Penelope wrote:Oh dear, once again, I must modify my claims. I don't stalk Robert, so I haven't read all of his posts by any means. I am refering to the few threads over a few years, to which we have both contributed. I have seen him insulted and called rude names but with no reciprocation on his part.
Penelope, there was one occasion where Stahrwe was maintaining that Christianity is not a religion and others called him a fool, and I piled in to call him Booktalk's resident idiot, for which I later apologised. I do regard young earth creationism as a form of idiocy, equivalent to maintaining flat earth theory, but as I recently noted, fundamentalists are far smarter than idiots, who are not capable of independent living.
No one now maintains flat earth theory, or belief in dragons and trolls. Trolls have made something of a comeback on the internet, with many sites having warnings not to feed them. YECism, as an advocacy of myths that are clearly and massively contradicted by evidence, is a strange atavistic exception to the evolution of thought away from myth towards reason.
YECism is so persistent because it is built in to the centre of the Christian idea of salvation, eg Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15:21 "from man came death and from man came also the resurrection from the dead". The archetypal myth of cross and resurrection is explained by Paul as the cure for Adam's sin, which makes no sense except by YEC. YEC is therefore seen as the keystone of the arch of faith, without which the whole vision of Christian community will crumble.
Salvation is the key idea on offer from the church, so liberal churches flail about with an inconsistent doctrine, saying they believe that Jesus saves but rejecting Paul's cosmology of the fall. Like the lukewarm church of Laodicea in Revelation 3:16, liberal faith is neither hot nor cold so gets spat out. YEC has the advantage of internal consistency, but the disadvantage of complete inconsistency with the evidence of our senses. Astrotheology, which I suggest will return as the basis of faith, has the dual advantages of consistency with the Bible, read as allegory, and consistency with modern science.
The problem is that the weight of orthodox hostility has been so immense over the centuries that people cannot even start a conversation about how the Bible sees heaven as the heavens. For example, I have argued that the
River of Life is the Milky Way. To my reading this is a simple, coherent, elegant and compelling explanation, but it cannot be discussed in churches because it destroys the vestiges of YEC, present even in liberal faith.
