Mr. Phat,
I think most of your questions are (or should be) rhetorical - but I'm going to answer them individually anyway (ornery me).
Phat writes:
If everyone thought alike, would Jesus approve?
Depends. If everybody thought that they should love their neighbour as themselves, I'm sure He would approve of that. If everybody thought that the earth was 6000 years old, I'm equally sure He would not approve of that.
Does the Creator really care if His creation believes in Adam and Eve and a Snake and a Flood?
I think He "really cares" that they understand the
message behind the stories. If they cling to a belief in a literal Adam and Eve, they have missed the point. If they cling to a belief in a literal snake, they have missed the point. If they cling to a belief in a literal flood, they have missed the point.
He cares about the point, not the fairy tales told to illustrate the point.
Does He not want us to use our minds that He created (directly or indirectly) within us?
Are there not too many negatives in that sentence to make it incomprehensible?
I think you meant to ask, "Does He want us to use our minds?"
Yes.
Are we expected to turn our backs on the hallowed halls of education that brought society out of the ignorance of the past?
No.
Perhaps we really are hopeless victims of Original Sin....
Since the fiction of "Original Sin" is supposedly right at the beginning of the Bible, the "hopeless victims" scenario would make the rest of the Bible redundant.
... we really shouldn't try and deify our own human wisdom....
You've made an Olympic-caliber long jump from "should we use our brains?" to deification of our human wisdom.
We should use our feet for walking, but that doesn't deify them. We should use our hands to make a living, but that doesn't deify them. Why single out the brain for atrophy?
... the best answer for a universe full of problems.
Bear in mind that the
unused brains of religionists have probably created more problems than they have solved.
Can a man be a critical thinker and also believe that Jesus lives within him?
I think jar - among others - illustrates that he can.
The problem is that some people don't
believe that he believes. Could that be a flaw in
their beliefs? Or a flaw in their critical thinking?
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