Actually it's both. C S Lewis once said that the statement "God became Man" implies "Myth became fact". The myth of the dying and rising god is derived from the annual cycle of the seasons, the autumn fading and spring brightening of the sun, and the harvesting and regrowth of the crops. But that natural cycle is itself a reflection of the Creator of nature. It's a portrait of Him.

So, hazel, why do you still refer to The Creator as "him"? Is it just habit (tradition?) or an actual choice or do you think it's true whether you like it or not? Or do you think this is why so many of The Faithful, especially Christians, try to deny Evolution (the necessity of or at least higher importance of WombMan over Man)?

Side notes in stupativity:
 

unsubscribing :hattip:

Maybe God is Greater than we could ever possibly hope to realize ...

Maybe we are "the Blind Men," facing an incomprehensible Elephant.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/artic...05/4775745.htm
Were Christian Missionaries Good for Liberal Democracy?

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...eral_Democracy
Abstract
This article demonstrates historically and statistically that conversionary Protestants (CPs) heavily influenced the rise and spread of stable democracy around the world. It argues that CPs were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms, thereby creating the conditions that made stable democracy more likely. Statistically, the historic prevalence of Protestant missionaries explains about half the variation in democracy in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania and removes the impact of most variables that dominate current statistical research about democracy. The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses.

The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publica...eral_Democracy [accessed Dec 06 2017].

Well, it's traditional, but in addition I'm female, so I actually prefer a male god. I've always felt that for a woman,
goddess-worship is a little bit like that Nina and Frederick song about the worm who fell in love with his own back end.
The Goddess is an embodiment of nature, so she's very much the back end of me and not anything I want to worship. Also
the Bible often uses the symbolism of marriage to describe the relationship between God and Israel, and the New
Testament applies that to Christ and the Church, or Christ and the individual soul. The language is symbolic, but it's
the symbolism that God chose to communicate Himself to us, so I think we should respect it.

I doubt if the problem many Christians have with evolution has anything to do with gender politics. It's partly a
tendency to take Genesis 1-2 too literally (though St Jerome said in the 4th century that it had been written "in the
style of a popular poet") but also a justified suspicion of the political uses to which evolution has often been put. On my
website you will find a ramble called "The problem with evolution" where I try to tease those factors out.

I have always felt that "species evolution" – which is the only level at which we have ever observed evolution to occur – was a rather hopeless conjecture ... science's "scientific (sic) creation myth."

We see plenty of evidence in nature that there are controls to ensure that creatures propagate "after their own kind," and that abnormalities are taken care of e.g. by miscarriage. The genetic process is obviously filled with safeguards, many of which we might well not know about yet. Thus, even with the injection of "billions and billions" hand-waving (sorry, Dr. Sagan (RIP)), to me the hypothesis does not hold water – and never did.

- - - - -

When we speak today of (the Christian) "God," we should remember that we are speaking of the Judaic "God," and that there were in fact several of these, called by different names. The "God" that is quoted most often was obviously their war god, since he is quoted promising victory over their enemies and is presumed also to give them over to defeats – of which they had a great many. This god is also extremely violent, to the point that there is a WikiPedia article on "The Bible and Violence." On more than one occasion this god ordered the extermination of "every living thing" in the cities that were conquered. At other times he promised that a city would be destroyed by fire that would never burn out – where lush forests stand today. And so it goes. The Q'oran has a very similar legacy and comparably violent content. Nevertheless, it is an official history of the civilization that authored it, although by no means a complete collection.

You also need to know that it is a curated anthology, and much of its content is known to be redacted. Human politics and nationalism is never far away from celestial religion.

So, whether you like it or not, this is the legacy that is contained in "that Book in your hands," should you care to slog through it all. And I think that you should, at least once, because, "an unexamined faith is not worth having." Learn all that you can about the religion – if any – that you embrace. (And the same is very much true about "scientific theories!")

Greetings again 'ol buddy. I stopped reading, as of yet anyway, right at the above quoted sentence because this is an absolute falsehood. It has been observed, documented, and even freeze-sampled so anyone who wants to check it can do so, noted and explained
--- HERE ---
that 12 species of e.coli as a starting population in 1988 has by 2016 undergone some 66,000 generations, offering the ability to observe a lifeform with compressed, accelerated gestation period to show us what would have taken nearly a million years in humans, and this is but one such example of experimental observation of Evolution in action.

More to the understanding of The Common Man is the recent observation in the wild (full article -- Scientists Watch New Species Evolved -- ) of the Finch family on Galapagos Island.

It is an all too common "argument" of fundamentalists that so-called Macro-Evolution has never been observed, when it has indeed been seen and for hundreds of years just not in total continuity until the 20th Century and in the wild and as a live process until now.... but here it is and it can no longer be denied by anyone with any intellectual integrity.

Please do not take the reference to "intellectual integrity" as any kind of argument simply from authority because all of us have compromised integrity in this regard. For some odd reason we, essentially all humans, do not commonly integrate what we know with our minds with what our brains perceive. A glaring example, one of thousands if not millions, is that all of us, every single human on Planet Earth in every language, knows what it means and describes it the same, as "Sunrise" and "Sunset", because that's what our eye-brain connection sees while over 90% of human minds now knows that is NOT what is actually happening.... yet we persist.

