Growing up I always interpreted the Bible metaphorically, as a moral code and historical text created by users of natural hallucinogens which eventually became controlled by organizations to keep everyone's ducks in a row. For all we know, not to be confused with believe, the universe could be a single cell or atomic particle within an organism known as God and his message is distributed by neurological impulses. That could support the difference of time since it is thought that smaller objects experience the fourth dimension differently due to their smaller mass.
Now, if a "true" Christian believes the Bible is to be taken literal - then Creationism is a lie within its own religion.
Creationism
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MovieWes
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I'm a Christian, and I honestly believe in both Creationism and Evolution. And here's what I think; the Bible does state (don't ask me where, but I know it's in there) that 1,000 ages in the eyes of man is like a couple of hours to God. Now, I'm not familiar with measurements of time, but I think I remember that an age lasts 20 years, so 1,000 ages would be like 20,000 years. And that's just a couple of hours to God. With this in mind, 240,000 years (or probably more) would be like an entire day to God. So seven days could conceivably last millions or probably billions of years from the point-of-view of God, to which the concept of "time" as we think of it has no meaning. So Evolution is a phenomenon created by God. In fact, I believe that science is simply God's tool, so science in general is just God at work.
So, in sum, the Earth is 4 billion years old because God created it 4 billion years ago. It's not rocket science, it's just the way it is. If "born again" Christians have a problem with this, then it's their problem, not anyone else's.
Edited By MovieWes on 1222292025
So, in sum, the Earth is 4 billion years old because God created it 4 billion years ago. It's not rocket science, it's just the way it is. If "born again" Christians have a problem with this, then it's their problem, not anyone else's.
Edited By MovieWes on 1222292025
"Young men make wars and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution." -- Alec Guinness (Lawrence of Arabia)
(Ahm, the problem is that most people don't get that's it's more of a case of a Shakespeare trying to find Hamlet, not getting he's a creation of his own imagination).Big Magilla wrote:I'm paraphrasing here, but I think T.S. Eliot put it best when he said that people trying to find God is no different than Hamlet trying to find Shakespeare. He can run to the top of the stage and shout at the top of his lungs for Shakespeare to show himself but the only way he can see Shakespeare is if Shakespeare were to write himself into the play.
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Big Magilla
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I'm paraphrasing here, but I think T.S. Eliot put it best when he said that people trying to find God is no different than Hamlet trying to find Shakespeare. He can run to the top of the stage and shout at the top of his lungs for Shakespeare to show himself but the only way he can see Shakespeare is if Shakespeare were to write himself into the play.
Amen to that.Uri wrote:Then again, the real question is why an intelligent person would believe in God. That is way beyond my ability to figure out.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
The funny thing is that there should be no problem, once one choose to believe in God, to have both creationism and evolution cohabitate peacefully in one's mind. The world was created exactly 5769 years ago (as every Jew knows). And God created it with all the evidences it's a several billion years old universe integrally put into it. Why? It is not for us to comprehend God's logic. A true believer, at least an intelligent one, should be able to accept this. Ignoring the indications of evolution is in a way an act of disrespect to the efforts God's gone through to put them in front of us to study. The test of a true believer is to confront all this knowledge, embrace it for what it is and still being humble enough to accept his or her inability, being merely human, to figure out the contradiction between those facts and the doctrines one believes in.
Then again, the real question is why an intelligent person would believe in God. That is way beyond my ability to figure out.
Edited By Uri on 1222288158
Then again, the real question is why an intelligent person would believe in God. That is way beyond my ability to figure out.
Edited By Uri on 1222288158
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Big Magilla
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I appreciate the enlightenment on the second quote.
As to the first, I know most Creationists advocate the teaching of it alongside Science, but some advocate the teaching of it in place of Science. I thought she was part of that school. If she isn't then that might be even more dangerous because it might be an easier sell.
