This is going to be one hell of a post…I’m going to cover everything I possibly can:
- Homosexuality
- Abortion
- Politics
- Origins of the World/Man (Evolution)
- Religion
Homosexuality
Too much scientific evidence points to the understanding that being gay is not a lifestyle and/or choice. I’m in a privileged position because I have access to the scientific documentation that has been published about it. The average joe wanting more information might know to search through places like Scirus and Google Scholar, but without paying $30+ for each article they want to read, all they have access to are abstracts. Even those that might have access to scientific journals because they’re college/grad students might not have the scientific background to understand completely the language being used in said articles. I not only have the access but the proper scientific background. All studies done thus far indicate that chemical receptors in the brain of GLBTQ individuals behave differently than they would for their heterosexual counterparts. Because the difference in brain action is CLEAR, it’s obvious that this is not a choice being made to BE GLBTQ. It is their choice to embrace their physiology, but that’s it.
That being said a lot of people (mainly “Bible-thumpers”) like to go on and on about homosexuality is against God’s nature, it’s a sin, etc. I can’t stomach this at all. If God has created these individuals who have been “wired” differently, they cannot be against His nature – He created them. Additionally, I know just as many homosexual couples that have been monogamous and equally committed as many heterosexual couples. In fact, the homosexual relationships I’ve been privileged to witness are mostly more genuine than a lot of the heterosexual relationships I’ve witnessed. They experience love as deeply as anyone else; Love like that is surely to have been blessed by God. Again, if God made them that way and allowed them healthy loving relationships HOW can it be against His nature?
Abortion
In general, frivolous abortions should not be allowed. Johnny shouldn’t be able to knock up Suzie, break up with her the next week and then Suzie go and rid herself of her burden. Sex, whether you’re ready for it or not is a HUGE thing. While getting pregnant is not always an easy thing, every sexual encounter should be treated as if it will end up with a child. E.g. – Don’t have sex if you couldn’t handle being a parent.
That said, if a pregnancy threatens a woman or her unborn child’s potential life it has to be up to her to decide what to do. If a woman is raped she shouldn’t have to be forced to face the ordeal head on for 9 month and go through hours of labor to produce a child she does not want to have (regardless of whether she would be altruistic enough to give it up for adoption).
With this topic come a lot of cries about how it’s murder. Honestly, that depends on when you think “life” occurs. Personally I don’t see how life can possibly exist without implantation. Even many implantations end in what is medically referred to as a chemical abortion. (For this reason I am not against things like the Plan B pill.)
In my opinion, until you can hear a heartbeat the bundle of cells can’t possibly be viable and if need be I would have no problems with a woman wanting to terminate for a non-frivolous reason. No matter what you should be able to hear a heartbeat no later than 12 weeks gestation, PLENTY of time to figure out you’re pregnant and make a tough decision if need be. (This would include being ok with RU-486 – not the same thing as Plan B.)
Once you being the 2nd trimester though, you’ve made your decision (even by indecision!). Suck it up and deal with it if you’re not happy about your situation. And if it turns out that you don’t really want the kid after all, give it up for adoption because there are SO many families out there that would love a baby but for whatever reason were not blessed enough to have their own biological children.
Politics
Swear this one will be short! In short, don’t be an uneducated twit. Research your candidate IN DEPTH and don’t make a snap decision on whom to vote for. There’s nothing inherently wrong with voting along strict party lines – so long as the party you choose continuously meets the needs you need meeting.
I hate it when people vote gender or race.
I hate it when people tie themselves so closely to a political party that they no longer understand what their party stands for.
Just take care with your political position, educate yourself thoroughly and often and don’t be afraid of making a change if your beliefs no longer align with the guy/gal you thought you were going to vote for.
And because that all sounds a bit “liberal” per se, I am thoroughly unhappy with not only the Obama administration but the state of politics in America. It’s turned into a good ol’ popularity contest and whoever has the most money, which is NOT what it was originally intended for.
Origins of Man – Evolution
I actually had a very interesting discussion about this yesterday with a close friend of mine from college over FB. I’ll mostly copy & paste what I wrote there:
Evolution is the progressive change of genetics within a species. Often the changes are so small that we do not observe them. Such is the case with large organisms, like humans, whose time between generations is very long (remember humans have a life expectancy ~75 yrs or so). We can see the progressive change of genetics in species that have much smaller generations, like bacteria or weeds. (Bacterial generations can be completed in as little as 30 minutes depending on the species, but most bacterial species will have a new generation within 24 hrs. Weeds/plants are a little longer, in the "weeks" category, but still short enough for human observation.)
