A few highlights of the hilarious recent feature in The Onion, ht RF:
ALBUQUERQUE, NM—The process of evolution, through which single-celled organisms slowly developed over billions of years into exponentially more sophisticated forms of life, has inexplicably culminated in local Albuquerque resident Mitch Szabo, leading evolutionary biologists reported Monday.
According to baffled sources within the scientific community, the exact same mechanisms responsible for some of nature’s most spectacularly ingenious adaptations have apparently also produced a 35-year-old office assistant who has only worn pants that actually fit him a total of five times in his adult life.“Despite evolution’s emphasis on the inheritance and replication of advantageous traits, a man walks among us today who sweats profusely in any temperature and went to see Anger Management in theaters twice.”
“Mitch poses a real challenge to the whole notion of survival of the fittest,” Goldwyn-Ross added in reference to the biological triumph who has never held a full-time job for longer than seven months. “He’s turning evolutionary theory on its head.”
“It’s a given that natural selection, mutation, and genetic drift have interacted in some elegant way to create this man who smacks his lips pretty much constantly and still listens to Papa Roach,” Professor Dan Robbins of Yale University said. “And yet, paradoxically, that seems impossible considering all the undesirable qualities evolution is supposed to filter out.”
Added Robbins: “I mean, did you guys see his new haircut?”
“I know this is controversial, but we have to consider the possibility that Darwin was wrong, ” said Victor Siles, a geneticist at the University of California–Berkeley. “Nothing we currently know about DNA, no fully mapped genome, can account for the presence of someone whose apartment smells that much like Chef Boyardee.”
Creationists, meanwhile, have been surprisingly muted in their celebration of a man whose existence would seem to disprove so much of evolutionary theory. “It’s great that Mitch has been so disruptive to the evolutionist camp,” Jim Moore of the Colorado Springs–based Genesis Ministries said. “But quite honestly, there’s no way we can explain him in terms of a perfect or loving God, either.”
“We’re just going to sit this one out,” Moore added.
When approached for comment, Mitch himself shrugged and asked if he’d be getting any money for this interview.
COMMENTS
7 responses to “From The Onion: Eons of Darwinian Evolution Somehow Produces Mitch”
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I wish we could "get away with" this kind of humor,
in the pulpit. People so easily take offense, and can hear such a commentary as lacking in compassion, sentimentally understood.
Something about the Onion's ethos or the cultural 'background music' in which this piece was produced, and now received, seems to exempt it from the sort of discomforted accusations it would probably pull down on itself in many church settings.
I think is an extremely clever and one-day-maybe-we'll-say inspired piece of social criticism.
thanks dave, my favorite new term is now 'genetic drift'
paul, not to be overly personal here, but you are the funniest preacher on earth when you just let it rip. People are going to take offense for something anyway, so why not be yourself and damn the torpedoes. Far easier said than done, I know. Better anything than the bland, safe, inoffensive piously sincere or very mildly humorous "sermon illustrations" that fear chases many to adopt. Surely the gospel means that even the preacher gets to raise a little hell, of the "tell it like it is but love it all anyway" variety. (That, by the way, is why _Tom Jones_ is the greatest Christian novel ever written)
miguel
Dear Miguel,
I agree with this completely.
The key is the courage to "let it rip"!
I especially like your phrase "mildly humorous 'sermon illustrations' that fear chases many to adopt."
I still wish I could have been freer in the pulpit.
Maybe in the… next job. Or life.
Paul, truly, truly, you've "Let it all hang out" before…I'm thinking of your "Heart of the Matter" sermon, which is a personal favorite (available, folks, on the MB resource page). Tres magnifique!
job 😉
Nicely done, and happy Thanksgiving from across the pond.