What is the whore of Babylon - part 5

Charles Darwin didn't use his theories to attack Christianity. Not exactly. No, that mantle was picked up by a man who called himself "Darwin's Bulldog", Thomas Huxley. Huxley, in his scientific paper Man's Place in Nature took a basic scientific observation (that successive generations of living organisms seem to adapt to their environment through a process called natural selection) and began the process of crafting it into a religion. but it was his grandson, Julian, that just went all crazy with it.

Julian Huxley developed a system of belief that he called, "evolutionary humanism". Huxley famously stated: "Many people assert that this abandonment of the God hypothesis means the abandonment of all moral sanction. This is simply not true. but it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture, that we must construct something to take its place."

And so he did. This 'new' religion was going to meet in places like a church, sing songs like hymns, and study all the moral goodies that evolution compelled them to believe.

Of course nobody much went along with this. You see, evolution doesn't compel you to believe anything in the moral sphere. Huxley should have snapped on this being one of the main members of the British Eugenics society (eugenics is the study of selective breeding and weeding out of humans) during the same time that one of the main members of a little German eugenics club-- an Adolf Somebody-or-other -- was busy "weeding out" 13 million human beings in his concentration camps.

Science is like that. It can tell you what you are seeing. But it can't tell you what it is worth; it can't tell you whether it is good or bad. At least it's not supposed to. The funny thing is -- that doesn't seem to be stopping anybody. Evolution should state that more complex living organism derive from more simple organism over time through the process of natural selection... and that's it. But it doesn't. There's a 'company line' of sorts that is attached to evolutionary teaching that says things like: evolutionary theory teaches us that God is a product of the human mind (uh, it does?), evolution teaches us that women are wrongfully repressed by the male dominated culture (I don't remember seeing that in the fossil record), or evolution shows us that homosexuality is a valid form of sexual expression, (actually evolution has a problem even explaining homosexuality. You know, natural selection and all).

The 19th century was where we said goodbye to science 'the method of discovery' and began to say hello to science 'the religion'. The same century that gave us a whole new host of objects of idolatry (like the icons of romance stories) also gave gnostics a new and potent foundation for religious use. With Christianity, it was like trying to manipulate a person who doesn't want to do what you're telling him. But with science, it's like moving a puppet. Science makes no attempt to defend itself. It crunches the numbers and then stands dumbly while the person viewing those numbers uses them for whatever purpose they choose.

Not all scientists are gnostics of course, but quite a few are. The concentrations gets ever higher if you look at something like the modern "skeptic" movement. Two centuries ago a spirit of gnosticism had sufficiently infused the scientific community to create the battle lines that we see today between science and "faith". Make no mistake, that battle is not between observation and faith-based revelation, it is between one religion and another.

Because this battle rages, many of my fellow Christians get angry with me for defending evolution. They think I've sided with the enemy. It's the same thing as when a scientist like Stephen Jay Gould tries to assert that science has no business making religious claims for any sort of moral judgement, and then a whole host of his colleagues ask him if he would kindly shut the hell up.

This is a conflict between two ideologies. And it is about to turn bloody.

Next post: what is this going to look like in the 'half a time'.

What is the whore of Babylon - part 4

Let's be clear: our world appears to be over four billions years old. There were no dinosaurs when man first came on the scene. There was never any "water dome" surrounding the earth and if you saw the individuals that we refer to as "Adam" and "Eve" you might be surprised that they didn't look like the nearly hairless caucasian teenagers that we somehow always depict on felt boards and in movies. Oh, and you probably have a great grandmother somewhere who has outlived Methuselah.

The sad part is that you probably think that I just contradicted the Bible one or more times. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I am disputing is a pattern of interpretation; a pattern that picked a certain outline of what it decided Biblical truth must be and has now spent the last four centuries or so working backwards trying to create some sort of evidence for itself.

Well... at least we got rid of the gnostics.

What am I talking about? Where do I start? There are so many points at which the current -- oh, what do I even call this thing? It doesn't deserve terms like evangelical or even conservative... only about half or so of Bible believing Christians go in for it... let's just call it Young Earth for now -- crumbles into a heap of irrational mishmash:

The age of the planet? The creation story from Genesis was spoken long before it was written down and let me tell you, even if Adam had have been born in October of 4004 there still would not have been a language in existence that could have said the things that we try and make that passage say. By the time it was rendered into Hebrew the Hebrew language had two words to denote the passage of time. Two. No hours, minutes, or seconds, no millenniums, centuries, or years.... and no word that meant, "a period of 24 hours". Time keeping was tricky for primitive man and our earliest two words meant something like, "a period of darkness in between two periods of light", where darkness can either literally mean nightfall or can mean something more vague like, "a period of the unknown". The second word means the reverse, "a period of light in between two periods of darkness and it can express the same sorts of multiple meanings. Context is the key. The same word that Young Earthers take in Genesis as meaning 24 hours is taken by the same folks to mean "7 years" when it is given in the context of, "the great and terrible day of the Lord."

I'm going to get to the point for the sake of time. In debates with atheists I can do something fancy that always leaves them thinking I've just cheated in some way or another -- I can take the current scientific theory of our universe's creation and the evolution of life on this planet, place it next to the Genesis account and make the two match. It's simple. You just have to apply a couple basics rules that any primitive group of humans would have employed when understanding such a story.

The Bible is an amazing thing. It doesn't need our help to defend itself. Trust me. We are not doing God any favors when we create our own little fictions that supposedly will explain everything.

