![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mid-day Finger Rambling
Oct. 6th, 2005 12:20 pm"Ultimately, creationism is not just bad science to me, it's bad Christianity, it's Bible worship. There's just no reason to look at all these patterns of layered sediment, or the fossil record, or at the stars, and think that what you're seeing isn't what you're seeing. God doesn't require you to be stupid, to deny what you see, to deny what you know." [my italics]
NY TIMES article on creationist and evolutionist views on the Grand Canyon. I was reading the linked-to article this morning and that line stuck with me. My religious leanings have been tenuous since adolescence (par for the course, I suppose), but at the moment I seem to have slipped right back into the relationship. It's comfortable, like putting on a pair of worn jeans (then again, the last relationship I described using those words went to shit shortly thereafter, so...). I find it easy to say I'm a Christian and also not believe that the world is less than 5000 years old. How could you look at all the technology we have dating mineral formations to the millions of years and honestly conclude the Grand Canyon was made 4700 years ago during Noah's Flood? Or say that dinosaurs and man lived together? Too often blind faith is used to justify following word-for-word a document that was penned at a time when it was advantageous for people not to eat certain foods (lack of refrigeration and pasteurization processes) or for a man to dominate a household (he was the sole source of income) or a book that was changed to favor the ruling party (the whitewashing of the actions of the Romans in the story of Christ's life). Sometimes, when I'm flipping through channels and I see things like The 700 Club or catch so-called religious leaders condemning one segment of the population or catch quotes where natural catastrophes are called "God's Judgment on a Sinning People", I get so disturbed - this weird mixture of anger and sadness that I cannot describe any other way - and I wonder what God those people worship.
NY TIMES article on creationist and evolutionist views on the Grand Canyon. I was reading the linked-to article this morning and that line stuck with me. My religious leanings have been tenuous since adolescence (par for the course, I suppose), but at the moment I seem to have slipped right back into the relationship. It's comfortable, like putting on a pair of worn jeans (then again, the last relationship I described using those words went to shit shortly thereafter, so...). I find it easy to say I'm a Christian and also not believe that the world is less than 5000 years old. How could you look at all the technology we have dating mineral formations to the millions of years and honestly conclude the Grand Canyon was made 4700 years ago during Noah's Flood? Or say that dinosaurs and man lived together? Too often blind faith is used to justify following word-for-word a document that was penned at a time when it was advantageous for people not to eat certain foods (lack of refrigeration and pasteurization processes) or for a man to dominate a household (he was the sole source of income) or a book that was changed to favor the ruling party (the whitewashing of the actions of the Romans in the story of Christ's life). Sometimes, when I'm flipping through channels and I see things like The 700 Club or catch so-called religious leaders condemning one segment of the population or catch quotes where natural catastrophes are called "God's Judgment on a Sinning People", I get so disturbed - this weird mixture of anger and sadness that I cannot describe any other way - and I wonder what God those people worship.
