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I am astounded that we, the members of Rant/Rave, can argue back and forth with over 100 comments on evolution! Half of the people in the country don't believe in evolution and 18% think the sun rotates around the earth, and it is futile to argue with these folk because all of the logical arguments and facts are dismissed because they prefer to believe in the literal interpretation of the bible. In my opinion relying on ancient texts to explain the modern world is nothing less than intellectual laziness.
Most of these people do not understand the origins of the bible and how the original "revelations" or folk tales were carried on from one person to another for hundreds or thousands of years before they were committed to clay tablets or papyrus. Any psychologist can tell you how anytime you have one person relate a complicated story to someone else it will change with each telling, with the story teller embellishing and adding or editing the story so it better fits their own belief system. If you told one person a story and had them pass that story on to someone else and that person to another by the time you reached six other individuals the story would be unrecognizable.
So even if you did believe that God told a prophet one of the truths of the universe, that truth would be unrecognizable in a short time. Even after the oral tradition gave way to written word, the scribes and the head monks would take editorial liberties to make the story more understandable. There used to be thousands of different versions of sacred texts before the Synod of Hippo in 393 decided which writings would become what would be called the New Testament.
I wish that while they were editing out these texts, that they would have left a few scribbles from the women who used to be quite important to the church before it merged with Mithraism and became the Official Religion of the Roman Empire. I also wish they would have edited out all of the instances of extreme violence and the insanely harsh practices that occurred in the middle East way back then. The Jewish and Christian faiths just tend to ignore where the Torah and the Old Testament demands that you stone your son to death if he gives you any lip, and one of the big problems with the world today is that the Muslims didn't go through 350 years of cruelty during the inquisitions or go through the Protestant reformation that re-wrote the bible to make it more humane. Even Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the bible (or collaborated on one), but by the time he threw out all the outrageous parts it was pretty small. Islam is still stuck in the 6th century when those harsh punishments were acceptable.
Half of the Christians do not even know that these three religions each worship the same God of Abraham, or that many of the sacred texts have the same origins.
Today there are a thousand different sects of Christianity, many splintered off because they didn't like a particular version of the bible, and each one will condemn everyone else in the world to hell if they do not share their perverse and quaint beliefs. When the Spaniards were conquering this country they baptized the young Indian babies, to save their souls before splattering their brains against a wall. Almost all of these Christians, Jews and Muslims envision God as some old guy with a long white beard, because Man is created in God's image.
Science has determined that life exists in almost every environment on earth, including the harshest climates you can imagine. There is a lot of evidence that life on this planet might have originated form outside earth in comets (where we get a lot of our water) or even outside our solar system carried in asteroids. It is only logical that life would also exist elsewhere. And that is just the carbon based life forms. There could be intelligent sulfur based life living in the atmosphere of Jupiter (or silicon based, or nitrogen based). They probably wouldn't worship some old guy with a white beard. They would probably worship some big gas bag.
And what about other solar systems? Almost every star system we study has planets around that sun. It is mathematically a certainty that a very large number of those star systems will have planets that have the proper densities to contain an atmosphere like ours, and that they are an appropriate distance from the sun so that our species might survive there. Would they have life on such a planet? It is almost certain. Would they look like us? Almost certainly not. There are a bazillion galaxies each with a gazillion suns, with a googleplex of planets rotating around them. Did God just put those galaxies and stars and planets up there as decorations for us? I think it was Carl Sagan who once said something like: "If God didn't put life on most of those planets, it is a terrible waste of real estate". There are probably hundreds of millions of species that are much smarter than we are. Do you think they all teach "Intelligent Design" in their schools? Do you think that Jesus died for their sins also?