Methuselah? The Genesis genealogies are old enough that there are not a lot of other surviving pieces of literature to compare them to. But there are a few. And from the little we have it seems clear to me that the word we translate "year" in those genealogies did not mean "a period of 365 days" to Methuselah and his contemporaries. If I had to nail down a guess, I would say that the figures added up their ages using a lunar cycle (basically a month) starting from some sort of rite of passage event. If I'm right Methusaleh lived to be about 90. Whatever it was, the ancients did not use their genealogies the way that Archbishop Ussher did.

Dome of water? I feel silly even answering this sort of thing. A dome of water surrounding the earth? Seriously? You don't need God holding a giant bucket over the earth to make it rain for forty days. A nice-sized meteor hitting the ocean will do that for you. And no, sitting under a water screen would not make you live for a thousand years either.

So what does any of this have to do with Gnostics and the end times?

Christianity isn't just a religion, it is also a pattern of thinking -- a way of looking at the world and decided what to think/do about those observations. This is what Paul is alluding to when he says, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be changed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:2), where renewal leads to a Christian was of thinking and a casting off of the Roman pagan religion/thought patterns. When Christianity was the dominant pattern of thought across the western world it was only natural that Gnostics would use it for their foundation of spiritual increase. When observational-based thinking began to separate from the Christian church, in other words when a person could either be a scientist or a Christian, but it started to be a little tricky to consider themselves as both, the gnostics suddenly had a choice. And science works better as a foundation for gnosticism than Christianity ever did.

Next post: Gnostics, the where are they now episode.

What is the whore of Babylon - part 3

For a thousand years the whore dressed up in church clothes and did a pretty good rendition of a "nice" girl. Then the church did something that began the process of flushing them out into the open: the church decided that it couldn't be wrong anymore.

The official claim of Papal infallibility (the notion that a pope can never be wrong while carrying out his official duties) didn't come until the 1800's, but it had been the normal working order since medieval times. The medieval church was the one that decided to consolidate its power and prestige, and to do that it couldn't go around admitting that it made mistakes.

Now the church in Western history had actually been the prime supporter of scientific progress, and that lasted up until Renaissance times. Most of the Western advances either came at the hands of monks or through the support of some church agency. But once the church leaders decided to agree with certain scientific theories it was stuck, because now if you remember, it could no longer admit to being wrong. Thus Copernicus and Galileo and a host of others would make discoveries and then find themselves in the peculiar position of either keeping their finds to themselves or going to prison.

At this point there is something that needs to be clarified. I've previously said that all the world's major religions have a gnostic variant, and that's true... to a point. It ceases to be true if you consider Mormonism a 'major world religion'. Gnostics don't care much for the Mormon faith. You see, it's hard for a gnostic to put much stock in a system of knowledge if that system has no internal logic and can be best described as... well... stupid.

Mormonism works very much like a classic mystery religion. For the Mormons, as you progress in the faith, you get to go to a special study room and see presentations on all the really "special" elements of the faith -- this involves a churchmen giving a multimedia presentation on how you are going to one day zip around the cosmos keeping your long-suffering wife pregnant for all eternity. The Mormons lose members as they teach these special "truths". A good number of ex-Mormons describe the difficulty in putting their faith in a system that made no logical sense.

Christianity is not Mormonism. At least, it's not supposed to be.

The Christian Bible invites skepticism. It holds itself to the standard of logic, so much so that John actually refers to God as the great "Logos" or logic in the first chapter of his gospel -- your Bible likely translates this as "Word" as in, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made man...." and "Word" isn't a bad translation since most folks would scratch their heads if it read, "In the beginning was the 'Logic', but you need to understand 'Word' is correct because of what a 'word' is; it's a discrete piece of rational thought. In other words it's the difference between "hello" and "olhel" where the first one contains a rational thought and the second one doesn't. What I'm trying to say is that the Bible makes a very fundamental claim to logic and reason. A Mormon can look you in the face and explain why they accept Mormonism in spite of the logical inconsistencies in the Book of Mormon and the lack of any archaeological support. A Mormon has "faith" and it's okay for their faith to run contrary to logic and observation. A Christian does not have this luxury.

Case in point -- right now professing Christian Kirk Cameron is going around handing out copies of Darwin's The Origin of Species that have a preface which tries to undermine the theory of evolution and in stead prop up the "Christian" theory called young earth creation. Now, I guarantee that Mr. Cameron has no little, and very possibly no idea where young earth creation comes from and that he likely doesn't care; he has faith, and why should rational observation stand in the way of something grander like faith.

Most people think that young earth creation comes from the Bible. It doesn't. It comes from a man named James Ussher, an Irish Archbishop in the 1600's, and no, he did not say that the world was formed in the year 4,000 BC. What he actually said was that the world was formed on October 22, 4004 BC... in the evening... I am not joking.

The way he came up with this astonishingly precise figure was to add up the ages found in the Genesis genealogies, apply it to the Julian calender and voila, an exact date of world creation. His timeline found popularity and was inserted into the back of the King James Bible, at a time when everyone was buying and reading the King James Bible. Now Christians are funny in that sometimes we don't always discriminate between "Scriptural" and "Biblical" and by that I mean that we often tend to assign the same sort of 'infallibility' to the footnotes, inserts, maps, and whatnot, that we do for the actual text.

I personally have no problem attempting to defend the claim that the writers of Scripture were divinely inspired, I would have a much harder time trying to lay that at the feet of the modern day Biblical scholars. But Renaissance believers had no prior experience with Biblical scholarship and they accepted what they were given, cover to cover. The 4004 date became institutionalized as if it were the work of an apostle, rather than a Renaissance Catholic archbishop. "Faith" has keep it alive since. But I will give Archbishop Ussher this: working with the assumptions of the time his theory was actually semi-logical. That's three and a half centuries ago. Today, it's nothing short of ridiculous.

Next post, I pick up with creation/evolution and hopefully start explaining where those pesky gnostics went after Renaissance times.