Tradition and Legacy are extremely powerful and exceedingly long-lived forces. Our automobiles are the size they are because of the longevity of Roman-built roads which were made to accommodate two passenger abreast Roman Chariots which the roads obviously outlived. In your area of expertise, software, even though Apple's system to increase directly addressable RAM to 16MB, remove segmenting limitations and several other revolutionary quantum leaps, failed to beat out DOS (causing Billy's famous remark "I don't see why anyone would ever need more than 1MB RAM") which literally took it to the bank by pandering to investment in Legacy and human short-sightedness.

So please, if only for your own integrity, find some other argument, if you must, since this one is provably invalid.

Thanks again hazel for expanding on your point of view.

At this point I won't argue but just point out two minor items to consider. Words in an of themselves are symbols so ALL language is symbolic. In this regard I cannot in good conscience offer any special privilege to any Bible or even begin to comprehend anyone's allegiance to the idea that any of them has come down to us uninterpreted, unaltered and by design to be "the literal Word of God". Even if, for sake of argument, I assume it it is for a moment, it is obvious that Mankind does not "get it" since the wild variety of interpretations is so apparent.

Similarly I take issue with "justified" as it applies to some cultures interpretation of Evolution. To take 'survival of the fittest" to mean "survival of the most predatory" I find to be entirely self-serving for fascists such as National Socialists in turn of the century Germany and also elsewhere. That is not at all what Evolution states, let alone, implies. It is only a very small part of that formula. Sometimes the meek do inherit while the "big and bad" go extinct. On the largest Big Picture level it is an interdependent continuum much like the conundrum of Vampirism. If predation is ultimately successful, it is explicitly also doomed.

e. coli in a Petri dish still has not turned into a monkey – nor streptococcus. Nor is it ever likely to do so.

We can readily observe species evolution at work. But, we also see that the process has limits. Sexual reproduction has limits, too. A jaguar can't mate with a leopard. Either a jaguar will produce another jaguar, or nothing at all. Therefore, what I am calling "conjecture" is the hypothesis that the vast diversity of life on this planet somehow has occurred in spite of these strictures, thanks to (hand-waving here ...) "billions and billions™" of years.

I suspect that we have never observed this "other" process at work – or, if we did, we didn't recognize it. So, we took what we can readily observe, waved billions of years at it, and called it a theory. I am very simply not persuaded that this conjecture holds water, no matter how many aeons may be stirred into the pot.

Instead, I think that species evolution is a rapid-adaptation mechanism that is nevertheless tightly constrained. I speculate that these constraints serve to actively prevent the kind of changes that are fundamental to "evolution as a scientific creation myth." I suspect that there is something else that we do not suspect ... yet. I cannot and do not speculate just what it might be, nor how rapidly it acts.

Come on sundial. Evolution never stated a pear tree would bear apples either and in fact shows the progression as a fairly smooth continuum because of usually small changes over a great deal of time. As for mammal interspecies reproduction not only are there domesticated examples but in this thread the Texan red wolf as a result of wolf-coyote breeding has already been noted. Nobody has ever claimed the last word is in on Evolution or any other Science for that matter. Of course there is more to know but much like gravity that we don't understand very well at all especially why it is so incredibly weak compared to the other 3 fundamental forces, we do know enough to have confidence that we won't go flying off the planet unless we want to and apply an exactly calculable amount of energy to do so and navigate our solar system with superb, even heroic levels of accuracy. zthere will undoubtedly be refinements to Evolution but the base concept and the bulk of how it is understood today will remain terra firma at the very least within the constraints of Life on Earth.

So how is that "hopeless conjecture"?

And actually a jaguar can mate with a leopard. The result is called a
jagupard.

One of the reasons I monitor this thread so regularly is to try to be a part of the influence that recognizes the actual value of the Scientific Method and how it totally transformed the world as it existed circa ~1850 well up into the very early 20th Century. We take so much for granted these days (familiarity breeds contempt?) that we all mostly forget, never knew or conveniently ignore the absolute Sea Change in civilization due to Science.

Not only are very basic and often unseen conditions like sewage treatment and clean water supply that recent where prior to the 20th century drinking water was very often a death sentence and health and medicine in such primitive and shoddy state that death during childbirth was utterly commonplace. The chlorination of drinking water was an important tipping point and a direct result of scientists like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who in the late 17th and early 18th began to explore what is invisible to the human eye, and previous to then, human consciousness.

Move forward to the present where quite literally some 90% of what we work with, what we know as important, and what we use on a regular basis - Medicine, Electricity, Electronics, even construction materials - owe their existence to "the unseeable" at least without the aid of technology. Yet despite this simple fact, many still hang on to primitive notions that our unaided 5 senses are all we need to know the Truth. The very reason that The Renaissance took some 300 years to become actualized is the time and effort it took to build a solid foundatiuon, a body of reliable knowledge based on Evidence and Logic instead of Fear and Superstition.

The sooner Humanity integrates Brain and Mind the better off all of us will be..... IMHO, of course.

The irony is, people keep pointing out counterexamples to your wild claims - but you won't recognize it.