Creation, Evolution, Lies and Truth

Over the weekend I read and then heard about the things that happened in Norway.

And things happening in Africa.

Sometimes it’s hard to be optimistic about things.

I also watched some religious television. Dr Grady McMurtry was talking about Creation versus Evolution. There’s a clip of him here if you’re interested. It’s not the programme that I saw … but gives you a feel for the things he believes.

 

It’s worth checking out his background from other sources as well though … for example here.

I only caught part of the programme. He was reading from the New Testament – Romans Chapter 1 and seemed pretty much to be in the process of making a case against the idea of evolution and in favour of the idea of creation.

Once I would have agreed with some of what he was saying. But not all of it.

Right now, to me at any rate, his arguments seem to be somewhat disingenuous.

Why? And does what I think matter at all?

Well … it matters to me. And putting the thoughts into words helps me as well.

So here goes with some of Andreas thoughts on Creation, Evolution, Africa, Norway and Fundamentalism.

Some scientists are convinced that there is no God. Evolution is maybe then the only way the universe could have happened. Christians are enemies. Religion is the enemy.

Some Christians are convinced in the literal truth of the book of Genesis in the Bible. Creation is the only way the universe could have happened. Evolutionists are the enemy. Philosophies with roots outside of Christianity are the enemy.

And maybe the same is true of some of the followers of some of the other religions.

Myself. I think I am agnostic. I don’t know if God is there. If the level of my commitment to agnosticisms seems unconvincing … well that’s probably because I’m not convinced.

As an aside … did you hear about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac? He would lay awake all night wondering if there really was a dog.

Sorry. I heard that one at a Christian meeting I was at many tears ago,

In the days when I believed in God I was never in the camp of literal Bible Believers. I would say that I was a “creationist” … but not the kind that believes that the Earth is only thousands of years old. Which maybe means that I wasn’t actually a “creationist” at all.

Back to the letter that Paul the Apostle wrote to the Christians in Rome and to Grady McMurtry.

He seems to be firmly in the literal creationist and anti-evolutionist camp.

My Bible quotes are from the New International Version of the Bible (NIV). At the time that I’m writing this you can read the first chapter of Romans here. There are some Christians who view the NIV Bible as being a work of the Devil (take a look here for example) so here is the King James Version (KJV) of Romans Chapter 1 which some people believe to be the absolute literal Word of God.

Well … in the part of the TV programme that I saw, Grady seemed to be presenting the stuff in Romans chapter 1 verse 18 onwards as some kind of an attack on people that believe that evolution happens.

So where it says:

¹⁸ The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, ¹⁹ since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

he seemed to be saying that it was evolutionists that are suppressing the truth by their wickedness.

To me it all seems a lot more ambiguous than that.

I don’t think that it’s true that:

since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made

When I look at the world I see a whole mix of ambiguous messages. Beauty. Ugliness. Life. Death. Joy. Sorrow. Peace. War.

Another thing I watched at the Weekend was the movie The Invention of Lying. This scene expresses some of the ambiguity of it all. If you haven’t seen it then do watch it.

 

There was a time when I would have tried to understand good and bad as follows:

• God made all the good things
• we turned away from God and that resulted in all the bad things.

Now … maybe that is the case.

But either way … looking at the evidence around me … it’s not at all clear to see God’s invisible qualities in every aspect. You have to be picky. And that pickiness isn’t easy to do without some kind of faith.

It doesn’t seem reasonable to blame people for misinterpreting nature or misinterpreting some religious people.

And then, back in Romans we have:

²⁴ Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. ²⁵ They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

²⁶ Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. ²⁷ In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

²⁸ Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. ²⁹ They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹ they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. ³² Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Which begins with an unfair kind of statement, because they didn’t really know God in the first place – so how could they knowingly exchange God for something else?

Grady chose to emphasise a few particular aspects of this stuff – giving the impression that the teaching of evolution is directly responsible for the following “facts”:

• there are more gays and lesbians in the world
• there are more murders – mainly because he views abortion as being murder – and because society at large allows abortion then it has legalised abortion … and this is a direct result of the teaching of evolution
• more children disobey their parents

You know though? In my own heart when I read the words from Romans I also think about the way that religion – and that includes Christianity – has persecuted people. Mistreated women. Mistreated children. Accepted slavery. Subjugated entire nations. Used people. Abused them. Killed them.

And you know … there are gay men and lesbian women that love their partners in a way that is every bit as wholesome and “good” as partners in any heterosexual relationship. There are gay and lesbian relationships that are about love and not all about shameful lusts. There are people involved in heterosexual relationships … even religious people … even Christians … that have no fidelity, understanding, love or mercy.

