Heretical Conservatism: How Do You Know Adam Wasn't a Monkey?

- Allowing for the teaching of theistic evolution in schools:

I could care less about whether God created man in his own image or if we’re descended from monkeys. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. Because of this, I have no stake in the Creationism v. Evolution v. Intelligent Design debate and know virtually nothing about any of them.

Conservatives, however, are perfectly willing to make assholes out of themselves on this.

Evangelicals believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and use this to support their position on creationism. There’s even a “Young Earth Creationism” movement which believes that the earth was created in six 24 hour days and is somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years old..

What a MONUMENTALLY stupid belief. And I mean the “inerrant word of God” part.

Just for fun, let’s say that God did come down from Heaven and found a human to take dictation. If the reporter DID manage zero errors in his transcription, that may indeed qualify as inerrant. You would then have to believe that every translation to every different language was also without a single error. THEN you would have to believe that every single variation (King James, New International, Revised Standard, etc, etc.) contains not a single error or misinterpreted word. You would also have to have an unbreakable faith to believe that someone didn’t just change words around to fuck with people.

That’s not how it happened though. For starters, as evidenced in the most excellent movie “Dogma” the voice of God is so powerful that it would cause a man’s head to explode. Accordingly, I sincerely doubt that God dictated hundreds of pages of text to an ordinary man who made zero errors.

Kidding.

In order to believe that the word of God is inerrent, you not only have to believe the above, but you have to ignore the fact that the Bible is a conglomerate of 66 texts picked from hundreds of choices by a committee of men with an ulterior motive.

Constantine, who was trying his hardest to become a Christian after years of being a pagan, was genuinely confused because everybody was preaching a different doctrine. Some were preaching the “divine son of God, born of a virgin” doctrine while others just thought he was a pretty cool philosopher. Constantine was getting a little frustrated because he kept getting told different stories by different people.

So he convened a council of bishops in Nicaea and told them to come up with a uniform message. They did, in the form of the Nicene Creed (which emphaiszed the more extreme, supernatural position) and then went on to develop their supporting document, the Bible. Although there continued to be some further development in subsequent years, the meat and potatoes remained the same.

And despite the unearthing of the Nag Hammadi Library and the Dead Sea Scrolls (all of which predate the codified Bible) there has YET to be an updated version.

So you have a book, commissioned by a Roman Emporer and developed by a committee whose ultimate goal was to make Constantine happy because they were tired of being persecuted and wanted to put themselves in positions of power. Any texts which may have conflicted with their uniform message were thrown out, burned, destroyed, whatever.

(There's also some anecdotal evidence that any bishops who conflicted with their uniform message were thrown out, burned, destroyed, whatever. Certainly plausible but I can't say for sure.)

In the 1600+ years since the book was developed, it’s been translated into hundreds of languages and hundreds of different versions by thousands of different people. Do you still believe that it is without error?

If so, keep in mind that Jesus was very cryptic in his messages and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. When God was telling the story of how he created the heavens and earth and everything therein in 6 days, a “day” could have represented millions of years. God’s concept of time may not be the same as ours.

Thomas Jefferson once said that he belonged to a sect of Christianity that had but one member and, through most of my adult life, I’ve related to that sentiment. My Christian ideals are a strong mix of Protestantism and Gnosticism with a little Deism and Philosophical Taoism thrown in for good measure.

This should explain both my belief that the Bible is NOT the inerrant word of God as well as my verbosity when it comes to talking about fundies.

Again, I’m not going to argue the merits of evolution vs. creationism as I’m completely apathetic on the issue.. I AM going to say, however, that if you believe that the earth is only six thousand years old because the Bible says so, you are deluded. If this is how you want your children to believe, teach them yourselves. Or find some backwards, snake-handling church and they can teach your kids for you.

Like it or not, by requiring the teaching of creationism in the schools, you start heading up that slippery slope towards government promotion of religion which the First Amendment says is a great big no-no (I’ll talk more about the First Amendment later…it deserves it’s own post). Further up on that slippery slope is the line that demarcates theocracy which, again, is completely ANTI-conservatives.

PS. Isn’t it funny how many of the people on the “creation” side of the argument are the ones who are most up in arms about Islamic law in the Middle East?

PPS. They also tend to be the ones who scream the loudest that Barry O’Bama is SURELY a Muslim because his middle name is Hussein and “We can’t have no Muslim in the White House!”

PPPS. Far be it for me to defend ole Barry. I have HUGE concerns about the guy and, (as it’s probably fairly obvious) won’t be voting for him in November. Being black and having a funny, Muslim sounding name are not two of them, though.