NOTE: This is not a research paper. It is a blog containing my thoughts. Nothing that I've said is to be taken as absolute. Most of this was written without consulting other sources at the time of writing. Information was taken from memory in most cases and so is not cited.
I work with a guy who was raised in a Christian home but departed from the faith as a teenager and has begun to slowly return to it, albeit a very different one than he left behind a few years ago. Like me, he is tired of religious ceremony and of the pomp and circumstance displayed by many in church, and of the hypocrisy that tends to run rampant through the lives of believers. However, unlike me, he takes a liberal, often extremely liberal, view of life whereas I am more conservative. One day while discussion the problems with "churches" and Christianity he asked me why Christians don't do more about global warming. I didn't know what to tell him then aside from mentioning that I had read that many Christians don't believe it is happening or else don't believe that it is as big a problem as it is made out to be by the media and politicians.
I still am no expert on global warming and the arguments for or against it. I do my part to combat it by making sure loads of laundry are bigger, doing dishes by hand instead of using the dishwasher, buying a car with better fuel economy instead of the beefed up fast one that I was looking at, using those new halogen light bulbs instead of the old incandescent ones, etc. I do all this, not because I believe humans are increasing the temperature of the globe, or altering climates to the point where mass extinctions are a given if we don't cut it out, but because it doesn't hurt anything or anyone to do it. To my knowledge, even the biggest alarmest can not imagine a circumstance where using less oil, water and electricity will cause irreparable damage to the earth, so I don't mind doing my part to be responsible with the resources I use.
The reason that I have not joined the green side and why I will not parade arrogantly around with a condescending T-shirt that says "Save the Earth You Idiot!" or something similar is probably much the same reason that I don't believe in evolution. That is, I feel the people arguing in favour of global warming have more to gain from it being true than those arguing against it have to gain from it not being true.
For example, Kyoto costs one trillion dollars a year for full implementation according to one article I read. Who gets that money? Chances are most of the money goes to scientists and engineers who try to come up with alternative energy resources and the machines that use them. Since 1990, and probably even earlier, global warming has been big business. Scientists have devoted their entire careers to studying the effects of a warmer globe. In order to get the funding necessary to continue their research they have to show that the globe is in fact warming. But many of these scientists are not climatologists, they are biologists who study the effects of a warmer climate on animals in a particular area of the world. That's great. I'm sure there are many good uses for such information. But when they speak about what caused the warming, they are speaking outside of their field of expertise, in other words as layman.
I once read that most scientists whose degree is in climateology are on the skeptics side of the debate. I have not done a thorough examination to see if this is true, but I have done some looking and it seems as though many climateologists are actually against this global warming alarmism that has taken control of the media. Many of them suggest that the warming of globe is a natural phenomenon that has happened many times before and will continue to happen as long as the earth goes on, and that it always has and always will be followed by a cooling period. In the seventies some were worried about global cooling, predicting that an ice age was imminent if something wasn't done. The following quote bears this out:
"It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.
I'm quite certain that many on the global warming side would say that the quote is taken out of context or that Lowell Ponte was an idiot, quack, fringe thinker, fundamentalist, etc. They may or may not be right. I don't know who he is except that he seems to have been a radio announcer and former roaming editor of Reader's Digest. To my knowledge he had no qulaifying credentials. The only reason that I quote him is that there must have been some reason for him to have said that. Take it how you will.
Lastly, I should say that I don't side with the alarmists because they act like bullies. Much the same way as evolutionists snub their noses at anyone who would question their beliefs, so too it seems that those who support global warming do it to those who are skeptical of it, even going so far as to call them 'deniers' thereby equating them to, or at least drawing comparisions to Holocaust deniers. This reason is of course very unscientific. Whether or not global warming is true is entirely independant of the attitudes of those who support it. But over the years I have come to mistrust those people. I've seen the way they can ignore facts and get away with it because most people agree with them and will never give ear to the opposition. I've seen the way science has become a popularity contest more than an intelligent inquiry into the way the world works. Unlike most, I've come to the conclusion that the small voice in the background is usually more trustworthy than the trumpet blower on the pedastal.
You don't have to agree with me. I already know most people don't and never will. I'm not concerned with convincing you otherwise, just explaining myself and in so doing learning a bit more about hwy I believe what I do because, until you've explained yourself, I don't see how you can really know what you believe.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
The Time's, They Are A-Changin'
Shortly after I became a Christian I began to realize that something was just not right. I seemed to go through periods of highs and lows in my faith and I thought that was just normal and that everyone did it. But soon my lows began to severely outpace my highs, and in the beginning, I found myself often questioning whether or not there even is a God. To get out of my lows I would often search the internet for Christian material and I would learn something new about my faith and it would fire me up and off I would go to the message boards thinking that I now had the key to converting every last sinner in cyberspace. I had information now that proved I was right, or I had a little anecdote that really described a vital truth that I thought people were missing (because obviously if people didn't agree with me it was because they didn't understand what I was saying.)
At the very beginning it was e-mail forwards that got me revved up. I remember one in particular about a class that was told to bring a picture of someone they were angry at or that they (gasp!) hated, and the teacher put their pictures up on the dartboard and everyone took turns throwing darts at the pictures. Afterwards the teacher took down their pictures and behind it was a holey (yuk-yuk-yuk) picture of Jesus. And I thought "Oh yeah. Hey that's neat. When we throw darts at people we are also throwing darts at Jesus. Therefore Christianity is true!" I forwarded that little nugget of soul-saving truth off to all of my friends in my contacts list. A few of them wrote back with some of the harshest words that were ever spoken to me. Words that people who hate me would hear and say "Whoa. That's a little harsh, dude." And we got into arguments, and I lost some friends at that point.
Eventually I moved on to apologetics. I would read C.S. Lewis and suggest him to all of my hethen friends thinking that if cutesy little e-mail forwards didn't do the trick then surely an Oxford Scholar would do the trick. Some people refused to even look at him and others suggested that he was one of the worst arguers in the world and that only an idiot would be taken in by his lies. (I think that's taking it a little far actually but whatever.) I presented arguments about how the Bible was put together by 40 different authors, comprising of 66 books, written over thousands of years and is completely congruent. I soon found out that not all people believe the Bible to be completely congruent, or that it was written by 66 authors, or that it took thousands of years.
Later still I found my faith under attack by my college professors, most of whom flatly stated that since evolution was true, Christianity could not be; and also, science had disproved miracles, including explaining the 10 plagues of Egypt (mind you their explanation fails because it only explains how the river could have turned red and not how the water in all the Egyptian basins but not the Israelite ones could have, but that's beside the point.) I almost fell to this attack, but while searching the internet I came across some people who believed that the earth was only six thousand years old and that it was created in six days. Most importantly they had lists of quotes from evolutionists admitting that evolution was either not the water tight theory/fact that we were taught it was, or even some that said it had been proven impossible!!
Well, you better believe I copied those quotes wholesale and pasted them in every discussion forum I knew of. And I hit the post button with a grim satisfaction as I imagined the jaws of all the damned evolutionist-atheists hitting their respective computer desks as their evolutionary worldview crumbled around them.
I waited impatiently for the first response so that I could start witnessing to these poor lost souls. And the first one I got was something like this. "What are you fu*%&ng stupid? Those quotes don't prove anything! They were taken out of context (which considering that taking things out of context is their favourite means of biblical interpretation I was a bit surprised to read.) And even if some weren't, it only proves that one scientist is as stupid as you. Die already. Your impeding our species evolutionary progress." (I think that he failed to understand that, if evolution were true, he still would never experience being more evolved than he was now and therefore impediment of evolution shouldn't really concern him. But whatever.)
My studies of creation continued and as you may have read in my previous post, I moved on to more qualified websites run by real scientists with real degress from secular Universities. I figured that people would at least have to accept that not all "thinking" people were evolutionists and that they would give ear to the arguments made by people much more qualified than themselves. But, as with the previous cases, my vision was left unrealized as I received insult after insult for stating my views.
By this point in time I was beginning to develop a caustic attitude toward people. I would argue for the sake of arguing, I would enter debates I didn't really care about just to fight with people. And I bore real pains from the comments of people who I felt I was trying to help. At this point I realized that I was doing it but I was so angry that I didn't care. I just wanted to rile them up.
