We can take our time, we don't have to hurry
Andrew Murray, Andrew Murray
Hand on the bible, no perjury to the jury
Andrew Murray, Andrew Murray
My great great great grandfather was a Scottish Presbyterian
He traveled to South Africa to settle and get married in
The Transvaal,
Which was an Afrikaner area
That Dutch Reform Christian folk were farming dairy in
My great great great grandfather Andrew Murray was a minister
1822 he emigrated to begin his work
Preaching sermons every Sunday for the sons and daughters
Of the Boer people,
The cattle-farming Afrikaners
Calvinism was the religion, he did the honours
David Livingstone was one of his visiting doctors
He went to Holland first to learn the tongue of the Netherlands
He needed it to tend his flock and be a better Reverend
Mooi! Maria Stegmann was his 16 year old wife
& Soon they had a couple of kids, I'm talkin' plural
Nice!
Andrew junior was a writer
He wrote The Prayer Life, Abide in Christ and other fine works
Two hundred and forty total books of Christian piety
Surrender and devotion,
Obedience and sobriety
I come from good good Scottish protestant stock
My ancestors loved that divine providence talk
My ancestors, well they weren't exactly rational
Except that natural selection trades in one capital
Surviving descendants, raw genetic self-interest
And that's different from individual forms of selfishness
Andrew Murray could've set up shop to sell fishnets on the Scottish coast,
But he was just too religious
So instead he was a fishermen of men like the apostles
He read his gospels and had as many kids as possible
But we can take our time,
We don't have to hurry
Andrew Murray, Andrew Murray
Hand on the bible,
No perjury to the jury
Andrew Murray, Andrew Murray
So if I'm livin' and my cousins are livin'
Maybe there's something more to my great grandfather's religion
Than meets the naked eye, 'cause they spread the word of Christ
And they married fertile wives
And their children's children thrived
And I bet they'd probably tell you they did it for Jesus' sake and
Not because the love of Jesus leads to baby-makin'
But I'm tryin' to see how these religions came to be
And that's different from the reason people say they believe
'Cause if beliefs can motivate you to an action that's adaptive
There's no reason those beliefs need to be factually accurate
In fact, if they can motivate you better with distractions
From reality, well we would call that "practically accurate"
And pragmatism when you're talkin' natural selection
Just means: "Whatever leads to leavin' plentiful descendants"
That's the "ultimate cause" and to emphasize the difference
The "proximate cause" is in emotional mechanisms
And yes, participation in a church can bring some benefits
Mutual collectivist assistance and the rest of it
The circling of wagons and defence of all your brethren
The measurable acceptance and love and trust and togetherness
That comes from bein' part of somethin' bigger than yourself
If you need to find community, hey, religion can help
But I've got my own community, some hippie Canadians
Some hip-hop heads and some entertainers and atheists
And writers and some scientists and profs at some colleges
And yeah, religious people seem to be outbreeding all of us
But we can take our time,
We don't have to hurry
Andrew Murray, Andrew Murray
Hand on the bible,
No perjury to the jury
Andrew Murray, Andrew Murray
I went down to South Africa to meet my Christians cousins
And whoa!
I've got dozens to the power of dozens
Explosive exponential growth,
I'm talkin' hundreds
And hundreds, my cousin Teo did the sums and number crunchin'
And yeah, Andrew Murray's doin' okay genetically
Let me break it down for you geometrically
Andrew and his teenaged wife Maria Stegmann
Had sixteen children and one of them had sixteen children
And the rest had nine or ten, and some died at a young age
But their surviving grandchildren numbered a hundred and eight
And every single one of his sons became ministers
In the church,
And every one of his daughters married ministers
And it worked,
Andrew Murray had eight thousand descendants
Of which five thousand are now currently livin'
Of which only one is kickin' raps about religion
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is natural selection
So here's a definition of religion:
It's an evolved mechanism for converting resources into descendants
Evolved via culture through religious competitions
And evolved in our mental architecture that's intrinsic
Cause our minds are designed to get religious in the right conditions
Especially when things are fragile and your life is threatened
See, Andrew Murray preached a sermon every Sunday
But I be preachin' on stages myself so I can't complain
I'm just glad my sister and my women cousins
Aren't expected to have babies by the dozens and dozens
I mean,
Maria Stegmann could've had a career
I guess she was born in the wrong year,
Poor dear
Well her great great great great granddaughter will be brought up religion free
Let's see if my baby makes her decisions differently
I got a preacher's blood,
But with a science brain
So let's take this godless revival to a higher plain
I got a preacher's blood, but with a science brain
So let's take this godless revival to a higher plain!
But we can take our time,
We don't have to hurry
Andrew Murray, Andrew Murray
Hand on the bible,
No perjury to the jury
Andrew Murray, Andrew Murray