I am a Creationist only in the broad sense, by which I mean that while I am a Christian who believes in creation by intelligence rather than raw time+chance, I also believe the historical truth of the origins of Man and the Earth to be significantly stranger and less compehensible than either the Biblical literalists or the abiogenesis advocates imagine. I should point out that I have virtually no idea of what form that stranger and incomprehensible truth actually takes, but it renders me a virtual agnostic on the general issue of origins.
While I put great credence in documentary evidence, I think much of the YEC case is based on a forced literalism that is absent from most historical readings of the Bible or other historical documents. I am no more concerned about the literal seven days than I am with determining what color the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was. In my opinion, those Christians and anti-Christians who impute great significance to belief in the specifics of the events recounted in the early chapters of Genesis are largely missing the essential points of Christianity. Since I am skeptical of the crude imprecision of secular scientists as they make wild assumptions about events they did not witness, it should surprise no one that I am equally skeptical of the attempts of the theologically inclined to impute very specific meanings to events neither they nor the author of Genesis witnessed either. And since we do not understand either God or His ways, there is absolutely no chance that we can reasonably hope to properly understand the information He has communicated to us through generations of men who did not understand it either. If the first generation Christians, many of whom were there and lived through the relevant events, saw the truth of Jesus Christ as though through a glass darkly, how much more obscure must the truth of Genesis be to those of us who live today?
Here:
The generation of idiots aka Baby Boomers have to be the most trivial, most foolish, most contemptible generation in the history of the planet. Gail Collins explains one of the many reasons why:
The Woodstock-mania must drive young people crazy since it is yet another reminder that the baby-boom generation is never going to stop talking about the stuff it did, and that when they are old themselves there will probably still be some 108-year-old telling them how everybody slept in the mud but that it was worth it because Janis Joplin sounded so awesome and the people were all mellow.
It was a concert to which a bunch of young adults went 40 years ago. BFD. And yet, the Idiot Generation is still rambling on and on about it as if it was ever actually significant to anyone or anything, let alone history. Gibbon wept. Can you imagine The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with a long chapter entirely devoted to the seminal importance of a well-attended concert? Actually, I suppose I can, but where was the Belisarius of Woodstock when the world needed him?
The Idiot Generation is the first and only generation to fail to grow out of their teenage years. They don't drive the rest of us crazy, they have simply caused us to conclude that they are, and have always been, collectively nuts. This goes well beyond the usual parent-child divide; every generation of teenagers believes it invented sex, but the Baby Boomers are the only ones who still believe it as obese, grey-haired, rock-n-rolling AARP members. Instead of going to a concert, my grandfather's generation went off to war in their teens, kicked the asses of the Nazis and Imperial Japanese, came home to build the richest economy in the world, and never once appeared to worry about being cool, much less what anyone happened to think of them. Meanwhile, we have the inevitable avalanche of "60 is the New 35!" articles to anticipate next year. What a bunch of historical losers.
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