But not too long ago I read a book about relational Christianity called "So You Don't Want To Go To Church Anymore" by Jake Colson (Which is actually a combination of two guys names, but I don't remember their names right now.) It's main thrust was getting away from institutionalized Christianity and into a relationship with each other and with Christ that most people only ever dream of. One of the big points was learning to trust God with EVERYTHING in your life. About trusting that God will ensure we have enough to get through today, though he made not have made his provisions for two weeks from now clear. If you think you believe in God here's a thought experiement for you. If you felt that something you were doing at work was in violation of what Christ would want for you, would you quit your job on the spot and trust God to carry you through your day to day life until he saw fit to bless you with another job ? (And it's a possibility that he may never do that.) If your answer is not an emphatic yes then it would seem that you don't fully trust God, or fully believe in him. Or at the very least you are not following him with all that you have. God said he would take care of you and provide you with what you need to get through the day. If you can't put everything, including your finances and sense of security into God's hands then you don't trust him to fulfill that promise.
But what does this have to do with what I began writing about? Well, there was a point in the book where the main character, Jake, was admonished by the teacher character, John, to stop always trying to push his beliefs on other people. John wasn't endorsing pluralism (the idea that there is more than one path to God), he was just saying that out job is just to help people along on their journey. It's up to the Spirit of God to convict and change people and He's doing it in the most efficient way possible. When witnessing becomes about getting other people to agree with you more than it is about sharing Christ's love and helping them to be set free from the bondage of sin and society (including institutionalized church), we are only getting in God's way.
It is one of the most freeing feelings I've had in years to realize that I don't need to make people believe what I do. That all is not lost if people don't believe in a literal creation or even if they leave conversations with me believing there is no God. I no longer feel the intense need to have my beliefs confirmed by other people. I no longer feel that I have to be hard as a rock, never admitting that I could be wrong, as if admitting it would make it so, or not admitting it would do the opposite.
I think "church" as most people understand it doesn't help people to get past these things. "Church" is a passive thing where we go and we perform a comfortable (if boring) routine and we get told how it is. We are taught that the person standing at the front has a special annointing from God and that whatever they say is true. We believe that since they went to school that they know more than we can about the Bible. And that may be true in all of the senses that don't matter such as various ways in which it is translated, how it came to be put together and so on. But the real teacher of all truths that you hold dear is the Holy Spirit and he was poured out on to all believers. That's not to say that you can't learn anything from anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. No matter who you are, you can learn something from everyone. Or such is my belief. Take it or leave it, or take some and leave the rest. But I feel that I'm on a better path than I was simply because I no longer feel bound by the truth, but set free instead.
At the very beginning it was e-mail forwards that got me revved up. I remember one in particular about a class that was told to bring a picture of someone they were angry at or that they (gasp!) hated, and the teacher put their pictures up on the dartboard and everyone took turns throwing darts at the pictures. Afterwards the teacher took down their pictures and behind it was a holey (yuk-yuk-yuk) picture of Jesus. And I thought "Oh yeah. Hey that's neat. When we throw darts at people we are also throwing darts at Jesus. Therefore Christianity is true!" I forwarded that little nugget of soul-saving truth off to all of my friends in my contacts list. A few of them wrote back with some of the harshest words that were ever spoken to me. Words that people who hate me would hear and say "Whoa. That's a little harsh, dude." And we got into arguments, and I lost some friends at that point.
Eventually I moved on to apologetics. I would read C.S. Lewis and suggest him to all of my hethen friends thinking that if cutesy little e-mail forwards didn't do the trick then surely an Oxford Scholar would do the trick. Some people refused to even look at him and others suggested that he was one of the worst arguers in the world and that only an idiot would be taken in by his lies. (I think that's taking it a little far actually but whatever.) I presented arguments about how the Bible was put together by 40 different authors, comprising of 66 books, written over thousands of years and is completely congruent. I soon found out that not all people believe the Bible to be completely congruent, or that it was written by 66 authors, or that it took thousands of years.
Later still I found my faith under attack by my college professors, most of whom flatly stated that since evolution was true, Christianity could not be; and also, science had disproved miracles, including explaining the 10 plagues of Egypt (mind you their explanation fails because it only explains how the river could have turned red and not how the water in all the Egyptian basins but not the Israelite ones could have, but that's beside the point.) I almost fell to this attack, but while searching the internet I came across some people who believed that the earth was only six thousand years old and that it was created in six days. Most importantly they had lists of quotes from evolutionists admitting that evolution was either not the water tight theory/fact that we were taught it was, or even some that said it had been proven impossible!!
Well, you better believe I copied those quotes wholesale and pasted them in every discussion forum I knew of. And I hit the post button with a grim satisfaction as I imagined the jaws of all the damned evolutionist-atheists hitting their respective computer desks as their evolutionary worldview crumbled around them.
I waited impatiently for the first response so that I could start witnessing to these poor lost souls. And the first one I got was something like this. "What are you fu*%&ng stupid? Those quotes don't prove anything! They were taken out of context (which considering that taking things out of context is their favourite means of biblical interpretation I was a bit surprised to read.) And even if some weren't, it only proves that one scientist is as stupid as you. Die already. Your impeding our species evolutionary progress." (I think that he failed to understand that, if evolution were true, he still would never experience being more evolved than he was now and therefore impediment of evolution shouldn't really concern him. But whatever.)
My studies of creation continued and as you may have read in my previous post, I moved on to more qualified websites run by real scientists with real degress from secular Universities. I figured that people would at least have to accept that not all "thinking" people were evolutionists and that they would give ear to the arguments made by people much more qualified than themselves. But, as with the previous cases, my vision was left unrealized as I received insult after insult for stating my views.
By this point in time I was beginning to develop a caustic attitude toward people. I would argue for the sake of arguing, I would enter debates I didn't really care about just to fight with people. And I bore real pains from the comments of people who I felt I was trying to help. At this point I realized that I was doing it but I was so angry that I didn't care. I just wanted to rile them up.
But not too long ago I read a book about relational Christianity called "So You Don't Want To Go To Church Anymore" by Jake Colson (Which is actually a combination of two guys names, but I don't remember their names right now.) It's main thrust was getting away from institutionalized Christianity and into a relationship with each other and with Christ that most people only ever dream of. One of the big points was learning to trust God with EVERYTHING in your life. About trusting that God will ensure we have enough to get through today, though he made not have made his provisions for two weeks from now clear. If you think you believe in God here's a thought experiement for you. If you felt that something you were doing at work was in violation of what Christ would want for you, would you quit your job on the spot and trust God to carry you through your day to day life until he saw fit to bless you with another job ? (And it's a possibility that he may never do that.) If your answer is not an emphatic yes then it would seem that you don't fully trust God, or fully believe in him. Or at the very least you are not following him with all that you have. God said he would take care of you and provide you with what you need to get through the day. If you can't put everything, including your finances and sense of security into God's hands then you don't trust him to fulfill that promise.
But what does this have to do with what I began writing about? Well, there was a point in the book where the main character, Jake, was admonished by the teacher character, John, to stop always trying to push his beliefs on other people. John wasn't endorsing pluralism (the idea that there is more than one path to God), he was just saying that out job is just to help people along on their journey. It's up to the Spirit of God to convict and change people and He's doing it in the most efficient way possible. When witnessing becomes about getting other people to agree with you more than it is about sharing Christ's love and helping them to be set free from the bondage of sin and society (including institutionalized church), we are only getting in God's way.
It is one of the most freeing feelings I've had in years to realize that I don't need to make people believe what I do. That all is not lost if people don't believe in a literal creation or even if they leave conversations with me believing there is no God. I no longer feel the intense need to have my beliefs confirmed by other people. I no longer feel that I have to be hard as a rock, never admitting that I could be wrong, as if admitting it would make it so, or not admitting it would do the opposite.
