I Should Have Known

But then again, how could I?

I thought I was going to move on to ELS codes, but after thinking about it for quite a spell, it seems to me that this issue of someone like Paul  is what I need to deal with and get it over with.

I didn't chase after Paul.  He came to my Blog, I didn't go to his to try and proselytize for my side.  I won't go to his blog and comment there, because, quite frankly, I don't see any point.  From here on out, I expect there will be those who won't like my tone or some such thing. While my rhetoric will be sharp and uncompromising, and I will not entertain warm and fuzzy methods of persuasion, I am not trying to hurt feelings for the sake of scoring points.  Eternal destinies are at stake.

I started out making it clear that I had spent most of my youthful years of development coming to a dedicated belief in evolution.  I was so very gung ho about evolution that watching the movie Inherit The Wind was almost a religious experience for me. Watching Clarence Darrow just make an idiot out of William Jennings Bryan had me pumping my fist in the air.  I actually grew up believing that the movie was a documentary.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not defending Bryan, he went into that trial completely unprepared and with little understanding of what he was dealing with.  This is very much like most people who claim the title of Christian today.  The vast majority of Christians don't understand the importance of having reasoned, logical answers that help prove Christianity.

I thought and pondered, pondered and thought, gathered notes and copied links to websites regarding ELS codes in preparing for my next post, but I couldn't stop thinking about Paul my commenter.  In Knowing God: Part 3, I made the point that he reminded me of other people who just seem to be able to pull one part of their brain out and isolate it from the conclusions that logic demands in order to maintain something else they want to believe.  I almost started to go back over the scientific evidence and facts to show that Paul doesn't even understand the science, because he simply parrots stuff that he has heard or read and can't explain it in his own words.  But there is the rub.  If he truly understood the science, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, he would KNOW that the stupid stuff he's been told about energy being added to an "open" system doesn't overcome the chaotic nature of entropy.  I can use the simple analogy that if you pour gasoline on a bonfire, it doesn't result in carbon crystallizing into more complex shapes that contain coded information. I dare anyone to take a power supply for a computer and create a voltage and current amplifier system so that you can just vary the current input for days, weeks, or years on end and then explain to me how that will result in more complex, or any kind of programming language being developed inside the CPU.  Build yourself a little terrarium and set it out in the sun and then show me how, other than adding heat to the enclosure, you ended up with more complex structures just because of the sun's radiation. No, going over the science again and helping to actually understand how the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics works is not going to change Paul's mind, because some guy with a Ph.D. who Paul respects more than the Bible is going to tell him that's how it is, and Paul will just accept it.

Now, because I try my best to think logically, and would like to think that anybody who would take the time to read my posts values logic as much as I do, I figured a few responses to Paul would at least send him away thinking for a while. I try to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who claims to be a follower of Christ, that their loyalty is to the Creator and what He has to say about His own creation, and that a follower of Christ understands that man is inherently flawed.  Problem is, I forgot that just like in the issue of firearms and hoplophobia, there are people  who can seem reasonable at first, but upon further inspection reveal themselves to be happy with a condition of cognitive dissonance.  Then again, maybe the human mind is so complex that we'll have to come up with a new label.  Or maybe I just don't understand Paul's condition, or the last option is that Paul is just crazy or evil.   WHOOAAAAHH!! Did I just say that?  Not that I wanted to.  To go to Paul's website, you would think he's such a nice guy.  Far nicer than me.  He has six kids.  I'm sure he's a loving father and his kids and his wife adore him.  What in the hell is wrong with me for picking on Paul?

You know, I've got other people I like and respect in the blogosphere.  Let me use Kevin Baker as an example.  Kevin runs The Smallest Minority.  Kevin and I think the same about a lot of issues regarding personal liberty, firearms and government.  I like Kevin and consider him a friend.  In the interest of full disclosure, I've never met him.  I feel I know him based on his rather candid writings.  Kevin is a self proclaimed atheist.  Religiously, he's my polar opposite.  How could I possibly like him so much?

I would much rather be in a combat situation with Kevin Baker than with Paul.  Kevin is an engineer by trade.  A logical thinker.  His essays display a deep, thoughtful character.  I have read so many of Kevin's essays and the sources he cites to explain how he comes to the conclusions that he does.  His writing reflects a deep desire to find real objective truth, regardless of feelings or wishful thinking.  Kevin says he is an atheist because as far as he has wanted to search, he has found no reason to believe in a deity.  Thus proving that you cannot and will not find something that you are not looking for, even if it is right in front of your face.  This is profoundly important.  While I may feel regret in the idea that I won't see Kevin in the next life, I understand that the worst thing I could do would be to preach at him about his soul when he sees no need and would merely be irritated by my efforts.  If the subject of the afterlife came up because Kevin was sincerely interested, I would have no doubt that his logic and engineering type mind would demand that he make some decision either way, but I can tell from his writings that there would be no sitting on the fence or compartmentalization when it came to deciding on what is real and what makes sense.  In that regard, I feel confident that given all the good evidence, Kevin would choose the right way.  I respect that about Kevin.  Regardless of his decision, I respect that.

