionary steps, I bet it won't take any of you more than seven links.
Oh, and I am available for the talk circuit, this idea should be a sensation.