Ladies and Gentleman... I give you...
Cognitive Dissonance! Let's give it a big round of applause!
I'll be spending this weekend camping and hiking in southern Utah with friends and family. Our frequent trips to the great National and State Parks always conjure the memory of a trip we took a few years ago with some very good, very evangelical Christian friends.
Dave and I stood overlooking the massive canyon carved from the rock by the Colorado River at Dead Horse Point. Dave read from an etched-metal sign to his young daughter. "This canyon was formed from millions of years of erosion by the swift and muddy water of the great river..." He was then quick to teach the youngster that the sign was, in fact, incorrect. "Actually, this canyon was formed only thousands of years ago when God flooded the Earth at the time of Noah. The Earth is not even millions of years old, as we know from reading the Bible."
"Wow," I thought, "he's gonna have some 'splainin' to do when we get to the dinosaur footprints this afternoon."
Instead of trying to reconcile the timeline of the Bible with the observable facts of science, as I did for many years, I have found it much simpler to conclude that Bible is simply wrong. Trust me, that was no easy thing to do in my mind. But once I did, my mind was suddenly clear, no longer muddled with the distracting explanations of global flood geology, dinosaurs from other planets and near-history creationism. The natural world suddenly made sense.
In other words, once I stopped believing in bullshit, it was easy to stop believing in bullshit.
Filed under - Family | Friends | TravelYup! From what I've read, I think you went through it too ;) I am amazed at how much I have to think through guilty feelings I have wondering, "Am I feeling guilty for a real reason, or because of my Baptist upbringing?" The number one is dealing with members of the opposite sex, because we were taught that you didn't hold hands until you were contemplating marriage.
I
joke
not.
Well, that too, but I was talking about how you can identify yourself as a Christian yet still think the Bible is nothing more than nice poetry.
Cognitive dissonance is the sincere and honest belief in two contrary things. Like my wife believing the scientific view that the Earth is a billion or so years old AND believing in the Adam and Eve creation story of the Bible, the Temple and LDS teachings.
I guess me believing that the creation story is poetry and evolution is possible could be considered CD, but then all my profs in the Theology dept would be suffering from it too :\ We've been taught to analyze the Bible just like we would any of piece of literature, learning the history and background of the people who wrote it. I'm guessing this is why angry parents call our Academic Dean.
I got this t-shirt with a dinosaur on it that says never forget. I wore it over thanksgiving around my TBM family. My sister looks at the shirt then me and says "I don't get it". I didn't have the heart to say, "Ya that's cause you think the earth is only 6k old"
You're one of those evangelicals from the church of the flying spaghetti monster, aren't you?
'Fess up!
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It feels funny to say "the Bible was wrong" but I did personally come to the conclusion that the creation story is two well-written Hebrew poems that are "just so stories." I'm a Christian, most definitely. I just choose to believe that God works most often through the laws of nature, mathematics, and such that he put in place instead of lots of random zapping...