VSHA Sunday Talk

 

                                          ABRAHAM LINCOLN:  THE AMERICAN HUMANIST HERO

 

Our President, Robert Light, will give a dramatic reading from his one man show called FOREVER FREE.  The script was written as a companion piece to his earlier one man show on Charles Darwin called BEING EVOLVED. The two pieces were inspired by a speech given by the great and late biologist Stephen Jay Gould calling Darwin and Lincoln “the twin revolutionaries of the 19th century.” 

The good Dr. Gould had good reason to twine those two great destinies together.  Did you know Lincoln and Darwin were born in the same hour of the very same day?  It is true!  Darwin was born 45 minutes before Lincoln on February 12th, 1809.  They are linked also by their anti-slavery and pro-science opinions.  They even had five mutual friends. Lincoln read Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” and later discussed it with Louis Agassiz at the founding of the National Academy of Science.  Lincoln believed Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.  Agassiz thought it would take thousands if not millions of years to prove or disprove it.  He was soon proven wrong.

 

FOREVER FREE is based on research from over 100 books on President Lincoln.  It was written by Robert Light in the fall of 1993 while he was in prison for non-violently protecting the forests, with 1,800 other activists, in Clayoquot Sound.  All of the Clayoquot protesters were later ruled, on appeal, to be not guilty.  The injunction barring protests, set up by the logging companies with the BC government, was declared too wide in scope and too vague in offence.  It was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada.

 

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See you there!  Everyone welcome!

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