I think "church" as most people understand it doesn't help people to get past these things. "Church" is a passive thing where we go and we perform a comfortable (if boring) routine and we get told how it is. We are taught that the person standing at the front has a special annointing from God and that whatever they say is true. We believe that since they went to school that they know more than we can about the Bible. And that may be true in all of the senses that don't matter such as various ways in which it is translated, how it came to be put together and so on. But the real teacher of all truths that you hold dear is the Holy Spirit and he was poured out on to all believers. That's not to say that you can't learn anything from anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. No matter who you are, you can learn something from everyone. Or such is my belief. Take it or leave it, or take some and leave the rest. But I feel that I'm on a better path than I was simply because I no longer feel bound by the truth, but set free instead.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Sorry Dude, but no
I just came across the following quote on the blog of an evolutionary biology Ph.D candidate:
"Sexual selection is our most elegant confirmation of [Darwin's] central tenet that the struggle of individuals for reproductive success drives evolution-a notion that natural selection cannot adequately confirm because its products are also the predictions of other evolutionary theories (and also, for optimal design, of creationism itself). The proof that our world is Darwinian lies in the large set of adaptations arising only because they enhance reproductive success but otherwise both hinder organisms and harm species."
-Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile
My beef is with the part about proof that our world is Darwinian. Sexual selection does not prove the world to be Darwinian and more than it proves Biblical creation. It's true that it's one of many possibilities we could expect from Darwinian evolution, but it also fits perfectly well with creation because of one factor that evolutionists seem to either forget or have trouble grasping; the fall.
I once heard that in thousands of years humans will be divided into two groups. One as ugly as trolls or ogres and one with incredibly beautiful people because of people's tendencies to marry those with a similar level of attractiveness. From a biblical perspective, ugliness would be caused my a mutation that deformed God's perfect creation, combined with our fallen sense of desire. As physical deformities (i.e. uneven eyes, big noses, too much body hair, slanted brow, etc.) became more pronounced in some, they began to be selected against by those with none or very small deformities or what have become highly desirable features. Some of these highly desirable features are harmful, such as overly small waists and overly large breasts.
From a Darwinian standpoint, overly large breasts would be a disadvantage for a woman who needed to escape a predator, and diseases like anorexia and bulimia stem from the desire to have an overly small waist. Clearly if it were only up to natural selection these things would be selected against and disappear.
From a biblical standpoint, these things are to be expected. As our desires wander further away from Godly desires we come to appreciate things that are not good for us, and that are shallow and meaningless. The evolutionists see something that no perfect God would have created. Their uniformitarian glasses have blinded them. The present is certainly not the key to the past here. God created perfection, and man ruined it through sin. The things we desire in a sexual partner are very likely not what we would have desired when God created us.
Sexual selection is evidence of the fall, not proof that the world is in fact Darwinian.
-Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile
My beef is with the part about proof that our world is Darwinian. Sexual selection does not prove the world to be Darwinian and more than it proves Biblical creation. It's true that it's one of many possibilities we could expect from Darwinian evolution, but it also fits perfectly well with creation because of one factor that evolutionists seem to either forget or have trouble grasping; the fall.
I once heard that in thousands of years humans will be divided into two groups. One as ugly as trolls or ogres and one with incredibly beautiful people because of people's tendencies to marry those with a similar level of attractiveness. From a biblical perspective, ugliness would be caused my a mutation that deformed God's perfect creation, combined with our fallen sense of desire. As physical deformities (i.e. uneven eyes, big noses, too much body hair, slanted brow, etc.) became more pronounced in some, they began to be selected against by those with none or very small deformities or what have become highly desirable features. Some of these highly desirable features are harmful, such as overly small waists and overly large breasts.
From a Darwinian standpoint, overly large breasts would be a disadvantage for a woman who needed to escape a predator, and diseases like anorexia and bulimia stem from the desire to have an overly small waist. Clearly if it were only up to natural selection these things would be selected against and disappear.
From a biblical standpoint, these things are to be expected. As our desires wander further away from Godly desires we come to appreciate things that are not good for us, and that are shallow and meaningless. The evolutionists see something that no perfect God would have created. Their uniformitarian glasses have blinded them. The present is certainly not the key to the past here. God created perfection, and man ruined it through sin. The things we desire in a sexual partner are very likely not what we would have desired when God created us.
Sexual selection is evidence of the fall, not proof that the world is in fact Darwinian.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Kent Hovind
Kent Hovind holds a very special place in my heart. It used to be a place of reverence, but now it's a place of pitied admiration. If you know who Kent Hovind is then you've probably already formed a negative opinion of me based on that last sentence. I'll ask you kindly to reserve judgment until you reach the end.
I became a Christian when I was twenty-three years old. It was a long process from my staunch atheism to Christianity full of flip-flopping and, as the Bible says, being blown in the wind like a reed. My absolute refusal to even imagine that there might be a God subsided a little bit when I was twenty or twenty-one. At that time I was living in squalor in a terrible neighborhood in Toronto, blowing my money on things like pot and ecstasy and eating mostly minute rice with salt and pepper to add flavor. My only exposure to Christ in that time was my roommate who, at the time I thought to be Christian. I've since learned that things he believes resemble on slightly Christianity as taught in the Bible, but he did and does still believe in a god loosely based on the God of the Bible.
If you've ever smoked pot then you know that often times it leads to philosophical/religious discussions. Our tiny apartment would be filled with our stoned friends and we would all be arguing against the possibility of God except for my roommate who would hold his on arguing for God. Eventually I began arguing for both sides. I would give my arguments against God, but I would also point out flaws I saw in arguments from my fellow atheists. It was a very confusing time as I realized that despite my desire to be against God, I was finding myself defending Him.
Eventually one of our friends from back home moved to Toronto to live in our apartment. He wasn't an atheist so much as a dabbler in different things, but one thing he definitely was not was a Christian, which worked for me. He would be another ally, and a good one I figured since he was the mountain top guru type who everyone went to for advice back home.
Arguments ensued as expected but I found him to be less of a useful ally than I had imagined. It's true that when it came to fact free imaginations of philosophy he was quite good at imagining possible alternate realities and various ultimate truths that made sense to those wanting to find sense, but when it came to arguing about Christianity, which true or not, involves facts about what the Bible does and doesn't claim, he wasn't so great. I found myself arguing against him from my very, very limited knowledge of the Bible because he so often said things about Christianity that I knew to be false. And an argument based on a false presumption isn't a lot of good. One day, at the end of my rope, I threw a Bible at him and told him to read it if he was going to argue against it. He went to a bedroom and emerged a day and a half later, threw the Bible on the couch and said, "I believe it." My jaw hit the floor. That wasn't supposed to happen. At that point I was by myself arguing against Christianity, and I was now being told that I too thought many things about the Bible that were unwarranted. But at that point I wasn't ready to read the Bible.
My friend didn't become a Christian that day. He believed what the Bible said, but he wasn't ready to devote his life to God. What caused him to become a Christian was an experience that borders on miraculous. One that no person who has no reason to trust my friend is likely to believe, so I'm keeping it a secret. Even I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen the absolute metamorphosis that it caused in him throughout the years. So great was the change in him that I often look at how little my life has changed in comparison and wonder if I have actually become a Christian.
But I have greatly digressed from my main point and by now my non-existent readers have likely forgotten that this entry is about Kent Hovind, a disgraced young earth creationist from Pensicola, Florida and the special place that he holds in my heart. I'm not quite ready to talk about him yet though, I'm just reminding you why we're here.
I left Toronto having come to believe, as best as I knew how, that Jesus Christ was God, and once again having rejected Him after reading the first chapter of "Farewell to God" by Charles Templeton. I had tired of living in shambles in Toronto and I was moving back in with my parents, and I was angry. Very angry.
It would be another year or so before I became a Christian. My parents had decided to start attending church while I was in Toronto and my mother prodded me constantly to join her for church. All I could do in response was to make fun of her and her beliefs with my brother who to this day remains agnostic/Buddhist/whatever. For some reason I still have a vivid and painful memory of promising my mother that I would attend the Christmas Eve church service with her, only to back out at the last minute to smoke pot with my brother (she didn't know about the pot.) I knew she was hurt by it, but I ignored it thinking, as most non-Christians seem to, that she didn't really believe that nonsense anyways, she just went because that's what people did.
I'd like to say that my conversion was due to some miraculous occurrence like my friends, but it wasn't. Mine was a result of coming into contact with the first real Christian I had seen since I was a child. I saw that being Christian was more than a claim to believe in God, it was a relationship and a lifestyle choice. And I saw that it made people truly happy. I did have an experience at church the Sunday after I met this person that solidified my belief, but I was converted at that point, so it was more of a confirmation.
