inter faith

[percival]

It's all nice and easy to be an inter faith enthusiast when you talk to moderate Christians, Buddhists, Taoists,
etc. - but whenever I encounter a specific sub group of Evangelical Christians, namely the one illustrated by the
Creation Science Fair,
I can't suppress a strong urge to retch. (I found the URL in sff_corgi's journal.)

I've nothing against fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity - but if science is twisted in line to support a world view that is often diametrically opposed to my ethics, that crosses the line.

For example, I can accept the argument that women should stay at home to look after their children because the children will benefit. But I will never accept an "argument" that takes women's lower pay to be a justification for excluding women from the work place.

As for the demonstration of the difference between Uncle Steve and a monkey, and the experiment to create life from inanimate substances - oh please. That just goes against the grain of scientific method - and demonstrates no grasp even of the popular scientific literature. (Notice how I suppressed a SNARXY comment about Uncle Steve.)

That said, I could probably live with my children adopting these views - or living with somebody that has these views. I'd just hope they'd snap out of it again ;)

Comments

[dr-c.livejournal.com]

By the way, be careful not to confuse the time-scale issue (billions vs. thousands of years) with the mechanism issue (creative acts of intelligent design vs. random chance and unchanging natural laws). There are a fair number of Evangelicals who are "old earth creationists," taking the days of Genesis to refer to longer periods of time, viewed from the surface of the earth (day 1 = light and darkness become distinct, day 2 = surface mists clear, sky and sea become distinct, etc.). I personally don't think this view conflicts with the honesty of Genesis; supposing it to be correct, and supposing quite hypothetically that (for whatever reason) God had appeared to an ancient Hebrew and explained that the days were actually longer periods of time, I don't think the Hebrew would have felt lied to by the text of Genesis.

This was of course one of the issues that I had to consider in re-evaluating my beliefs a decade ago. Not being a scientist, I couldn't independently evaluate everyone's arguments, but I could still look for reasonableness of presentation. It seemed to me that the young-earth creationists had to resort to desperate stretches when trying to interpret natural history in a short time-scale, but that there were some valid points in favor of intelligent design that mainstream scientists weren't quite taking seriously, perhaps due to a form of scientific method that disallows entirely any consideration of supernatural explanations.

That wasn't what convinced me to remain a Christian, of course-- it just kept the question open while I considered other related issues.

***

Also, I note that your view of religion differs sharply from mine in matters of morals and ethics; you seem to be saying that you wouldn't accept a religion that contradicted your moral sense, while I believe in first finding out about God and then letting Him (assuming correctness of pronoun) dictate what my moral senses ought to be. (Indeed, I would almost prefer to define "religion" as "that which dictates one's moral values"; if your view of humanity dictates your values, independently of the presence/absence and nature of God, then I'd wish to say that your view of humanity is your real "religion"!)