Creationism is the belief that God made humans in his image from the dirt in the ground. That is if my memory serves correct anyway.  The story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis explains that one if you need to catch up on that belief.

Evolution is the theory that humans have evolved from apes. We are indeed extremely similar to apes as well. Nevertheless, it is an interesting theory. Darwin, in his book The Descent of Man made it clear that it was a theory!

Anyway, I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in God so I don’t believe in the made from the ground thing. Though if memory serves correct humans are made up of 75% water. I could be remembering that wrong. I also don’t believe in the theory of evolution. We are similar to apes no doubt, but if we evolved from apes, I think they would have been extinct long before we came into the picture.

I’m not sure how humans got here or how humans were made. I have a theory we are aliens but that doesn’t make sense since we need trees for our oxygen. Really, I have no idea. I have no idea what the point of this article is either. I just know I don’t believe the creation myth of the theory of evolution.

Enjoy debating!

Indiana legislators are moving forward on a bill that would allow creationism to be taught alongside other theories in the state’s public school system. Indiana’s Senate Education Committee had a vote which will send the bill to their state’s senate.  If Indiana legislators succeed in passing this bill, it may be the start of  bringing religion into our public schools in America.

Creationism is a theory with its roots in the Bible’s Book of Genesis.  It suggests that divine power created man, and all earthly matters. This is in direct opposition to the theory of evolution which is clearly supported by scientific research. 

The most destructive element to education is the attempt to spread personal beliefs to everyone. Because creationism is rooted in the Bible, this is in conflict with people who do not believe in biblical teachings.  I believe in respect for different religions. There are people in our country who do not have religious beliefs at all. We are all Americans.  When our children attend public school, they should have thier rights as individuals respected.  

Evangelical Christians are driving the attitutues of the far right wing of the Republican party.  They are free to educate their children about creationism.  However, they should not impose their views on all public school children.  People’s religious beliefs belong in their  places of worship and the private or religious schools which are associated with them.  Science, not Creationism, belongs in our nation’s public schools.

What is so wrong that now you want to push religion in schools? This is not what our forefathers had planned for this country of ours. We have “separation of church and state” for a reason. I also notice that it is Christians who want to push prayer and “creationism” in our public schools. You say we are a Christian nation. I beg you to look up your history. America is supposed to be a melting pot of all cultures! We are supposed to have religious tolerance among all religions granted we aren’t killing one another in the process.

Unfortunately, many Christians I know of today are hypocrites. What happened to “Love thy neighbor?” I have rarely seen any true Christians out in the world. The rest of you spout hatred and use God to justify your hatred. Of course this happens in all religions, not just Christianity.

If you click the link below you will see how far Christians have come in their hatred. Once again it is not just Christians who are spouting hatred, it is other religions as well… Still, what happened to you Christians? What happened that you would willingly partake in the beating of a high school student because she took a religious flag down? Remember we do have “separation of church and state” for a reason!

http://www.examiner.com/atheism-in-atlanta/christians-bombard-teen-activist-with-hate-and-abuse

I also laugh at people who want prayer in schools. If that was the case you would have a lot of different people from different religions praying at different times of the day that would disrupt the education of our students. Do you really want this type of chaos in our schools?

Here is the article for the bill of “creationism.”

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/01/15/missouri-gop-introduces-second-creationism-bill-in-state-legislature/?fb_comment_id=fbc_5007063156283_860299_5007063591283

Do you not remember Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution and the evidence he provided? Do you not remember how he was persecuted by teaching evolution to his students ? Do you not want children to think for themselves? If that’s the case you are a fascist!

If you want to teach “creationism” fine but keep it in a world mythology class.

Here is a wikipedia entry on Charles Darwin…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

Also, please have a happy Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

Creationism is a view primarily held by Christian religions that the world was created by God. This is the theory that is written about in Genesis, where God created all the animals, and then created Adam and Eve. It actually wasn’t until around the 18th century, when scientists started questioning this belief. Religious fundamentalists often take this point of view, because of their literal and close readings of the Bible.

Creationism rejects not only the idea of evolution, but also the studies of fossils and anything else that appears older than the world could possibly be, if God created it as described in the Bible. When presented with this evidence, creationists usually cite that God has put these fake pieces of evidence on the Earth to test our faith, and that those who question this faith by believing this evidence negate the teachings of the Bible and, thus, are not good Christians.