I developed an insatiable appetite for Christian reading material. I read the Bible, C.S. Lewis, any and all Christian magazines, and a bunch of other things, some of which I probably should have left alone. I reeled at the mistaken ideas that I had held about Christianity and in my naive enthusiasm I began to talk excitedly to my friends about my new found faith expecting them to be happy for me. I felt like I had uncovered the lost city of Atlantis, and everything people had thought about it was wrong and it was my job to sort them out. I experienced my first tastes of anti-Christian bigotry from people I respected, even loved. And it hurt. It hurt knowing that these people had such darkness in them. I knew that they wouldn't believe, but I never thought that they would belittle me or my new faith. I lost a lot of friends in the early days. It was sad to realize that without pot or drinking, I had nothing in common with these people.
Things didn't get any better when I went to college either. I was taking General Arts and Science so I had a wide range of subjects from Children's Literature to Philosophy. It is easy to understand how Christianity would come up in philosophy class, but what I never expected was for it to come up nearly every day for the mere purpose of being ridiculed. Indeed my philosophy professor held Christianity in such contempt that he decided to skip the section on Thomas Aquinas because he had been a Christian philosopher and therefore, according to my professor, had nothing to offer us in this age of enlightened thinking.
It was also hard to understand what relevance Christians and the Bible had to the study of Children's Literature, when the stories studied were neither written by or about Christians or the Bible. Yet it did come up. And it did come up frequently.
So as my professors attacked my faith in every class (even music appreciation), in every case because evolution had, in their minds, proven it to be false, I began to have a crisis of faith. The experience I mentioned having at my first church service as a Christian had confirmed the reality of Christ to me, but my professors had a point. If evolution were true, and it had to be since it was taught to me as such ever since I can remember, and if the earth were very old, which again, it had to be because that's what I had been taught all my life, the the claims of the Bible could not also be true. What was I to trust? A personal experience or everything I had ever been taught in school? I wanted to trust the experience, but as time wore on, I found I couldn't. Then my faith started slipping away, and I soon stopped caring that it was.
It was by accident that I stumbled on to a website called God Said Man Said. It has a weekly webcast where a pastor "proves the veracity of the majority text King James Bible, again and again." The main point is to refute what man says and give evidence why what God says is true. While I no longer believe that it is a good source for creation/evolution information, I still respect it because it was the first place I had ever heard that there were people who believed in a Young Earth and literal creation, and that evolution wasn't the airtight fact that I had been led to believe.
There was a webcast on the site called "Evolution is Dead. They Just Forgot to Bury the Corpse." It was about fifteen or so minutes long and was quote after quote by scientists who said things that showed there were a lot of things to be desired about evolution. It's possible that some, maybe even most were taken out of context, but not all of them were as I have learned from years of further study. Suddenly I had a glimmer of hope. Maybe God was real, and maybe what he said was true. And if that was the case, it was possibly the most exciting discovery I would ever make.
I began to tell my Christian friends about this site. And I posted articles from it online in journals and blogs. I e-mailed people things. Once again I thought I had stumbled onto a huge story and I was going to blow it wide open. And once again I found I was late to the show and many people had already heard about this creation issue and developed a healthy animosity toward it and anyone who espoused it. But this time they didn't get to me. This time I was excited and I was staying that way.
My parents mentioned to some people at their church how I had taken an interest in creation science, and those people happened to have some of Kent Hovind's seminars on VHS. They loaned them to my parents who loaned them to me and I watched them over and over and over again, gobbling up everything he said and thoroughly enjoying his glib attitude toward the people who had made me so miserable in school with their evolutionary propaganda.
God Said Man Said had given me a taste of creation, but Hovind had given me an insatiable appetite. When I had watched and rewatched everything Hovind made that I could get my hands on I searched for others like him. I had a nagging feeling in my stomach about the fact that Hovind was only a high school science teacher, so I was hoping to find people with better credentials. This wasn't because I was uncomfortable with getting info from a high school science teacher, but because I knew the people who I would talk to about this would demand more. It wasn't long before I stumbled on to Answers in Genesis.
AiG was exactly what I was looking for. It wasn't pastors speaking entirely from an area outside the bounds of their expertise, nor was it science teachers speaking beyond their expertise; rather it was practicing scientists with indisputable credentials from major secular Universities speaking directly from their areas of expertise. AiG has thousands of web articles and new ones everyday except Sunday. They have DVDs and computer programs, books and audio tapes/CDs. debates and Seminars. Two quarterly magazines. These guys were exactly what I needed to combat years of public school programming.
I'm now twenty six and I've spent nearly everyday since discovering AiG studying creation and evolution from both sides. I've found other sites for creation including Creation Ministries International, the truth.origins archive, Apologetics Press, and Institute for Creation Research. I've collected a mass of secular science magazines and books which have given me a more even handed information base. I've even tried to read some Richard Dawkins, which is quite a feat if you can pull it off.
The point is, I've gotten to the point where I have made a well informed decision to be a creationist. I have come to believe the Bible without nagging doubts the whole time stemming from the heavy handed brainwashing I had been receiving since I was old enough to understand the spoken language. I've gotten to the point where evolutionary arguments no longer upset me because I can see the flaws in them on my own without having to run off and see what a wiser creationist has to say on the subject.
Am I sure that I am right beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt? No. Do I believe that a literal creation has been proven? No. Do I believe it can be proven? No. The most important thing that I have learned from my studies is that nothing at all can be known about history with absolute certainty. The best a person can hope for is that they will have a very well evidenced story, where everything seems to fall into place and fit snugly. But without having been there to witness it, you will never know for sure what happened. It comes down to trust and worldviews. And my worldview consists of a God who told us how creation happened. I believe that God was there and I believe He gave us the Bible to know what he wanted us to know. I trust him before people. I believe creation doesn't suffer from the problems evolution does. I believe every time evolutionists are forced to rethink how it happened, creationists sit back and say, we told you so. I believe that the evidence fits better with the creation model than with the evolution model and that all of reality is aptly explained by creation, whereas there is an awful lot about reality that doesn't make sense in the absence of God.
I should point out that I do not refer here to small scale biological evolution, but rather the general theory of evolution. It was a creationist who first proposed natural selection and natural selection or adaptation is an essential part of the creation model. If you believe that dogs, coyotes, and wolves have a common ancestor then we agree. If you believe that far enough back on the family tree you will find and ancestor common to these animals but also to bananas then we have a problem.
Without Kent Hovind, my interest in creation would likely have been a flash in the pan, and I would likely have slipped out of my faith. But thanks to his seminars I eventually found reputable creation resources which have allowed me to make a real and informed decision about what I believed about the origin of life and of species on the planet.
So, even though Kent Hovind believes things that I no longer believe about creation, and even though he is in jail for tax evasion, which is certainly not proper Christian behaviour, I still remember what he did for me, and probably countless others. I can see how God used his ministry to allow me to keep my faith and so I admire him and I pity him. I pity him for his beliefs about government conspiracies which ultimately landed him and his wife in jail, but I admire him for not bowing to the evolution machine. Yes, he is mistaken about many things, but then, so are the people he fights against.
I became a Christian when I was twenty-three years old. It was a long process from my staunch atheism to Christianity full of flip-flopping and, as the Bible says, being blown in the wind like a reed. My absolute refusal to even imagine that there might be a God subsided a little bit when I was twenty or twenty-one. At that time I was living in squalor in a terrible neighborhood in Toronto, blowing my money on things like pot and ecstasy and eating mostly minute rice with salt and pepper to add flavor. My only exposure to Christ in that time was my roommate who, at the time I thought to be Christian. I've since learned that things he believes resemble on slightly Christianity as taught in the Bible, but he did and does still believe in a god loosely based on the God of the Bible.
If you've ever smoked pot then you know that often times it leads to philosophical/religious discussions. Our tiny apartment would be filled with our stoned friends and we would all be arguing against the possibility of God except for my roommate who would hold his on arguing for God. Eventually I began arguing for both sides. I would give my arguments against God, but I would also point out flaws I saw in arguments from my fellow atheists. It was a very confusing time as I realized that despite my desire to be against God, I was finding myself defending Him.