And you know … there are people in churches that are gossips and slanderers. That believe that everyone who thinks evolution happens is foolish, futile darkened and given up by God.

And there are some who believe that evolution happens that think that all Christians are hypocrites.

Grady says that if you read the original Greek the words that Paul uses to describe these foolish people are actually much stronger than those that are used in most English translations of the New Testament. And he then uses the stronger words … the justification being that they are not his own words … but those of the Bible. So it’s ok to say them. Even if they are rude and offensive.

Some people would say that in the past, Religious control freaks have frightened people into a particular kind of behaviour. Frightened into heterosexuality. Born and destined to remain 100% male or 100% female. Some people believe that changes that are happening now are a result of freedom from a kind of tyranny. A freedom that allows people to be themselves.

Just today I had an email from someone that said:

I have been dressing in secret for as long as I can remember(probably since about 7 or 8 yrs old)

For most of that time I have felt that there was something wrong with me and that I was not a proper man, and have tried to stop dressing (even throwing away all the clothes!). However I am now starting to realise that it is part of me, part of who I am, and I now want to embrace and enjoy my newly discovered other side, and hope that by meeting with other people I my come to terms with everything more easily.

And I know exactly how he feels. And I know a lot of other people that feel the same way. And some of them go to Church. And there are churches that have no problem with it.

It’s this that makes me sure that I could never go back to the place that I used to be as part of the church. Having to hide my thoughts and feelings.

But maybe one day I could become involved again in a church that was more concerned with treating other people in the way that Jesus treated people rather than in discussing creation versus evolution and arguing over the infallibility of the Bible.

A few of the things that I am sure about:

• Fundamentalist Christians that have an infallible view of the Bible and think that people who disagree with them are all fools are mistaken.
• Fundamental evolutionists that think that all people involved in religion are idiots are mistaken.
• I don’t know the answers.
• I hardly know the questions

Dealing with the hatred and fear that seems to be evident in the acts carried out by a man in Norway.

Working out a way to allow people in Africa to eat and drink.

These issues matter more than the literal truth of the Genesis story.

The argument that not teaching Genesis as truth inevitably leads to teaching evolution which inevitably leads to wickedness which leads to hatred and fear and starvation and death doesn’t ring true to me.

People can be decent human beings and not believe in creation.

People can believe in creation and be inhumane.

Some people that are not Christians can be more like Christ than some people that are Christians.

In the end, though, to know what Paul the apostle really thought mattered most you could take a look at this … just to help restore the balance a little.

Ponies, people, the Bible, Jesus and me

Recently I spent a while chatting with someone using the nick ponygirl in a chat room. For over a year now she explained that she has lived as a ponygirl.

She has an owner … who owns five pony girls at the moment. Some of the things that she has mentioned:

• It’s not a sexual thing.
• She hasn’t been forced into it.
• She is happy.
• The ponies spend a lot of time restrained in various ways … mostly, I think, in ways that make it feel more like being a pony
• They don’t talk
• The ponies are trained
• They are disciplined
• They are well cared for
• The pony that I talked with has access to the internet once in a while
• Her family visit her every so often. They don’t find it easy … but they accept her choice. She doesn’t speak to them when they visit, but they do communicate by email

She said that the thing that she likes most is a sense of belonging.

In some ways, it’s not easy to understand why anyone would want to do this.

I think that quite lot of people would also find it hard to understand what it is that makes a guy want to wear makeup, a wig and a dress.

It’s not natural I’ve heard people say. I’ve even heard myself say it.

But is clothing natural? Plastic? Automobiles? Aeroplanes?

Maybe it’s really more about acceptability than it is about naturalness?

And different things are acceptable to different people.

Plastic, aeroplanes and just wars are acceptable to many people.

Pony girls and transvestites, gays and lesbians maybe to less.

There was a time when the Bible helped me decide what was acceptable and what wasn’t.

I was more of a “hate the sin but love the sinner” kind of person - as opposed to the “fire and brimstone” variety.

Nevertheless, the Bible was the final arbiter when it came to acceptability.

And yet looking back at those times, it was really my interpretation of the Bible that was the arbiter.

And my interpretation of the Bible was always flawed.

I think, in a way, everyone’s interpretation is flawed.

I mean … is it acceptable for women to speak in church? To commit genocide if God tells you to do it? To work on Sunday – or maybe that should be Saturday? To speak in tongues without an interpretation? To use contraceptives? To kill? To be gay? Lesbian? Transsexual? Transvestite? Pony girl? To manufacture weapons? To trade unjustly? To have two coats while someone else has none? To respond to one slap in the face with another?