Evolution

The theory of evolution started with Darwin, and has been accepted by many scientists, both Christian and not. Darwin’s theory of evolution reflects the idea that species that survive are the fittest, and those that die out are less than fit for survival. Species continue to give birth, and mutate. Those mutations that better adapt the species to succeed and thrive in the world are accepted and reproduced and the others are rejected and do not show up in the species again. Of course, evolution is said to be at a standstill now, with technology taking over and making it unnecessary for many species – especially humans – to mutate and become more fit for the surroundings.

A Mixture of the Two

Many theorists, scientists, and teachers actually believe that the theories of evolution and creationism can actually coexist. The National Academy of Sciences is quoted as saying, “Today, many religious denominations accept that biological evolution has produced the diversity of living things over billions of years of Earth’s history. Many have issued statements observing that evolution and the tenets of their faiths are compatible. Scientists and theologians have written eloquently about their awe and wonder at the history of the universe and of life on this planet, explaining that they see no conflict between their faith in God and the evidence for evolution.

Religious denominations that do not accept the occurrence of evolution tend to be those that believe in strictly literal interpretations of religious texts.” This shows the attitude that the teaching of the two theories can be combined in public school. This might mean that some teachers teach both sides of the issue without taking a stance. It can also be taught by presenting that the Big Bang could have been caused by divine intervention, and then evolution took over.

This is the philosophy that Phillip E. Johnson targets in his book, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism.  This idea has many names, including naturalism, materialism, physicalism, and modernism.  His goal is not to combat an exact element of evolution, but rather the foundation itself; the ‘religion’ behind evolution, which is naturalism.  That is why he considers his life’s work, and this book, the “wedge” of truth.  He considers himself the tip of the wedge.  He wants to start splitting the “log” of evolution with the very basics.  Others will follow behind him, with more specific and selective arguments.

Johnson believes, rightly, that all evolutionists, even those who combine Christianity and evolution, are putting their faith in a philosophy that is not truth.  They believe that law and/or chance are the only things that rule the universe, and they diminish God’s glory and power, by claiming that He did not create life in a supernatural manner.   Johnson intends to prove these people wrong.  All facts are interpreted based on belief, and in order to change what someone accepts as fact, you must change what they believe.

Johnson begins his book with an example of how convincing naturalism can be.  He tells the story of Philip Wentworth, a young Christian who attended Harvard, and gave up his faith for the naturalist philosophy.  And this all happened in the 1920s, before evolution was even popular.  Wentworth wrote an essay describing what he went through and why he changed his beliefs.  The real reason that he was converted is because the naturalists invoke their beliefs into every single part of knowledge and science, regardless of how absurd it seems.  They will invent whatever they need to in order to gain a convert, and they won over Wentworth.

Wentworth himself acknowledges the dangers of the naturalistic philosophy at the end of his essay.  “In so far as the colleges destroy religious faith without substituting a vital philosophy to take its place, they are turning loose upon the world young barbarians who have been freed from the discipline of the Church before they have learned to discipline themselves.” (Johnson 283)  This is ironic, because Wentworth, an extreme naturalist, implies that everyone needs to be disciplined.  If there is no God, then how can anyone know how to be disciplined?  This is a very common anti-atheist argument.  There are many people who don’t believe in a God, but do believe in morality.  That doesn’t make sense.

Throughout the book, Johnson focuses very much on the difference between rationalizing, and reasoning.  Reasoning is true logic.  When you reason, you examine the facts, and derive other, true, facts without adding or changing anything.  Rationalizing, on the other hand, works in the opposite direction.  When evolutionists rationalize, they take their beliefs first (naturalistic philosophy) and form their supposed ‘facts’ (evolution) around those initial beliefs.  Johnson says that when the modern intellectuals rationalize, they “justify what they felt like doing.” (Johnson 287)  That is exactly right.  They do not want to face God, and the truth about their sin, so they decide to believe that there is no God, and then they rationalize history around that belief, and thus, evolution is invented.

One thing that Johnson makes clear, in order to articulate what exactly he means when he targets evolution, is that there is a difference between ‘microevolution’ and ‘macroevolution.’  Scientists define evolution in many different ways, and they believe it in different ways too, but it needs to be clearly understood what these different ideas are.  Johnson says that “Scientists have no difficulty providing specific examples of evolution, if evolution merely means change.”  (352) That is essentially what microevolution is.  It is simply change.  This type of evolution happens all the time, through heredity, mutations, natural, and even artificial selection.  All these things cause organisms to change; to have different genes.  Macroevolution, on the other hand, is the more complete ‘Theory of Evolution.’  This theory suggests that all living things are descendants of one single, common ancestor.

