Why I Can’t Mess With the Overly Religious

To put it bluntly, they are either stupid or mindless drones. First off, I’m not an atheist. I believe in God. If you were going to throw me into one of the defined “religions”, it would have to be Christianity. However, I’m not a religious person. I can’t stand “religion”. Not only does religion seem to be the cause of about 90% of the conflicts in the world, but to me it seems to just be a tool used by those in power to maintain their power. If you have a problem with that statement I suggest you first, calm down, then I want you to go research some of the conflicts in the world and some of the most ruthless leaders in history and see what I mean. I’ll be fair. Part of my problem with religion is that I don’t trust human beings. We lie. It’s part of our nature. Sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it because we have become so blinded by our position on something, that we really think what we are doing is right. This small fact leads to the basis of my conflict with the overly religious. I simply have a hard time believing anything anyone says. That issue is futher complicated with the fact that those that argue with religious people know that they always invoke two things when their backs are up against a wall in an argument: Faith and The Bible. Like a cornered wildcat, you count on them to start hurling quotes from the Bible when they are faced with facts and inconsistencies. It reminds me how when you were little and playing “Super Hero” with your friend how they would always make up powers to compete with yours. So if you were play fighting and you had the power of flight and they had super strength and you pretend to fly away, all of the sudden they would say they could do that too. I’m not saying that faith isn’t the answer sometimes, however, God also gave us common sense (well, most of us anyway) and I think God would like us to use it some times.

Now before I go into what caused me to write this article, I want to say that when I say I don’t take everything in the Bible literally, that is not an attack against God. Some people always get up in arms and feel a need to come up with some elaborate excuse as to why I am disgracing God when I say that. The problem is that people always say that the Bible is the word of God and therefore it cannot be wrong. That would be fine if the Bible was comprised of the actual words from God, word for word. However, the Bible has been transcribed and translated by man, and while God is perfect, man is far from it. I can barely type my own words in this article without misspellings, exaggerating, or just plain leaving things out. In elementary school we played this game. It was called ‘telephone’. The 15 students would sit down in a line and the teacher would whisper a phrase into the ear of one of the kids and tell them to pass it along. The objective would be to see if the message would get all the way to end exactly as it was given at first. By the time it got to the last person, the phrase “Jimmy, pass this message along” became “Jimmy farted in Timmy’s cereal.” If you’ve ever written a paper for a history class you know that you don’t rely on one reference source, but on many. Many religious zealots will completely ignore known facts and evidence and say “well the Bible says it” with nothing to back themselves up. When confronted with those facts, they’ll say the overused “Well, if you had faith, you would know it was true” which is a complete cop out. I’m not saying that the things written about in the Bible are false, I just think that due to different people translating and trying to recall it has had some things exaggerated a little. That’s no knock against God, it just means that his humble servants are, human…meaning, we make mistakes. Many people use their pastor or minister as their other source, and let me tell you, most pastors/ministers/priests are about as reliable as using a papier-mâché umbrella during a hurricane. Again, they are human too…therefore unlike God, they are not infallible.

This article idea all started with the “Dinosaur problem” when it comes to creationists explaining why a literal translation of the Bible is correct. See, if you say that the Earth was created in 7 days and that Adam had domain over all beasts, that means 2 things: 1. Dinosaurs are not as old as their fossils say they are and 2. Dinosaurs and humans lived amongst each other at the same time. I’ve had plenty of arguments where people tried to explain it to me and let me say that I have a better time believing those people that claim to be abducted by aliens. Then I read this article: T Rex Ate Coconuts. Actually, before reading that article, I flipped to Fox News in the morning (I like to see how the other side thinks sometimes). They were talking to this dude, Ken Ham (He looks like Abraham Lincoln reincarnated), who is opening a Creationist Museum in Kentucky. Now, I have no problem with people trying to express their views, even if they are different from me. However, to me, a museum is a place of fact, not fiction. After doing a search on the museum and reading the article above, it is obvious to me that someone has read one too many Dinotopia books. I started doing my research and realized that while the person that wrote the article wasn’t 100% accurate in describing the museum, Ken Ham (the creator of the museum) actually believes that all dinosaurs were plant eaters. Seriously, think about how absurd that sounds. A two story tall T. Rex, with menacing teeth and sleek predator body…eating bananas and apples, maybe munching on some tall grass. Even if they did use their teeth for eating coconuts, that’s a little bit of overkill…much like killing ants with a sledge hammer. Using the overly religious folk’s own argument, God doesn’t make mistakes…so why would he create a perfect killing machine if it was only going to eat coconuts? Ken Ham actually has a “rebuttal” of the article. I have the word “rebuttal” in quotes because when you read his responses, it’s not really a rebuttal at all. As a matter of fact, he pretty much confirms what the person that wrote the article said. The other article had minor mistakes in it. Like there aren’t any museum guides…just guest relations personnel. Yeah, big difference there buddy. My favorite though is how he says that the children aren’t playing amongst the T. Rex’s but just “near” them and that the dinosaurs are looking in the other direction. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I was to for some unknown reason have a display with children and T. Rex’s in close proximity to one another, regardless if the dinosaurs were looking in their direction or not, if the children and T. Rex’s were within eyesight of one another the children would be running away with the look of horror on their faces.

Now I know someone’s going to come in here and say that people like Mr. Ham (I can’t even take him serious with a name like that) are in the minority and are just extreme nut cases. Oh no, you’re not going to get away with that one. Dude got $25 million to open up this museum. There are plenty of people out there that support what he is doing. You read that correctly. There are plenty of people out there that not only think that dinosaurs walked the earth with humans but that the Earth is only is only around 6 to 10 thousand years old. Sadly, in recent years I’ve had to battle my mother over this issue. It is especially troubling because she’s a science teacher and she’s the one that taught me about evolution when I was little. As a side note, I always find it funny when people say they don’t believe in evolution because “I didn’t evolve from a monkey”, like the human race has always been the pinnacle of civilized society. A few centuries ago it was common place not to take a bath for weeks. We used to live in caves. Is it really that much of a stretch? Again, use the common sense God gave you. Remember, a few centuries ago people used to think that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the world was flat. Again, they used the Bible to back up their claims. See a pattern here?

Let me close by saying that people that argue that the Bible has to be taken as a literal translation are completely missing the point. Look, most people admit that time is a little different in the Bible. One day in the Bible doesn’t translate to one 24-hour day in our time. Come on, you know someone took some “creative liberty” with that. Creating the Earth in 7 days seems a lot more exciting and makes for a better story than creating it in 4.5 Billion years. However, arguing the intricate details is not only pointless but totally irrelevant. Does the fact that it took God 4.5 Billion years of our time to create the Earth make the feat any less amazing? When’s the last time you created a universe, planet, and ecosystem? It takes 9 months alone for a fetus to develop. If God didn’t create Adam and Eve until after the dinosaurs died off, does that turn our whole belief system upside down? Of course not. Its time people started reading between the lines and understanding the deeper meaning instead of just skimming the top and taking everything at face value. Wake up people. Wake up.