Eventually one of our friends from back home moved to Toronto to live in our apartment. He wasn't an atheist so much as a dabbler in different things, but one thing he definitely was not was a Christian, which worked for me. He would be another ally, and a good one I figured since he was the mountain top guru type who everyone went to for advice back home.
Arguments ensued as expected but I found him to be less of a useful ally than I had imagined. It's true that when it came to fact free imaginations of philosophy he was quite good at imagining possible alternate realities and various ultimate truths that made sense to those wanting to find sense, but when it came to arguing about Christianity, which true or not, involves facts about what the Bible does and doesn't claim, he wasn't so great. I found myself arguing against him from my very, very limited knowledge of the Bible because he so often said things about Christianity that I knew to be false. And an argument based on a false presumption isn't a lot of good. One day, at the end of my rope, I threw a Bible at him and told him to read it if he was going to argue against it. He went to a bedroom and emerged a day and a half later, threw the Bible on the couch and said, "I believe it." My jaw hit the floor. That wasn't supposed to happen. At that point I was by myself arguing against Christianity, and I was now being told that I too thought many things about the Bible that were unwarranted. But at that point I wasn't ready to read the Bible.
My friend didn't become a Christian that day. He believed what the Bible said, but he wasn't ready to devote his life to God. What caused him to become a Christian was an experience that borders on miraculous. One that no person who has no reason to trust my friend is likely to believe, so I'm keeping it a secret. Even I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen the absolute metamorphosis that it caused in him throughout the years. So great was the change in him that I often look at how little my life has changed in comparison and wonder if I have actually become a Christian.
But I have greatly digressed from my main point and by now my non-existent readers have likely forgotten that this entry is about Kent Hovind, a disgraced young earth creationist from Pensicola, Florida and the special place that he holds in my heart. I'm not quite ready to talk about him yet though, I'm just reminding you why we're here.
I left Toronto having come to believe, as best as I knew how, that Jesus Christ was God, and once again having rejected Him after reading the first chapter of "Farewell to God" by Charles Templeton. I had tired of living in shambles in Toronto and I was moving back in with my parents, and I was angry. Very angry.
It would be another year or so before I became a Christian. My parents had decided to start attending church while I was in Toronto and my mother prodded me constantly to join her for church. All I could do in response was to make fun of her and her beliefs with my brother who to this day remains agnostic/Buddhist/whatever. For some reason I still have a vivid and painful memory of promising my mother that I would attend the Christmas Eve church service with her, only to back out at the last minute to smoke pot with my brother (she didn't know about the pot.) I knew she was hurt by it, but I ignored it thinking, as most non-Christians seem to, that she didn't really believe that nonsense anyways, she just went because that's what people did.
I'd like to say that my conversion was due to some miraculous occurrence like my friends, but it wasn't. Mine was a result of coming into contact with the first real Christian I had seen since I was a child. I saw that being Christian was more than a claim to believe in God, it was a relationship and a lifestyle choice. And I saw that it made people truly happy. I did have an experience at church the Sunday after I met this person that solidified my belief, but I was converted at that point, so it was more of a confirmation.
I developed an insatiable appetite for Christian reading material. I read the Bible, C.S. Lewis, any and all Christian magazines, and a bunch of other things, some of which I probably should have left alone. I reeled at the mistaken ideas that I had held about Christianity and in my naive enthusiasm I began to talk excitedly to my friends about my new found faith expecting them to be happy for me. I felt like I had uncovered the lost city of Atlantis, and everything people had thought about it was wrong and it was my job to sort them out. I experienced my first tastes of anti-Christian bigotry from people I respected, even loved. And it hurt. It hurt knowing that these people had such darkness in them. I knew that they wouldn't believe, but I never thought that they would belittle me or my new faith. I lost a lot of friends in the early days. It was sad to realize that without pot or drinking, I had nothing in common with these people.
Things didn't get any better when I went to college either. I was taking General Arts and Science so I had a wide range of subjects from Children's Literature to Philosophy. It is easy to understand how Christianity would come up in philosophy class, but what I never expected was for it to come up nearly every day for the mere purpose of being ridiculed. Indeed my philosophy professor held Christianity in such contempt that he decided to skip the section on Thomas Aquinas because he had been a Christian philosopher and therefore, according to my professor, had nothing to offer us in this age of enlightened thinking.
It was also hard to understand what relevance Christians and the Bible had to the study of Children's Literature, when the stories studied were neither written by or about Christians or the Bible. Yet it did come up. And it did come up frequently.
So as my professors attacked my faith in every class (even music appreciation), in every case because evolution had, in their minds, proven it to be false, I began to have a crisis of faith. The experience I mentioned having at my first church service as a Christian had confirmed the reality of Christ to me, but my professors had a point. If evolution were true, and it had to be since it was taught to me as such ever since I can remember, and if the earth were very old, which again, it had to be because that's what I had been taught all my life, the the claims of the Bible could not also be true. What was I to trust? A personal experience or everything I had ever been taught in school? I wanted to trust the experience, but as time wore on, I found I couldn't. Then my faith started slipping away, and I soon stopped caring that it was.
It was by accident that I stumbled on to a website called God Said Man Said. It has a weekly webcast where a pastor "proves the veracity of the majority text King James Bible, again and again." The main point is to refute what man says and give evidence why what God says is true. While I no longer believe that it is a good source for creation/evolution information, I still respect it because it was the first place I had ever heard that there were people who believed in a Young Earth and literal creation, and that evolution wasn't the airtight fact that I had been led to believe.
There was a webcast on the site called "Evolution is Dead. They Just Forgot to Bury the Corpse." It was about fifteen or so minutes long and was quote after quote by scientists who said things that showed there were a lot of things to be desired about evolution. It's possible that some, maybe even most were taken out of context, but not all of them were as I have learned from years of further study. Suddenly I had a glimmer of hope. Maybe God was real, and maybe what he said was true. And if that was the case, it was possibly the most exciting discovery I would ever make.
I began to tell my Christian friends about this site. And I posted articles from it online in journals and blogs. I e-mailed people things. Once again I thought I had stumbled onto a huge story and I was going to blow it wide open. And once again I found I was late to the show and many people had already heard about this creation issue and developed a healthy animosity toward it and anyone who espoused it. But this time they didn't get to me. This time I was excited and I was staying that way.
My parents mentioned to some people at their church how I had taken an interest in creation science, and those people happened to have some of Kent Hovind's seminars on VHS. They loaned them to my parents who loaned them to me and I watched them over and over and over again, gobbling up everything he said and thoroughly enjoying his glib attitude toward the people who had made me so miserable in school with their evolutionary propaganda.
God Said Man Said had given me a taste of creation, but Hovind had given me an insatiable appetite. When I had watched and rewatched everything Hovind made that I could get my hands on I searched for others like him. I had a nagging feeling in my stomach about the fact that Hovind was only a high school science teacher, so I was hoping to find people with better credentials. This wasn't because I was uncomfortable with getting info from a high school science teacher, but because I knew the people who I would talk to about this would demand more. It wasn't long before I stumbled on to Answers in Genesis.
AiG was exactly what I was looking for. It wasn't pastors speaking entirely from an area outside the bounds of their expertise, nor was it science teachers speaking beyond their expertise; rather it was practicing scientists with indisputable credentials from major secular Universities speaking directly from their areas of expertise. AiG has thousands of web articles and new ones everyday except Sunday. They have DVDs and computer programs, books and audio tapes/CDs. debates and Seminars. Two quarterly magazines. These guys were exactly what I needed to combat years of public school programming.
I'm now twenty six and I've spent nearly everyday since discovering AiG studying creation and evolution from both sides. I've found other sites for creation including Creation Ministries International, the truth.origins archive, Apologetics Press, and Institute for Creation Research. I've collected a mass of secular science magazines and books which have given me a more even handed information base. I've even tried to read some Richard Dawkins, which is quite a feat if you can pull it off.
The point is, I've gotten to the point where I have made a well informed decision to be a creationist. I have come to believe the Bible without nagging doubts the whole time stemming from the heavy handed brainwashing I had been receiving since I was old enough to understand the spoken language. I've gotten to the point where evolutionary arguments no longer upset me because I can see the flaws in them on my own without having to run off and see what a wiser creationist has to say on the subject.
