Pat Robertson Dispels Creationist Idea That Earth Is 6,000 Years Old

Today during Sacrament meeting, we had our monthly congregational testimonies. One guy, a convert to the church, started going on how people believe man's descended from apes, and I had to force myself from rolling my eyes too hard lest they rolled down the aisle and onto the pipe organ's pedals.

Yup, the world is definitely ending this month. I agree with something Pat Robertson said...

Burn the heretic

Even if one applies this to the Genesis story, things still happen in the wrong order. Twisting oneself into contortions trying to reconcile the myth with reality is just as bad as believing in the myth.

Genesis 2 certainly does, but what about Chapter 1? It goes from sea life to birds to mammals and then finally humans. It's been a while since I took biology, but isn't that pretty close?

It also has the earth being created before the stars, and birds before land animals, amongst other anomalies.

Not to mention the firmament "separating the waters above from the waters below". And the identification of the Godhead as plural.

Yeah...well it's a creation myth...it's actually two creation myths. Waddaya expect?

Still seems to me that they got it pretty close in Chapter 1, considering.

In what way is that close?

Edgar Allen Poe solved the darkness paradox, so, there must be something to talking ravens.

Oh please!

You just happily agreed with Jan above that people who believe in creationism are not real people and not members of homo sapiens sapiens! That they are stupid and retarded.

Talk about anti-science bullshit. Declaring people who disagree with you as non-human...we all know the kind of people who do that, you bigoted little fuck.

The 53% who don't believe in young earth creationism don't necessarily accept a reality-based interpretation of things either. Some of them suffer from other delusions, such as guided evolution or other creation myths.

That plants came first, then sea creatures, then land creatures, and, lastly, humans. According to Rick it got the birds wrong, but four out of five isn't too bad considering Darwin's great-great-great-great grandfather hadn't been born yet when it was written.

Why are you only counting five parts of the chronology?

The ones related to evolution. They're the ones that seem to be right for the most part.

Does it matter that they somewhat got the order of things right? I doubt it. What point does that try to prove?

Well, it gets the birds wrong, and it has the first sea creature being a whale -- in fact one of the youngest, and one that descended from land creatures --, and it has the plants first because it believes they can exist without suns, and it has domesticated animals precede humans, and humans are not in fact last in reality, and... am I being a spoilsport here?

It doesn't prove anything. I just think it's interesting is all. Apparently I'm the only one.

I said it was close....not that it was dead balls accurate.

the traditional theology of Genesis 1-2 (in terms of explaining the differences between the two) is actually a pretty wise understanding of textual criticism and contains the foundation for a saner view of Scripture as a whole - yet far too many traditionalists will accept this explanation for THAT particular conflict and then NOT apply it to their view of the whole for some reason.

To wit: the reason the two differ is because of the fact that they both arise from Jewish traditional "oral history" customs (which go back to the days when history was passed down orally rather than written). According to that tradition, so the explanation goes, it was not at all uncommon for the storyteller to describe a broad overview of an event, then re-tell the story going into the personal human details which are intended to communicate the "moral of the story" (i.e. the reason which the story was preserved and handed down while others were not).

It was not uncommon or a "red flag" for the details to conflict between the overview and the detailed version because the "moral" was the point, not the details.

Which is actually an excellent framework for analyzing the whole bible but somehow too few make that leap.

The theory I heard was that it's simply two different creation myths written by two different authors...probably during two different time periods.

That as much admits it's fairy tales.
You could say that same bit of tapdancing about the various Superman reboots.

Yes. Indeed, very clearly during two different time periods, given the massive lingual differences.

I'd also been under the impression that it was written by two different authors.

However, Nova's explanation makes sense. I know that many religions of that era believed it "bad" to write down religious texts. That they needed to be expressed orally. One reason why clerics spent years in training - beginning in the their youth. It would take that long to memorize every story.

I hadn't heard about the "overview" verses the "moral of the story" part, but that does fit with other aspects of religious presentations in that time frame.

That's certainly out there, but not the view held by traditionalist evangelicals and charismatics and Fundies (can't speak for Catholics)

ETA: yours is the more likely and more logical understanding, but the one i described is the concoction which results from trying to preserve the "God inspired it and it has no mistakes" theology.

Whales being first? This is the first I've heard of this! Where is this passage found?

I've also heard people say dinosaurs=birds, as they are more similar to birds than to reptiles.

Everything in the universe relegates religion to the realm of fairy tales in your not so humble opinion. It's time to grow up. Because if you don't, you will end up like someone such as RickDeckard.

[action=Soma]shudders[/action]

I think fundies get too caught up in that. The bible doesn't have to be taken 100% literal for it to be "truthy"....the contrary in fact. Taken 100% literal, a whole lot of it is schizophrenic.

Not = exactly, but birds almost certainly evolved from one or more of the smaller dinosaurs. And mammals preceded both birds and dinosaurs.

Link?

http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/jpitocch/evolution/evoltimeline.html

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