Not so with Paul.  I wouldn't trust Paul as far as I could throw him. Paul says he's a Christian. He found his way to my blog, and has gone out of his way to defend evolution as if it can somehow be compatible with a belief in Jesus of Nazareth.  Mind you, Paul doesn't just speak of some passing, shoulder shrugging acknowledgement of Jesus as a figure of history.  I don't get the impression that Paul's Jesus is like that of the Unitarians or the Mormons or some strange cult, but I'm not really sure.  According to Paul's blog, he claims to love and glorify Jesus.  But when I take in the whole picture of Paul and what he writes on his blog and in my comments section, I have to say, "Nonsense!"  Or at least I have to understand that the Jesus Paul worships is a God of Paul's own making and not that of the Bible.

Yeshua HaMashiach who was prophesied about for thousands of years and proved Himself to be God incarnate, referred to the Torah as being Holy and incorruptible. Eternal and transcendant over even the world itself.   The very Word of God. The Gospel of John declares that the Word of God and Jesus are one and the same entity.  If the Bible is a liar and cannot be trusted, then Jesus is a liar and cannot be trusted.  At every turn, Paul would take the words of fallible, sinful men with limited knowledge that they in turn learned from men of limited knowledge about a theory that was dreamed up by men who's primary goal was to explain the world in such a way as to eliminate a Creator.  In any argument with me about science or origins, Paul would choose  Darwin, Dawkins, Gould, Hawkings or anybody else but Jesus Christ to make his case.  Yet he tells the world from his blog that he loves Jesus.

I made the points in my earlier posts that Genesis doesn't leave us any room to compromise with evolution.  As if He knew that the controversy would arise before and after Charles Darwin, God went to the trouble to define each of the days of creation as having evening and morning, i.e. regular 24 hour days. He went to the trouble of waiting until day four to create the sun, moon, and stars.  He specifically made the point that until man sinned in the garden that there was no bloodshed, no death or dying.  He created all the land animals and man on day six, so there were no millions of years between them. There is a lot more there that  Does all of this sound absolutely bat-$h0t crazy to an evolutionist or someone who has been indoctrinated in the government schools?  Of course it does.  I don't mind being thought of as crazy to people who think that man knows better than God. I quit worrying so much about that when it dawned on me that over the centuries, science has had to revise its thinking about so many things. At the same time, while man has had to adjust his interpretation of what the Bible means, at no point has anyone been able to point to something the Bible says and say, "We know THAT can't be true, because of THIS."  The Bible obviously conflicts with the interpretations and theories of scientists who only allow for a materialistic explanation of the universe, but the Bible doesn't conflict with things we know to be established fact. Believe me, I've pissed off several guys with Ph.D.s when I made them admit that fact.

 Evolutionary scientists love to crow about how science is "self-correcting," even though it can spend decades or longer wallowing in whatever the most accepted theory is before they are dragged, kicking and screaming, into a better understanding of the evidence.  Problem nowadays, as evidenced by movies like EXPELLED, and even lots of cases I studied before that movie, any heretic who presents hard evidence that goes against the dogma of neo-darwinian evolution is fired and ostracized from mainstream academia, without anybody demonstrating why the evidence is bad.  There are perfectly good explanations as to why the creation story of Genesis works with the science we know to be fact today.  Creationists don't need to be embarrassed by what the mainstream scientists think they know.

Paul's insistence on defending evolution raises the big question.  Why?  What's his motivation?  To help people accept that they can have a warm, fuzzy, non-judgmental Jesus who doesn't care what they think, regardless of the evidence? In order to do that, you have to dismiss the Bible as nothing more than allegorical stories and poetry and just a tiny smattering of wisdom.  The rest just shouldn't be taken seriously.   Is he trying to get evolutionists to say, "Hey, I can have evolution and Jesus too!"  Why bother?  If evolution is true, and it renders the Bible just so much religious nonsense that can be taken or left with or without the salt, then why waste my precious time?  Since Darwin's time, and actually even before that, the champions of evolution theory have made the main body of their argument not about scientific evidence, but rather about how crazy creationists are for going against the conventional "thought" of those who accept evolution.

Think of this another way. Imagine this improbable scenario.  Paul says he loves his wife.  And to everybody who sees the family that seems to be true. But there are some "well respected" people in academe who say Paul's wife is a good for nothing whore and he's wasting his time giving her any devotion or attention.  Out in public, Paul doesn't want to be thought of as being less intelligent than the average guy by disagreeing with those "well respected" guys in academe, so he actually defends those guys, while at the same time saying he loves his wife and is completely devoted to her.  Does this make sense?

Since Paul would never consider heresy against his beloved champions of evolution by considering anything the Bible has to say as being authoritative, I suppose Paul cannot be offended when I say that he brings to mind the passage where Jesus says that many will come in "that day" and say to Him, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and heal the sick and do this and that in your name." And Jesus will look at them and say, "Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.  I never knew you."

You know, I will be very careful to not offend an unbeliever, because my goal should be to bring him to God. However I must do so while being faithful to God and not compromising the truth.  There are lots of believers who need to be disabused of errors that have been taught as the traditions of the churches over the centuries. I know I am constantly learning, and have regretted being taken in by some stuff in the past, especially when it comes to keeping the commandments and understanding eschatology.  I can be understanding and deferential up to a point, but when someone shows his self to be hell-bent on taking the teaching of man over the teaching of God, I have to draw the line.