As far as her getting the country to do it, it does sound far-fetched but so do some of the things Nixon, Reagan and W. got away with in their administrations. What bothers a lot of people, me included, with the notion that someone with such outlandish ideas could even be considered for such a position is that it is at it heart no different than Iran electing fundamentalist Muslims or before that, Germany allowing Hitler to become chancellor.
As to the first, I know most Creationists advocate the teaching of it alongside Science, but some advocate the teaching of it in place of Science. I thought she was part of that school. If she isn't then that might be even more dangerous because it might be an easier sell.
As far as her getting the country to do it, it does sound far-fetched but so do some of the things Nixon, Reagan and W. got away with in their administrations. What bothers a lot of people, me included, with the notion that someone with such outlandish ideas could even be considered for such a position is that it is at it heart no different than Iran electing fundamentalist Muslims or before that, Germany allowing Hitler to become chancellor.
Big Magilla wrote:Zahveed wrote:I grew up in a Christian household for 18 years and I never heard of this craziness.
If Sarah Palin becomes President you will not only hear about it, your kids will be taught it instead of Science.
Let's be accurate here. She doesn't advocate teaching creationism only. She has said that she thinks it would be good to teach it in addition to what is currently taught, but not in place of it. And besides, it's not as if she'd be able to mandate that by herself if she were president.
They, or at least the ones at his sister's Church, believe that once they re-born they're automatically guaranteed a place in Heaven so they can do anything - lie, cheat, steal, tear pages they deem offensive out of library books, have people who look at you crooked fired when you're in powerful position, anything I guess short of murder, although maybe that's alright, too, because everything they do is righteous once they've been "saved".
It's part of the Free Grace movement, an offshoot of Calvin's teaching of perseverance of the Saints. Goes back to the idea of divine Grace which says that salvation does not depend on the actions of the individual (and which, I, as a Christian, reject), and as a result nothing the person does can effect his or her salvation. Calvin's view is that people who fall away and do bad things after this were never truly converted to begin with. Some of the Free Grace people say that the gift (salvation) is independent of the person and the life they lead, and that being justified ("saved") is separate from being sanctified ("living the life), hence the term..."once saved, always saved". It's a pretty controversial, and now widely rejected, view.
Edited By dws1982 on 1222283304
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Big Magilla
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If Sarah Palin becomes President you will not only hear about it, your kids will be taught it instead of Science.Zahveed wrote:I grew up in a Christian household for 18 years and I never heard of this craziness.
It's a nutty belief of a fringe of born again Christians who take everything in the Bible literally.
Somebody who has a born-again sister told me something I didn't know about them the other day. They, or at least the ones at his sister's Church, believe that once they re-born they're automatically guaranteed a place in Heaven so they can do anything - lie, cheat, steal, tear pages they deem offensive out of library books, have people who look at you crooked fired when you're in powerful position, anything I guess short of murder, although maybe that's alright, too, because everything they do is righteous once they've been "saved".
They're not just nutty, they're scary, very scary.
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OscarGuy
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You can tell by the Moose line and the "how long the floods lasted" line that Ebert was poking fun at Creationists who believe Dinosaurs and Man existed at the same time and that the world really isn't billions of years old, but is only a few thousand years old.
Wesley Lovell
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
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Big Magilla
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Creationism: Your questions answered
September 21, 2008
By Roger Ebert
Questions and answers on Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution:
Q. When was the earth created?
A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654 that the earth was created on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C. Other timetables reach back as far as 10,000 years.
Q. What about oil and coal, which seem to have been generated from ancient forests millions of years ago?
A. They are evidence of a Great Flood about 4,400 years ago, which laid down all the layers of sediment at once. They are nowhere near as old as evolutionists and archeologists say. A fossil claimed to be 200 million years old, found in Nevada in 1917, shows a shoe print. [See photograph]
Q. What about bones representing such species as Cro-Magnon Man and Neanderthal Man?
A. Created at the same time as man. They did not survive. In fact, all surviving species and many others were created fully formed at the same time. At that moment they were of various ages and in varying degrees of health. Some individuals died an instant later, others within seconds, minutes or hours.
