God should be present in every aspect in your life, both in praise and worship and in education.
God guides my conscience in every decision I make, but I do not need to artificially inject God into my science, or history, or politics to give proper thanks and praise.
To relegate detailed education to the church, is not what it's their for.
There
is no detailed education on creationism. It's simple indoctrination, coming up with facts to fit a preconceived view of things. The church is where things like that belong.
Church is about communing with other Christians, and about worshipping God, and learning more about His character.
And many fundamentalists seem to think that a literal reading of the Bible is part of the "character" that God intended us to discover. It's for churches, not museums.
It's not to go into minute detail over how and why things work.
If the creationism museum were going over why and how things work in minute detail, they wouldn't be a creationism museum. It's impossible to do that and not accept evolution.
Museums offer explanations for such things, and as a Christian, I wish they would paint the full picture.
They do paint the full picture on their topic. Their topic
does not extend to the supernatural. Churches are houses of the supernatural, not museums.
I never said that He was, I said he doesn't feature in them.
It's the same thing.
His work, is totally omitted
No, it's not. God's work is there, it's just not
labeled as God's work. But the fact remains that the creationism museum
does not discuss God's work. It discusses a fantasy that fundamentalist Christians wish were true because it justifies their flawed worldview.
if you stepped into a museum today, you would never even get the impression that there IS a God at all.
It's not a museum's purpose to give its patrons an impression that God exists.
That's the job of churches.
What kind of education is that? It's a secular, agnostic education that refuses to admit the existance of God. I find that abhorrent.
It also refuses to admit the non-existence of God. Museums don't talk about the existence or non-existence of God, because that's not what they're there for. If you want to hear about whether or not God exists, go to a church or a meeting of a rationalist society.
I was using that as an example, that there is never any mention of an alternative theory.
You wouldn't like the alternate theories either. The alternate theories are things like multiple-impact cause and volcanic activity. There is not alternate theory that involves anything that you would want to hear.
As you said, we've adopted something which we have absolutely no idea occurred with any certainty
Nah, we have a pretty reasonable amount of certainty that something happened 65 million years ago to cause the extinction, and a reasonable amount of certainty that a ridiculous amount of rain and a flooded planet were not to blame. That exists only in the fantasies of fundamentalists.
AND something that we have no idea occurred at the time dinosaurs roamed the land. We base these things on flawed radio-cardbon dating systems. Great stuff!
You don't even know how radio-carbon calibration
works. You're recycling what you've heard from other creationists, who heard it from other creationists, who heard it from other creationists who lied about it to promote their views.
Ok, lets not debate this as we clearly don't agree and it will further dissolve into a powder-keg argument.
I just wanted to make sure that you knew your argument didn't hold water.
Yes they are, and it saddens me.
It saddens all of us, and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. On the one hand, TEs are usually the ones with stronger backgrounds in the natural sciences and tend to be better educated. They've come to their worldview through a combination of faith and reason, and have reconciled the real world with their religious belief. On the other hand, young-earth creationists have inherited literalist interpretations and soldier-of-God attitudes. They tend to be less educated and have not applied reason to their study of Christianity. And, as it's often said, you cannot reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
Quite simply put, that is impossible, as where do you learn about God, if not from the Bible? Definitely not a museum that's for sure.
Certainly not. I learn about God in part from the Bible. It serves as a fine aid in exploring the faith, but the only literal truth God gave us is the world we live in. There is no one single tool to discovering God. It's worth noting that there was a fairly large span of time where the Bible did not exist, and yet the Christian faith remained and thrived. The Bible does not hold the keys to Christianity.
My example was of Him having a hand in evolution, which TEs (and you I assume) clearly think He did, as such, I cannot see why you wish explicitly that He be omitted.
I know what your example was of, and I told you that I
don't want theistic evolution being taught in a museum. Museums are where facts are housed, and theistic evolution is not a fact. It is a worldview that couples scientific knowledge with faith in a higher power. It requires faith, and museums do not afford people faith.
You say that, yet for years evolution was just such a thing, a faith based theory.
No, it wasn't. The faith involved in religious belief and the "faith" you mention here (as a sort of cautious acceptance given an incomplete set of evidence) are two very different things. Evolution started out as
all scientific theories do: a small set of facts supporting an explanation. From there it has grown without significant setback and little need for revision, which tells us that the theory is incredibly strong and very likely correct.
To be honest I find this line or debate quite ironic, as in actual fact many such exhibits in museums make huge assumptions about things. As an example, the colourings and markings of dinosaurs.
Every museum I have visited has had a disclaimer up somewhere making it clear that physical depictions of color and marking are guesswork, and that they are provided merely for aesthetic purposes.
A religious museum, is telling a religious account of things.
No, religious museums usually present a historical account of a religion from the perspective of how it arose and its acceptance in the global community. What you're talking about is a ministry disguising itself as a museum to lure in the unwitting passerby.
You need to stop saying that the message is wrong, as you cannot back that up and prove otherwise.
Actually, I can, given the enormous number of simply incorrect facts the creationism museum incorporates. If you'd like to discuss some I would be more than happy to.
A religious museum is not some cloak and dagger museum that is pretending to offer something it isn't.
This one is.
It's not like Ken Ham infiltrated the Natural History Museum and quickly setup a Noah's Ark display.
No, it's even more insidious than that. It's starting up a museum and claiming to have solid scientific evidence when none exists. I've made jokes in the past few days about this being the first museum in the history of ever to be completely unconcerned with the fact that their exhibits are not supported by empirical finding.
It's placing God at His rightful place as our creator and telling His story as presented to us in the Bible. It's not rocket science.
The right place for that is in a church.
Oddly, I stumbled upon an Atheist run site the other day, that derided TE's for believing in both God and evolution as they couldn't understand what in Genesis prompted this figurative view of it.
They simply have not studied the appropriate biblical history. The concept of literal history did not exist at the time the Bible was written. In fact, literal history is a very modern concept. People back then didn't care about how things
actually went down, only that their tales held significance they could incorporate into their own lives, that they were easy to remember and that they were engaging enough to avoid their oral audience losing interest.
The reason upholding a literal telling of Genesis is important to Creationists, is because it upholds the very authoratiy that the Bible lays down.
The only ones who feel that the authority of the Bible rests on its literal nature are fundamentalists. We have no reason to feel that the Bible's authority (which we certainly see to be more limited than fundamentalists do) is in any danger.
If we can decide ad-hoc what is figurative and what isn't, there will be chaos.
Except we don't decide ad-hoc.
If something in the Bible is untrue, then who's to say any of it is true?
That whole faith thing would come into play here. You do the same thing we do, you just don't realize it. The Bible mentions a number of things that are factually untrue (four corners to the earth, resting on pillars, etc.) that you shrug off as being unimportant or figurative. Why do you do this? Because you know from observing the world around you that they can't possibly be true - reality contradicts these things, so you assume that they must be figurative. We do the same thing. Reality contradicts young-earth creationism, and thus (coupled with the fact that we realize it was not intended that way anyway) we take the Genesis account to be largely figurative.
That's where the witnessing issues come into it, because all of a sudden, it's no longer a complete picture, it's half of this and half of that.
We hardly see it as an incomplete picture. Incorporating the whole of God's creation into faith isn't dangerous or debilitating; it's
utterly necessary to proper theology.
I have read a book recently called The Battle for Truth, and it's about worldviews and their approach to the 10 doctrines, one thing struck me, which is that all worldviews share similar points, except Christianity. It is unique, and as C.S. Lewis said, it's not something you would have ever guessed (like the other worldviews), it's dramatically different and unique, yet so complete.
Which Christianity are we talking about, here?
