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Young earth, created about 6,000 years ago through intelligent design, and global flood about 4,000 years ago, are better supported by unadulterated science, than is the pseudo science of millions and billions of years and chance. There is far too much order in things to have arrived by chance.
I do sincerely hope this was with tongue firmly in cheek. It was, right?
Tons of confirmation of young earth are to be found outside the textbooks used in public educational curricula, and there is yet any part of the Bible to be disproven. The process of serious attempts to disprove generally results in athiests becoming believers in Christ and the Bible. One such, who I like listening to, and have for hundreds of hours, is Walter Veith. One I'm less familiar with as yet is Walt Brown.
To me, "Genesis 1 and 2" are a beautiful poem, meant to be sung. You can easily find videos of it being sung in the original language. I think that it was meant to be metaphorical, not literal truth. All cultures have their own version of a "creation myth," and it doesn't bother me at all to think of this as another one. I don't require it nor expect it to be literal truth.
I think that the planet is extremely old and that it has had life on it for a very long time. I have no idea where it all came from. I think about it sometimes, but I have no answers.
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 05-11-2022 at 11:00 AM.
All I'm going to say on this is that the Discovery "Institute" has not only been found to come to conclusions that suit their agenda with ZERO objective evidence, they've been caught outright knowingly lying. If anyone needs to believe that junk, hey... whatever twirls your beanie but it is FAR from actual Science.
They were the crowd in the Dover "Monkey" Trials in the early 2000's and it is now a matter of public record how they tried to rebrand Creationism as Intelligent Design, and lied about it on the stand, in order to get their mythology taught as actual Science in schools. Thankfully they failed. They are despicable liars and fakers who have taken Jesuit Equivocation to new depths of immorality and intellectual dishonesty.
To me, "Genesis 1 and 2" are a beautiful poem, meant to be sung.
Gen 1 is definitely a poem. It has a repetitive structure of six verses, each followed by a refrain:
Code:
"And God said, "Let there be ---. And there was ---. And God made---.
And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the nth day"
Each day has an evening part where a creative act of God is seen from the outside as it were. God says, "Let there be..." and there is! Then we have the morning half of the same day (Jewish days started at sunset) which shows the same act of creation seen from within our world as a process taking place over time, the way a scientist would see it.
This is followed by a coda:
Code:
And on the seventh day God rested from His work. And he looked at all that he had created and it was very good!
I see nothing here that any modern scientist would quarrel with.
Genesis 2 is quite different. It doesn't have the repetitive structures of a Hebrew poem and seems to have originated as a folk story. I regard it as an allegory. The Man and The Woman (they don't yet have names) are the male and female halves of the human race. Woman is presented as Man's ezer kenegdo, the rescuer appropriate to his need. All the animals are presented to him as possible rescuers from his loneliness (the first thing in the created world which is described as "not good") but they all fail the test because they are not kenegdo, i.e. they are not of an appropriate kind for him. (Wittgenstein once said that if a lion could talk, he could tell us nothing that we would understand.) Another man would be kenegdo but he could not be an ezer, a rescuer, because whatever was wrong with the first man would be wrong with all men! What is needed is one who is sufficiently different from the Man to act as his rescuer but sufficiently alike to be able to share his mind. And this is Woman.
Again, there is no conflict here with science because it is not that kind of story.
Yes, and also notice that "male and female created He them," but not humans. "Huh?"
Of course this cannot be anything but allegory. To suggest anything else is, at least to me, "quite silly, and unnecessary."
I feel the same way about "Let There Be." It's a myth, and "myth" is not a bad word. Every society has them, and this one is a song.
If you engage in calisthenics trying to portray it as "literal truth," I'm just going to smile and look at you strangely. "Why bother? It is what it is. Let it go."
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 05-11-2022 at 06:33 PM.
I think that "creation" in all of its forms is a legitimate subject that should be taught in schools as a part of social science classes, because every society has its own version of "First Man" and "First Woman," and of the Gods who came before them. It is a rich and luxurious tapestry, and the Judaic version of it is even more glorious for being fashioned as a song. I know that there have been entire University courses which were constructed as a systematic exploration of and a comparison of these ancient stories.
But – it isn't "science," and the two notions should never be conflated. Neither are the two ever in opposition to one another. One of the great privileges of Deity is the prerogative to keep secrets.