Johnson attacks this macroevolution by pointing out one of its largest flaws.  This problem is called “The Information Quandary.”  It’s one issue that just about all evolutionists flat out ignore.  It is a very simple and undisputed fact, that our genes and the genes of any living organism contain information.  To avoid confusion, Johnson says that “by information, I mean a message that conveys meaning, such as a book of instructions.” (340)  Genes contain DNA, or coded proteins, which are translated into instructions about how to build and work the organism.  That is simple and true, but it’s inconsistent with naturalism and evolution. 

Why not?  The key phrase there is “contain information.”  The problem is that nowhere in the entire known universe has anyone discovered any non-intelligent matter that can create information.  It can contain information, but only intelligent beings can create it.  “Dawkins himself likes to say that a bacterial cell contains more information than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.” (Johnson 343)  That’s true, and the human body contains millions of even more complex cells working together.  So if matter cannot create information, where did all this genetic information come from?  No one knows, unless you include God, of course.

All these ideas that Johnson brings up are good arguments, but there are a few ways that evolutionists could attempt to weave their way around his defense.  A naturalist’s best defense would probably be that supernatural occurrences simply don’t happen, at least not in any obvious way.  Yes, there are miracles in the Bible, but those were a long time ago, and those can’t be proven anyway.  They’re just made up stories.  And yes, biogenesis (the beginning of life) seems to be some sort of supernatural occurrence, but that’s why there’s evolution.  It makes biogenesis natural.

One other difficulty that Johnson faces is that he often overstates what he’s trying to argue, to the point where an opponent might simply point out an exaggeration and bring down the entire argument.  For instance, when talking about The Information Quandary, he says that there’s no way that the massive amounts of information in the human body could have simply appeared.  He’s right, of course, but an evolutionist could easily overcome that statement.  He would say that all that information didn’t appear at once.  It began very small and simple, and then over huge amounts of time (billions of years) it grew and changed into what we see in the human body.  Johnson’s original argument was true, but it was overstated, which left a door open for an evolutionist to sneak through and bring down the whole house.

This book was definitely well-written, and helpful.  It took evolution from its very roots, and fought it strongly.  Of course, anyone’s faith and belief can be whatever they want it to be, but this book will easily push a reader away from naturalism and evolution.  Johnson really knows what he believes, defends it wonderfully.

Works Cited

Johnson, Phillip E The Wedge of Truth:  Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism [Amazon Kindle Version].             IVP Books, 2000. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Following a cursory glance at the title of this article, one may, with some prima facie justification, remark that this article seems, primarily, to be about a greengrocer comparing different fruit. Religion, seems to have no connection to pseudoscience; and neither does Ancient Alien Theory with President Barack Obama.

The President appears to have become the focus of all sorts of speculation connected with the “impending” 2012/end-of-the-world scenarios being touted on the net and with the “prophesied” Armageddon event of the Bible; but politically charged adverse speculation and so-called ‘negative spin’ would seem to be small grounds for a comparison.

They all, however, are simultaneously affected by, and are currently helping to drive those forces that are tugging at the integrity of the current global social order. The planet-wide lowering of living standards and the consonant increase in conflict make mockery of the very existence of the United Nations Organization which was set up to prevent a repeat of the horrors of World War II (on both sides).

This, apparently global, breakdown in governing systems and the ensuing chaos that obtains, must benefit some entities and in some cases, the beneficiaries of conflict may well be the (often) hidden instigators. Given the wealth (?) of information on the internet, a quantum possibility exists, that the subject matters are related in some theoretical conspiracy or religious prophecy that may yet be the subject of its own article.

That is not the aim of this discussion.

That said, the rise of fringe (perhaps, soon to be mainstream) theories such as Ancient Alien Theory, the increasingly fundamentalist posture of religion, pseudo-science in defense of fundamental religious dogma(intelligent design/creationism), secular theories in defense of religion and religion as a political litmus test demonstrate a real connection between each; one that is symptomatic of the state of our civilization. 

There is a greater and more pressing dimension to the sum of the problems presently facing humanity, and it is that the entirety of the current precariousness of human civilization is nowhere in the consciousness of the mass of the planet’s populations..

