Bad Religion and the Evolutionist Punk
by Jotabe Medeiros

Tranlastion by Henchman

New Maps Of Hell. That's the name chosen for the new album which will be out in July, says Greg Graffin, vocalist of the Californian punk group Bad Religion who will play in Credicard Hall. Bad Religion will do tomorrow "the sixth or seventh" passage through Brazil, according to Greg Graffin, who speaks from Buenos Aires, Argentina by telephone.

"When the fans see the front photo they will recognize it immediately because it is very similar to How Could Hell... our first album. It is, somehow, the end of a cycle." Those are good news for the fans that were expecting a new album for 3 years.

Graffin might be one of the most peculiar men in the world of rock. When he is not screaming at the microphone, he is in a classroom: he is one of the most important biology teachers in UCLA. The two worlds, which seem impossible to combine, are done very seriously, since university, then the first masters, doctorate and Ph.D.

"In my head, believe it or not, it's all the same thing, playing for thousands of people in a stadium or teaching for 300 people. I have always been the same all the time, everybody knew that I had an academic career. My other image was always academic. I grew up defending some sort of integrity, in rock or in the academic world."

The two things sometimes get very close, or fit together. Let’s see two examples:

1. Greg recently defended an academic thesis called 'Evolution, Monoism, Atheism and the Naturalist World View'. He interviewed twelve of the biggest biologists in the world such as Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith, wanting to know how religion and the personal beliefs affected the vision of those scientists about the evolutionist thesis. The thesis became a book, Greg promised to autograph the first 500, but it wasn't enough. Everybody wanted an autographed book.

2. The name of the group, Bad Religion, could perfectly be a sort of conclusion of Graffin’s thesis: Is belief in God good, bad or irrelevant for a scientist?

"We were adolescents when the name came out, and there was no religion in my life," says Graffin, smiling. "But I am very hesitant to say in a categorical way that religion can be bad. Many people need it, it's an important part of society. And it's not irrelevant because it is something that dominates the vision that people have of the world, and we cannot ignore it. Once, a scientist said, if you can believe in God, you can believe in anything. It is also very dangerous. The conclusion is that I think belief in God is good, because it maintains the focus of people, in private life or in science."

Graffin also talked a little about the new pope. "The new pope is more or less like the American president: nobody believes in what he says in fact," Greg said. "He could be fundamental in the work to guide people. But, instead of that, he hides from the most difficult issues. That's the problem. The last pope, John Paul II, said something interesting about the evolution, which provoked a big talk in church. The Genesis chapter is very discussed and spoken in biology. But, in general, the pope doesn’t say anything. He is like our president. When he speaks, it has nothing to do about what really happens in the life of the American people."