Am I sure that I am right beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt? No. Do I believe that a literal creation has been proven? No. Do I believe it can be proven? No. The most important thing that I have learned from my studies is that nothing at all can be known about history with absolute certainty. The best a person can hope for is that they will have a very well evidenced story, where everything seems to fall into place and fit snugly. But without having been there to witness it, you will never know for sure what happened. It comes down to trust and worldviews. And my worldview consists of a God who told us how creation happened. I believe that God was there and I believe He gave us the Bible to know what he wanted us to know. I trust him before people. I believe creation doesn't suffer from the problems evolution does. I believe every time evolutionists are forced to rethink how it happened, creationists sit back and say, we told you so. I believe that the evidence fits better with the creation model than with the evolution model and that all of reality is aptly explained by creation, whereas there is an awful lot about reality that doesn't make sense in the absence of God.
I should point out that I do not refer here to small scale biological evolution, but rather the general theory of evolution. It was a creationist who first proposed natural selection and natural selection or adaptation is an essential part of the creation model. If you believe that dogs, coyotes, and wolves have a common ancestor then we agree. If you believe that far enough back on the family tree you will find and ancestor common to these animals but also to bananas then we have a problem.
Without Kent Hovind, my interest in creation would likely have been a flash in the pan, and I would likely have slipped out of my faith. But thanks to his seminars I eventually found reputable creation resources which have allowed me to make a real and informed decision about what I believed about the origin of life and of species on the planet.
So, even though Kent Hovind believes things that I no longer believe about creation, and even though he is in jail for tax evasion, which is certainly not proper Christian behaviour, I still remember what he did for me, and probably countless others. I can see how God used his ministry to allow me to keep my faith and so I admire him and I pity him. I pity him for his beliefs about government conspiracies which ultimately landed him and his wife in jail, but I admire him for not bowing to the evolution machine. Yes, he is mistaken about many things, but then, so are the people he fights against.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Enough is enough
I read an article today from a Texas newspaper about a bill that allows children in public schools to discuss their faith without discrimination or ridicule. As I read it I thought, it's about time! I saw that there was an area for comments so I clicked on it. I'm saddened to say that I wasn't the least bit surprised to see what people were saying.
Most of the comments were the usual anti-Christian clap trap. The article had nothing to do with Intelligent Design (which is not Christian anyways, no matter how forcefully atheists try to ignore the facts), and yet there were numerous people all in a dither about that. There were the people who think they are being intelligent and witty talking about pastafarianism (which in case you don't know is a satirical religion based on the flying spaghetti monster who created everything), and those who acted like a girls right to pass out faith bracelets to her friends was the equivalent of a young radical muslim talking about jihad and blowing people up (please keep in mind that most muslims don't believe this is proper Islam anyways.) But the comment that really got to me was the person who said that s/he was tired of Christians acting like an oppressed minority. This isn't the first time that I've heard this comment from someone who has no idea what being a Christian in today's world is like.
Admittedly, North American Christians could be far worse off, but to act like they aren't mistreated is just unbelievable ignorance. In America, separation of church and state has been warped into something completely unrecognizable to the people who wrote it. Most people who tout it don't even know what it was originally for, which was to keep the government out of church business. Unfortunately it has been almost completely reversed by this corrupt and unbelieving generation.
In this day and age it has become acceptable to openly hate Christians. It's not enough these days to just disagree with a Christian, instead it's better to treat them with hostility. It has become the politically correct stance to be violently opposed to Christians. I myself have been told that I should die, or be killed. And this by people who I'd never said a word to, but who have come across some of my poetry online.
The ACLU, as stated in an earlier entry, is trying to remove religious symbols from the war vet cemeteries. And why are they doing that? Who knows? Probably just because they get money and society will allow such a frivolous proceeding to take place.
The faith responsible for molding the western world, for freeing black slaves, for starting many, if not most, hospitals and schools, and for pioneering many of the hard sciences is now under attack by people who know nothing about it other than what they hear on TV or see in the newspaper. And this is evinced by the fact that they suggest all Christians are like faith healers, or televangelists. The Christianity I'm a part of is nothing like the one people outside the faith lampoon and abuse. And yet I'm told that I am the one who is ignorant when I defend my faith.
I'm tired of it. Enough is enough.
Most of the comments were the usual anti-Christian clap trap. The article had nothing to do with Intelligent Design (which is not Christian anyways, no matter how forcefully atheists try to ignore the facts), and yet there were numerous people all in a dither about that. There were the people who think they are being intelligent and witty talking about pastafarianism (which in case you don't know is a satirical religion based on the flying spaghetti monster who created everything), and those who acted like a girls right to pass out faith bracelets to her friends was the equivalent of a young radical muslim talking about jihad and blowing people up (please keep in mind that most muslims don't believe this is proper Islam anyways.) But the comment that really got to me was the person who said that s/he was tired of Christians acting like an oppressed minority. This isn't the first time that I've heard this comment from someone who has no idea what being a Christian in today's world is like.
Admittedly, North American Christians could be far worse off, but to act like they aren't mistreated is just unbelievable ignorance. In America, separation of church and state has been warped into something completely unrecognizable to the people who wrote it. Most people who tout it don't even know what it was originally for, which was to keep the government out of church business. Unfortunately it has been almost completely reversed by this corrupt and unbelieving generation.
In this day and age it has become acceptable to openly hate Christians. It's not enough these days to just disagree with a Christian, instead it's better to treat them with hostility. It has become the politically correct stance to be violently opposed to Christians. I myself have been told that I should die, or be killed. And this by people who I'd never said a word to, but who have come across some of my poetry online.
The ACLU, as stated in an earlier entry, is trying to remove religious symbols from the war vet cemeteries. And why are they doing that? Who knows? Probably just because they get money and society will allow such a frivolous proceeding to take place.
The faith responsible for molding the western world, for freeing black slaves, for starting many, if not most, hospitals and schools, and for pioneering many of the hard sciences is now under attack by people who know nothing about it other than what they hear on TV or see in the newspaper. And this is evinced by the fact that they suggest all Christians are like faith healers, or televangelists. The Christianity I'm a part of is nothing like the one people outside the faith lampoon and abuse. And yet I'm told that I am the one who is ignorant when I defend my faith.
I'm tired of it. Enough is enough.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Change My Blog Name?
Ever since I picked the name "Real Freethinking" I've wanted to change it. I'm a Christian and my goal in most of my interactions is to make more Christians. My reasons for that are not as diabolic as many people seem to think. I gain nothing by converting people. But I gain quite a headache from trying. That's not because people present mind boggling information that I've never heard before and I'm left blubbering like an idiot insisting on the truth of the Bible, but rather because people call me names and utter (via the internet) death threats and the like, which causes stress for me. Sometimes crafting a response to them takes quite a lot of restraint, and I will freely admit that from time to time I have lost my cool. My bad. And it is bad.
Anyways, the reason I picked "Real Freethinking" was that I have freely chosen to believe in Christianity. I was not raised Christian, so I wasn't brainwashed. However, quote-unquote freethinkers, seem to believe that only those who were brainwashed can believe in God. I wanted a blog where a community would form based on real free thought. A community where you were allowed to be atheist and you were allowed to be Christian or Muslim, or Jew. Where each "member" (reader/commenter) could present their case in an environment of mutual respect, without fear of ridicule or violent speech. But I came to think that people would be upset by the fact that Christian has called himself a real freethinker, thereby calling all others non-freethinkers. Unfortunately, I don't know how to change my blog name, so I'm stuck with it. Also, I've decided that I want to keep it anyways.
[quote]
This is from the site of a secular summer camp. I will not be giving the web address because I won't promote them anymore than they would promote a Christian summer camp. Forgetting about point four, I'd say that those points look pretty good. But what happens when we go to another section? One titled Affirmations of Humanism? Let's see, shall we?
[quote]
de·plore [di-plawr, -plohr] verb (used with object), -plored, -plor·ing.
Hmmmm...well, I'm not going to tell you what to think about all of that. If I did that I'd be no better than a freethinker. My kids probably won't go to camp. But that's just because I hated it when I was a kid and won't force them to go. But if they do go, they'll go to a camp where their thinking isn't deplored as a matter of principle.
