Monday, October 26, 2009

 

And Now for Something Not Even Very Original


It seems the Seventh-day Adventists are aping the Clergy Letter Project's Evolution Weekend program. They just held their first Creation Sabbath, where such startling presentations were made as:

... evidence for the biblical account of a worldwide flood, including turtle fossils in the United States and whale fossils in Peru that are in the same state of decay, indicating they were likely buried at the same time.

No, I haven't a clue either. Fossils in "decay"? Weathering or erosion I know about. The matrix may break down. But decay? ... as a dating technique? And why would it be surprising that turtles and whales were buried at the same time?

At least they didn't have the ol' microevolution versus macroevolution business. This time it was called "micro-evolution" and "mega-evolution." Nothing like a cosmetic change to freshen things up!

But never mind. This was my favorite piece of the article:

"All through history, there isn't an idea - no matter how ludicrous, no matter how stupid, no matter how contrary to the basic views of Christianity - that we're not going to find some 'progressive' Christians wanting to incorporate," said Goldstein, who edits the church's Adult Bible Study Guide. "I don't buy into the idea that they're the Galileos of their time and that we're retarding progress."

The whole idea of taking Genesis' creation stories as a literal historical account is a relatively recent one with its roots in the "back to fundamentals" movement of the late 19th and early 20th century in reaction to the "higher criticism" of the Bible and general revulsion among conservative Christians with Modernism. So denigrating others for incorporating bad ideas into Christianity is not a good move. If I were them, I wouldn't be using the words "ludicrous" and "stupid" so freely when talking about ideas. "Retarding" and all its cognates might also be words for them to avoid.

Also in the category of things that can end up ugly:

Pat Hamoodi ... said she attended to see the issue of creation discussed by some of the church's experts. She was raised in an atheist home and said she wants to debate her family on the matter of origins "in a good way."

"I came here to get ammunition, you could say," Hamoodi said.

I'm sure her foot appreciates it.
.


Comments:
Jesus Christ. For some time I considered going to Loma Linda University. Looking at stories like this, I'm really glad I got out of the SDA school system early enough.
 
One might almost say heaven was watching over you.

;-)
 
John wrote

The whole idea of taking Genesis' creation stories as a literal historical account is a relatively recent one with its roots in the "back to fundamentals" movement of the late 19th and early 20th century ...

And (not incidentally) a core proponent of bastardizing science in service of a literal reading of the Bible for decades in the early 20th century was self-taught 'flood geologist' George McCready Price, who was an SDA.
 
... self-taught 'flood geologist' George McCready Price, who was an SDA.

And who was very mad at W.J. Bryan for not defending a young Earth in the Scopes trial and may have been responsible for the myth that Bryan lost Christians' support when he "admitted" that the Earth might be old. In fact, according to Ronald Numbers, most conservative Christians of the time were "day-agers" or "gap" creationists.
 
One wonders how a Seventh Day Adventist can complain about ideas that they are outside of mainstream Christianity.
 
I read somewhere (but don’t ask me where) that the SDAs regard Isaac Newton as a Saint because of his work on Bible prophecies that was published posthumously.
 
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