John Zmirak at The Stream connects Darwinism with the eroding of Second Amendment rights. Plausible? I think so. He begins:

You might be surprised to find it there, but I put a long section in my new book on the Second Amendment dealing with Darwinism. Was I being undisciplined, maybe? Was my editor out to lunch, allowing me to rant about anything and everything, both on topic and off?

Not really. I lay out in the book how the decline of the Christian worldview degrades our picture of man. Instead of the image of God arrayed with intrinsic value, moral accountability, and an eternal destiny, we’ve learned to see ourselves as slightly brainier apes — featherless bipeds of no particular cosmic significance. Our origin isn’t the sinless Adam painted by Michelangelo, but some crude, grunting caveman. Our destiny isn’t glory, but icy oblivion.

So maybe all those “inalienable rights” we thought we’d been “endowed” with by “the Creator” were useful fictions, slaveowner slogans, or just wishful thinking. No wonder regimes treating Darwinism as dogma such as Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and secularized U.S. blue states toss human rights like a match into Darwin’s toilet to drown.

Apes with Guns?

Indeed, the major cost of evolutionary thinking has been the change it has wrought in what we believe a human being is. The “moral accountability” he mentions may be the key. Only a morally accountable being can be entrusted with a firearm. In a movie context, a recurring motif in the Planet of the Apes series, from the very first in 1968 to the most recent, is the sight of apes with guns. We know it shouldn’t be, which is why it never fails to give a frisson of horror. Zmirak adds:

As I document in No Second Amendment, No First, the most powerful effect of Darwinism on Christians was to convince us on some deep level that our faith doesn’t deal with facts. It cannot survive rational scrutiny, cold-eyed reflection, and modern research. 

And he gives a shoutout to intelligent design advocates who specialize in “rational scrutiny.” If more people “studied the arguments made by Intelligent Design thinkers such as Stephen Meyer, William Dembski, Michael Behe, and others published by Discovery Institute, they’d realize that at best, the atheists are no more grounded in empirically testable science than Christian believers.”

Read the rest here. Zmirak’s new book is No Second Amendment, No First. He wrote at Evolution News most recently on “How the Christian Civil Rights Movement Defeated Social Darwinism and Eugenics.”