Anyways, the reason I picked "Real Freethinking" was that I have freely chosen to believe in Christianity. I was not raised Christian, so I wasn't brainwashed. However, quote-unquote freethinkers, seem to believe that only those who were brainwashed can believe in God. I wanted a blog where a community would form based on real free thought. A community where you were allowed to be atheist and you were allowed to be Christian or Muslim, or Jew. Where each "member" (reader/commenter) could present their case in an environment of mutual respect, without fear of ridicule or violent speech. But I came to think that people would be upset by the fact that Christian has called himself a real freethinker, thereby calling all others non-freethinkers. Unfortunately, I don't know how to change my blog name, so I'm stuck with it. Also, I've decided that I want to keep it anyways.
[quote]
Purpose
- Promote a sense of belonging to a large freethought community among the youth participants
- Encourage critical thinking in young people to enable them to draw their own conclusions
- Promote respect for others with different viewpoints, values, and beliefs
- Provide a safe and fun environment for personal and social development
This is from the site of a secular summer camp. I will not be giving the web address because I won't promote them anymore than they would promote a Christian summer camp. Forgetting about point four, I'd say that those points look pretty good. But what happens when we go to another section? One titled Affirmations of Humanism? Let's see, shall we?
[quote]
A [selected] Statement of Principles: (brackets mine)
- We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.
- We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.
- We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.
- We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.
- We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.
de·plore [di-plawr, -plohr] verb (used with object), -plored, -plor·ing.
| 1. | to regret deeply or strongly; lament: to deplore the present state of morality. |
| 2. | to disapprove of; censure. |
| 3. | to feel or express deep grief for or in regard to: The class deplored the death of their teacher. |
Hmmmm...well, I'm not going to tell you what to think about all of that. If I did that I'd be no better than a freethinker. My kids probably won't go to camp. But that's just because I hated it when I was a kid and won't force them to go. But if they do go, they'll go to a camp where their thinking isn't deplored as a matter of principle.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
ACLU
If there were people who read my blog then many of them would likely know who Kent Hovind is. Kent Hovind's seminars were the first that I had seen about creation. They were also the first place that I'd heard of the ACLU, which he lovingly called the American Communist Lawyers Union. Eventually I began to distance myself from Kent Hovind's teachings as I realized that he used many fallatious arguments and some that were known to be wrong. I began going to more reputable places for my information on creation. Places with real, practicing scientists, with degrees from secular Universities and who hold positions at these Universities. I did so, not because I felt that made their arguments more valid to me, but because the people I talked to required it.
All this isn't to say that I have no appreciation for Hovind. If it weren't for him I may have never found Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Reasearch or the Truth.Origins archive and perhaps would have given up my faith during my college years when the validity of it was attacked by everyone of my professors, from psychology to philosophy to Childeren's literature. But thanks to him I was led to information which has convinced me of the truth of my beliefs, and rather than give them up like I was nearly at the point of doing (and at the time I didn't really care that I was losing my faith) I instead began voraciously reading all the information I could get my hands on regarding creation and the scientific interpretations that uphold it. I realize some people believe that it's not science, but that's because they believe science must exclude God by definition, forgetting the fact that nearly every scientific field was pioneered by someone who, if not a biblical creationist, at least believed in God. Including the atheist beloved natural selection first postulated by Edward Blythe, a biblical creationist. Please note, the fact that these people believed in creation or God, does not mean that creation is true, or that God exists. But it does mean that the statement "real science excludes the supernatural" is false.
But I digress. The point of this post is the ACLU, which for those of my non-readers who don't know, actually stands for the American Civil Liberties Union. I haven't much to say about them actually, other than that everytime I hear about them doing something I become sick with anger. They seem like the most self-serving, greedy, underhanded, conniving group in existence today. But I also understand that all my information about them comes from hearing about what they are doing to Christians (and other religions for that matter) such as the war vets who have come together with lawyers working pro bono to fight the ACLU's attempt to have all religious markers removed from war cemetaries. Basically, everything I hear about them involves them trying to expand the separation of church and state ammendment to a level that only an idiot would believe was intended by those who put it in place.
What I want to know is, have they ever done something good? Have they ever done something that they shouldn't be ashamed of? I'm not American, so I'm not really affected by them as much, but all Christians are my brethren, so when people attack them, I tend to take it a bit personally. And I know that people of other religions feel the same way. I'm sure they must have done some good in their time. I'm sure that my understanding of them can't be correct because in my eyes they are an entity so evil that to find it's equal you would need to read a children's storybook. And I say a children's storybook because the evil characters are usually exaggerated in them.
I open to people arguing against my understanding of these people. I would like to believe otherwise than I do because sometimes I think about groups like this and become afraid for the future. Suppose they remove all religious symbolism from the public view. Suppose they make an America where the only way to know religion ever existed was to stumble upon a cell group that meets in someones basement to proclaim the gospel, or preach on some other faith. Suppose the ACLU actually succeeds in "cleansing" America of religion and the religious. What then? They get together and have a meeting and say, "Well done. Let's go home."? I doubt it very much. Their censorship campaign has been a very lucrative one. They'll just change their focus. Because no matter what you believe, there are always going to be people who believe you're wrong and that you shouldn't be allowed to believe it. And if those people have the money to pay people like the ACLU, then it will only be a matter of time before you won't be allowed.
It's not a conspiracy. I'm not suggesting that there are any secret plans. I just think that if the world continues in the direction it's going the outcome might be very different than the one people desire, if people even think about outcomes these days.
These are just ideas. Don't argue with me as though you can't change my mind.
All this isn't to say that I have no appreciation for Hovind. If it weren't for him I may have never found Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Reasearch or the Truth.Origins archive and perhaps would have given up my faith during my college years when the validity of it was attacked by everyone of my professors, from psychology to philosophy to Childeren's literature. But thanks to him I was led to information which has convinced me of the truth of my beliefs, and rather than give them up like I was nearly at the point of doing (and at the time I didn't really care that I was losing my faith) I instead began voraciously reading all the information I could get my hands on regarding creation and the scientific interpretations that uphold it. I realize some people believe that it's not science, but that's because they believe science must exclude God by definition, forgetting the fact that nearly every scientific field was pioneered by someone who, if not a biblical creationist, at least believed in God. Including the atheist beloved natural selection first postulated by Edward Blythe, a biblical creationist. Please note, the fact that these people believed in creation or God, does not mean that creation is true, or that God exists. But it does mean that the statement "real science excludes the supernatural" is false.
But I digress. The point of this post is the ACLU, which for those of my non-readers who don't know, actually stands for the American Civil Liberties Union. I haven't much to say about them actually, other than that everytime I hear about them doing something I become sick with anger. They seem like the most self-serving, greedy, underhanded, conniving group in existence today. But I also understand that all my information about them comes from hearing about what they are doing to Christians (and other religions for that matter) such as the war vets who have come together with lawyers working pro bono to fight the ACLU's attempt to have all religious markers removed from war cemetaries. Basically, everything I hear about them involves them trying to expand the separation of church and state ammendment to a level that only an idiot would believe was intended by those who put it in place.
What I want to know is, have they ever done something good? Have they ever done something that they shouldn't be ashamed of? I'm not American, so I'm not really affected by them as much, but all Christians are my brethren, so when people attack them, I tend to take it a bit personally. And I know that people of other religions feel the same way. I'm sure they must have done some good in their time. I'm sure that my understanding of them can't be correct because in my eyes they are an entity so evil that to find it's equal you would need to read a children's storybook. And I say a children's storybook because the evil characters are usually exaggerated in them.
I open to people arguing against my understanding of these people. I would like to believe otherwise than I do because sometimes I think about groups like this and become afraid for the future. Suppose they remove all religious symbolism from the public view. Suppose they make an America where the only way to know religion ever existed was to stumble upon a cell group that meets in someones basement to proclaim the gospel, or preach on some other faith. Suppose the ACLU actually succeeds in "cleansing" America of religion and the religious. What then? They get together and have a meeting and say, "Well done. Let's go home."? I doubt it very much. Their censorship campaign has been a very lucrative one. They'll just change their focus. Because no matter what you believe, there are always going to be people who believe you're wrong and that you shouldn't be allowed to believe it. And if those people have the money to pay people like the ACLU, then it will only be a matter of time before you won't be allowed.