Never tell kids that anyone "has all the answers." What they really need to be shown is the exploration. Show them these two entirely-different and unrelated strategies which have been used by humans since the dawn of human time. But, don't try to pick a winner: that's not the point. (In fact, "the point is" that there isn't one. As the bumper-sticker says: "Coexist.")
We have religion. We have science. Treasure them both.
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 05-11-2022 at 06:56 PM.
They are despicable liars and fakers who have taken Jesuit Equivocation to new depths of immorality and intellectua dishonesty.
You obviously don't know the Jesuits very well The Jesuits have been banned at some stage in most countries they are in.
The Young Earthers are imho more sad than bad. But they know, and everyone else goes to hell. It's just a different strain of the virus, like they have Omicron whereas most of you have the Delta Variant.
As for the "Creation" exchange of views: It never ceases to amaze me that if you can say anything about a Bible passage (e.g. "Genesis 1 is poetry" or "Some berks think Isaiah has 2 authors despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary") or sundialsvcs with his own unique take on Jewish/Roman history, that seems enough for you to ignore the sometimes very weighty messages contained therein.
Remember, these are very old books. In fact, they originated as oral history, passed down from fathers to sons who memorized them. There were no digital error-correction codes associated with them in those days.
The books are also very much about war. These were warrior people who conquered their neighbors, were conquered by them, and often got carted off into captivity for extended periods of time. The writings and prophecies were clearly of their war god, promising rescue from their defeats while also blaming the people (their "sins") for those defeats. These were the motivations for much of what was written by their "prophets," who never prophesied that "the sun will come up in the morning and you will have a very nice day."
We can study the writing style of the surviving texts and speculate about their provenance, but we can never know. This is true even of books like the entirety of the New Testament, which were authored and distributed in comparatively modern civilizations – ancient Greece and Rome. Some of them do appear to certain scholars to have been written by different people at different times, then brought together into a single document. But we can never know.
The Bible that we now have is a compilation that was developed by committee. Some writings were considered to be "canonical," while we know of and now have easily-online copies of many others which were not. "National and international politics was always an important factor in everything, including all of those decisions. We don't have surviving record of all of them: there are things we will never know unless some future shepherd throws another rock into a cave and hears pottery breaking.
"And so, here we are."
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 05-13-2022 at 09:43 AM.
You obviously don't know the Jesuits very well The Jesuits have been banned at some stage in most countries they are in.
While it is entirely possible you know more about the Jesuits than I do, being banned is not evidence of anything but a popularity contest IMHO. It might have been more prudent of me to have never brought the Jesuits up because it actually doesn't change how despicable The Discover Institute really is. I have to admit that in High School I was for a time fascinated with Guy Fawkes and The Gunpowder Plot and spent some time trying to develop a probability for who wrote the anonymous "rat out" letter that foiled the plot.
Parallel to that having read that a few members of Jesuit Clergy apparently openly rationalized "equivocation", lying to spread the faith, I sought documentation from the time that didn't sport the somewhat obvious bias of the opposing faction. There wasn't a lot I could find in just 3 libraries in Baltimore and Washington, DC (it was the 1960s, long before The Webz) but I did find a handful of "horses mouth" vindication of the concept. It wasn't mere slurs from "the enemy". At least some of the upper echelon Jesuits did justify lying in a rather Machiavellian fashion.
Again, that has no bearing on discovery.org other than as a comparison of "birds of a feather".
Quote:
Originally Posted by business_kid
The Young Earthers are imho more sad than bad. But they know, and everyone else goes to hell. It's just a different strain of the virus, like they have Omicron whereas most of you have the Delta Variant.
I agree it is sad, very sad, but it is also bad. Not only is it bad to seek to have non-science taught in schools as actual Science, to lend it an Official Stamp of Approval and Validity, but it speaks volumes on their role as the typical dogmatic "Do as I say, not as I do" despotism anathema to Truth and Knowledge, not to mention a terrible role model for anyone, let alone children.... obvious indoctrination intent.
Quote:
Originally Posted by business_kid
As for the "Creation" exchange of views: It never ceases to amaze me that if you can say anything about a Bible passage (e.g. "Genesis 1 is poetry" or "Some berks think Isaiah has 2 authors despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary") or sundialsvcs with his own unique take on Jewish/Roman history, that seems enough for you to ignore the sometimes very weighty messages contained therein.
