Thursday, February 10, 2011

Deconversion Pt.3

Hey all,

I know that it has been a while since I posted and I'm sorry. It was a combination between a lot of school work and laziness. It happens right? There was also something about being ashamed of my gene pool... but I will get to that one soon.

Anyway, as promised here is the third part of my deconversion story, and this one consists of learning about science and critical thinking.

When I was younger I went to Sunday school and was taught about the story of Genesis, and my parents reinforced this story, or did not provide any criticism of it. This was something that I accepted, and didn't think critically about... until high school. When I was in high school I learned about the theory of evolution, now I was lucky when in high school that my school was not one of those ones that "taught both theories", and I had a competent science teacher.

I loved learning about the theory of evolution and immediately understood how it made sense. The questions that I had were about God and where God fit in this model. I didn't suffer much cognitive dissonance when my mind was going between Genesis and Evolution, probably because even at a young age I had understood that the Bible was a book written by man, and that there is no way it could have been a first person account. Particularly if you take into account that there were no people in the beginning... so how would anyone know what order things came in, or how long they really took? I never once entertained the idea that the Bible was the "word of God" because I believed that since God "works in mysterious ways" there is no way he would have written a book if we needed faith to believe in him, so to me it was likely that the Bible was written by people trying to understand the nature of God, and that was that. So to me, evolution was a no brainer.

I remember talking about the theory of evolution with my father and we discussed the idea that it was God guided and he manipulated the processes in human evolution so that we humans could know God.... recently my father has fallen into the lies of creationism and conspiracy theories regarding the scientific discipline (this will be a topic of a later post). Now the idea of a God guided evolution never sat well with me and I will explain why, though this is kind of a round about and weird way to go about it, but it is the way it came to me, and it also happened while I was in high school.

I was taking a class in world religions, and we looked at a lot of ancient religions, as well as eastern and western religions. Along with the various creation stories we looked at we briefly discussed the "Chariots of the God's" theory. For those of you who are not familiar with this one it is the ancient alien theory that states aliens gave ancient man the ability to build all the monuments that we thought were too complex for ancient man to build. Such as the pyramids, stone henge, the Nazca Lines, and many many more. It was pointed out during the discussion that this theory gives no credit to ancient man what-so-ever. Let alone that there is no proof for aliens building the pyramids. This theory also really displays the ignorance that we have about the past and end up creating a historical "other". Because we have become dependent on the technology that we have we could not conceive that out ancestors could have been smart enough to create their own, or that they were just too stupid to build them on their own. This is all garbage, people built the pyramids, we know they did... move the hell on... Now how this relates to evolution.

Just like the ancient alien theory gives no credit to ancient man, this idea of God guided evolution gives no credit to life itself. If you think about just what a harsh planet this is it is astonishing that life began and was able to survive here. This idea of God guided evolution robs life of it's potential to find it's own way, and takes a lot away from how astonishing life really is. Life found a way to survive on this very hostile planet, and there is nothing to indicate that anything was specially created because of the many flaws we can see easily if our eyes are open.

These all piled upon one another, but it wasn't until learning about some of of theories of abiogenesis and the big bang I was still trying to fit this idea of God in the gaps of my knowledge, and only recently come to the conclusion that it didn't matter. There is nothing to substantiate the stories in the Bible and every time I asked for help or guidance in something I never got it, so it left me to believe that there was nothing out there.

There is more to the story, and next time I'm going to get in on my relationship with my father,

Until next time,
DD

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