Different Bible believing people have different answers to these questions.

Back in 1973, just after being Born Again, I remember reading a book Genesis in Space and Time by Francis Schaeffer. Even then it seemed odd to me that the author was adamant that the existence of a real Adam and Eve were fundamental beliefs, but that the story of creation in six days and the eating of the fruit of knowledge could just be viewed as allegories.

And I have had conversations with people that find it easy to own a whole collection of coats and yet condemn, absolutely, a whole series of perversions.

I know, for sure, that I am far from perfection. A little like Amy Ray’s friend:

My friend Tanner she says,
"Y'know me and Jesus we're of the same heart
The only thing that keeps us distant is that I keep fuckin' up"

And I do.

Back at Sparkle, I remember the policeman saying that his view of bad-mouthing members of the trans-gendered community was that it was similar to the racist comments that people make.

Not so very long ago, a man that lived in a Bible believing God-fearing part of the world had a dream:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

Y’know. I think that pony girls, gay, lesbian and transgendered people are mostly just wanting to be free to be themselves.

Indigo Sunday

Sunday 18 October 2009 - an Indigo night in Bristol.

Plan A had been to get to the Indigo Girls concert at either London or Brighton.

The plan fell apart upon discovery that both venues were sold out by the time I got round to trying to book.

So Bristol it was.

Only traces of Andrea make the trip. Bright red finger nails from the day before.

I arrive at the O2 Academy at 6:30 pm and join the end of a queue of maybe 40 people. There are three doorways, but just a single queue.

The queue gradually grows.

There was a time when bright red fingernails would have led me to keep my hands in my pockets most of the time. These days I’m not so bothered.

6:40. a barrier is built to demark the doorway on the right.

6:45 the queue is ushered across to the right of the barrier.

6:47 another barrier between the other two doorways.

6:50 signs appear.

To the left: O2 Customer Priority.

Middle: Paying and Guests

To the right: Ticketholders

O2 is a mobile phone company that also manage a selection of musical venues.

People with O2 phones begin to ask about the priority entrance.

All you need is an O2 mobile phone.

A little sheepishly the privileged few move across to the left.

Being an O2 customer I become a sheep.

Each O2 customer can bring a friend.

Within minutes I have a new buddette. Karen (I think) needs a friend with an O2 mobile phone. She’s been in the queue since 1:30.

7:00 the doors open.

No one checks anyone’s mobile phones.

I’m glad that I don’t have a handbag with me. They are all getting searched.

Into the auditorium and there I am standing at the very front just a few feet away from the stage.

“So … have you been a fan for long?”

The girl to my right and her husband have travelled over from Portsmouth.

She’s American and has seen Indigo Girls frequently in the USA.

Aged 30 and a fan since junior high school … age 14 or so.

She attended seminary and one day hopes to maybe be a pastor within the Lutheran church.

We talk a little about the church’s views on women, vicars, gays and lesbians. She smiles as she says that she was almost surprised to grow up and discover she wasn’t a lesbian.

We both see Indigo Girls as musicians that happen to be lesbians rather than lesbian musicians.

Favourite songs include The Wood Song, Ghost, Mystery and Loves Recovery.

Prefers the acoustic kind of sound.

8:00 and Stephanie Dosen takes the stage. And she is good.

I like her voice and her music.

She’s wearing a frilly white skirt. Black tights. A little wrinkled and torn. The tights that is.

Makes me smile to think how unfeminine I can imagine myself looking with torn tights and how feminine she looks.

Stephanie … smiling as she tunes her guitar.

“Joni Mitchell has a guitar that tunes itself when she pushes a little button.”

More twiddling and fiddling with the guitar.

A cute little smile.

Very quietly.

“Bitch.”

“Don’t anyone tell Joni I said that. When I see her I’ll tell her ‘I did not call you a bitch.’”

Stephanie introduces a song with what she insists is a true story.

A night drive in winter. Cows at the roadside. Cold and shivering.

She begins to sing. A freedom fighters song on behalf of the cows.

Drumming on the steering wheel.

All of a sudden the car is skidding, facing the wrong way and rolling over.

With a hint of sadness. “And the cows never came to visit.”

The words have changed, but the next song came out of those moments.

9:00. Emily and Amy take the stage.

They start to play and then stop.

Amy could perhaps have used a Joni Mitchell guitar at this point.

They both laugh a little.

“Any questions?” Emily asks the audience.