HOW a bacterium or weed becomes resistant, or a species becoming resistant in general, is determined by their genetics. Let me pose a scenario for you. Weeds are easier since they don't have any abnormal mating habits so that's where I'll go.
Imagine you are a small farmer and in your one crop field there are 100,000 individuals/plants of something, like pigweed. You want to do your part for the environment, but you still want an effective herbicide so you go with Roundup®.
After the first application of Roundup, maybe 90% of all the pigweed is gone. This still leaves about 10,000 individuals who were exposed to the herbicide but had slight genetic differences that allowed them to survive. In order for those genetic adaptations to be passed on they must show up in the sex cells of the individual. Assuming even that only half of the 10,000 have genetic advantage that can be passed on, that's still 5,000 individuals who survived with the advantage that can be passed on. A very VERY conservative estimate for plant species is a doubling of viable population. This original generation of plants that survived to reproduce is called the "parent" generation in genetics.
Alright, so assuming they double the 5,000 in the parent generation would beget 10,000 individuals in the first generation of offspring. But let's not forget, that the advantage that allowed them to survive can be passed on genetically. So ALL of the new 10,000 are also able to survive Roundup.
1st begets 2nd (10,000 becomes 20,000)
2nd begets 3rd (20,000 becomes 40,000)
3rd begets 4th (40,000 becomes 80,000)
4th begets 5th (80,000 becomes 160,000)
Before you know it, not only are there MORE weeds than the farmer started off with, but ALL of them are resistant to his preferred herbicide. Also to be taken into consideration, most weeds are angiosperms meaning they flower and their seeds are mobile. Be they blown on the wind or carried by an animal, the seeds move. Nearby "foreign" populations of pigweed get transported into the farmer's field. Of the transplants some of them too will become resistant to the herbicide, exacerbating the problem. So too, do the resistant pigweeds transplant into the "foreign" populations taking their genetic advantage with them.
A conservative estimate is that it may take 5 generations for the farmer's field to be overrun and not helped by Roundup any longer, but the reality is that it will probably be closer to 3 generations. That's about 1 year, maybe two depending on growing conditions.
Now imagine a similar scenario with bacteria that even take as long as 24 hrs to produce a new generation and you'll see that genetic resistance to anti-life agents (e.g. antibiotics for bacteria and herbicides for weeds) very quickly become obsolete.
Progressive change in genetics is most commonly accepted when we're speaking about breeds of livestock, companion animals or even crop varieties. The chickens and lambs and cows you eat today are not the same genetically speaking as those of the 1920s or earlier. Chickens back then were the size of grackles/black birds but today they're monstrous in comparison and it's not from injecting them with hormones. Even hormone free chickens are much much larger than their early 20th century counterparts. The corn you eat and the wheat that makes your bread is genetically different than those grown as late as the 1940s and 50s because of Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution. Dog breeds exist now that didn't exist 100-200 years ago. My Plott Hound is a great example of that.
All of these "micro" changes add up over long periods of time. The problem is that humans don't have a long enough lifespan to view when the micro changes add up to equal the macro changes, ie when a species splits because of the vast differences existing between two populations. For most organisms it's thought that that process cannot be completed without the passage of several thousands years.
Some people can accept the microevolution I just presented but have trouble extrapolating that outwards towards larger organisms – like humans; that's the one that's harder to prove, obviously. (And there’s a huge misconception that humans evolved from “monkeys,” I’ll get to that in a bit.)
For one thing our generation length is so long compared to other species that no one (even had they been aware of what to look for) could have been documenting it. What's left of "evidence..." then is the fossil record. Which in itself is a pretty sucky record. Imagine, it takes some pretty precise conditions for fossils to develop from a deceased body of any species. So in all, what we have from the fossil record is largely just bits and pieces that scientists have had to sort of craft together into something that makes logical sense.
Is it possible that humans did not diverge genetically from apes? (let's be clear there is a huge difference between a monkey and an ape but both are primates. In fact there are three categories of primates; monkeys, apes and prosimians -- things like lemurs, etc.)
While it is *possible* humans didn't "descend" from apes given the lack of quality evidence/information that we have, there is absolutely nothing substantive to suggest that we did NOT descend from apes. The genetic code is too similar, morphology is too similar, even social behaviors on many levels mirror those found in ape societies (think gorillas and chimpanzees). It may be disappointing to hear or think on even, but what evidence that we do have, inconclusive though it may be, does point clearly in one direction and one direction only.
