 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
I have been reading the reaction to the Kansas school board's decision to drop the necessity for the teaching of evolution with some interest. I also read Mr. Erwin Hanke's "other view" of the question about how enough dead matter got four miles beneath the surface of the ground in sufficient quantities to produce the oil reserves that we have. The two issues are the same: evolution and Hanke's earthquake mechanism in a multi-million year old earth. This issue needs some more perspective.
During the middle ages, and just as men were beginning to really stretch their wings in the pursuit of the knowledge of their habitation, a rather powerful religious establishment took on the rather ludicrous position (from our Monday-morning quarterback position) that the earth was flat and that those who taught otherwise ought to be eliminated from the planet. This was the decision of a so-called "church" that had forgotten several of the teachings of its Founder. First, it forgot that its Teacher had commanded love for enemies, not execution. Second, it forgot that its Teacher had never given it a mandate to force the world, by threat of death, to accept its message, nor had He given it a mandate to purge its own ranks by means of capital punishment. The true church's message has ever been a matter of preaching -- i.e. persuasion by rational argument and testimony established by history. It has always been the mark of apostate power mongers to attempt to use political power to quell debate and persuasion. This is manifest in the current case of prayer before the supreme court. What has that august body to say about prayer?? Only power mongers care.
But now the shoe is on the other foot and we currently have a whole new set of "flat-earthers". It has always been the policy of power mongers to not tolerate the free exchange and debate of ideas, and religion has had more than its share of such reprobates. But religion isn't alone in its fault. There are plenty of irreligious people who are also into the ego trip of power mongering and attempting to limit the free exchange of ideas. If, as some loudly claim, there is no valid evidence for creation, why is there such a hullabaloo about permitting its teaching in the educational establishment? Only the self-established micro-managers have a problem here. History has shown (by way of the "flat earth's" demise) that the truth eventually comes out clearly enough that ideas without substance die their own natural death. And the interesting thing here is that now, at the end of the twentieth century, evolution is coming into its own as a "flat-earth" notion. The more we learn, the less comfortable scientists are with the old theories of man's progress out of the primordial slime. Evolution is already being shown to be a flat-earth notion, and in the centuries to come people are going to snicker at how dumb people were to build computers and still hold on to evolution. Flat-earth religion and flat-earth science are both doomed by the progress of truth. History has multitudes of examples of the death of nonsense.
The problem is that the people who are into the power-mongering business always have a vested interest in their particular brand of micro-management [control freaks have always been with us and, unfortunately, always will be as long as security blankets are so thin]. This has kept them blind while in the fight. We have the advantage of the Monday morning quarterback, but when the game was going on, those in it were too caught up in the business of the present to consider the future's perspective of them. But the future always comes and the joke's always eventually on the person who felt some obsession for controlling others and their ways of thinking, from Caesar to Hitler, and from the former flat-earth religious/political establishment to the current flat-earth political/evolutionist establishment.
The reason the screams are so loud is that the cracks in the flat-earth notions are starting to show and the insecure are showing how thin their security blankets are.
Reader of mine, ask yourself this: if evolution is true, what difference does it make whether people believe it or not? So far, everyone you know has died after a paltry few decades of life in this "evolved" world, and evolution teaches that when we die, we are absolutely NOT. Thus it really doesn't matter what a person believes in that kind of a world. So what is all the screaming about? A few seconds of control in the progress of infinity?