(no subject)
Someone I know has gotten into a heated discussion with an old friend who's turned into a biblical literalist, and since I'm not part of the discussion and can't rant to the literalist in question, you guys get my rant instead.
Okay. When people of various faiths choose not to eat pork, for the most part they don't deny the edibility of pork, and they don't try to get people outside their faith to stop eating pork -- they simply say, "No, I don't do that. God says it's not for me." When people choose to rely on prayer for healing instead of going to a doctor, for the most part they don't deny the efficacy of conventional medicine, and they don't try to withhold medical treatment from other people (except for their children, which is a whole ball of wax I don't want to get into here). They simply say, "No, I don't do that. God says it's not for me."
Why can't evolution deniers approach that topic with the same sense of humility and spiritual grounding? "No, I don't make that piece of science part of my world view. God says it's not for me." Why waste so much time and effort trying to "scientifically" disprove it (most evolution deniers have an extremely shaky grasp of the scientific method, as you would imagine) and why create so much conflict trying to remove this science from the knowledge base of other people? Hello, literalists, not only do these attempts make you look ignorant and defensive, they make it look like you don't actually trust God. For all your desperate "It's wrong because God says so, and I trust God!" it looks like you don't trust God at all. If you really trusted God, you wouldn't *need* for evolution to be scientifically inaccurate in order for you to let go of it -- you would just say, "Right or not, God asks me not to make it part of my life." (And wouldn't I love to see evolution deniers actually walk the walk and try to live without the advances in medicine, agriculture, and other fields that have been attained by the understanding of evolution.) If you really trusted God, what other people make of evolution would be irrelevant to you. You would tell your children, "Learn the material for the exam, but don't forget that we're special and God has a different story for us," and you would trust God to do God's work in that relationship.
And we would all be much, much happier.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/393557.html.
comments on that entry. Please comment there using OpenID.
Okay. When people of various faiths choose not to eat pork, for the most part they don't deny the edibility of pork, and they don't try to get people outside their faith to stop eating pork -- they simply say, "No, I don't do that. God says it's not for me." When people choose to rely on prayer for healing instead of going to a doctor, for the most part they don't deny the efficacy of conventional medicine, and they don't try to withhold medical treatment from other people (except for their children, which is a whole ball of wax I don't want to get into here). They simply say, "No, I don't do that. God says it's not for me."
Why can't evolution deniers approach that topic with the same sense of humility and spiritual grounding? "No, I don't make that piece of science part of my world view. God says it's not for me." Why waste so much time and effort trying to "scientifically" disprove it (most evolution deniers have an extremely shaky grasp of the scientific method, as you would imagine) and why create so much conflict trying to remove this science from the knowledge base of other people? Hello, literalists, not only do these attempts make you look ignorant and defensive, they make it look like you don't actually trust God. For all your desperate "It's wrong because God says so, and I trust God!" it looks like you don't trust God at all. If you really trusted God, you wouldn't *need* for evolution to be scientifically inaccurate in order for you to let go of it -- you would just say, "Right or not, God asks me not to make it part of my life." (And wouldn't I love to see evolution deniers actually walk the walk and try to live without the advances in medicine, agriculture, and other fields that have been attained by the understanding of evolution.) If you really trusted God, what other people make of evolution would be irrelevant to you. You would tell your children, "Learn the material for the exam, but don't forget that we're special and God has a different story for us," and you would trust God to do God's work in that relationship.
And we would all be much, much happier.
This entry was originally posted at http://loligo.dreamwidth.org/393557.html.
comments on that entry. Please comment there using OpenID.