It's not a conspiracy. I'm not suggesting that there are any secret plans. I just think that if the world continues in the direction it's going the outcome might be very different than the one people desire, if people even think about outcomes these days.
These are just ideas. Don't argue with me as though you can't change my mind.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Homosexuality
This is a tough topic for me. I've had many gay friends in the past and there are gay people in my family. On this topic I tend to get blown around like a reed. The thing is I have two minds on the subject. I don't want to approve of something that I believe God has condemned just for the sake of not offending a person, and I don't want to offend needlessly.
As it stands my view is that the rules of Christianity are laid down for Christians. When the Bible says to act a certain way toward your brother (as in pointing out his sin, or rebuking him), it means fellow Christian. So when secular people want to allow homosexual marriages I tend to see no reason why they can't do it. But when people claim to be Christian, I believe the Bible to be quite clear that homosexual behaviour is to cease.
Notice I said behaviour. I do not believe that being attracted to men is a sin, it's only when that attraction is acted on and a man shares his bed with another man or burns with lust for another man that it becomes sin. And I think it's the same way for heterosexuals. I'm a married man. If I am attracted to a woman who isn't my wife, how can I help it? I can't. I don't think this is sin. It's only if I dwell on the attraction, or worse, act on it and commit adultery that I have sinned.
My reason for not wanting to sin has a few facets. The largest being that I don't want to offend Christ and belittle his sacrifice for me. I also don't want to cause confusion among younger Christians who are trying to learn about the faith and God. Lastly, I believe that God's rules are set for a reason and breaking them will always have negative consequences. I'm not worried about going to hell because I've accepted Christ's offer of salvation, so, as far as I know, that's not a possibility for me unless I conciously reject Christ and renounce my faith.
The Bible states that we are to have no part with those who work iniquity. If a brother sins we are supposed to confront them with it one on one and show them their sin, at which point they repent of it and begin a journey away from it (which may take their entire life), or, if they refuse to repent, it is my understanding that they be put out of the church until they change their minds. The reason for this is that unrepentant sinners endager the faith of those around them. It's not a matter of saying "we're better than you." It's a matter of saying, we love you as we love the rest of this church, and as such we can not condone this sin. Come back when you are ready to let go, we'll be here to help. I freely admit that this is not the way it is handled in most cases. Depending on which church you attend, sin tends either to be ignored, condoned, or viciously judged. But that sin is not properly handled within the church is in no way a fault of Christianity and Christianity should not be blamed and hated on the basis of people who mistreat it.
I think that I should end this post by saying that all people, Christian or not homo or hetero, have been created in the image of God. It's because of this that they are deserving of a certain amount of respect. Respect, contrary to popular belief, is not condoning every action their heart desires, but through love, trying to bring them into proper behaviour. However, it should also be noted that people are not to cast pearls before swine. In other words, the gospel and the Word of God are precious, but there are those who have no appreciation for it, just as swine have no appreciation for pearls and will just trample them underfoot. We are not to give them that opportunity with the Word of God. I believe this means there is a point at which Christians are not to continue evangelizing a person, but rather leave the person and move on, allowing God to do whatever is his will with that person.
If anyone has any points on this topic that I may not have considered, please share them respectfully. I know this topic has the tendency to breed anger but please be master of your emotions, rather than the other way around.
As it stands my view is that the rules of Christianity are laid down for Christians. When the Bible says to act a certain way toward your brother (as in pointing out his sin, or rebuking him), it means fellow Christian. So when secular people want to allow homosexual marriages I tend to see no reason why they can't do it. But when people claim to be Christian, I believe the Bible to be quite clear that homosexual behaviour is to cease.
Notice I said behaviour. I do not believe that being attracted to men is a sin, it's only when that attraction is acted on and a man shares his bed with another man or burns with lust for another man that it becomes sin. And I think it's the same way for heterosexuals. I'm a married man. If I am attracted to a woman who isn't my wife, how can I help it? I can't. I don't think this is sin. It's only if I dwell on the attraction, or worse, act on it and commit adultery that I have sinned.
My reason for not wanting to sin has a few facets. The largest being that I don't want to offend Christ and belittle his sacrifice for me. I also don't want to cause confusion among younger Christians who are trying to learn about the faith and God. Lastly, I believe that God's rules are set for a reason and breaking them will always have negative consequences. I'm not worried about going to hell because I've accepted Christ's offer of salvation, so, as far as I know, that's not a possibility for me unless I conciously reject Christ and renounce my faith.
The Bible states that we are to have no part with those who work iniquity. If a brother sins we are supposed to confront them with it one on one and show them their sin, at which point they repent of it and begin a journey away from it (which may take their entire life), or, if they refuse to repent, it is my understanding that they be put out of the church until they change their minds. The reason for this is that unrepentant sinners endager the faith of those around them. It's not a matter of saying "we're better than you." It's a matter of saying, we love you as we love the rest of this church, and as such we can not condone this sin. Come back when you are ready to let go, we'll be here to help. I freely admit that this is not the way it is handled in most cases. Depending on which church you attend, sin tends either to be ignored, condoned, or viciously judged. But that sin is not properly handled within the church is in no way a fault of Christianity and Christianity should not be blamed and hated on the basis of people who mistreat it.
I think that I should end this post by saying that all people, Christian or not homo or hetero, have been created in the image of God. It's because of this that they are deserving of a certain amount of respect. Respect, contrary to popular belief, is not condoning every action their heart desires, but through love, trying to bring them into proper behaviour. However, it should also be noted that people are not to cast pearls before swine. In other words, the gospel and the Word of God are precious, but there are those who have no appreciation for it, just as swine have no appreciation for pearls and will just trample them underfoot. We are not to give them that opportunity with the Word of God. I believe this means there is a point at which Christians are not to continue evangelizing a person, but rather leave the person and move on, allowing God to do whatever is his will with that person.
If anyone has any points on this topic that I may not have considered, please share them respectfully. I know this topic has the tendency to breed anger but please be master of your emotions, rather than the other way around.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Freethinking
I have, at numerous times, come across people who call themselves freethinkers. Without fail they have been people who reject the idea of God. It seems that their definition of "Free thinking" is actually very constricted. I find term arrogant and misleading actually. I'm not saying that free thinkers can't arrive at the conclusion that God doesn't really exist, I'm saying that people who believe God doesn't exist are not proctors for free thinking, no matter how forcefully or frequently they suggest they are. If you are not free to conclude that God exists, or you make no allowance for another to do so, then you are not a free thinker.
As a Christian I feel that my beliefs are not well represented by those who would try to represent us but are outside of the faith. They boldly paint us with one brush, they misreport our beliefs and our God, they misquote us, and they provide misleading information about us. A free thinker should also be able to be informed about his thoughts, and based on the conversations I have had in the past, I would have to say that there are very many "free thinkers" who are using faulty information to arrive at their conclusions.
I'm not suggesting that what I have to say will change any ones opinion about God or Christianity, or even that what I say will be in all ways correct. But sometimes I just have to set the record as straight as I'm able after reading what people have to say about the faith that I have chosen. Some may come to understand something differently than they had in the past and it may affect their outlook, others will remain unconvinced and others may convince me otherwise.
I'm writing this blog as an experiement in a free thinking that allows room for God, and to show that even after concluding that God does exist, there is plenty of room for free thought.
As a Christian I feel that my beliefs are not well represented by those who would try to represent us but are outside of the faith. They boldly paint us with one brush, they misreport our beliefs and our God, they misquote us, and they provide misleading information about us. A free thinker should also be able to be informed about his thoughts, and based on the conversations I have had in the past, I would have to say that there are very many "free thinkers" who are using faulty information to arrive at their conclusions.
I'm not suggesting that what I have to say will change any ones opinion about God or Christianity, or even that what I say will be in all ways correct. But sometimes I just have to set the record as straight as I'm able after reading what people have to say about the faith that I have chosen. Some may come to understand something differently than they had in the past and it may affect their outlook, others will remain unconvinced and others may convince me otherwise.
I'm writing this blog as an experiement in a free thinking that allows room for God, and to show that even after concluding that God does exist, there is plenty of room for free thought.
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