Andrew Murray - Baba Brinkman

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