The fastest growing religion in the U.S. and around the world.

Frightening isn't it ?

Quite the spokes-model for God's image there!

Why don't these people simply become Amish?

"In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God"
Charles Darwin

and one of the reasons Darwin was so slow to publish his theories was that he was very reluctant to stick a finger in his society's idea of a god. It was only when Wallace wrote to him for advice on his (very similar) theories that Darwin got off the stick and started publishing. He realized that his theory obviated the need for a god creating species, and was kind of mortified at the implications.

To make one thing clear up front: I am not a Christian. I do not believe that a just and merciful God could blast those who don't believe in Christ to Hell and still be just and merciful. If Torquemada is in Heaven then it can't be a very exclusive neighborhood and if Mahatma Gandhi is in Hell then it's not a place for only wicked people. I would be a liar if I recited the Apostle's Creed and said that I believe it.

Belief in evolution by natural selection does not make Christianity crumble. It does a number on biblical literalism, but there are Christians who are not biblical literalists. Pat Robertson (see video below) came out recently and said the earth is more 6000 years old and the process of creation took considerably longer than six days. Robertson added that accepting scientific facts does not affect his faith one bit. We may disagree with Robertson on many things, but we have no reason to doubt him on this.

I saw an awful lot of circular reasoning on the part of Christians in the video, each of whom was a biblical literalist. The argument of each boiled down to a belief that the Bible is true and therefore evolution by natural selection is false. One said he couldn't believe in the Big Bang and another went so far as to say no dinosaur could have been carnivorous or have had a brain tumor. One says if the Bible says 2 + 2 = 5, then he would believe it. I can show him a passage in Bible (1 Kings 7:23) that speaks of a vat "ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about" (King James version). From that passage, one must infer that ? = 3, not approximately 3.14159 like every teacher I had from third grade onward said.

I think this is why Dr. Robertson spoke up. He was right to do so. Perhaps I'm not a Christian, but it's perfectly OK with me if the next person is, as long as he's not an engineer who thinks ? = 3 and designs commercial jets. The result of that kind of mathematics would be as absurd as proceeding with the assumption that 2 + 2 = 5. A pool contractor should know that to build a circular swimming pool in the backyard that has a diameter of ten feet that he will need enough decorative blue tile to lay around the outside edge of the pool to cover 31 feet and a minute fraction less than five inches.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kulinski (the internet is your friend and that young man's name is Kyle Kulinski) is also engaging in a formal logical fallacy by presenting only biblical literalists as Christians, when in fact not all Christians are biblical literalists as no less of an example than Pat Robertson demonstrates. In fact, most Christians I know are not biblical literalists. They know what Genesis says, but they'll also tell anyone who wants to hear them say it that the Big Bang occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, that our sun and the plants moving around it congealed out of an interstellar gas cloud about 4.5 billion years ago and that our species evolved from the same animal that also spawned other primates. Then, they will also tell any one listening that Christ died for our sins.


For reference:

...obscuring it for decades. His network has long featured young-earth creationists and given them a platform. He 's being disingenuous in that clip because without young-earth creationism, there is no conflict. It's an unremarkable, mainstream position among most denominations of Christians that god "guided" evolution. And that's fine: there's no science-denial or bashing science as "Satan's lies" involved.

For Robertson to pretend that the conflict isn't driven by evangelicals kind of breaks one of the Commandments.

Nicely done!

I had a hyper-religious mother, and I even taught Sunday School for a while, but I did the one thing these poor people find abhorrent: I asked questions. I've been a devout atheist for fifty years.
Their arguments are sad and indefensible, but they are so weak and frightened of reality that religion is their only source of security.
They are so ignorant of history that they insist that the Bible is the literal word of God, when it is actually the word of Constantine I and the Nicean Council as he sought to prevent Rome from being torn apart by a war between Christians and pagans. Constantine was a pagan until he was baptized - against his will - on his deathbed.
I could let them live in their absurd fantasy, but they are determined to impose their will on the rest of us, and that makes me lock and load.

I find myself in somewhat of a "no man's land" here, somewhere in between the host, who seems to be somewhat of a dogmatic atheist / agnostic and holder of blind faith in modern science and technology, and the dogmatic literalist Christians whom he criticizes so vehemently. I think that the extreme fervor and passion with which he criticizes the literalist Christians could be due, in large part, to a subliminal projection of his own dogmatism onto them.

I don't hold the Bible to be literally true, although I read it from time to time, but I can't really call myself a Christian in the conventional sense of the word. I prefer to call myself a metaphysically oriented universalist. My belief in God and the immortality of the Soul comes more from personal experience than it does from any book, no matter how revered it may be. I am an avid student of history, including the history of religion, especially that of Christianity, and find the previous commentator's remarks and conclusions about Constantine and the council of Nicea and its impact on Christianity to be grossly oversimplified, from the considerable reading that I have done on the subject.

When approaching a factual error in the Bible, I would not try to brainwash myself into believing it was true, like the Christian literalist, nor would I browbeat the literalist with the mechanics and technicalities of the facts. Rather, I would try to understand the history behind the book or passage of scripture and the tradition that gave birth to it. Probably the old prophets of Israel were simply not as astute mathematically as the ancient Greeks; hence the mathematical errors in the previously quoted passage of scripture.

I believe, like Darwin, that a belief in God does not prevent one from believing in evolution as well. The way I approach this is rather unique, I feel: If God is all-knowing, or omniscient, and is the source of all intelligence and knowledge, then He would get mighty bored with a simple once and for all creation of the earth and everything that lives upon it in six short days; I think that weaving the grand panoramic tapestry of evolution as living organisms change and evolve in their complex interactions with each other would be much more deserving of God's intelligence, and a fitting challenge for such an omniscient Supreme Being.