As corporations continue to prove each day in the degrading of environments; each specific instance of an occurrence while it may be started by an individual entity with specific motives follows an entirely different logic in the range of possibilities that it creates.

You are probably, already familiar with the seemingly (just) Zen statement about the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a storm. Chaos Theory suggests that in an evaluation of any very large system, it requires very little change (comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings) to deviate from any path predicted by earlier observation.

The flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, [these same changes add up]  So, in a month’s time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn’t happen. Or maybe one that wasn’t going to happen, does. 

(Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

Part 2.

The retreat of constituted authority before a sort of mass or mob democracy (which seems to use democratic means to impose totalitarian and or corrupt systems), is the current rage amongst the world’s disenfranchised people.

They, urged by the perversity of their existence, are reacting chaotically, thus fomenting more chaos. The promise of a Great Society rising from the ashes of World War II, exists only as the long-lost dreams of those freedom fighters.

The victorious armies that squabbled and fought over Hitler’s war technology at the end of WWII and long afterward, continue to foment and engage in a new types of war; ones based on acquisition and future control as opposed to homeland security and defense.

In the new paradigms that arise, like Cadmus‘ dragon’s teeth turned spartoi, to supplant ancient canons of ethics, religion and other human affairs; there is no space for the moral certitude or the other comforting nostrums that the ancien regime would have trotted out in past times.

Times have taken a different turn into a saraband with Chaos, the mythological entity and the language of empire is unmistakeable.

All is couched in the language of expediency; preemptive strike policies, control of resources through military conflict, denial of resources to the future enemy through cold war, the bartering of human suffering for economic advantage.

Head to head, they clash, ancient notions of ethics with the new rules. The forecast war, the future war is all there is on the minds of the populations as they see the norms change and with it their freedoms, imagined or not.

Religion, which gave us the concept of the ‘just war‘, is at the forefront of this new warlike posture. As fundamental religious dogmas are increasingly held up to secular scrutiny, exposed to science and disbelief, caricatured by outright mockery and incivil blasphemy; religious observers (especially monotheistic ones) have retreated into an almost cult-like mysticism, the professing of an unquestioning belief in the religion accompanied by a violent, militant attitude toward proselytizing even those who decline the advantage of choosing their particular religion.

It is no secret that organized religion and the god concept has been under some small pressure from science (so to speak) for quite some time now, however, one effect of the lessening of the importance of religion in daily life has been a loss of generations of morals and ethics tied to religion.

Of course, one does not need religion to evolve moral and ethical standards on par with, or superior to, anything current or historical, but one glaring failure attendant on the success of science in demystifying a large part of what was held to be religiously unknowable, was that it unintentionally caused societies to need to re-evolve these standards.

This need for re-evaluation of these standards has excited religion to the possibilities of science falling somewhat short of being the supplanter of religion as advertised in some quarters, but the arena has changed. Religion must needs meet Science with blades of cold logic and pure reason in the light of day and thus; the serendipitous entree of Intelligent Design which builds on the deep seated belief that (in the Christian tradition) an entity called ‘God’, created the world as described in the Bible and caused the Bible to be physically written in its current form, thus making it historically accurate; the crux of Creationism.

President Obama, himself famously a symbol of change, becomes then; a political caricature with an odious religious slant to himself, his actions and his destiny; for religion has cloaked itself in politics.
Thus, the politics of religion becomes inevitably; St George and the Dragon, David and Goliath and the Apocalypse of St John, the Divine.

Part 3.

As with all wars, there are lacunae in which all forms of unlikely life take root and even flourish. It turns out that many of these refugees have certain things in common. In a sense, these new ideas are the mammals cowering from the thunder of dinosaurs, evolving to proven, workable standards; as it were, a basic skeleton modified to fit the various needs of a chosen ecological niche.

So it is that Ancient AlienTheory neatly dovetails with those of the Creationist and Intelligent Designer.

As discussed elsewhere, Ancient Alien Theory posits a planet of hominids being visited by extraterrestrial life forms which variously genetically engineer a slave race(using alien and hominid DNA to genetically manipulate humans into existence) to help with their mining, become mistaken for gods and are worshiped as such and who bring enlightenment and civilization, mathematics and astronomy to ancient peoples.

These alien visitors have apparently been a part of human history from prehistory!

