Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Does God Need New Lawyers?

I was watching one of my current favorite television shows, “Boston Legal” and was a bit disappointed with their treatment of the concept of the separation of church and state.

The storyline went something like this.

The school board decided to make the science teachers teach creationism in their science class along with evolution. The person on the school board hired the law firm to represent his stance on forcing the teaching of creationism in the classroom. Of course, rightly so, the law firm said they would not win a case such as this, but they would try.

During the court appearance it was brought up that you can't teach creationism in a science class because it is not science. There is no scientific evidence that the world was created in 6 days a short time ago, and that man just suddenly popped into existence.

The arguments for the evidence that God does exist was that they claimed scientists everywhere are starting to believe in God because when they see the complexity of cells they know that some greater power had to have designed them.

This reminds me of a quote from Arthur C. Clarke which says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

A great quote, and can be viewed from the creationists position by arguing that because God's work is so advanced, it looks like magic to us. How true, and I'd be willing to accept this if it wasn't for the fact that I take a different position.

I would submit to you that something as complex as nature itself, the natural order of things and the natural evolution of life, appears to be magical to us. It is because of this appearance of magic that some humans believe that it can only have been created magically, by some all powerful supreme being.

Let's take a step back to Biblical days shall we.

This is the time when many cultures believed in all manner of God's and Goddesses. They believed that the God's made the sun rise, and the crops grow. Deities brought the rain, or caused a drought when they were unhappy with their worshipers.

People sacrificed everything from people, to livestock and food to appease their deities. Why did they do such things? We now know that these deities do not exist, and that this was just the way ignorant people tried to make sense out of their lives on this planet. In place of science they inserted magical and make believe stories to explain how nature worked.

Do you truly believe God exists and controls your life here on Earth? Did he create the world in 6 days, because after all, how else could it have happened? Are you merely following the teachings of your family before you, and their family before them because that's the way everyone always believed?

Let's take a real quick spin around history to see why Christianity is one of the prominent religions of the world today.

When Christianity was just the new kid on the block as far as religions go, they had a tough go of it. They had to hold secret meetings for fear of being killed for their viewpoints. Luckily, over the years the religion grew because of the faith of their followers and their determination. Soon, people began using God as the reason for their leadership. Leaders, such as Kings and Queens, decreed that they ruled countries because they were put there by God himself, and that theirs was a divine ruling family.

To further this position the monarchs of the world poured their support into the church, and made the church a powerful force in its own right. With the backing of royalty, armies began invasions based on religious beliefs. Taking their lead from the stories in the Bible, which talk of killing entire cities, men, women children and even all of the animals, the crusaders did nothing less and slaughtered entire cities who did not believe in God.

Christians the world over tortured and killed non-believers until amazingly enough, most of the world now believes in God. Does this seem odd to you?

I get tired of hearing that this was just in the past, and that Christianity is not like that these days. That's not the point. The point is that their religion got the way it is today because of its past!

The power base of the Christian movement is as strong as ever, and they get downright self-righteous with anyone who does not “see the light” the way they do.

The belief in God is as man-made as the belief in all of the other deities throughout our history. The power of the church is a scary thing, and the confused sheep that follow it may mean well, but they must one day wake up and truly analyze what religion means in this world and why it is killing humanity, not saving it.

Armageddon may very well become a reality as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not because God planned it all, but because our ignorant attachment to ancient religious ways continue to cause too much bloodshed in the name of our gods.

If this information is the foundation of creationism, then it's more in the realm of psychology and history then science. If the writers were not so busy trying to make their case for creationism, they should have stepped back and not even brought this one in the courtroom because it was an extremely weak argument.

3 comments:

  1. Here is also an interesting related story.

    http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/01/13/evolution.textbooks.ruling/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ya know, if you made a Link out if it, more people might actually check it out.


    ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Mom, glad you dropped by!

    I’m sure that was the point they were desperately trying to make, but my comments hold true. Evolution is a science, complete with scientific data to show how evolution has happened throughout the history of this planet. It does not come out and say that man evolved from ape like everyone assumes, but it does show that Modern Man did in fact evolve from Cro-Magnon Man.

    Creationism is no more a science, or even a decent theory, then the Easter Bunny. There is no scientific data to back up the view that the Earth was created in 6 days, nor that mankind instantly sprang up in a wonderful garden and spoke to a fictions being.

    If we allowed creationism to be taught in school as a plausible theory, then we must also teach that Odin, Thor, Isis, and all of the other deities throughout history are, theoretically, plausible.

    Better to leave the stories of magical beings for Disney and tails around the campfire, because they simply have no place in a science class.

    - |\/|ystic

    ReplyDelete

Politics and Common Sense

  I realize the two terms seem at odds with each other, but let me explain where I am going with this.   During President Trump’s ter...