I think we’re in agreement...:)
I just get frustrated when so many evangelizing opportunities are blown because someone demands that a highly illogical - and in fact, scientifically provable lie - is held up as what one must believe if you’re a Christian.
These are fun to discuss in Sunday afternoons when digesting the meal; in public, it should be the central tenets of the Bible: God created all (how is irrelevant), God loves us, and God sacrificed His Son so that we could experience a relationship with God once again.
All else is simply window dressing!
I think we’re largely in agreement as well.
And you are 100% right about the loss of evangelizing opportunities. Did you see the St. Augustine quote I gave earlier in the thread (post #28)? He says the exact same thing.
Forgive me my prickliness about taking the Bible literally. I used to be scientifically-minded agnostic and through a long struggle eventually came back to the Christianity in which I was raised. One of the hardest things for me to accept was the Resurrection. I couldn’t accept Jesus rose in a literal sense, so I played at the edges for a while, thinking it was metaphorical somehow. But the whole thing really didn’t make sense.
Well, to make a long story short, I was reading an article about the Shroud and St, John’s Gospel when it suddenly clicked in my brain....what if the Gospel was *literally* true? What if he actually saw what he saw and is just reporting that? All of a sudden the whole narrative made sense for me in a way it never did before. I’ve been a believer ever since, and even though I still have a skeptical streak, I’ve come to look with scorn upon those theologians who have a perennial beef against the literal sense of the text! :)
Have you heard the theory based on the proper translation for the creation story that God created this earth/universe from pre-exisiting matter?
It may bridge the gap and explain the identifiable age issues with the generation counting issue. Dinosaurs, etc. were already in the matter used.
Just an interesting thought.