When I was 10, I asked my mom to explain why dinosaurs were not in the bible (re Orrex thread)...

If the bible contains the entire history of the universe, why wouldn't god include dinosaurs? I was very confused. School taught me all about dinosaurs and this weird thing called "evolution".

I went to church for 6 hours on Saturday and Sunday and 3 hours on Wednesday. We watched videos on creationism and biblical tales.

I went to evangelical church camp. We would talk about creationism and, on occasion, we'd attempt to speak in tongues (I never did speak in tongues. I thought the entire practice was disturbing). Our dorm leader would get mad at us for telling ghost stories at night.

I remember being baptized at a church members house. I got really pissed off at my paster for holding me under water for too long. By the time he got to "the holy spirit", I was about to pass out. The entire practice seemed absurd.

I also wasn't allowed to watch Scooby Doo, Care Bears and a long list of other shows. Harry Potter was off limits too. My parents said it was witchcraft.

So how did my mom respond to my question about dinosaurs?

"I don't know"


And so began my slow departure from close-minded religious indoctrination. I was always an intellectual outcast in my family.


That's the kind of environment I grew up in. I can't believe I made it out okay.

Thanks Orrex for doing the right thing. When your kid is at Yale, you'll realize the benefit of your actions.

the Bible was written, and before human beings were on the earth."

Hence, I've never had a problem with science and religion living together comfortably.

My church, by the way, has also run a "Harry Potter" camp the last three summers.

When the day of reckoning comes and Moloch rises from the purple ashes, you and your fellow believers will be consumed in a fluffy mayonnaise sauce.

I don't recall actual disapproval--just a bit of puzzlement.

It was lutheran
i should have known better....

anyway
on a wall was a bunch of poster done by some 4th? graders about how dinosaurs
where a hoax and never existed because they were not mentioned in the bible.
I told her on the spot there there was no fucking way that i was going to send my son to a school
that lied to the kids. Perhaps a bit too loudly cause boy was she pissed at me......

So the kid stay public--another can of worms....

ever heard an anti-evolution screed in any of my churches

so, some creationists pretend that dinosaurs were mentioned in the Bible. :silly:

About how I shouldn't believe in evolution. I just smiled and nodded.

He then suggested I go to bible college and become a preacher. He was talking to the wrong grandson, haha.

:shrug:

Actually, I would TOTALLY go to a church that had you as a preacher.

Sort of like the last church I went to had a queer pastor, and every minority, gay, and transperson for miles around went too. :D

I would make a pretty kickass preacher though, haha.

Or so I've heard. I also think he runs some sort of halfway house for runaways or something.

when I was six.

Later that night, I asked my (Southern Baptist Deacon) dad - where are the dinosaurs in the Bible?

---crickets-----


uh - well - uh - um - I don't know. Let me think about it.


To his credit, my dad wasn't like the Southern Baptists of today - they (we) weren't fundamentalists. My uncle was something of a Bible Scholar and between the two them they later told me that DAYS to God were a whole lot longer - a "thousands of years" I think they said - than we call a "day". and that in between the part where God made the animals and God made man was where the dinosaurs were.

I tell ya - that makes a whole lot of a damn more sense than the stupid crap the fundies come up with nowadays. (If, of course, one still wants to even believe in that sort of thing.)

She quoted some verse in the Bible that said a thousand years was like one day to God, so the dinosaurs were already extinct by the time there were any humans on the planet. We were Southern Baptists, but no one in my family ever took the creation story literally. Of course that was around 1960, before the fundamentalist crazies took over the denomination.

and it made me into the warped human being that am.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrZcztxRquo

Absolute genius.

I'm not sure that >any< of the major religions/paths discuss the saurians. They're pretty Humano-centric.

Just like geometry and chemistry didn't come up. We were taught Bible stories as examples of faith, morals, how to honor yourself, your family, and God, etc - it was never a substitute for or attack against "science." Is this attitude really that common among Bible schools nowadays?

Yeah, that must have sucked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Camp

If you did, how did it compare with your experience?

The only thing we didn't do was have a life sized cardboard cut out of Bush. Everything else is pretty damn close.

They aren't dumb. But they don't seem to be as academic as myself.

or have you gone to a whole other religion or agnosticism or even atheism?
I am curious because I have gone through a lifelong process of leaving catholicism.

But I'm not necessarily an atheist. I'm a philosophy major, so I'm still religious on a certain level. But not in the traditional sense.

I have long since abandoned Christianity. I never plan on joining an organized religion again. Although, I have considered Taoism.

My parents had been married 14 years before, in the garden of old family friends, by an Episcopal minister.
They thought it would be nice to go to the church in the town where he was the minister, but we hadn't been very often.
The apple orchard our house was surrounded by was part of an old farm, but the barn had recently been torn down. My brother, 6 at the time, found an old cow femur near the barn's foundation. To him, it was the best dinosaur bone ever discovered! He took it to school for show and tell.
Where else could he impress people with his dinosaur bone?! Oh, yeah...of course! Sunday school!
NOT!




I think that was the last time my family went to church. I was 4.
When I was 9, I told a Catholic boy that people descended from apes, and he said "Maybe you did, but I didn't!" LOL.

At least my fundie upbringing knew dinos were around. I haven't been to church in ages except for funerals and weddings and my kid doesn't go to church. we couldn't watch "Dark Shadows" or "Batman". Ha, morons. I had to go to church about 3 hours on sunday, and one hour on wed. Good luck to your mind and soul.

The teachers answer was that they never existed. I asked "what about the fossils?" To which she replied that those were put there by the devil to lead man astray.

:wow:

That was my first ever introduction to cognitive dissonance. The logical side of myself soon won out though as I realized that tales like THE Flood and some dude getting swallowed by a whale and then yakked out on a beach three days later were no more true than Aesop's Fables. They may contain valuable lessons and truths but they certainly aren't TRUE.

It still blows my mind that something like 30% of adults believe the above stories to be literally true; as much so if you told me that a third of adults believed in Santa Claus.

and extinct. :think:

She said something like, "I don't know, I guess it's just what they were raised with". Thin end of the wedge. Atheist by the fourth grade.

By pure coincidence, at about the same time, I checked out my first dinosaur book from the First Baptist Church library -- how ironic is that. Likewise, the thin end of the wedge. :)

Which kind of pissed me off.