Intelligent Design makes the argument that the fact that the Golden Mean and Fibonacci Numbers are expressed in nature are part of a seeming design by an Intelligent Designer because such specific design elements could not be statistically reproducible in random mutation.

Of course, the word random, only makes sense to a verbalist (my word for a word specialist); to a computer programmer or a mathematician or physicist or anyone used to dealing with the concept, the word is simply an explanation for obtuse calculations that randomly turn up the same answer a certain percentage of the time. 

Random, for those people, is not random until you have sieved out the duplicates and triplicates, the series, the numbers related to each other as part of a progression in ordinal series and on and on.

In reality, genetic failures are at risk at the moment of conception and thus, basing conclusion on observation in this case is to be blind to missing data. Perhaps, the intelligent design may well be what survives and what survives, depends on how well their parts work. In spite of that drawback (to my mind), one can clearly see the connection with Ancient Alien Theory. In essence the Theory of Intelligent Design can be summed up in the following passage.

Beautiful poetry, if I may add.

Psalm 8 King James Version (KJV)

 1 O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.

 2 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

 3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

 4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

 5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

 6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:

 7 All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;

 8 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

 9 O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

Creationism posits an omnipotent extraterrestrial being or beings, who creates a man from whom he then creates a woman. This being, having given man and woman a choice, whether to eat a certain fruit in a particular garden, becomes inconsolably enraged when the woman and then the man exercise the choice, they had supposedly been given. The enraged creator being, then curses the man and woman and their descendants till the end of time.

Time passes, then the creator being regrets and impregnates a virgin, then takes her son and supposedly sacrifices him for the sins of all the man and woman’s descendants. The creator being’s son, having being resurrected from the dead, will then return to earth where he will fight a battle of all time with another extraterrestrial being, once the creator being’s most trusted lieutenant, who had a falling out with the creator being at around the time he was creating the man and the woman.

It is into this mix that the politics of the United States has cast the upstart President Obama; for he has been secretly billed as the opener in the Armageddon sweepstakes where the forces of evil will be led by a human equivalent of the creator being’s son; the dreaded Anti Christ.

Part 4.

At the very beginning of this discussion I wrote that:

Following a cursory glance at the title of this article, one may, with some prima facie justification, remark that this article seems, primarily, to be about a greengrocer comparing different fruit. Religion, seems to have no connection to pseudoscience; and neither does Ancient Alien Theory with President Barack Obama.

As we have discussed so far, this is not entirely true. In fact, they all are tangentially related by history and by circumstance, ironically tied in with religion.

Western Religion is messianic; that is, it postulates the future arrival of a Messiah who will right all evils, get rid of the bad people and create a new world. As a result, the end-of-times is very much on the mind of adherents, given that the faithful have been waiting for 2 millennia or more. It is understood, therefore, from a Christian perspective (and to some extent also a Muslim perspective), that there will be signs that herald the coming of the end-of-time.

It should go without saying, that there have been many failed prophets; nevertheless, the fever caused by dreaming of the next world, persists. This belief permeates Western society as a whole and seems to drive the logic of its raison d’etre. It is no secret, I should hope, that other than political and military reasons, the West is also supportive of Israel because significant parts of their populations devoutly believe in a Judaeo-Christian religion. In fact, much of Christianity is tied up with Israel and Palestine from its beginning to the end-of-the-world, and so political events in the Middle East take on religious significance.

This nuance is not lost on Muslims who see the expansion of the [Christian] West into the umma (the Muslim polity) as thinly veiled religiously based attacks reminiscent of the Crusades. In turn, the Muslims view any actions by the West (including Israel) with a religious slant.

Both Islam and Christianity are messianic in varying degrees; for Christians it is the Christ who will return to fight the march of evil; for Muslims, the 12th or Hidden Imam. Both, however, will be faced by a human army lead by none other than the Anti-Christ .

The Anti-Christ, according to scripture is the evil spiritual twin of Christ , the son of God. He, however, is the son of Satan, the devil who is portrayed as both human and divine, and who challenges the faith of humans in God. He will be born of a human mother, will eventually bring peace, before showing his iron fist. He will enslave the planet and use numbers imprinted on the forehead or hands of humans to control their lives. It is he who is the proxy, the champion for the Devil in Hell who will be jousting with the Christ, the champion of God in His Heaven.

