With all due respect to ACDC, this is what I was told the last two weeks in church.
Our pastor has decided to preach a five week series on creation. Why? I don’t know. My wife and I discussed this before the first sermon and couldn’t figure out where he was going with this. “After all”, my wife said, “creation or evolution has nothing to do with salvation.”
Well apparently, it does. Here are the lowlights:
[ul]
[li]A ~6000 year old universe is the only true understanding of “science” and salvation is contingent upon it[/li][li]The ultimate goal of evolutionists is to eliminate God[/li][li]Evolution is a lie being spread by Satan[/li][/ul]
So pack the sunscreen and pitchforks. Where I’m going, it’s going to be hot.
Man, I am sorry to hear that your pastor is taking the low road on this topic. I cannot stand when religious types tell folks that evolution is the gateway to atheism, communism, etc. Point number two, in fact saddens me. Just because scientists are trying to understand the mechanism does not mean that they do not believe in a god. I wish I could understand why evolution is the scapegoat that it is.
Didn’t Newton and Leibniz both use science to try to find God in the world? Why do some of these modern day religious types think they are incompatable (God ad science)?
Although sometimes it feels like inviting people into a burning building, when I hear stories like yours I want to say: The Episcopal Church Welcomes You. Seriously.
I be he also believes that God wrote the Bible by controlling the hands that held the quills. The concept that it’s possible to believe in both creationism and evolution would probably make his head explode.
It sounds like he could have been the preacher of the church I went to as a kid. In fact, I initially learned about evolution from a Chick tract that said evolutionists believe that “your grandfather is a monkey”. In my nine year old brain, I figured evolution must be satanic, because otherwise why would anyone believe such drek?
On the positive side, when I learned what evolution actually was, around 12 or so, it made me question everything the church had taught.
I predicted about 30 years ago that the anti-evolution furor was just a passing phase. Man, was I ever wrong.
There are some quotes from Galileo about the compatibility of religion and science, too. And there are certainly modern examples of scientists trying to find or understand God through their research- Abdus Salam, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for his work on elementary particles, is one very prominent example.
There are, of course, many branches of Christianity that don’t teach that the Bible’s account of creation is literally true, and don’t have any problems with evolution- Catholicism is one of them.
I think it’s hilarious, especially when they say that acceptance of evolution is responsible for problems like alcohol that predate evolution by thousands of years.
I really like Einstein’s quote, something like he was “thinking God’s thoughts after Him”.
I meet with the pastor later this week. I can’t decide if I’m looking for an apology or if I just tell him that I’ll find a church that deals with theology as opposed to crackpot science.