Q. Were there ice ages lasting millions of years?
A. No, but a recent and catastrophic Ice Epoch.
Q. Did the Colorado River carve out the mile-deep Grand Canyon over eons?
A. It was the result of Ice Epochs, the Great Flood and other catastrophes within the last 64 to 100 centuries.
Q. Was there a Noah, and did he have an Ark?
A. Certainly. There are many unverified reports of a massive wooden vessel on Mount Ararat. The Arc contained eight people, from whom we are all descended. It also contained two of each kind of animal. Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc.
Q: What about dinosaurs?
A. They walked the earth at the same time as man, but were wiped out by the Flood, whose turbulence buried their bones in non-sequential sediments.
Q. What did the creatures on the Ark eat?
A. Food on board, fish, and possibly trapped sea birds.
Q. How long did the Great Flood last?
A. We know that Noah was 600 years, two months and 17 days old when he sailed. Using that as a starting point and counting forward, Genesis tells us it lasted for 40, 150, 253, 314 or 370 days.
Q. Since the earth was completely covered, even to the highest mountains, where did the waters go?
A. This is explained in Psalm 104, verses 6 and 7: "Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away."
Q. What about such cosmic phenomena as the rings of Saturn?
A. Evidence of a catastrophic collision between Saturn and another object within the same 10,000-year span.
Q. Why would God create such an absurd creature as a moose?
A. In charity, we must observe that the moose probably does not seem absurd to itself.
September 21, 2008
By Roger Ebert
Questions and answers on Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution:
Q. When was the earth created?
A. Archbishop James Usher, working out a chronology from the Bible, calculated in 1654 that the earth was created on the night of October 23, 4004 B.C. Other timetables reach back as far as 10,000 years.
Q. What about oil and coal, which seem to have been generated from ancient forests millions of years ago?
A. They are evidence of a Great Flood about 4,400 years ago, which laid down all the layers of sediment at once. They are nowhere near as old as evolutionists and archeologists say. A fossil claimed to be 200 million years old, found in Nevada in 1917, shows a shoe print. [See photograph]
Q. What about bones representing such species as Cro-Magnon Man and Neanderthal Man?
A. Created at the same time as man. They did not survive. In fact, all surviving species and many others were created fully formed at the same time. At that moment they were of various ages and in varying degrees of health. Some individuals died an instant later, others within seconds, minutes or hours.
Q. Were there ice ages lasting millions of years?
A. No, but a recent and catastrophic Ice Epoch.
Q. Did the Colorado River carve out the mile-deep Grand Canyon over eons?
A. It was the result of Ice Epochs, the Great Flood and other catastrophes within the last 64 to 100 centuries.
Q. Was there a Noah, and did he have an Ark?
A. Certainly. There are many unverified reports of a massive wooden vessel on Mount Ararat. The Arc contained eight people, from whom we are all descended. It also contained two of each kind of animal. Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc.
Q: What about dinosaurs?
A. They walked the earth at the same time as man, but were wiped out by the Flood, whose turbulence buried their bones in non-sequential sediments.
Q. What did the creatures on the Ark eat?
A. Food on board, fish, and possibly trapped sea birds.
Q. How long did the Great Flood last?
A. We know that Noah was 600 years, two months and 17 days old when he sailed. Using that as a starting point and counting forward, Genesis tells us it lasted for 40, 150, 253, 314 or 370 days.
Q. Since the earth was completely covered, even to the highest mountains, where did the waters go?
A. This is explained in Psalm 104, verses 6 and 7: "Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters stood above the mountains. At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away."
Q. What about such cosmic phenomena as the rings of Saturn?
A. Evidence of a catastrophic collision between Saturn and another object within the same 10,000-year span.
Q. Why would God create such an absurd creature as a moose?
A. In charity, we must observe that the moose probably does not seem absurd to itself.