One detail in the story affects lives everyday. This battle will take place in Israel in a place called Har-Megiddo. Thus it is that any action by a President Obama (good or bad or indifferent) is seen through the lens of this future Apocalypse. It would be bad enough to have to work with this constraint, I would think, but President Obama’s woes are just beginning. In fact, his racial difference to all 43 previous difference is remarkable and even in this day and age, stupendously astounding for many.

Part 5. 

In a country such as the United States, where many people believe their country is at the forefront of God’s destiny and is particularly beloved by God; there is no doubt in the minds of believers that the Anti-Christ will be a future President of the United States. It would be unthinkable, they say, for the Number One Evil Guy, to be anywhere else.

An unusually high percentage of North Americans (and to varying degrees across the planet) believe in the fact of the existence of extraterrestrial life that is able to transport themselves (and humans) as they wish. These extraterrestrial life forms are known to the various governments and are in contact with these governments who are concealing this knowledge from its citizenry.

As it turns out therefore, there is a secular version of the Armageddon story; one in which there is full disclosure by governments and these aliens come from out the background of human history to be seen in the light of day. This widespread belief that the moment is nearing also feeds into the minds of those who believe the Armageddon story. In turn, anomalous events such as the election of President Obama, the tsunami in Indonesia, and the earthquake in Japan take on a significance and linkage not readily accessible to those outside the belief system. 

In attempting to verify prophecy, all manner of events have significance. There is no real way to weigh occurrences or even to take a decent sample, but in this part of human life, intuition and revelation are generally cited as the guiding principles. Thus it is, that a personal experience can affect the lives of many others as happened in The Great Disappointment but not all prophecy is unverifiable.

The astronomical prophecies of the precession of the equinoxes and other scientific aspects to the 2012 phenomena are predictable recurrences that suggest that the end-of-the-world scenario has some basis in facts reinterpreted out of existence. In any case, such momentous changes as the solar maximum due next year and its possible effects on our electromagnetic technology, lend weight to the believer that religious prophecy is coming true.

In such a context, it is not hard to see an ex-slave society reacting viscerally to the election of a black man to the Presidency and for this to be spun into, and later propagated as, a religious sign of the end times. What it really shows is an internal conflict in which old is pitted against new, and much like the rutting of stags; anyone is at risk, whether bystander or participant.

It is this conflict that is raging in religion and pseudo-science, the ET/UFO community and in American politics. The canvas of the mind in which this political tableau is being painted is one that expects the end of the world as we know it and so everyone is rushing forward as if at the Running of the Bulls , to make their mark.

So it is, that expectation may bring reality.

This is the end of the series. 

If you would like to read more of my writing elsewhere, please click here 

So it is that Ancient Alien Theory neatly dovetails with those of the Creationist and Intelligent Designer.

As discussed elsewhere, Ancient Alien Theory posits a planet of hominids being visited by extraterrestrial life forms which variously genetically engineer a slave race(using alien and hominid DNA to genetically manipulate humans into existence) to help with their mining, become mistaken for gods and are worshiped as such and who bring enlightenment and civilization, mathematics and astronomy to ancient peoples.

These alien visitors have apparently been a part of human history from prehistory!

Image via Wikipedia

Intelligent Design make the argument that the fact that the Golden Mean and Fibonacci Numbers are expressed in nature are part of a seeming design by an Intelligent Designer because such specific design elements could not be statistically reproducible in random mutation.

Of course, the word random, only makes sense to a verbalist (my word for a word specialist); to a computer programmer or a mathematician or physicist or anyone used to dealing with the concept, the word is simply an explanation for obtuse calculations that randomly turn up the same answer a certain percentage of the time. Random, for those people, is not random until you have sieved out the duplicates and triplicates, the series, the numbers related to each other as part of a progression in ordinal series and on and on.

In reality, genetic failures are at risk at the moment of conception and thus, basing conclusion on observation in this case is to be blind to missing data. Perhaps, the intelligent design may well be what survives and what survives, depends on how well their parts work. In spite of that drawback (to my mind), one can clearly see the connection with Ancient Alien Theory. In essence the Theory of Intelligent Design can be summed up in the following passage.

Beautiful poetry, if I may add.

Psalm 8 King James Version (KJV)

 1 O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.

 2 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

 3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

 4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

 5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

 6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:

 7 All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;

 8 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

 9 O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

Creationism posits an omnipotent extraterrestrial being or beings, who creates a man from whom he then creates a woman. This being, having given man and woman a choice, whether to eat a certain fruit in a particular garden, becomes inconsolably enraged when the woman and then the man exercise the choice, they had supposedly been given. The enraged creator being, then curses the man and woman and their descendants till the end of time.

