From: Cmekve@aol.com
Date: Sun Oct 19 2003 - 23:56:33 EDT
In a message dated 10/19/2003 12:09:45 PM Mountain Standard Time,
jwburgeson@juno.com writes:
> 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
>
>
Burgy-
These guys were featured in an article in Westword a few months ago. It's all
rather pathetic. It speaks volumes to the fact that the only thing YEC knows
less about than science is theology.
Karl
*************************
Karl V. Evans
cmekve@aol.com
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