It is not possible to know for sure, whether we did or didn't evolve from apes. Even that aside, evolution does not have to fall outside the boundaries of the Bible. Genesis 1 clearly states that man was created last in order to care for the world around him. Any phylogenetic tree or rendition of the fossil record will show you that evolutionarily speaking, humans arrived "on the scene" last. But because Genesis gives no concrete definition of time, who is to say how many years = a day in Genesis 1? Is it then not also possible, that evolution could be God's method of sculpting out the world and all that fills it?
I actually rather enjoy the vision of God as a sculptor. As any artist will tell you, a work of art takes time and many forms before its completion. So too it is possible that God's "chisel" is evolution. It would make sense then that His work of art would take time and take on many forms. Or even never stop changing, if we are to assume that God is still present and involved and not some being that set things in motion and sat back to see what happened (as some people believe).
To quote Albert Einstein: "Science without Religion is lame, Religion without Science is blind." - 1941, Science, Phylosophy and Religion: A Symposium.
The two do not *have* to be mutually exclusive of one another.
Some people take offense to the idea that a day in Genesis 1 might not equal 24 hrs and those like to spout verses like "By him, were all things created," (Colossians 1:16) and Romans 1:25 – “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.”
To those folks I have the following: Geologic time, by that definition is then incompatible with the Bible. If a day = a day, then in 168 hrs the world was created. Science would not have ANY merit, because EVERYTHING we know and understand about this world from a scientific standpoint, negates any possibility that the world was created in 168 hrs. There would not be any need to try and view Science and Religion as anything BUT mutually exclusive -- Science would be a complete lie.
This is plainly not the case. Thousands of years of scientific investigation has proved otherwise and if you still come down on the side who's opinion it is that the world was completed in 168 hrs then you should never see another doctor ever again; never take another drug; never undergo another surgery. ANY modern day convenience would not exist without scientific innovation and you should take that into consideration any time you use so much as a telephone or flush a toilet.
If God is the instigator, the propagator of evolution, then Colossians 1:16 has not been altered and Romans 1:25 no longer applies to this situation. And just as an aside, Darwin, though he was given the credit for the 'discovery' was not the only or even the first to put evolution into words. He was just the first to publish on the topic. In fact, he had refrained from publishing on it for many many years because as a Christian he knew the sort of backlash it was going to receive.
Why then did he publish it anyway? Because he, like all other human beings, was a prideful sinner and wanted the credit to be all his when a young man in his field naïvely sent him a copy of a manuscript outlining Darwin's own thoughts and wanted Darwin's "expert" opinion as to the validity of his conclusions. The young man's name: Alfred Russell Wallace.
Which finally brings me to….
Religion/Jesus Christ
You may have picked up on it in the evolution section, bit if you didn’t: I am a Christian. I’m a bit of an unconventional Christian though.
Some background, I lost my faith in high school. But I regained my faith in college…through science. The more I learned about biology the more I knew that this whole world must be orchestrated by some higher being. While in college I read a fantastic book by Yann Martel called The Life of Pi. My pastor actually had this book on our reading list. It is a must read for anyone. In it the main character Pi, questions why you cannot belong to more than one religion. The most poignant line I read in that book:
"If there's only one nation in the sky, shouldn't all passports be valid for it?" [A question asked by Pi when the truth is out that he has been practicing Hinduism, Christianity and Muslimism.]
Later I came across another book that I believe all people should be encouraged to read: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. You can’t see the statistics, the vast complexity of life and NOT believe in something greater than yourself. Lastly I challenge anyone to study the array of religions humans have devised and tell me that at their core the majority of them are not basically carrying the same message.
For practical purposes, I am a practicing Lutheran – ELCA. I find comfort in the liturgy of the Lutheran church. The services are doctrinal, didactic and musically rich.
As to Jesus, I know he existed and I believe that what he was capable of doing and what he DID do was true. Science is even beginning to shore all of these suppositions up. However, many use John 3:16 – 21 as evidence that those who do not believe in Jesus will not join God in eternal life. In general, I hate to pick and choose aspects of the Bible in which to place credence or otherwise. But as you may have picked up already, I do not believe the Bible to be the actual Word of God. It is a human made instrument, that probably does not miss the mark as to it’s meaning (ie. the Word of God is intact in meaning, if interpreted in more than one way).
To lean on the character, Pi’s, passport analogy: When you go to a foreign country you do not have to book passage in exactly the same way as all others traveling to that country. You can arrive by boat, maybe train or car, you can fly! Those of go by plane, train or boat have multiple carriers through which to book passage. In the same way, I believe that belief in Jesus is one way to book passage into the eternal life. But I cannot hold with the idea that he is the only passage.