Time passes, then the creator being regrets and impregnates a virgin, then takes her son and supposedly sacrifices him for the sins of all the man and woman’s descendants. The creator being’s son, having being resurrected from the dead, will then return to earth where he will fight a battle of all time with another extraterrestrial being, once the creator being’s most trusted lieutenant, who had a falling out with the creator being at around the time he was creating the man and the woman.

It is into this mix that the politics of the United States has cast the upstart President Obama; for he has been secretly billed as the opener in the Armageddon sweepstakes where the forces of evil will be led by a human equivalent of the creator being’s son; the dreaded Anti Christ.

End of Part 3

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Religion itself is highly dominated with pseudo-science to be sure, but that can only be considered to be pseudo-science if one thinks for a moment that these ideas are in fact representations of facts of the natural universe. They are not. They are something called a mystical or symbolic interpretation. A form of fiction that assists in generating, over a substantial period of time, the spiritual “God Consciousness” that has been sought by the seeker. Heliocentism, whereby the sun is portrayed as the centre not only of the solar system, but of the universe, is similar. So to are the ideas that the Earth is central to the Universe, or indeed that the Earth is flat. We know that the Earth is not flat, nor is it the centre of the universe and neither is the Sun! But the belief, when seen mystically and used in meditation, can be a stepping stone towards building up a spiritual cosmology in the mind of the practitioner that has the capacity to bring them bit by bit into a God Consciousness.

This is where things get difficult both for the believer and for the sceptic to swallow. The literalist Bible believer may find it hard to accept that his faith has been constructed to give the believer God Consciousness rather then the Bible being a record of historical fact. The sceptic will find it hard to believe that believing in any way whatsoever in either a Higher Power, the importance of the journey to God Consciousness or any mystical ideas are any good to the individual or the rest of society. But the literalist believer hasn’t thought that the journey to God Consciosuness is more important than believing in the literal interpretation of the bible and the sceptic has not realised that there is an importance to the result of the journey, being the devlopment of that same God Consciousness.

When I look at my own journey into spirituality (which is a variety of Deism, to be precise, Transcendental Deism in which the search for spiritual experience is he goal, without needing to adopt any literalist dogma) I see many moments when in my meditations and deliberately induced spiritual experiences, a development of a more empathic form of altruism than I have experienced before, a desire to become more ethical in my work and a sense that what I say and do has an effect on society, all as a result of reaching the state of mind whereby, for fleeting moments, God appears to exist and I sense a presence.

In order to achieve this, I have used mind blowing religious concepts and ideas as objects of meditation. Using titles for this thing that might not exist called “God”, such as “Creator of the Universe” and immersing myself in the depth and power of what a term like that means if God did exist. After a lone enough time of practising many different types of exercises like this, I started to sense a presence, to feel things that some people call “The Holy Spirit” to see halos (auras) and have many experiences that many people would call “psychic”. However that was just the tip of the iceberg. Many more experiences came my way. Mind blowing experiences which showed me that maybe consciousness is everywhere and we are somehow a part of a massive sea of energy and each of us have some moral responsibility over our lives and thoughts. It was absolutely amazing. No, there is no factual signature of Gods Fingertips in the universe, but the mythology, the mind blowing concepts of faith focused on in meditation that have a connection to the vastness of the universe, were part and parcel of the development of the God Consciousness that I felt.

The fact of the matter is that it is the mystical ideas, the apparently fictitious ideas of religion contemplated in mind blowing meditation and ritual, that allowed me to have these experiences and to have a revolution of mind and spirit.

Creationism and many other mystical ideas can be used for this.

There are many cults out there that sell creationism as if it is a scientific fact, and there is even a move to have creationism taught in some schools in certain parts of the world as a scientific theory, something that grates against me terribly. But when creationism (or any other theological cosmological hypothesis taken from any major or minor world religion) is taken mystically and symbolically not scientifically, it can be a substantial stage towards the creation of the God Consciousness that have experienced. So long as creationism moves towards a mystical school of thought and not a scientific one, I have no problem with it. Mystical creationism, performed in prayer and meditation and celebrated in churches and temples for the purposes of bringing about God Consciousness would not be a threat to education, science or politics at all. On top of that, as it creates this peculiar Nirvana state of being, would also have many social benefits such as awareness of natural morality that is written into us automatically and we can access when we reach this God Consciousness, as well as a level of compassion and social responsibility that is analogous to the change in mentality that the Buddhists might go through when they perform Compassion Meditation for many years.

