From: John W Burgeson (jwburgeson@juno.com)
Date: Sun Oct 19 2003 - 14:03:54 EDT
It seems as if we in the wild wild west are not immune either to the YEC
preachers. here is part of a note from Denver, Colorado.
B.C. Tours offers a politically incorrect view of Denver.
Holy Moses!
"In the beginning, the Big Bang created the heavens and the earth. Also,
camels and lions were never immortal, and neither were humans, who
actually used to be monkeys. Oh, and get this: The Earth is billions of
years old, not six thousand, like the Bible tells us. "
Tyson Thorne bit his lip to keep from laughing while listening to his
seventh-grade science teacher drill heretical ideas into the
impressionable minds of his classmates at Lakewood's Creighton Junior
High School. It was 1983, and Thorne knew better.
"I grew up in a home that was well-based in the Bible, and my parents did
a good job of discussing with me what I learned in school that day, and
if there were problems with what I was taught, they corrected those
problems," he says.
"They instructed me to learn my lessons and to be respectful in class,
but to always know in my heart that science isn't infallible; the word of
God is."
When it came time to take his science midterm exam, Thorne faced a
dilemma. Below the first question on the multiple-choice test -- "How did
the universe begin?" -- he did not find the answer which he knew to be
true: God did it.
"I didn't want to fail the exam, but I didn't want to lie, either," he
remembers. "So I circled the answer I knew she wanted, which was the Big
Bang theory, and then I just wrote her a little note in the margin that
said, 'Well, I know what you've taught us, so this is what I circled, but
I know better, because God created the universe' And that's what I did
all the way down the test. I circled the answers I knew she wanted, and
then I wrote the true answers next to every question."
Thorne passed the test, but his teacher pulled him aside a few days later
and suggested that he try to avoid taking science classes in the future.
He took her advice. Today he is a tour guide (in a white lab coat) with
Denver's B.C. Tours. The B.C. stands for "Biblically Correct;" they
conduct about 150 tours of major Colorado attractions every year.
Over a three-day period in May that coincided with a Christian Home
Educators conference, B.C. Tours shepherded more than 1,000 home-schooled
children through the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, also known in a
B.C. Tours pamphlet as the "Temple of Doom."
Divided into small groups, the kids listened as tour guides detailed a
defiantly alternative, fundamentalist view of the museum's exhibits --
one in which every word in the Bible is taken as the literal truth.
The children learned that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time,
that a Tyrannosaurus Rex frolicked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of
Eden, that radiometric- and carbon-dating methods are frauds, that
evolution is a lie and that when God says in the Bible that He made our
world in six days, He means just that: six 24-hour days.
The B.C. Tours guides also denounced scientific creationism -- the
middle-ground concept that evolution occurred roughly as modern science
says it did, but only by virtue of God designing the Earth's system
software and then booting it up on the cosmic mainframe. The men in white
lab coats instructed the children that scientific creationism is an
unholy alliance of incompatible beliefs.
"You have a key misunderstanding of the character of God if you believe
in any form of evolution as a Christian, because everything that
evolution purports to be true is pretty much the opposite of what the
Bible tells us really happened," explains Thorne. "According to
evolution, life began in the sea. According to the Bible, it began on
land. According to evolution, it took billions of years for this world to
develop. According to the Bible, it took six days. Evolution tells us
that the Earth was originally all land, that it was molten rock, and that
it had to rain for hundreds of thousands of years until we had oceans and
streams and rivers. The Bible says that, in the beginning, the Earth was
all water. It simply doesn't make any sense to try and fit science and
creationism together. To make a case for scientific creationism, you have
to pick and choose your way through the Bible, deciding as you go along
what's true and what's poetic allegory. Who are you to set yourself up in
judgment over the word of God?"
And if you believe what God's telling you, every word of it, then you
believe that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, that Joshua
actually made the sun stand still and that Adam actually lived to be 930
years old. And if you're a true believer, you have to accept that your
loving God committed genocide.
"That's true," says Thorne. "God told the Israelites when they moved into
the land to wipe out everybody, to spare no one, not even their cattle.
Why did he do that? I don't know. That's God's call. In that case,
genocide was obviously the right thing to do, because God commanded it.
I'm not willing to set it aside and say, 'Well, that part of the Bible is
patently untrue, because a loving God would never do that.' I don't
presume to lecture God."
Thorne likes to say he lives by the example of the Apostle Paul, a single
man who wandered the earth visiting the temples of the heathens, where he
would preach the word of the one true God. "Places like science museums
and zoos are the equivalent temples of our modern culture," he says.
"They are where creatures are worshiped instead of their creator, where
the work of the hands of man is worshiped over the work of God and where
lies are worshiped as truth."
Friends, the YEC movement continues to prosper and grow. as home
schooling, of which I generally approve, increases, the YEC movement is
feeding on it. At what point will the YEC movement be able to declare
victory? I suggest that that day is only a few years off. How will we
know it has arrived? Perhaps when we have a presidential candidate
directly and forcefully argue for it, and all over this country millions
of poorly informed citizens rise as one to "establish God" (their god) in
the White House.
Sorry for the ranting. But I see we are heading for REAL trouble in this
country. And I've got to holler about it.
Burgy
www.burgy.50megs.com
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