Reply #62: I'm a Christian (preacher's kid no less) and

[Lydia Leftcoast]

it IS a mythology versus reality debate.

My father's response to people who tried to get him to promote creationism was, "The Bible isn't a science book. God gave us brains to figure out the natural world for ourselves"

Having been to seminary, he knew that if you read Genesis closely, you find that there are two creation stories, one in Genesis 1, and the other in Genesis 2. In one of them, man and woman are created together, and in the second one, Eve is created from Adam's rib. Genesis is in fact woven out of three separate ancient stories passed down by oral tradition, and they are identified as the J strand (because God is referred to as YHWH), the E strand (because God is referred to as Elohim), and the P strand (the so-called "priestly" stories). At some point a few hundred years B.C., they were all written down.

I'm trained in linguistics, and scholars who look at texts can tell whether they were all written by the same author (because writers have their own habitual styles and turns of phrase) or whether they were all written at the same period, because language changes over the years. (Think of how different Shakespeare's English is from ours.)

This stuff has been known since the mid-nineteenth century, and if your ministers are telling you that the Bible is literally true and was written by Moses in 3,000 B.C., then they are either ignorant or lying.

The fundamentalists want the Bible to be literally true, because you can find a Bible verse to justify just about anything. But note that they pick and choose.

They use the Bible to condemn homosexuality, but they do not condemn the rich who exploit the poor and defenseless (e.g. WalMart, Enron, wealthy ranchers who hire illegal immigrants for less than minimum wage), as the Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah do at great length.

They condemn sex outside of marriage, but they don't condemn violence and aggressive war, despite the Sermon on the Mount.

They love to condemn people to hell for not "accepting Christ" in their prescribed way, but they somehow never get around to citing Romans 2:12-16.

They want their children to be able to show off their piety in school prayer (which never existed in most of the U.S.) and yet they ignore Jesus' instructions to pray in secret.

It's odd that people will type on a computer, which is based on science and engineering that the Bible never mentions; take medicines that are based on biology and chemistry that the Bible never mention; ride in airplanes that are based on physics that the Bible never mentions; understand that the earth moves around the sun, even though the Bible says that Joshua made the sun stand still, and yet they balk at accepting evolution.

Personally, I find it much more exciting to think that God started the whole evolution ball rolling than that he just zapped everything into being like a cartoon wizard.

Think about it.