jerker77:
So the thing I’d like to ventilate is “why all this fuss?”. Why are people so upset and religious leaders so zealous in this matter? In short, reflections upon the motives behind the creationist movement.
You have to consider history. A watershed moment was the Scopes trial in 1927. H L Mencken covered that trial for the
Baltimore Sun. Mencken had a notoriously acid pen. He held up the creationists (most of whom were liberal Democrats in that day, as he was) to ridicule. Naive churchgoers, who were not much accustomed to media attention in the first place, suddenly felt scorned and humiliated in the eyes of the world. They withdrew.
A boom in the formation of rural Bible colleges followed. Fortress-like school buildings were erected in remote places. Newsletters proliferated with titles like 'Guardian' and 'Fortress.' There, the Scopes generation of evangelicals, bitter and smarting, instilled in younger generations the idea that on the issue of Darwin's theory there could be no compromise. It was the source of every evil. It was the source of everything anti-God, anti-Christian, outside, alien, other. It was the fundamental ill of society. The young were told that no accommodation with science on this point could be made. If they gave ground on evolutionary theory they were giving up their faith, and Jesus, and heaven.
Polarization takes practice, a desire to settle a score, and a loss of all sense of proportion.
And it takes training.
The students learned their lessons well. Many became preachers, and passed the lessons on. You see the results in this forum.
quote:
The parents have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.
Jeremiah 31.29
Edited by Archer Opterix, : Typo.
Edited by Archer Opterix, : HTML.
Archer
All species are transitional.