Do you understand that I commend you for your devotion? You appear to be "All In" and I do respect that all the while I question the means by which you arrived at such a conclusion. I have never denied the value of scripture... ANY scripture, at the very least as a part of The Human Story, but also the entire saga of how it/they came down to us, evolving over time, interpreted and re-interprted, outlawed and modified, and still manages to carry some, as you put it, "weighty messages". I just adamantly disagree that it is any manner or divine revelation let alone, literal.
Not that my opinion on this matters one whit but I happen to think you do belong here. If thousands of post were of the same basic point of view from my POV that would be a complete waste of "space". As it is, it seems there is something of value in these many pages for anybody who cares to glean a little overview from many sides.
"Until we encounter these weird little unexplainable things." Such as my grandfather's account of having encountered a man who rang his doorbell on a cold winter's day and asked him for a coat – which he provided. He then turned around briefly to call for my grandmother to also come to the door, and when he turned back the man was gone.
My grandfather searched the yard of his very small house, and the very small end of the very small road upon which it stood, and found nothing. There was absolutely no place where this man could have gone. He had disappeared ... along with my grandfather's coat.
"An angel?" Well, that's what he said it was. With due respect to both of them, I might not myself choose to go that far. But I will choose to accept that they honestly described what they saw, and like them I cannot rationally explain it. But I also do not choose to, nor do I need to.
As for me, I'm just not ready to dismiss these "strange things that sometimes are said to happen." Because there are just too many of them, and because I'm not at all ready to say that I have the answers. My grandfather related this story to me, and I will never consider him nor his wife to have been a liar: "I believe that they saw what they saw, even though there is no rational explanation."
"Instead, I wonder." And, even perhaps, I marvel. What a very strange world this is ... "is this cool, or what?!"
So ... just maybe ... things like religion really are just as "valid" as science. Perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss either of them ... let alone to pit one of them against the other in some fight to the death.
Perhaps both of these human perspectives have something "valid" to teach us ... both at the same time. In a world that is, just perhaps, far more irrational(!) than we comfortably care to consider.
"Think outside the [ box | science | dogma ] ..." Who says that any of them has to "win?"
Last edited by sundialsvcs; 05-13-2022 at 08:40 PM.
I imagine everyone here is aware of a precept that most scientists accept as an axiom. It's origin is steeped in blurry controversy but best evidence seems to favor J.B.S Haldane in 1927 who wrote "“the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Science accepts limitations and mystery. Often it is referred to as "singularity" when even Mathematics can model what we vaguely observe. Many singularities get "chipped away" and refined over time. Progress does exist.
To a somewhat lesser extent than Pure Science, Philosophy does adapt and evolve. However I think this is anathema to Religion or at least on a vastly longer, slower time scale. As long as religion confines itself ton the Spiritual Mysteries, there is zero conflict between it and Science, so there is, and can be, no winner and no loser. It is only in areas where Religion tries to define the Natural World, especially through ancient beliefs, that Religion comes onto conflict with Science, and such philosophies fueled by rigid binary (and ancient) conclusions are doomed to fail, and in that regard, lose.
Be very careful, @enorbet, that you do not equate "religion" with "The Roman Catholic Church,™" which is in fact a very distinct thing, and in its own way extremely governmental i.e. political.
"Religion" is broader than that. It doesn't [necessarily] have a Pope.
While I do harbor substantial animosity toward The Church of Rome at the very least for both condemning Galileo and taking 300 years to set the record straight and apologize, I also do recognize that despite their agonizingly slow pace early on, they eschew literal interpretation of scripture and later championed actual scientific discovery, so Catholic record is a bit all over the map, unlike fundamentalist Christian sects and other fundamentalist religions. There are a few exceptions like Buddhism and Brahmanism. Carl Sagan even noted how Brahman espoused a sort of Deep Time view that is remarkably consistent with the actual age of the Universe but considered it cyclical and as of yet that is still an unknown.
I'm suspect that the majority of Young/Flat Earth-Centric believers are not Catholic and far more likely to be literal interpreters like the many Southern Baptist sects (cults?) and other fundamentalists.
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