July 22, 2009; In which I discuss belief

Sometimes I see something or hear something that gets me thinking, and I can't get it out of my head. If I'm lucky it's chainsaw swords or other fun things like that. If I'm not so lucky, it's something that I really can't do anything about. Today it was a faith/ religion-related bit... I saw a T-shirt for the Creation Museum. Now, I had heard about this establishment before, and the very idea of it is strange to me. I have nothing against religion or creation theories, but one of the things I've heard about this particular venue is that it features displays of humans and dinosaurs walking together.

Okay, I should have said this before, but the following might be a little offensive. I will try to keep it as completely civil as I can, but this is an issue that, try as I might, I cannot be fair and balanced on.

I am not religious, though I was raised Roman Catholic. My mom is a science teacher, so I had a very open line of dialogue with both religious and scientific origin theories. I was exposed to a lot of them, everything from Adam and Eve to a giant turtle to the Big Bang to the seven days = four billion years idea to Amaterasu and all that falls in between. There aren't many lines of thought on that road that I haven't at least looked down. I have to say, though, that while I don't know how we started I am pretty sure, in my own mind, what didn't happen. I cannot personally believe that a being created the whole Earth and everything on it at the same time, and it's been around for only a few measly millennia. It just seems so contradictory to modern thoughts and scientific findings to me that my mind automatically pushes it into the "blather" pile, despite the fact that I know some people who believe this and they are all wonderful and kind human beings.

I can understand creationists who say that fossils were planted by God to test our faith. That at least makes some sense, albeit a very warped kind of sense that makes me nod my head and mutter something about "mysterious ways." It is easy for me to imagine that whatever creator, be it God or the universe's infinite probability or what have you, started this planet's formation with the necessary factors to create life and thus life evolved in the forms we know today over hundreds and hundreds of millions of years. I cannot understand how so much science can just be ignored. If humans walked with dinosaurs why aren't they mentioned in the Bible? Why don't we see crude paintings of T-Rex's in caves? Why are they buried under millions of years of sediment while our oldest human remains date back no more than two million years and even those are questionably homo sapien?

I think I should end this before I go too far, and some might say I've done that already. Others will say I didn't go far enough, but this is my stopping point. I will leave you with this thought:

I understand faith. I understand believers. What I do not understand is the need to warp the world to your own beliefs instead of embracing that your dogma, whatever it is, was laid down by people who didn't know everything there was to know. Humans are by nature fallible, but we cannot fault ourselves for it. We seek answers because of this ability to be wrong, because we need to be right. Just know when to accept that right for a thousand years ago and right for today might not be the same.

And who knows? Maybe I'm the one who's wrong.