Out of curiosity, DA, with that pre-med background, did you strike for HM?
After decades of experience in the creation/evolution "controversy" (I still maintain that that "controversy" is itself a creationist fabrication), I've had to arrive at the conclusion that Christianity's major failing is that it creates an environment that is conducive to and protective of fraud, deception, and hypocrisy. It isn't that the religion itself nor even the churches themselves (yes, I had to swallow kind of hard on that one) are hypocritical, but rather that they allow hypocrisy to flourish. Specific cases I have encountered which support this view are believers in YEC to whom I had proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that a creationist had deliberately lied, such that they admitted that that that creationist had lied, and yet they adamantly refused to even consider confronting that creationist about it in any manner (it was a local creationist advocate whom they knew personally). They swore that it is not their duty to warn a brother who is sinning, even though it's their duty ot zealously denounce non-believers' "sinning" and be very in-their-face about it. They couldn't care less that their brother was placing his soul in mortal jeopardy of eternal punishment, even though they "care" oh so much for the souls of non-believers.
But that's not my story. My family was nominally Protestant. Even though we did not attend church as a family, in early elementary school (late 1950's) my mother had enrolled me in the Released-Time Religious Education program (which I'm surprised to find to be much older than I had thought --
Released time - Wikipedia) and regularly enrolled me in Vacation Bible School. I attended Protestant church with our neighbors and when I was about 11 years old, was baptized there in the wake of a Billy Graham revival.
About a year later, I decided that I should get serious about my religion and start learning more about it. Proceeding from the nave assumption that I was supposed to believe what was in the Bible, I started to read it, from the beginning. I read it in a navely literalist manner -- I don't know, but I'm pretty sure remembering back that my church was more mainstream and not literalist; I don't even know what denomination it was nor can I ask anyone since it no longer exists. Anyway, I found what I was reading to be incredibly unbelievable, until I finally had to conclude that I simply could not believe it. And since I could not believe what I thought I was supposed to believe in order to be a Christian, then that meant that I couldn't be a Christian. So I left at about the age of 12. That turned out to have been the right choice, even though it was for the wrong reasons.
In high school (late 1960's), my reading exposed me to some of Christianity's bloody history, which reinforced my choice. Then around 1970 the "Jesus Freak" movement hit Orange County. Many of my friends converted and I became something of a "fellow traveller". The biblical literalist approach just made no sense to me whatsoever, but the Chick Pubs pamphlets were hilarious to read. It was also at that time that I was first exposed to "creation science", mainly in the form of a general claim that the evidence supported Noah's Flood, that C-14 tests showed live clams to be thousands of years old (the truth of which I found years later), and the claim of a NASA computer having found "Joshua's Lost Day". That last one just proved to me that those claims were bogus and I rejected creationism out of hand. Then a decade later when the ICR's road show came to the university in the town where I was stationed, I was intrigued, thinking that if they're still around, then there must be something to it after all. So I started to study "creation science" and very quickly learned that the whole thing is a deception and its claims are nothing but lies.
I have described myself as a "confirmed atheist", since I had become an atheist 45 years ago around the traditional age of confirmation. I'm not anti-religion -- many of my friends and co-workers have been fundamentalist and evangelical Christians and we get along just fine. I respect others practicing their own religion, but I insist that they extend the same respect to others, which is why I feel very strongly about any religious group's attempts to gain political power and/or to subvert the "Great Barrier that Defends the Rights of the People" (a much earlier and more original description of the "Wall of Separation"). I also strongly urge them to be true to their faith and to its teachings; ie, I am opposed to hypocrisy.
Philosophically, I am agnostic, in that the supernatural is unknowable. I would even describe myself according to a bumper sticker: "Militant Agnostic: I don't know,
and neither do you!" While I do not exclude the possibility that the supernatural might exist, I do not believe that any person can know anything about it, especially not to the degree of detail that religions claim to have knowledge of. I view all gods as being human inventions, attempts to describe and think of something that we cannot describe nor think of. Even YHWH (AKA "God") is a human invention and would still be even if some supernatural being like Him were to exist; He would still just be a human invention, an inherently failed attempt, to try to deal with the idea of that real supernatural being. When we speak of whether or not we believe in God, that begs the question of what "God" is -- shades of ignosticism (
Theological noncognitivism - Wikipedia). The gods I do not believe in are the ones created by Man, which includes the gods of Christianity. I remain skeptical of claims regarding the supernatural.
The history of my father's side of the family might be of interest. It wasn't until I had reached adulthood that he even spoke of religion. The family started in the US in the 1850's when a Southern German (presumably Catholic) married a girl from Ireland (Eire, definitely Catholic). Most of the people who married into our line were also Irish and Catholic, until my Scottish mother. My father's father wasn't much for religion, until in one town he suddenly got religion and joined the local Protestant church. In order to keep the family together, the rest of the family also converted -- this was before my father's confirmation. Then the church leaders swindled my grandfather in a business deal and he lost interest again, but the family remained Protestant. My father attended church until he was 21, mainly for his mother's sake, since over the years he was finding the hypocrisy he was witnessing increasingly intolerable. As soon as he had turned 21, he didn't go back to church. Though for no reason he could fathom, in the Navy (he was a Chief Carpenter's Mate in the SeaBees, WWII Saipan) the chaplain latched onto him as a drinking buddy when they'd go out on liberty.
Edited by dwise1, : minor cleanup
{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world. (from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber,
No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)
Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.(Sherlock Holmes in
The Hound of the Baskervilles)
Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield,
Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)
It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.Robert Colbert on NPR
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