No, don’t even joke about it, but do think about it. Cars can be whizzing by you, merely inches away, but you are safe if you keep that golden &uot;guard rail&uot; between you and the tons of metal going in the opposite direction. Tempt it, and your next ride may be in a shrieking ambulance.

It’s the same if your friend supports a different political party: keep your mouth shut; don’t cross that line. It’s the same when writers get anywhere near the subject of religion. The line separating whether or not to discuss it, let alone write about it, is equally dangerous.

For example, you might make a statement that more human beings have been killed because of religions than those who died as the result of disease and wars. It may be the truth, but you will prompt fisticuffs in some quarters, or even your own demise.

Recently a new &uot;science&uot; has been &uot;created.&uot; Upstarts who think they know better are challenging Darwin’s old theory about how beings evolved. If you want to start something, suggest that God created man in his own image and then describe what man’s appearance probably was a zillion years ago. It wasn’t too far back that we looked more like apes than a human and certainly God was around back then. So did He or didn’t He? That’s a real can of worms and I won’t go there.

Believing Darwin is a lot easier, and if he is dead right we may all be dead soon.

Oprah Winfrey recently put together on her TV show a team of highly educated people who suggested the troublesome bird flu would get us all, and not too many years from now. It has something to do with the evolution of the deadly little things some birds carry around in their tiny systems. To keep this discussion simple, let’s just call them &uot;bugs.&uot;

Not content to just wipe out the bird population, these bugs somehow get into the human bloodstream and raise havoc with our immune systems.

And, so far, man’s ability to cope has been nothing to brag about. In spite of all of our test tubes, Bunsen burners, drugs, computers, and microscopes, we seem to be losing the war of the birds. Only God knows how many chickens, ducks, and turkeys have already been sacrificed in a feeble attempt to head off the bird flu mutations. This baby seems to be unstoppable.

And that’s not the worst of it. Darwin’s theory allows no final step in evolution; there’s no logical end to the changes. Take a look at your disappearing little toenail … and we are not sure that human baldness is not in the cards.

If the bug that now moves from bird-to-bird, and bird-to-human, takes the next logical step and acquires the ability to move from human-to-human, we are in big trouble. Deaths caused by religions, wars, and pestilence will pale to insignificance, and earth’s human population will disappear at an exponential rate.

Running out of oil will not cause as many problems as the mass death of oil workers. Your trips to the grocery store, even if you walk to it, will not be as bothersome as the fact that no one is left to grow the foodstuffs. And just how will you protect yourself from contagious humans, even those in your own family? A problem, eh? Will we have to pull the kids out of school, build a fence around the home and learn to eat grass?

Will you then avoid the comfortable closeness of companionship in your church? (And how many of you who have bypassed religion will suddenly be crying out for help from higher places?) I find there is some comfort in being old, having already lived a sufficiently long life when the little bug takes over the mountains and the prairies. But wait — if Darwin was correct, we came from the sea. So if we humans can evolve back to the sea, maybe that Avian flu bug will be stopped at the surface, a line we may be forced to cross to continue living on this planet.

robert.pocklington@suffolknewsherald.com