“What’s your favourite pizza?”

“Well … cheese is good. And lately … mushroom and Canadian bacon.”

The atmosphere is friendly, almost intimate.

“Amy … please may I have your plectrum?”

“My plectrum? Well yes … especially since you asked so politely.”

“So how many people here would have asked for a picker?” asks Emily.

“Meeeeeee”.

“Only one?”

“But I am American”.

Amy: “Plectrum … it almost sounds sexual.”

Emily: “Anatomical.”

Amy: “Yes that’s what I mean.”

A request from the audience.

Amy: “Nooooo you cannot play with my plectrum. It’s a kinda personal thing.”

Amy: “It’s a good thing that our new songs are different than the old ones. If they were the same it would mean we never could have gotten better.”

Emily: “When I was younger I would write lots of songs. As you get middle aged it’s easy to find yourself repeating yourself. It takes longer to write songs now.”

Lots of conflicting song requests from the audience.

Then: “Play whatever you want.”
Amy, smiling : “That’s what Mr Obama says.”

“Amy, I love you.”

“Emily, I love you.”

Emily: “We love you too.”

All of a sudden its 10:40 and the stage is empty.

And then they are back and play a couple more songs.

Amy hands over the plectrum.

Time for home.

I loved it. The music. The people. The experience.

Just a few minutes ago I booked a ticket at the Concorde 2 in Brighton for next Monday – it seems it’s not quite as sold out as I thought. £20 at the Concorde 2 web site. The alternative was a bargain at £94 from what is, I guess, a less than honest web site. Now I just have to organise leaving work early enough to get to Brighton by 7:30.

A little like Emily I find it easy to find myself repeating myself.

See what I mean … three myselfs in two sentences.

It’s an easy thing to do in a blog.

On being somewhat less than 100%

The post at http://andrea-wright.blogspot.com/2009/05/street-brummie-and-bisexual.html provides some background on these musings.

Maybe some people are 100% male.

Maybe some are 100% female.

Maybe it depends on how we define the terms.

Maybe masculinity and femininity include personality traits and preferences as well as genetic sequences.

Maybe there are a lot of “less than 100 percent-ers” around.

Maybe I am one of them.

Maybe you are.

Maybe not.

We are both, though, 100% people.

Maybe the proportion of masculinity and femininity within a single person can vary as time passes.

Maybe it moves back and forth, even over short periods of time.

Maybe there is no hard, fast link between femininity, masculinity (gender) and sexuality.

Maybe a person can be:

• 100% man and 100% gay
• 100% woman and 100% lesbian
• 100% either and 100% straight
• 100% either and bisexual
• not 100% either 100% and 100% lesbian
• not 100% either and 100% gay
• not 100% either and bisexual
• maybe terms such as not 100% male and gay are meaningless.

Maybe the terms gay and lesbian would only have real significance in a world occupied by 100% men and 100% women.

Maybe a person that is 51% male is 49% lesbian if (s)he isn’t gay?

Maybe you are getting a sense that to talk percentages is maybe to talk bullshit.

Maybe people who most loudly proclaim I am 100% are sometimes those that are most afraid that they aren’t.

Maybe it can be a good thing to not always be 100% .

Of Sexualty and Gender

Towards the end of last year (December 23rd) I was, as usual, listening to the radio on the way to work.

There was a story about some words of the Pope. The same story was included in the news headlines on television and featured in headlines on Google news.

I haven’t read the actual words that were written and spoken – my Italian isn’t up to it. So my thoughts are based on second hand accounts.

On the radio, the suggestion was that the Pope had said that issues of humanity and gender need to be addressed and dealt with just as urgently as issues of the environment.

Reports say that no mention was made of homosexuality. But people seemed to be making accusations of homophobia. The implication seemed to be that gays, lesbians and the transgendered were posing a threat to the survival of the human race that was on a par with the threat posed by Global warming.

There were two ladies on the radio sharing their views on what the Pope had, or had not, said.

The first, who always referred to the Poe as “The Holy Father”, made the point that homosexuality is patently wrong – not just because the Church says so – but because biology and science say so. If everyone was homosexual then the human race would be doomed. Where would all the children come from?

There seemed to be a certain irony in this statement. The thought crossed my mind. If every man became a priest, or every woman a nun, then the human race would be doomed in just the same way. Where would all the children come from?

Of course, I don’t think that it is expected that every man should be a priest nor every woman a nun. But, nor do I expect every man and woman to be gay.

