I know I am mid thought here, but I was reading some of the comments, and thinking about how important it is to creationists that they be right and evolution is not true. Most of the time, I find myself wondering "Why? What changes in your daily life if you are wrong?" Will you no longer be able to wash the dishes or love your children? Will gardening not be fun anymore? Will you lose the urge to watch sports? What?
Will you have to die some day?
Because I gotta tell ya; it's going to happen.
It's the same sort of brain stall I go through when I am confronted with racists or homophobics. I don't get it. It all seems like such a colossal waste of time: marinating in hatred or pushing your weird ideas about the origin of life when there's just so much other stuff to do! I mean, once you are done with work and your day to day responsibilities, this is really how you want to spend your time?
OK, not fair. I am sure they have hobbies.
But I guess the problem for me is that I don't remember what it felt like to be a believer, and I don't remember any moment when it fell away and everything changed. Because everything did not change. It was just one day, I realized that I had not been buying it for awhile, and then later on, I realized that I did not buy any of it, at all, and a little after that, I realized that I was an atheist. It was very gradual.
Maybe it's because I was never, in all my believer time, a creationist, and I always found that to be ridiculous and unimportant. The Garden of Eden was so obviously a story, like all creation myths, that it was clearly metaphor.
Even debates like the one a few nights ago strike me as weird. What's the point? There's no debate. And the Sesame Street song "One of these things is not like the other..." starts running through my head. What has evolution ever done to them?
On second thought. Don't answer that.
Dr. Bergman wanted to have a different debate, anyway. It seemed like he wanted to debate about atheists and what is wrong with being one. And since atheism and evolution are the same to many of these people, maybe he thought that was a legitimate place to start. But expected him to lay down a case for why ID should be taught alongside evolution in the schools, I really did. I did not expect to agree with it, but I thought he would present one. I think he expected Dr. Myers to be all fire and brimstone and atheisty all over him, so instead of actually preparing a case, he was defensive from the very beginning.
Either that, or this is the only thing they CAN do because they have no case.
1 comment:
Bergman did seem pathetic with his nobody likes me routine.
Like you I was expecting more of a debate from the "yes" side than was given.
I don't understand some of these people but it seems they use the bible and their belief in Jesus as a crutch to get through their day to day existence.
My impetus for trying to understand the creation v. evolution debate started when my born-again sister told me she thought the earth was only 6,000 years old. After lifting my jaw back up to its normal position, I tried to reason with her to no avail. (It was bad enough when she came out to the family as a born-again who thought her lesbian life style was wrong. Thanks, sis, I thought, you've made it so easy for me to come out as gay.)
As for atheism I, like you apparently, slowly drifted into it. I was raised by an orthodox Catholic mother and a father who went golfing on Sundays (or stayed at home). To this day I don't know if my father had any beliefs in God. I would guess he was an agnostic which is what I was until I gave church another try. I still (don't ask me why) believed in transsubstantiation when I attended All God's Children MCC in south Minneapolis, but this belief is what finally led me to atheism.
No, it wasn't PZ Myers desecration of a cracker that broke the camel's back of my belief, but our church choir minister who thought transubstantiation was a load of bunk and the wafer and wine were just symbols. The unbidden thought came to me that if he thinks my beliefs are a load of tosh, then, maybe his beliefs are the same.
Now, I can't believe in any of it and it seems silly to me that I ever did.
It was hard to be angry with Bergman as he seemed more pathetic than dishonest. And, his dishonesty was more of a poor parroting of current creationism thinly disguised as "intelligent design." I am sure this deluded fool believes in what he spouts and writes in his numerous books and articles. (Why are these creationists so prolific?)
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