Re: Cobb County

In a message dated 1/21/2005 10:59:55 AM Eastern Standard Time, Either Carol or John Burgeson <burgytwo@juno.com> writes:

>>> All I can say is that there are people in the church who are trying.>>
>
>Yeah. But not enough of us. We are too small a voice. And the trends are all in the wrong direction.
>
>Naomi Schaefer Riley, the author of "God on the Quad: How Religious
>Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America," writes that
>many in the next generation of Christian Americans
>are more radically conservative (read -- YEC) than their parents. The
>link is at
>
>http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories
>/012005dnediriley.9c730.html
>
>That seems to be the case in my family -- only 1 of my eight children
>seems to share my more tolerant views. But then, I was pretty far to the
>right when I was their age too. Like Glenn, I once gave the YEC arguments
>some credibility. Like Glenn, I rejected that credibility after studying
>them carefully.
>
>Hopefully, my kids will mature as they enter their 40s.
>
>jb

I've been staying out of the thread on evolution because I embraced evolution quite early and don't need to debate the issue. What I find fascinating is Burgy's comment that his kids are religiously conservative and when they grow older they will mature to a level of religious liberalism. It was just the opposiete for me. I was conservative in my youth, liberal as soon as I was out of parochial school, but then I studied evolution, accepted it and began to read the bible through Darwinian eyes beginning with genesis. That is what brought me back to conservative religion. The laws of God are the laws of science, but first of all you have to separate the allegories from the Darwinian facts.
There is reason to believe that in genesis specifically, the creation account is borrowed from earlier Mesopotamian myths, because the accounts of the lives of Biblical people are evolutionarily correct in the message they are conveying. This "evolutionary correctness" permeates the entire bible and is an untapped resource for the vast majority of believers.
So, people who start out conservative via faith, wind up liberal without a Darwinian understanding of the bible, but once having gained that understanding I predict they will move back to moral conservatism. So, it is important to get past the evolutionary issues to arrive at a scientific validation of the Hebrew bible.

I've often mentioned Kevin MacDonald's work on the "evolutionary strategy of Judaism."
He was awarded a prize by conservatives in Washington last year for this work.

http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/jllp1/jllp2004.html
http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/jllp1/jllp-km.html

The corpus of his work proves beyond any doubt that Darwinian principles were known to the Biblical writers and the priestly caste (e.g. Ezra).

rich f.
Received on Fri Jan 21 12:44:23 2005