Scientifically speaking, Darwin is absolutely correct about the evolution of mankind, but the New Atheist Movement is completely incorrect when they say that there should be less religion in the world.

If an atheist asks you what you believe, for instance, think of what their motives might be, they might say “I am interested” and they might actually seem interested, but one has to ask oneself as a person who has some faith or other, “why would an atheist be even remotely interested in what I believe?” the fact of the matter is that most people are just interested in themselves and have no interest in what you think at all. They are interested in their own arguments and doing anything that they can to misrepresent your position so that they can make you feel bad. Essentially, sometimes people can appear very liberal, but in so doing they are merely trying to find a new way of bullying you through getting you to open up about what your thoughts are and undermining your position, and making themselves feel stronger as a result of having destroyed someone. So under those circumstances do not answer them with what you believe, but answer them instead with a truth “I believe that what I believe does me good, and that is all I need to know”. If they ask you why you feel that your faith is a good thing, tell them the facts. Something that is verifiable, that most charitable and socially concerned enterprises are set up by people of faith, and as a result we can see that through history, faith has fed the hungry, provided shelter for the homeless and water for the thirsty. Also some faith groups have even assisted the economies of developing nations, lifted the poor out of poverty and given self esteem to millions. If they ask you why your faith in particular and not any other faith, again you can be honest and tell them that the traits you have already mentioned (in terms of charitable behaviour and the like) are present in the faith of your choosing, you admit that there are many other social issues that need addressing in society, but you personally cant deal with every social problem, and as such you choose to be supportive of a faith that has some benefits to society.

Selling religion based upon the beneficial properties of faith structures has to be more successful in the long run than just selling based on an argument that can be disproven. Also being liberal and expressing the freedom of the Atheist to believe or disbelieve as they see fit can be essential to your progression. Tell them that you have your beliefs and that you will support their right to have theirs, but you also reserve the right to disagree with them.

You cannot disprove that being an atheist is somehow wrong (although I personally have a strong objection to the modern “New Atheist Movement”, but that is another issue), but you can show that you are dong what is right through supporting a group of people who are involved in doing some good to society. Keep your apologetic to the benefits of faith structures, the sociable and charitable benefits, and not to prove one faith over another. Being a person of faith, whether you are a Deist, Christian, Muslim or Jew, you are already in ownership of the moral high ground anyway. You don’t need to prove that to anyone who sees it as their job to harass you.

1. Know your stuff.

Before you start calling someone else on their errors, make sure you’re not making your own.  If you don’t know about the topic, do some research, and make sure your source is reliable.  If you’re not sure, it’s better to say “I don’t know”, or at least make it clear that you’re speculating, than to just make something up and try to pass it off as fact.

2. Attack the idea, not the person.

Smart people can have stupid ideas.  Calling someone stupid is likely to make them more defensive, and less likely to listen to or consider what you’re actually saying.  And personal attacks don’t necessarily address the merits of the ideas in question, in any case.  Stupid people can have smart ideas, too.

3. Be polite.

Don’t namecall, don’t use rude language, keep your volume down, all the usual rules of polite behavior.  The most obvious thing you can do to keep a debate civil is to act civilly.  And it’s hard to take someone seriously if they’re screaming at you.

4. Respect their position, or at least the reason behind it.

One of the weird things that brains do is a little trick called confirmation bias (discussed at length here: http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney )  If you make information “unfriendly”, people will reject it regardless of its merits.  So, do your best to aim your arguments only at the topic at hand, and do your best to present the information in a way that is “friendly” to them.  If you’re arguing with a neoconservative about global warming, try to present the information in economic terms, and acknowledge the possibility of solutions that don’t involve Big Government or crippling the economy.  If you’re arguing evolution with a creationist, don’t deny the possibility of God, or specifically attack Christianity.  And so on.  It might be a good idea to keep in mind the ideas discussed here: http://www.cracked.com/article_15759_10-things-christians-atheists-can-and-must-agree-on.html .  Even if you’re not actually arguing religion, most of the same concepts still apply.

Good luck, and may you bring light to unenlightened minds.