Ma y years ago, in my born-again evangelical days, I wrote an open letter to the University magazine at the place where I was a student. It expressed similar sentiments to those voiced by the lady on the radio. It seemed obvious to me that nature didn’t design people to be homosexual. I remember a small delegation of representatives from the Anglican Society, the Catholic Society, the Christian Union and the Methodist Society dropped by to congratulate me. It makes me smile to think about this – I know for sure that we did not all agree on doctrines such as the Virgin Birth, the Immaculate Conception, Papal infallibility or lots and lots of other things. But homosexuality was something we all felt the same way about.

Of course, people change - me too. And although Margaret Thatcher may not have been a lady in favour of U-turns, I’m happy enough to have made a few of them myself.

In my student days my feelings about homosexuality were strongly affected my understanding of what the Bible was. As a Bible believing Christian, all my beliefs and feelings were affected by this – in theory at least. I fell into the “typical conservative” camp as described at http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_bibl.htm . It was because I believed that the Bible was the Word of God and that the Bible condemned homosexuality that I wrote my letter to the University magazine.

In fact, I have always realised that the way that Nature works is not always the way that societies want to work. For example, Nature seems to select and favour the strong and allows the weak to pass away. Natures answer to high death rates seems to be to work towards even higher birth rates.

There was a time when I would have explained this contradiction between Nature and Society in terms of the “fall”. I believed that, in some ways, Nature had become broken when humanity decided to turn away from God. But not completely broken. So some aspects of Nature work in line with God’s will, but others do not.

I did, however, miss the point that it is, perhaps, disingenuous to use Nature in support of some theories and yet disregard other aspects of Nature wherever it didn’t fit in with the theories.

These days I think that Nature of itself offers little in the way of guidance on moral and ethical issues. Condemning homosexuality using Nature as the basis for the condemnation seems akin to using Nature in support of a policy that would cull the sick and elderly before they became a burden to society.

So, I’m left feeling that whatever Nature has to say about sexuality is not the final word. Societies are not obliged to condone or condemn certain aspects of human behaviour just because it appears to be natural or unnatural.

Ultimately what we condone or condemn is based on what we believe to be right or wrong. And there are many things that can contribute to these beliefs. Nature. The Bible. The Pope. Parents. Peers. Science. Religion.

My own feelings about Gay and Lesbian issues has been influenced by Indigo Girls. I discovered their music quite a few years ago when Napster was a source of vast amounts of music that you could download free. One night in a fit of nostalgia I had been doing some web searching – I almost used the word googling – but maybe Google had not yet been invented, so it may have been yahooing. I was looking for antiwar songs – or at least songs that included the word “war” in the lyrics. In amongst the results was a song called “You and me of the 10,000 wars”. I’d never heard of Indigo Girls and if Napster had not existed that would have been the end of it. However, courtesy of Napster, I was listening to the song ten minutes later – 56K modems took quite a while to download songs. In the years since then I have attended 5 or 6 Indigo Girls concerts and purchased all of their CDs – none of which would have happened with that first free download – RIAA please note!

I’d been listening to Indigo Girls music for a little while when I began to find out a bit about who they are. It was kind of surprising to discover that the love songs that they wrote were quite likely about lesbian relationships. I hadn’t been able to tell from the words. The words just seemed to express love. It’s hard to remember what it was that I’d thought before. But in lots of ways it came as a revelation of what maybe should have been obvious. Gay and lesbian love isn’t different from love. Without knowing it, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray have helped me begin to understand things in a different way than I used to.

I think, as well, that as my opinions on Gay and Lesbian relationships has changed it has become possible for me to begin to accept my own sexuality. I am, like most transvestites, heterosexual. But I guess I am not 100% macho male either.

There was a time when I felt guilty about that. I hid it. I denied it. I buried it. I was, I believe, burying myself.

I was a long time coming, but I have accepted myself. I am happy with the whole TV / transgendered thing.. I don’t feel bad about it. I don’t at all understand it. But that’s ok – I don’t understand lots of things.

A song that Emily Salliers wrote has an interesting perspective on beliefs. Is it beliefs that make people – or people that make beliefs?
We're sculpted from youth
The chipping away makes me weary
And as for the truth
It seems like we just pick a theory

And it's the one that justifies
Our daily lives
And backs us with quiver and arrows

To protect openings
Cause when the warring begins
How quickly the wide open narrows

It may be that one day whoever is Pope and whoever is leading all those Conservative Evangelical Christian groups might be able to see sexuality from a different perspective. Over the years churches have learned to accept things that, once upon a time, would have been an anathema. Perhaps sometime in the future people will look back and smile and think ... “how could they ever have thought that?”