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Aswad -> RE: Dinosaurs (8/13/2012 7:16:23 PM)
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~fr~
The simple answer is: creationism only makes sense when you see it as a metaphor.
Dinosaur bones and all that is sort of like the UFO crowd. Connect the dots can be an entertaining exercise when you also get to pick and choose the dots, but ultimately it's not an enlightening one. Take away the creationism, and they'll be on about the Illuminati instead. Or how alien tech is used to control humans via satelites to kill us off, as opposed to just placing an asteroid in our way around the sun (at a couple megameters per second, even a smallish rock makes anything we've ever done seem like lighting a match). Or networks of gay politicians allowing the Russians to govern the world.
The upshot is if they do movie scripts, movies might get more fun.
I sure ain't this creative.
Creationism, to me, is the religious equivalent of one form of the anthropic principle. The universe got the exquisitely narrow set of parameters that could sustain life, not by chance, but because its purpose is to host life. A purpose that comes from the being whose name one might liberally translate "existence itself is my identity". God, then, is the foundation of the stack of turtles: he exists unto himself. The rest follows from that. We're not here by chance, and not scheduled to blink out of existence by chance, either. That's an aesthetically pleasing idea, and one which neither contradicts any present evidence, nor leads to dangerous behavior in and of itself. Whether one believes it or not, is a matter of faith, a question of preferences. It isn't as if we have any solid basis for the idea that we exist, either, but I take it we all have faith in that notion.
You could also do a wierd reverse causality twist over the theme of God at the end of time looking back and observing a specific past, but only if you're a Calvinist.
Anyway, window dressing.
The biblical story presents a universe being created from nothing, symmetries breaking, forces and interactions differentiating, mass coalescing, worlds being created, life arising from the primordial seas with mammals emerging late in the process, and finally the ultimate product of this process: Woman. Then we mature and head out into the world. Try to kill off the farm boy, which results in being ostracized. The agricultural revolution is a fact. That's the Fall. And so we move on down the ages, fucking things up as we go, with occasional pointers as to the right direction being provided and ignored. Throw in some periodic revisions of the story to make it suit the political agenda of the day.
One thing I do not see in there, is a young earth and fake dinosaurs. Nephilim, sure, but no fake dinosaurs.
Course, there may be a decoder ring that comes with the tinfoil hat, which I didn't receive.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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