Political Poster

     In our youth, children are isolated to one-sided opinions.  It is only through education and the exposure to new things can people discover how multi-faceted our society is.  For my political poster, I chose the subjects of evolution and Christianity (in particular, Mormonism).  When I was in sixth grade, our class began to learn about human evolution.  It was my belief that Mormons should shun this theory, which I readily did.  It was not until eight grade that I started to reexamine my beliefs and ask other members about their views on evolution.  Through my series of inquiries, I was able to educate myself to fully understand the complexities of the matter and reconcile two ideas that I had thought were contradictory.

     When we are young, the way we express ourselves is influenced by our experiences.  A Nigerian woman named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered a TED talk named "The Danger of a Single Story."  Adichie explained that she read British and American literature with blonde and blue eyed characters who ate apples and commented on the weather.  Reflexively, Adichie would right stories about blonde and blue eyed characters even though her community was not made up of any of these individuals.  Adichie noted,"What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify." It is fortunate that Adichie went on to discover new things, or else she would still be writing about white children eating apples commenting on the weather.  It is through our exploration of the unknown that we may heighten our understanding of our community and ourselves.

     In a news story from Christianity Today titled "Creation of Evolution? Yes!", Francis S. Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, was interviewed concerning his thoughts on his Christen faith and Darwin's theories.  Collins noted that God is not limited by space or time and he finds that our discoveries of the evolutionary creative process are completely in line with the Scriptures.  Collins was then asked, "If evolution is true, don't atheists have a point?" Collins then answered, "No...This leaves out profoundly important spiritual questions, such as why we are here, if there is a God, and what happens after we die.  Those are questions that science is not really designed to answer. You have to look in another place, using another kind of approach. And for me that's faith."  To believe in evolution does not make one an atheist.  It can simply means that they consider evolution to be the path by which God took to create man.

     Considering this path has not been condemned by the LDS church.  In fact, the theory of evolution has been widely discussed as a possible means of the Creation among prevailing church members.  There have been several statements throughout the years that make it clear that man was created in the image of God, but it is unclear as to how Heavenly Father accomplished this.  In my poster, there is a Darwin fish and the angel Moroni kneeling down, extending an arm to the creature.  This depiction reflect my reconciliation between my faith and my belief in evolution and how they can work in tandem.  I chose the quote, "...all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have a love one to another" because if members are followers of Christ, they will be accepting and loving of our different beliefs.  So much hate crime has been produced out of disagreements among Christians and evolutionists.  It is a contradiction for members to hate people for their believes since Jesus so often preached the opposite action. Our prophets leave it open to our own interpretation of the scriptures and science to decide how humankind came about.  This open interpretation allows us to investigate avenues of understanding we may not have attempted to tread before.

     It is understandable that we parrot our parents' opinions when we are young.  However, as we mature and discover different patterns of thought, one must come to their own view of the world and how things have come to be.  The power of a single story is great, but the might of many stories is even greater.

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