• Welcome to Autism Forums, a friendly forum to discuss Aspergers Syndrome, Autism, High Functioning Autism and related conditions.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Private Member only forums for more serious discussions that you may wish to not have guests or search engines access to.
    • Your very own blog. Write about anything you like on your own individual blog.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon! Please also check us out @ https://www.twitter.com/aspiescentral

Outed!

Well, folks, I have been outed. The assistant pastor found out that there is--gasp!--a Darwinist in their midst. He was rather taken aback but didn't make a big deal of it. I'm still welcome to join them at worship; but I suspect that if I formally applied for membership then it would become an issue. For now, we have agreed to disagree.

He did say that evolution and Christianity are incompatible in that evolution strikes at the heart of Christianity. And I agreed with him there, to his great surprise. Nonetheless, I am a Darwinist; I came to be one after much study and reflection, and to me Darwin makes sense. But I am not out to push it on anyone. Contrary to what he might believe, no one twisted my arm or pressured me to accept evolution; on the contrary, all the pressure has been on the religious side.

But he is right. Darwin's theory of evolution is absolutely fatal to a Christianity based on a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis. And I am not talking about the six days of creation or how old the earth is. That's trivial stuff. It's ironic that Christian apologists, starting with Paul, have hammered on the Resurrection as being the make-or-break issue--"If Christ is not raised, then your faith is in vain"--little suspecting that a sneak attack would come around from the back. And that's exactly how they view it, a sneak attack from the "Enemy". Oh, yes, they believe in a literal Enemy. So did the nuns in Catechism class, who taught us children to be afraid of even our thoughts, because the Devil can and will use them to separate us from God.
I was very tempted to say, "How do you know that I have not been sent by the Enemy to sow discord?" but did not.

The reason why evolution and Christianity--at least this church's interpretation of it--are incompatible is that without Adam and Eve, there is no Fall, and without the Fall, no need for atonement, without need for atonement there is no need for Christ to come and die for us, and that is precisely what Darwin's theory did away with. It goes without saying that this is a peculiarly Christian interpretation of Genesis and the rest of the Tanakh; the Jews look at the story of Eden in quite another fashion. Their quarrel with Darwin, like Islam's, is that Darwin and his successors took God out of the picture. But theistic evolution is perfectly compatible with Judaism and Islam. No, it is the whole Original Sin business that is the problem. When asked where I stood on that, I said that I saw Genesis as a parable; that clearly something got messed up somewhere but not necessarily in the way Genesis puts it. That caused some frowns.

So now, some of the cards are on the table. I genuinely like these people and don't want to cause them distress, but I don't want to lie, either. Pastor says I ask good questions and he is impressed with my knowledge of Scripture, so I am sure that they have high hopes of turning me from heresy.

Comments

There are no comments to display.

Blog entry information

Author
Spinning Compass
Read time
3 min read
Views
738
Last update

More entries in General

More entries from Spinning Compass

Share this entry

Top Bottom